Farm Pickings

News and Updates from Sanborn Mills Farm

— August 14, 2024 —

If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.

– Evelyn Waugh

Fibershed Design Challenge This Saturday

The mission of the Northern New England Fibershed is to support, develop, and reinvigorate regional natural fiber supply chains in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. To that end, Sanborn Mills Farm will host the Northern New England Fibershed Design Challenge Showcase this Saturday, August 17, in Fifield Hall. Come join us and learn how NNEF helps cultivate equitable relationships amongst farmers, manufacturers, artisans, and designers along the supply chain to support textile production from raw material to finished product. 

In 2023 NNEF was awarded a grant to support a year-long Design Challenge that would encourage participants to create a product utilizing local materials, processing, labor, and natural dyes. The goal of the Design Challenge is to better understand the regional textile infrastructure and to shed light on potential challenges and opportunities within the region. In addition to these guidelines, participants were also asked to provide a narrative that outlined their experience in creating their submission in order to better understand their unique process and to show what materials or processes might be missing from our regional fibershed. 

NNEF is an affiliate of the Fibershed Organization that was started by Rebecca Burgess in California in 2010.

Join us for an evening of celebrating regional textiles and local designers while learning about the challenges and opportunities in our current regional textile system. The event starts at 5 PM and is free to the public. Please park in visitor parking and follow signs to reception.

Farm to Table Dinner & Silent Auction,

Sept. 7

A reminder to mark your calendar and make your reservations! This year’s Farm to Table Dinner & Silent Auction, one of the most anticipated and popular events at Sanborn Mills Farm, will be held Saturday, Sept. 7.

Click here for our Dinner and Auction webpage and to purchase tickets.

Sawmill Demo at August 22

Farm to Table Lunch

A great opportunity to see our water-powered sawmill in action follows the Farm to Table Lunch on August 22.

The sawmill will be demonstrated from 1 to 2 p.m. after the Lunch. These events are popular, especially when a demonstration is included, so don’t hesitate to sign up for one of our lunch dates. Click here for more information and to register.

Upcoming Workshops of Interest

Sanborn Mills Farm’s 2024 Workshop Program is now underway, but it’s never too early to register for a favorite workshop later in the schedule. Many of our workshops fill quickly, so if there’s a workshop or two that catches your interest, make a point to register soon. The full schedule of 2024 workshops is posted on our website here.

Here are three upcoming workshops that may be of particular interest to you. Click on the workshop title for more information and to register.

NOTE: Two of our popular Blacksmithing workshops have spots available and the dates are sequential. We have one spot available for Forge Welding on August 23 and spots available for Numbers and Letters the next day, August 24. This is a rare opportunity to sign up for two separate Blacksmithing workshops scheduled for a Friday and Saturday. Click on each workshop name to sign up today!

Harvesting Color

September 13-15

Instructor: Sara Goodman

The main product of this class will be a set of approximately 50 five-inch sample swatches, made of five different fibers: cotton, linen, wool, silk dupion, and silk organza. Students will leave the class with an extensive color library. On the first day of class we will prepare all the cloth for the dye bath with proper scouring and mordanting for both cellulose and protein fibers. Then we will head to the Sanborn Mills dye garden to harvest the flowers we will use in our dye baths. At this time of year there will be many plants available for collection. We will look for leaves from trees, nuts, bark, wildflowers, and roots. We can even experiment with some food scraps that give good color. Possibilities for modifying colors by changing pH, adding iron, and over-dyeing with indigo will be explored. An indigo vat will be available for overdyeing sections of the color swatches. Participants are welcome to bring dye materials from their own gardens or other materials from their home environments to experiment with.

Improvisational Quilting and Fabric Books

September 14-15 — NEW DATE

Instructor: Mickey Mariash

Leave your preconceived notions and rulers at the door! In this class participants will let go of their inhibitions about quilting and learn how to improvise and design nontraditional quilts. On day one we will introduce ourselves and discuss/ look at examples of improvisational quilts. As a warmup, participants will pick a bag with random shapes and colors and textures of paper. They will arrange them into paper “quilts” to introduce them to the sense of play and freedom that comes with improvisational quilting. Then we will move onto arranging fabric scraps into various collages to begin the design process. Participants are encouraged to bring scraps, fabrics that have special meaning to them, old clothes, or anything else they want to incorporate into their project. On day two we will continue working on our mini quilts and be introduced to fabric books. This class is open to all – no sewing experience is needed.

Designing Patterns and Prints for Textiles

September 26-29

Instructor: Arielle Toelke

Get drawing and designing in this workshop focused on pattern and prints. Find your inner designer and leave with naturally dyed prints you will want to wear right out of the studio. This four-day workshop will demystify the design aspect of surface design, breaking the process down and making it fun and easy. Each day we will perform different drawing and design methods, discuss patterns throughout history, and learn how to make repeatable patterns.

Participants will create silk screens without needing an exposure table or chemicals and learn the basics of mordant printing on cotton. Using a variety of methods, designs will be realized on cloth with mordant pastes and natural dyes. This method is perfect for the budding designer as mordant pastes will give a range of color from a single dye pot. At the end of this workshop, you’ll leave with samples of your prints in a variety of natural colors, bandanas, a shirt, silk screens, a personal pattern catalog, instructions to keep working at home.

www.sanbornmills.org

Photo Credits

Top photo by Helen Westergren.

Fibershed Design Showcase graphic by Lea Rossignol.

Farm to Table Dinner photo by Steve Bjerklie.

Sawmill photo by Colin Cabot.

Workshop photos courtesy the instructors.

Sanborn Mills Farm | 7097 Sanborn Road | Loudon, NH 03307 US