In sagebrush country, on warm days, the scent of medicine swirls in the air. Some of the same compounds which give Artemisia tridentata its signature scent and potent medicinal qualities also produce brilliant natural dye colors, and we’re after both—color and medicine—in this immersive one-day workshop: Color Medicine.
Join me at Feser Cold Springs, a rustic homestead on the confluence of Tule and Sespe Creeks housing a spring-fed flower and fruit farm—about fifteen miles north of Ojai, but in an entirely different world—for a day outdoors celebrating sagebrush’s dye and herbal medicine.
We’ll dye silks with Artemisia’s vivid colors, brewed from plants we’ll harvest on-site, and create medicinal salve using sagebrush oil—infused the day of the workshop—with the option to add other plants, both medicinal and colorful, to our salves and dye pots. In conversation and practice, we’ll explore ethical harvesting practices, land-tending and relationship, and discuss sagebrush’s role in the ecosystems it defines.
You’ll leave with a dyed wearable silk capturing the color of a place and time—high spring in sagebrush country—and a tin of your own coordinating medicinal, fragrant salve. Both processes will be explored from start to finish, offering you a foundation to repeat the techniques yourself, and to forge an ongoing relationship with this plant, the places it grows, and its potent medicinal color.
I hope you’ll join me for this special one-day workshop—a day spent outdoors among fragrant sagebrush and blooming flowers, beside the creek trickling in the background as it threads its way through the mountains, with our dyes simmering in water from the farm’s spring, and the medicine of Artemisia inspiring and guiding our craft!
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