Please join us for a viewing of the 1997 prize winning film, “Textile Magicians of Japan”, featuring the creations of five Japanese contemporary fiber artists in the cedar forests near Kyoto, Japan.

With: Masakazu Kobayashi, Chiyoko Tanaka, Jun Tomita, Naomi Kobayashi, Hiroyuki Shindo

Mark the date!  The Black Sheep Handweavers Guild is meeting the second Thursday of June for the annual raffle, auction and sale. Your yesterday’s yarn might someone’s dream-come-true!

Local entrepeneur Supriya Pradhan recently started Sofold, a clothing company with friends and family in India. Their first products are organic cotton dresses, hand spun and woven, naturally dyed and sewn in India. They are made of khadi cotton, made famous by Gandhi and currently promoted by the Indian government. https://www.sofold.com/

Surpriya will talk about starting this business and bring samples of the dresses, as well as shawls Sofold has added to its emerging product line.

Black Sheep member Barbara Shapiro will share images and objects from two recent trips to Japan highlighting textiles and baskets she encountered. On a Longhouse Reserve tour to the Beppu area in Oita Prefecture in the south of Japan, known for thermal baths and hot springs, she visited museum collections, saw artisans working in bamboo and stayed in a tiny mountain village where young people live simple lives working in sustainable textile practices far from the bustle of Tokyo.

On the 11th International Shibori Symposium tour to Yamagata Prefecture in Northern Japan she had amazing experiences exploring bast fibers, sashiko stitching and natural safflower harvesting, processing and the dyeing of four colors from a single plant, which the area is known for.

Workshop and museums completed the experience in this mountainous area with long snowy winters. One highlight was a prehistoric weaving device for a twined bast fiber fabric that predates loom woven cloth. 

These two very different tours, led by Yoshiko Wada, explored Japan’s rich cultural textile heritage.

We are delighted to welcome John Marshall to Black Sheep. He will be talking about Japanese textiles and will be bringing some of his own samples to share with us.

http://www.johnmarshall.to/

John is an internationally known textile artist working with techniques of paste resist dyeing. He produces a wide range of sophisticated and colorful designs, many of which show the influence of his years of study in the Orient.

Come join us in a hands-on Round Robin: practice rug finishes, a Nigerian braid, twining, backstrap pebble weave and card-woven selvages.

Join us for our first Blacksheep Guild meeting of the year and welcome Linda Heiple, long-time Blacksheep weaver. Linda will share the history of the drawloom, along with techniques and examples of the beautiful textiles that she has produced using it.

We will meet at our usual location (Redwood City’s Veterans Senior Center). We’ll begin setting up at 5:30 PM, with dinner at 6:30 PM.

PLEASE NOTE: we will be in a different room than usual. Please look for signs.

After dinner, we will proceed with our gift exchange. Gifts should be items that another “fiber person” would enjoy, priced at no more than $15. We will use a poem to guide the gift exchange.

Bro. Nich Perez, CSC’s current project, “LETTERS: The Art of Grieving”, is a a documentary film about the powerful transformations of grief into art. The film explores the art that intertwines with the lives of three women artists: Joan Schulze, local poet and fiber artist who lost her husband to dementia, a sketch artist whose 9-week-old son died unexpectedly, and a young painter who lost her mother to brain cancer. The film examines their art as love letter to the ones they have lost. https://vimeo.com/282166036