Shibori Workshop at Trillium Park

It was a blue sky over goldenrod kind of day in Vancouver, which is to say one of the best kinds of days in this lovely city. We lucky folks got to play with a vat of indigo lovingly prepared by MOP artist in residence Catherine Shapiro and her co-conspirator Gloria Tsui.

The location is Trillium Park in Vancouver, bordered by busy soccer fields and a semi-industrial part of east Vancouver near the train station. We are in an area beside a container fitted out as a Fabrication Station, suitable for all sorts of creative pursuits.

While we worked with dye, Rebecca Graham processed locally grown flax fibres, creating a luxurious flax 'stache.

We tied marbles and nuts into the fabric, stitched and clamped it to create areas that would resist the indigo dye.

There are many recipes for indigo dye pots, and Gloria and Catherine have been growing indigo and experimenting with it for months.

We snacked on a potluck "blue feast" while dyeing and waiting between dips for the dye to oxidize. The deepest blues you see in indigo cloth can be dipped over a series of months.

Clipping provided the most resistance and the more dramatic patterns.

We worked with scoured cotton, but I brought along a pale green piece of thrift store silk to work with too.

Oliver is proud of his indigo sky.

East West brought in special violet blue potatoes by request and Catherine made a potato salad.

We didn't eat the blue tomatoes because they are not ripe and "didn't taste too great".

Gloria's fromage blue sur endives avec poire et noisettes: formidable!

Hey, my hands match my jeans!

This was the indigo we used, from MAIWA.

This is what the plant looks like dried.

As Rebecca broke the flax, with a rhythmic wacking sound of wood on wood, David Gowman and friends hammered and chiseled on paulownia wood to make musical horns.

It was like we were part of a village before the industrial revolution!

This is an empress tree growing on the site. Just like the MOP Garden  site, materials grown here are made into art. Soon this tree will be chiselled into a musical instrument. Someone should write a song about that. Oh wait, they already did.

A little caterpillar friend came to visit.

Sadly, this park is in danger of being lost to development for a replacement for the viaduct. Typical Vancouver problem. Please visit the site and help us save it. I've started a hastag on Instagram #SaveTrilliumPark, but my hashtags @beespeaker don't seem to be working. Le sigh. Maybe you will have better luck!

I've been informed that this is not the case--Trillium Park is outside the proposed re-route. Phew!

Weaving Bee Narratives and Blackberry Rope at the Bridgeport Pollinator Meadow

I was invited to spin some stories on bees while participants in the EartHand Gleaners Society project made rope for an eco-art installation. The site was the beautiful meadow at Bridgeport Industrial Park in Richmond, just west of IKEA created by the Border Free Bees project.

The meadow is almost finished for the year, but there are bumblebees and leafcutters in the bull thistle, California poppy and bits of clover still blooming.

 This mystery plant and the Rocky Mountain Bee plant are also flowering.

This looks like a giant coreopsis, but the foliage is more like a wild sunflower.

The leafcutter bees shake their fuzzy booties under blue skies and the gleaming bellies of passing jets.

We sat in a circle, and shared anecdotes about bees, but we also tackled some difficult issues, like those raised in this article on a paper about pathogen spillover from managed bees to wild bees and vice versa.

This is a popular dog-walking path, so many local folks get to see the lovely meadow change throughout the seasons.

The site has some really good signage to let people know what's going on here.

 As the sun fell, the eastern bumblebees and the Voznesensky bumblebees started to fall asleep. Someone needs to write a lullaby for a bee.

 Here's the main pollinator hotel, with lots of room for cavity nesting bees.

We snacked on blackberries growing just a few feet away, while the participants wove rope out of blackberry stems and waxed the rope with solar-harvested beeswax from Hives for Humanity.

These are going to be giant butterfly nets which will be installed at the site, high in a tree.

The butterfly net was a great image to inspire us to talk about native bee enumeration, monitoring and conservation.The bee scientist Lincoln Best has got me thinking because he advocates for saving whole ecosystems, rather than focusing on just protecting one species of bee. Both the city of Richmond and Vancouver have just implemented plans to protect sensitive ecosystems and protect biodiversity in the parks. This is a huge accomplishment and really good news for our urban bees.

I also chatted about the recent work by artists Sarah Peebles and Valerie Chartrand. It's my pleasure to introduce other artists to their inspiring work.

Many thanks to EartHand Gleaners and the Border Free Bee Project for hosting an enchanted summer evening. You are also invited to attend their event this weekend to celebrate the installation: Saturday, Aug 13.

Please join me next week at the Vines Festival and the Garlic Festival at Terra Nova.