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As a professional ceramic artist, I spend a lot of time bent over a throwing or banding wheel working on clay objects and sculptures. In this head-down position my hair would often fall into my eyes…or wet clay. One day while wiping the hair out of my eyes with clay covered hands, I had an epiphany; wear a bandana. Being an artist type no plain bandana would do, I needed a cool bandana, and being old I needed one from my youth, one from the Sixties! So after a quick trip to Jerry’s Artarama (my place of steady income) and a few hours meditating in my backyard, I started tying and dying, turning plain white bandanas into objects with rainbows of many bright colors and beauty….I think there might be something metaphorical there.
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I use several tie-dye methods. The more traditional one where the material is folded one way or another, bound with rubber-bands, and dyed with a variety of colored dyes. I also use the Japanese Shibori method, where blocks of wood are clamped on to the material after it had been folded in a certain pattern, and it all is dipped into a natural Indigo dye. Between these two methods, I can create an unlimited number of unique bandanas.
So why Bat*Crazy Tye-Dye? Anyone who has lived in Austin Texas for any length of time has heard about our love for bats, specifically the Mexican free-tail bat. They have a large colony consisting of millions of bats who for decades had made their summer home under our Congress Street Bridge.
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Me wearing Sunrise
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Being a little bat sh** crazy for bats, I added bat bandanas (try to say that ten times really fast) to my bandana repertoire. With saw in hand I cut a pair of bats out a piece of some scrap wood and began dying bats Shibori style. Taking bat bandanas one step further, I started silk-screening my little bats on traditionally tye-dyed bandanas so I would have some with a little color.
Tye-dying my shirt at a Jerry's Artarama demo
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Being one who believes knowledge should be shared, I teach tye-dying at Jerry’s several times a year. The dates are posted on their FaceBook page (@jerryaustin) when a presentation is scheduled. If you don’t live in Austin, I’ll share my tye-dye hand-out with you. See, by being interested enough to read to the end, you got something free.
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I hope you like my bandanas enough to purchase one or two and help me keep Austin weird.
Robb McKenzie
