Is it Dying or Dyeing?

You can't believe how easy it is for a Dutch person, like me, to scramble these words, especially as I am so familiar with the meaning of both of them.
Next year I will be living 20 years in England and I still seem to encounter problems with the language. Although I must admit that writing and speaking in Dutch is more difficult for me now then using English. Not that I believe I will completely loose my native tongue, but as I think, dream, read and talk in English I have to turn a switch in my head when 'going Dutch' again. And I can't always remember where that switch is....
Back to the Double D words of  'Dying and Dyeing', which reminds me of a piece of work I did, called 'Double Dutch - a Strangers cloak', which was for an exhibition in Norwich, but I will talk  about that another time.

So here we are, let's start with  the 'darker' side so we can end with some colour

Dying, Death and Death Café's
This coming Sunday it will be the first Death Café I am facilitating.
Apart from advertising it on the Death Café website I also advertised it in the newsletter of the Rudolf Steiner School, which my daughters attended and where we celebrated Kiama's life, almost a year ago now. I have been overwhelmed with the response of people who want to attend and had to put people on a waiting list, as we only had place for 12 people and now we got 14 coming.
I am already thinking of doing another Death Café here in Hertfordshire next month.
Possibly during the Dying Matters Awareness Week, which runs from 13-19 May, starting just 2 days after the first anniversary of Kiama's death.

Apart from my recent passion to inspire people to talk about life, death and funerals I have been curious and fascinated all my life with the BIG QUESTIONS of Life, Death, Consciousness and Identity. This fascination lead to a conscious decision, in my late teens, to leave religion behind in search for the Truth. I am a great believer in no-believing and have dedicated my life to discovering the knowledge and wisdom inside myself through meditation, contemplation and philosophy. So far it has been the most amazing life-changing and life-affirming 'journey' I could have ever dreamt off. More importantly all of the Big Questions, I had, got resolved which is the main reason why I also can deal with my daughters' death the way I do.

Many people find comfort and strength in their faith, traditions and believes but many also experience being challenged in this when confronted with death and bereavement. For most people questions are still left unanswered, as religion nor science provide the answers.

I just had a look at what Wikepedia had to say about Death and I have copied something to ponder on:

"One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. As a point in time, death would seem to refer to the moment at which life ends. However, determining when death has occurred requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This is problematic because there is little consensus over how to define life.
It is possible to define life in terms of consciousness. When consciousness ceases, a living organism can be said to have died. One of the notable flaws in this approach, however, is that there are many organisms which are alive but probably not conscious.

Another problem is in defining consciousness, which has many different definitions given by modern scientists, psychologists and philosophers. Additionally, many religious traditions, hold that death does not (or may not) entail the end of consciousness."
 
Of course no personal account of life, death, consciousness or any unmeasurable, unscientific personal experiences are taken into any serious consideration to come closer to the answers on the big questions. So we are left finding our own ways, our own answers........but that might me a good thing and maybe this explains the increasing popularity of the Death Café movement!

Now over to some Dyeing.
I am working on a commission of 22 ribbons, each containing text inspired by the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot Deck. It's quite a big project, which has been delayed by a year now, so I really have to pick it up and run with it.
As I couldn't and didn't want to use commercially fabricated ribbons, I had bought some nice cotton sateen fabric at Art van Go to dye in all the colours of the rainbow. (3 ribbons in each of the seven colours plus 1 in 'gold' for 'The Fool')
I don't have a dedicated studio for dyeing, so the whole mess has to happen in our kitchen and to be honest I was not looking forward to it. Partly also because it was several years ago that I dyed fabric.
So I kept putting it off until Jenny, one of my textile friends, offered so kindly to come for a day to start me off. Although Jenny's expertise lays in Natural plant dyeing and I am using Procian Dyes, the principle is the same. In fact it is all very straight forward with the help of Ruth Issett's books Colour on Paper and Fabric and Colour on Fabric.

I decided to use the method of  tray dyeing, where you lay the fabric in natural folds in a tray and mix your dye powder with a soda solution and a earlier made up chemical recipe containing urea and Calgon. It creates a more organic textured appearance rather then the plain flat colour which you get with Bucket Dyeing.

Not to waist any dye I gathered lots of snippets of different fabrics, which I pushed in plastic beakers to soak up any leftover dyes, like the turquoise and blue's here, waiting for any future projects.

 Indigo and Violet drying here.

The whole dyeing project took about 5 days, which included a trip to Art Van Go for more urea and missing colours of dye and.... all the other necessary household tasks, like cooking for loved ones.

All the colours posing here.

