New Spring Eco Dyeing Courses from Nikola Orpen in UK. Dorset, (Bridport) / Suffolk, (Mettingham near Bungay) and North Yorkshire, (York). March/April 2019

Eco Colour on Cloth – UK Tour 2019

Three weekends of Eco Textile Workshops with Nikola Orpen M.A.

Sat & Sun 23/24 March 2019 Chapel in the Garden – Bridport 

Sat & Sun 30/31 March 2019 Mettingham Village Hall – Suffolk

Sat & Sun 6/7 April 2019 Orchard Park Community Centre – York

Day one
Indigo and Shibori (Japanese resist)
Students will learn how to make up an ORGANIC INDIGO SUGAR VAT (no
nasty chemicals) and using Japanese shibori techniques will create
exquisite and unique samples on cloth.

Day two
A day of Eco Printing using flowers and leaves.
Students will learn how to make beautiful prints and patterns on cloth
and paper by capturing colours directly from nature using contact
printing and steam.

£65 per day with all basic materials provided.
There will also be an opportunity to purchase some ‘special’ cloth
and plain silk scarves to dyes.
Please bring an apron, rubber gloves, fabric scissors, notebook and
pen and any special (not synthetic) yarns or cloth of a neutral colour
that you may like to use.
Refreshments are provided all day, please bring something for lunch to share.

It is not necessary to attend both days but will be more
fulfilling if you do. Both courses are suitable for all levels.
A reservation is necessary as courses tend to book up quickly.
For more information and to secure your place with a £20 deposit per
day please ** email me** Nikola

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What you paid for: My African accomplishments

By public subscription, your subscriptions, I have completed my three months of voluntary service in Ghana.

Thanks to your generous support for my ‘Out to Africa’ and ‘FaceBook musical challenge’ appeals, much, much, much … has been accomplished. I want to share it here with you and let you all know what you have really contributed to, for it wasn’t ‘me’, it was for the hope and direct development of real people with real fear and loathings …. real need and, in the end: real gratitude, that I am asked to pass on.

 

I’m going to lay it out as a simple list for ease of speedy reading – I’ll follow up with some pictures and minuté in later blogs.

As an overarching instrument I created a named initiative under the ‘INCOME’ and ‘Procom’ projects of the Ghanian NGO TradeAid, namely: “Procom Organic Vegetable Initiative” (POVI)

My role and aims were to educate and assist local farmers into organic farming methods and transitions ; the main reasons, simply stated,

• increase income, and thus abrogate poverty
• desist in detrimental and polluting activities with over use of costly synthetic farming chemicals

In three months I have, (but not without assistance):

• set up two small test farms
• conducted more than 20 ‘Farmer Field-school’ trainings – reaching four separate communities, thereby touching up-to 100 farming families, possibly as many as 400-450 individuals by DIRECT INTERVENTION.Delivery of key components by practical demonstration:
• Natural and ‘fast’ composting methodologies
• large volume composting pit methods
• soil building
• crop-specific compost and soil adjustment
• non-chemical integrated pest management and
• natural liquid pesticide manufacture and application

• design, overseeing and monitoring of 6 large scale, triple pit composting chambers for the manufacture of up-to 3.000 liters per chamber-set per season of mature compost
• manufacture of three free-standing compost ‘cubes’
• membership and contribution to CAOF, an upper-east region organic farming coalition

• production and sharing of more than 25 self-penned locally-aimed illustrated training documents, with the commencement of some translated into local dialect and language
• networking
• outreach and community liaison
• 4 detailed training films
• all work photographically and film recorded and shared
• creation of ‘dropboxes’ and web-sites and facebook pages

POVI farmers are: Anti Agri-Chem, Anti poison and Pollution, we are: ‘Forward and Towards Organacism’

Towards a cleaner, healthier, more valuable, non-polluting cropping methodology

Towards greater soil health, fertility and productivity

Towards a new ‘ethical’, sustainable farming practice

Towards a more fullfilling working practice for jobbing farmers

Towards greater and better quality yields for enhanced income, therefore: greater food security and decresed poverty for farming families.

Smock

Unlike some African countries Ghana does not have a particularly aggressive road-side sales culture. Then one meets the irresistible Melody whose charms had me smock-wearing in about 2 seconds, fully documented and the live-fed on FaceBook, to prove it.

I did look as good as she claimed in the traditional Ghanaian smock, but I didn’t buy. She was fine.

The real find of the day was in fact new friend Melody – She’s a real blast!

More Compost/Less Agri-Chems

Another demonstration of 1 cubic meter of fast compost (30 days then ready for application)

I am encouraging these to be built everywhere as free-standing, readily available soil nutrition. The farmers are being taught to make them, and the take-up for the training is most frequently the women, who make them fast – 2 hours tops.

This is a ‘direct-action, lightening-strike’ intervention that has captured the imagination … compost can do that!

In some of the villages and farming communities that I am working with, we have constructed 6, three ‘tank’ , deep compost-pits from block work.  Each chamber will hold upto 1,000L of finished compost – but compost that is a year in the making and maturing.

With the two types of compost generation we will be able to sustain huge annual land coverage and soil-building.

They call me ‘Compost-Man’ – I say fine …. but shouldn’t that be MR. Compost-Man?

Soil-regeneration by compost = Greater fertility, Higher yields, Decreased plant disease, Enhanced water-retention, Erosion eradication and Pollution abrogation … Where’s the down-side?

The Field-School Trainings continue: NPK ….

It’s all very well to get farmers, who didn’t really know how in the first place, to make all-organic general compost from the ‘wastes’ of their harvests and land clearing …. but to to transfer the fine-tunings of NPK, (Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium), took some very complex translation into Fra-Fra and, as such … one hell of a long afternoon!

Sean and Asuah

Indigo workshop

Some pictures from this weekends workshops

Indigo workshop – York UK Oct. 2016

Needed – heritage seeds

I am struggling to plant up in the organic demonstration gardens in our Ghana P.O.V.I. Initiative –  because …..

We can not gain easy access to heritage seed – we can find treated, hybrid, GMO anything and I can grow it organically but it won’t be ‘organic’ produce!

I am appealing to all and any who might have some supplies to help us out – ideally, of course, I need a West African source as the mailing and importation issues are somewhat of a challenge.

We are interested in growing any variety of the following crops: Tomato, carrot, chili pepper, okra and cabbage.