Silk Scarves and April Breezes

 On Thursday of last week, as part of our Chapel Visuals class, we dyed silk scarves in vats of liquids made out of natural materials:  black beans, turmeric, and turmeric with iron water (created by soaking rusty nails in water and vinegar).  I wrote this blog post about it.

We left the silk scarves soaking in the liquid.  My teacher took the vats home, left them soaking until Monday, and then hung them up to dry in her basement studio.  She brought them all to campus yesterday morning, and she strung twine between some of the trees in the courtyard of our seminary campus.

Then we pinned the scarves on the lines.  Our goal was to complete this task before chapel, and we were successful.  

It was the perfect day for this installation:  there was a breeze which kept the scarves fluttering, but it wasn't the kind of breeze that would rip them from the lines or flip them around.

I was intrigued by the ways that the scarves were both so similar and yet so different, even though we had all used similar techniques:  the same choice of dyes, the rubber bands to hold it all together in the vats of dye.

I loved the way they resembled prayer flags as they fluttered in the breeze.  Someone else took this picture of the courtyard from above, from a second floor window:

I am intrigued by how something relatively simple transformed the outdoor space, and the potential to impact the indoor space.  For example, people have this kind of encounter as they approach the chapel--our chapel has only the one way through the courtyard to it (for most of us who don't have keys to the other doors of the building that are kept locked), so people had to walk by the scarves--what would happen if the worship service built on what they encountered on their way to the chapel?

That's not what happened yesterday; we just had a regular chapel service.  But the potential is there, and I want to remember it.

I did something slightly different with the scarves that I dyed, but this blog post is getting a bit long.  Tomorrow I'll write about how I used other botanicals with my scarves to get a different effect.  Today I'll remember the beauty of them as they fluttered in the chilly April breeze.