The only one I am not totally happy with is the 'Antique Gold' in the front. So I have to see what to do about that. The other seven colours have all gone through 2 different dye processes to make them a bit more interesting.

The side view gives a bit more of an idea of how they would look as strips of fabric. The finished ribbons will be 140cm long and about 4 cm wide, but they need to be double, to hide the back of the stitched lettering, plus seam allowance.

So now I need to tear strips of 10 cm, iron them all and try out some lettering.

By the way, I think I finally cracked it, the use of the words Dying and Dyeing,  language is so colourful, I keep you posted.

Coffee, cakes and other taboos

There is so much happening in my life that I want to blog about that I can't seem to keep up with the pace. The last week in particular was unusual busy with lots of social interactions, communications and lavish consumptions of coffee and cakes  - no regrets at the time, but oh I do need to address some health (read weight) issues before summer.
So I attended some interesting lectures, one by the artist Cas Holmes for the HVA and one by Hilary Hollingworth for the Embroiderers' Guild. I met up with my textile art friends for our monthly stitch morning, had a very belated yummy X-mas diner at Jamie Oliver's with the members of the HVA Textile group and started my first new yoga class. 

But for now I want to talk about the other taboos...

Sunday, a week ago, we went to visit the last day of the exhibition Death: a self-portrait at the Welcome gallery in London. Not particular inspiring - lots of skulls and skeletons and for me, personally, far removed from any emotional connection to death. The highlight of the visit was meeting up with people of the Society of the Natural Death Centre, whilst drinking coffee and eating cake!

The  Natural Death Centre (NDC) is a charity with a 24 hour helpline, which gave us tremendous inspiration and support in organising Kiama's funeral and life-celebration. They are also working very hard to make people aware of the rights and wrongs of the funeral industry and highlight the importance of talking about death, funerals and our wishes for a 'good' death and funeral. There has been several occasions in the last year that I became painfully aware of the awkwardness some people experience when they try to avoid the subjects of Kiama's death and our grieving. I know people are afraid to upset us, but for me it is so much more upsetting when they even avoid speaking out her name, as if she had never existed. To me there is nothing wrong with openly expressing our emotions, it shows we are human. Also to me, crying and laughing are part of the same coin, so to speak, yet for some reason they are in our western societies not treated as equal acceptable expressions. So through these experiences I have become quite passionate about talking about all kind of matters surrounding the subject of DEATH and volunteer some of my time to support the NDC charity.

Through the Natural Death Centre I learned about a 'new' movement of 'pop up' Death Café's. It sounds a bit morbid and personally I would have preferred a different name, perhaps even keeping the original French name of Café's Mortels. Although, having said that, the English name goes extremely well with the 'Death by Chocolate' cakes, like this gorgeous looking chocolate heart cake by my friend, Gina.

Anyway the idea came from the Swiss sociologist, Bernard Crettaz, who found that several problems in Western societies are attributed to a taboo of talking about death. So he started these café's to help breaking the silence about a subject, we all sooner or later have to deal with.
The Brit, Jon Underwood, who also works for the charity Dying Matters read about this and introduced the English speaking world to the concept of Death Café's, the first of which was in London, in 2011.
Since last November I  have visited 3 Death Café's in London and met all kinds of people from different backgrounds, different ages and with different reasons for attending a Death Café, but we all shared a need and curiosity to talk about death, bereavement, funerals and more.

Some of the interesting people I met was the Australian artist Pia Interlandi who makes Garments for the Grave. She works at a Natural Burial site near Guildford and we are starting to exchange and share some ideas. So who knows where that will lead.
And then there is Sophie Marsden, a final year student in multi-media journalism. She filmed one of the Death Café's I visited and keeps a blog about her project, 'Dying To Talk'.

The atmosphere at a Death café is quite relaxed, respectful and I dare say, even inspirational. I was able to share our story of how we organised Kiama's funeral and life-celebration and also tell people about the poster of her 'My Bucket List' (see my first blog post), which echo's in part the objective of the Death Café:

 "To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives".

So all this led up to my announcement that I am organising and facilitating 2 Death Café's.
The first one will be on the 7th of April in Hemel Hempstead for which you can find all the details on the Death Café website here.

The other one will be on the 2nd of June at Global Tribe Café in Leeds. Global Tribe Café is a lovely vegetarian/vegan café in the centre of Leeds, which opened 2 months after Kiama's death, on what would have been her 23rd birthday.

It is owned by some very dear friends, who also own the Global Tribe Crystal shop in the same building.
Details for the Death Café there will be announced next month, but if you happen to visit Leeds in the meantime, do go in and enjoy your meal - leaving some room for coffee and cake...