I’m writing this from a basement room in London, having flown out of Morocco this morning, landed at Gatwick and then made my way here by train and taxi. On my first walk out (in search of fresh ginger root to brew up a spot of magic potion) I was accosted by a large man who tried to make me go with him to an ATM because he wanted cash and I wasn’t carrying any. It made me very uncomfortable, something I had not felt at all in my solo wanderings in Marrakech despite my lack of Darija and my somewhat rusty French and set me thinking that bullying women in the street for money is yet another thing that bears do not do, along with spiking your drinks, dictating your wardrobe, isolating you from friends and family and so on.
But back to Morocco. I think I left the thread of the adventure trailing somewhere amongst my collection of sardine tins. We had three lovely slow days in the studio at Ait Isfoul, watching the sky turn pink with dust and then clear again to deepest blue sprinkled with unfamiliar stars while we made boucharouite-inspired covers for our hand-sewn notebooks, and several of us began stitching on journeycloths (some had already begun theirs on their way to Morocco).
I had gathered some shards of riverbed silt near Ait Benhaddou on our way south and used a pebble along with a flat stone to grind them to a fine dust. Mixed with gum Arabic and a drop of honey, it made a lovely watercolour that danced nicely with a blue that I ground from the “indigo rocks” (partially pre-reduced synthetic indigo sold all over Morocco), and then also a mixture of the two so that we had three related locally “flavoured” colours.
The dried hibiscus flowers in the foreground printed nicely on silk, as well as making a pretty ink, but they would have needed a good thrashing with a mortar and pestle to be transformed into watercolours. I was pleased to see that when mixed with gum Arabic their colour didn’t oxidise to brown, though it did still turn blue when painted on to good quality paper.
Michelle’s new tidewanderer dress preparing to receive its first baptism in the dyepot.