Preview of Spring/Summer Festival, Thursday, May 21

Dear Current Families, Relatives, Alums, and Friends,

You are invited to our parent & child Mayfaire and summer festival for young children and parents on Thursday, May 21, from 8:30 to 10:30am (you are also invited to the school's larger Mayfaire on Sunday, May 3, from 11 to 3pm). Feel free to come later if 8:30am is too soon. Here is a provisional schedule. It is an outdoor festival--rain, snow, or shine.

8:30 to 9:30am Arrival, conversation, outdoor play, silk dyeing
9:15am First set of Maypole dances
9:30am Puppet show
9:40am Outdoor snack (picnic)
10am Reprise of Maypole dances
10:10am Dancing to the fiddle
Continued outdoor play and conversation until 10:30am.

To celebrate the gifts of plants and sun and bring us toward a summer mood (when the sun's fire is manifest), we will be dyeing silks in brazilwood (which produces red/orange) and osage orange (which produces yellow) plant dyes. The school will provide every visiting family with 1 30x30 silk (a good size for making a cape with for a young child). If you wish to dye more than one silk, we will also be selling additional 30 x 30 silks at cost ($3 per silk), payable by cash or check to WIWS (cash would make the administrative work easier).

You might choose, for example, to dye 3 silks--one red, one yellow, one with a yellow sun in the middle of a red background. You might want to dye extra silks for older siblings, as gifts, and the like.

It will help us procure and mordant the right amount of silks if you email me (wdolde@gmail.com) to let me know if you plan to buy silks in addition to the one the school is providing you. Please let me know as soon as possible. If you are not sure, do know that we will try to have some extras on the day of the festival.

I will do the work of preparing the silks (mordanting with alum and cream of tartar) and warming the dye vats. If you feel inspired to try this at home, or if you wish more information, I recommend Joan Almon's First Steps in Natural Dyeing.

Here are a few pages to give you a sense of the book. I am experimenting with ways of sharing pdfs on line, so here is the same selection given to you in 2 different ways. Please let me know if option A or B works for you.

A. This is a version uploaded to scribd.com.

B. This version uses google's document viewer.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde