Workshop alert!

When we first moved to Gabriola, I knew about the major open studio tour that happens over Thanksgiving. What I didn’t know about was another big event, called Island of the Arts, that revolves around art workshops! We moved to an island that has a workshop festival!? Pinch me, I’m dreaming.

I’ve taken workshops through the festival for the past couple of years, but this year I will be participating as a teacher for the first time. Check out the entire, eclectic schedule here. Scroll down to see my class, Subtle Colours from Nature: Fun with Hand-Made Inks, happening on March 31. Woo Hoo!

They keep the listings lean and clean on their website. I was limited to only 25 words to try and get across all the excitement:

We will make a batch of ink while playing with abstract mark making; building up loose patterns in muted tones on watercolour paper. Beginners welcome.

Thankfully, my newsletter has no such 25 word limit.

The workshop is meant to be a celebration of a muted, minimalist colour approach, as well as a demo on how to actually make ink from plant material. In a culture of excess, we are faced with a tremendous amount of choice when we walk into an art store, so much so it can be overwhelming. Making our own ink provides a way to simplify and narrow our focus while exploring nuance.

I’m going to teach—sort of—a combination workshop. While the ink bubbles in the background, I’ll talk about why I like to use unexpected tools for intuitive mark making and show you a couple of my favourite techniques. We will emphasize creativity without judgement, planning or technical constraints. And if the creative part of it ends up being a hot mess, oh well, at least you’ve had an ink making workshop.

If the idea of making your own inks is intriguing to you, you might enjoy the video I made for this newsletter. It features most of the handmade inks I’ve made in the past few years. It was such a joy to swatch out all of these colours from nature on one piece of watercolour paper.

The video is about 6 and a half minutes long, you might want to settle in with a cuppa. Side note; is anyone else obsessed with this Canadian-made Saint Armand paper? It’s so hard to find here on the west coast!

As I was making ink from Douglas Fir cones, I observed these beautiful double wing shapes. How sweet! This is where the seeds nestle inside the cone. I had to bust out the close up camera for a session.

I’d heard the old story about the mouse tail in the Fir cone. But I had never looked closely at these lovely wing structures before. I’m beginning to understand why the best way to get to know a plant is to closely observe and draw it.

On Feb 15, our Gabriola Fibreshed group was thrilled to host fibre artist Sharon Kallis for a nettle (Urtica dioica) processing workshop. Yes, you read that right, you can get fibre from Stinging Nettle!

What a very full day of learning this was. Sharon brought us a “variety pack” of nettles in various stages of retting, in order to feel the differences while processing. This was my first time processing nettle for fibre, and it’s lovely stuff. In the photo below, you can see clearly where I’ve first broken the retted nettle along its 4 sided, square stem.

This is the very first step of processing the dried stalk. The first of … many, many, many steps.

Very much like flax processing, getting fibre from nettle is incredibly labour intensive. This is the kind of thing that used to be done by small cottage industries, or entire villages of people.

If you’re not familiar with Sharon’s work with the Earthand Gleaners Society - do go check them out. Sharon gave me my very first free taste of plant fibre nearly 12 years ago and got me hooked. I am now a hopeless addict, and every chance I get, I try to get others on this good stuff.

Also in February, I had a brief but pleasant meet up with visiting artist Carly Butler. Carly spent 6 weeks here on the Kasahara House residence program, culminating in a weekend exhibit. I’ve loved her work from afar for years, especially the work around celestial navigation, so it was so nice to finally meet in person. The letterpress image below is taken from her website.

There’s a lot of talk about buying Canadian these days. I’ll do you one better; how about buying handmade, plastic-free watercolour paints from an Indigenous, female owned Canadian company. If Beam Paints wasn’t on your radar before, it sure should be now. Even though I make a lot of my own inks, every once in a while I have to treat myself to a new paint stone and this time it was a colour called Timberwolf, a grey-ish dark blue.

Here’s some recent landscape-y type work with the new purchase, mixed in with my own handmade yellow ochre earth pigment paint.

Timberwolf has wonderful granulation, and if I apply it in a very heavy pigmented puddle, it will sometimes dry into separate segments of blue and another, sort of tawny colour. An utterly gorgeous effect!

That’s about it for last month’s wrap up. I’ve got a few intriguing things on the go in the rest of 2025, some of them more basketry related than this dispatch. I will be writing about them soon, so keep your eye on the inbox for more news.

I’ll leave you with a few images from my mini accordion sketchbooks. These handmade books, made monthly, are a place for me to play with loose, gestural marks with no expectations or set outcomes. These photos feature sections in which I’ve used my own inks and paint.

~ Christi

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