- Our First Collaboration - Katie's Part

Everlea Textiles was born in the spring of this year, as ideas, brainstorms and shared passions slowly transformed into something more tangible.  Janna had to be in Vancouver over summer, but I was to be staying in NYC, doing my best not to melt into a puddle of myself.  We wanted to collaborate across the distance, so we purchased 20 yards of silk & sent each other off with 10 yards each.  The mission was left open - use the silk to do whatever we pleased, essentially.  Janna has much more patience than I with following recipes and directions and trying out new and exciting techniques, so her silk took on a number of different and beautiful formations through natural dyeing processes that are stunning, and she promises to teach me them sometime. 
I am enamored of the process of rusting silk, and so found myself at Jacob Riis park on a moonlit night looking for a piece of metal that I knew jutted into the sea.  

It eluded me that night, so the next day I went back to the beach at low tide and found the metal I'd been searching for in the moonlight.

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I went back with a friend that night and wrapped the silk.

There was a huge storm the following night, and the tide rose higher than usual, which made for beautiful patterns when I returned to dig the silk out from under the sand, and unwrap it from its metal lover.  

The unwrapping process was helped along by the tide as it went out, and the silk was rusted beautifully in places where it had been tightly wrapped, leaving entire sections that had simply been dyed by the ocean water.  

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So this big piece of silk that has spent a day and a night in the Atlantic sea bore some wear and tear, as witness to the passage of time against the elements.  The ocean had not been easy on it, and it had been buried under the sand and torn at places by its metal companion.  It regained some of its buoyancy as it dried in the wind.

I then experimented on it with some Inkodye, a non-toxic light sensitive dye on a trip to NH.  I also had a visit from a dragonfly. 

The incarnations continue, I've done some silkscreening on top of the Inko-dyed pieces, and have dreams involving a light grey immersion dye and T-shirts with the rest of the yardage.  It's been weathered a bit from that storm, but still would be nice to wear.  Who wouldn't want to wear silk dyed in the Atlantic under a full moon?!