Similarly to my Nomadic Knits, my Travel Shawls are a response to travel and to the magic of place. As I travel and interact with new people and environments, I always wonder how I can best imbue that into a keepsake. Using an eco-print method, I forage local plants and bundle them into fabric to leave their imprint. The pieces radiate with the magic of the place they were created and allow me to tap back into those spaces whenever I need it.

I like making these works in conjunction with others. As we communally share space, collect plants together, and process the plants through the eco-print method I grow in relationship with them. In many ways this work is about the process and not about the product. But the products are too beautiful to ignore.

This shawl was created in partnership with my Mother. One of the last few times I was at home, I convinced my Mom to go on a walk with me around her home to collect dye plants. I had ordered this large chiffon shawl to use for another project, but decided this was a much better time to use it. My parents live in Arizona, so you would think plants would be hard to come by. However, something that I always find so amazing about the desert is just how much life there actually is. We collected what we could and returned home to bundle up our work together. My mom was a bit nervous about ruining her piece, but I reminded her, just like with all natural dye projects, you can't really ruin it. We bundled the plants and then submerged them in a bucket with some rusty objects and vinegar until I came back home, a month later. When we opened the work, it was light and delicious, and the rosemary my Mom had been growing in her yard exposed the most substantially.

When I came home again a few months later, I convinced my Mom to let me put a second layer of plant dyes on shawl. It took some convincing, but eventually we came to an agreement. We wandered around the house again and found what we knew would expose well, by using the previous exposure as guidelines. This time, I used a carrier cloth, a piece of fabric that has been previously soaked in a rusty solution, along with the plants we collected. A carrier cloth helps the plants to expose more robustly, without much extra work. We let the work soak again in a solution of water and vinegar for around a month and pulled the work back out. It's a beautiful addition now to her wardrobe and imbued with some amazing place based magic.

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I find these Travel Shawls to be so interesting because they are an investigation for me into place based magic. This piece is especially interesting because of the history and narrative behind the decisions of this work. I asked my friend Aurora if she wanted to make a piece with me. As a budding therapist, she said she would love to make a wall hanging for her office. I told her we could go wherever she wanted, as long as there were plants to collect. I wanted her to pick a place that was important to her. She wavered a bit, but ultimately decided on the place she grew up, Norfolk, NE. We left on a beautifully sunny day, drove about two hours South, and made a few stops in the town she grew up in. It was warm, and muggy, and full on delightful conversations about social justice, therapy, and the current state of our nation. After we finished collecting plants, we grabbed a little snack, and headed back home to bundle the fabric up.

Now what is interesting, is one month later, when the reveal occurs because Norfolk is a complicated place for Aurora, as many of our hometowns are. They are full of heartbreak, suffering, and things that we spend the rest of our lives mulling over. Aurora, as we talked later on, admitted to me that she chose Norfolk as her place as a way of processing through some of that complication. When we unraveled the bundle there was shock at the results, but really no surprise in what we found. In a true way of processing through and banishing away things that no longer service us, Aurora's bundle, full of plant from her hometown, completely fell apart and shredded in the dyeing process. Now, one could just say that it was the way in which the work was processed. At first I thought the same thing, but I had also made a bundle, with plants form a different location, but using the same processing method. Mine had some signs of wear, but it did not completely fall apart. Sometimes the process is too intense and it asks us to release.

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This piece was pure happenstance. For one of my jobs I worked as a concierge at a condo building. As I was checking in on the clubroom one day I noticed a wedding bouquet left. I immediately wanted to take it, but kept my cool and waited it out a few days. When I saw the resident who I assumed the flowers belonged to, I asked if I could have them to use in an eco-print. She agreed, and I shared that the final piece would wind up being hers. It was a bit nerve racking, since I had no idea how it would turn out, but mixing in some of my favorite plant pigments alongside the plants gave me hope for a beautiful product. As soon as I opened up this bundle I was awestruck. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of work I had ever made. The dye powders offset the plants perfectly and left an ethereal and beautiful byproduct. I learned that baby’s breath prints much more substantially than I would have ever imagined. I was very sad to let this piece go, but I’m glad that it is being treasured.