One day last week I reached into my knitting bag to find that all the stitches on one needle had fallen off. I was having problems picking up the stitches so I decided to pull out a few rows. Sometimes it's easier to pick up stitches this way.
I hadn't picked up the stitches by the next morning and wanted to take my knitting with me. So I broke the yarn and started the second sock. The nice thing about this is that the two socks will share more colors this way.
Last night's full moon:
I wonder if it's what made the indigo sprout...
I had placed my planter with the indigo seed outside. I guess I wasn't quite ready to give up. Good thing too. I planted the indigo seed on March 14th.
Adding a bit of red to the shawl in progress.
I was worried that I'd missed seeing the bank of magnolias bloom at one of our local parks but I was right on time.
Playing with photoshop again:
The current reading list:
A library card is a wonderful thing...I check out books I wouldn't necessarily buy. It's possible to do things like check out the book version and the movie. I've already watched Handmade Nation, but have just taken a peak at the book. I'm not sure the movie said anything new to me, but it was interesting (warning if you watch the trailer all the images may not appeal).
Almost every movie needs popcorn, even a documentary:
This is a spicy version: cinnamon, nutmeg and chipolte powder.
This weekend the weather was nice enough that it was time to set up my shelter for the porch swing. This is an old lace table cloth. I tie two ends to the porch swing, one corner to my wall of windows and the other to one of the wires that supports my grape vine.
Part of the view at the moment:
Another project I am working on with a re-claimed table cloth:
A bucket style bag. This one had been dipped into an indigo vat twice when this picture was taken. Tonight I dipped it again to create more blue patterns farther up the bag.
From my indigo fermentation vat! It took me three weeks to get this vat working, but it does dye fabric. HOoray!
I don't have the necessary tools to make a really clean circle, but I love the shadows that were created by what I was able to do...
Also, just finished reading When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. It's a wonderful, wonderful book that I know I will reread more than once. I'm not going to share my favorite quote as the idea is more wonderful if it is discovered after reading all that comes before it...
You could have a bite of yogurt cake with rhubarb sauce:
It's the first stem of rhubarb this year (from the garden) plus a few frozen strawberries to make it red.
We could tour the garden. I had to try another batch of lettuce in egg shells as the first batch didn't work so well...
I'll show you my sky scarf:
It's getting quite long. It seems quite different to me to look at it as a whole rather than close up:
Every little section has something I love. The colors here are so soft they might not show up on all monitors quite right...and the yarn I spun on Friday night is here somewhere.
And I'd share the thing that has excited me the most this weekend... The indigo yeast vat that I started last summer and thought wasn't working very well, sat outside all winter. While I was cleaning the garden last weekend I decided it was probably time to dump it somewhere. But when I looked closely I realized it was an interesting shade of green and I thought "Hmm, maybe I should bring this inside and warm it up a bit?" So I did and amazingly enough...it works!
The yellow is velvet dyed with onion skin. I love these colors together.
it's quiet in the neighborhood.
I took my spinning/knitting projects out to the front porch. A cool evening, but too nice to be inside.
Deliberately, I am letting the end of the roving catch in the already spun yarn.
The roving I am using for a shawl has patches of color that matches the fungi growing on the stairs.
And also the snail that is crawling by my foot.
He's probably heading for the primroses.
I want to know why the weather is given as 40% chance of rain instead of 60% chance of sun? Mostly we got the sun. And oh it made me happy...
Most of my spring cleaning happened in the garden today(had the day off from work)! Weeding and digging and pruning. I harvested a handful of lettuce that reseeded last fall and is just now starting to grow. I was experimenting to see if I could save lettuce seed. I'm not actually sure where that lettuce seed is at the moment, but what reseeded in the garden did beautifully.
I also did some spring cleaning in the pantry. I pretty much made this up but it is loosely based on the rhubarb chutney recipe in Small Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard. It has dried cherries, dried prunes, dried apricots, apple cider vinegar, red onion, rhubarb (from the freezer, my plant is almost ready to start harvesting from) and a bit of sugar.
Also did some closet organizing whenever the clouds sailed over and covered up the sun. This once was the leg on a pair of pants. Now it's the latest thing from the indigo vat...and yes there is a spot of dirt on the fabric.
4:44 AM I can hear the rain hitting the chimney. Often I wonder what it would be like to live under a tin roof.
6:01 Having my second cup of coffee. Wondering about wardrobe choices. Layers are very necessary where I live. I wonder if the lighter layers for winter could be made to stand alone for summer?
6:56 Just came back in from the letting the chickens out. The code for the sky scarf for the last three days would be G-G-G.
8:04 This morning I'm being more deliberate about cheese making then I usually am. I'm following these directions for making Paneer.
9:00 Been working on a Jelly for the last hour. There's a break in the rain so I'm off to the grocery store to get potting soil.
9:55 On my way to the grocery store I saw two cars go by with snow on them. Talked to one of my brothers and he said he had an inch of snow this morning. No April Fools joke, that is unless you thought it was spring...
11:23 Just finished planting up the tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, and broccoli. The indigo isn't up yet. Maybe I need to reseed? Nope, need to be patient, I just looked up the germination time and it can take over 32 days!
(I'm particularly pleased with these tomatoes. They grew from seed that I saved two years ago. I'll thin these to just one plant in a couple days.)
2:34 Spent an hour or so outside, some beautiful sun breaks off and on this afternoon. Made an indigo vat (chemical) to dye a sweater that could use a pick-me-up.
4:00 Cleared the table. I'm finding that I need to have an open space available to work if I want to keep working on things during the week. But I constantly fight a desire to stack things...like books.
6:23 Time to think about what I need for work tomorrow.
I found a home for a fermentation indigo vat. It was almost 90 degrees F on top of the closet this morning. A little warmer than it would normally be, but I'm pretty sure it stays consistently between 70-80 degrees.
The closet came from The ReStore in Seattle. It was originally from one of the Seattle schools and was taken out during a remodel. I've had it for a long time now.
Today was really more about the garden, but I did stitch the bottom hem on the t-shirt I've been working on. I sat on the front porch steps with the dogs and watched the morning go by...
A favorite from childhood, drum stick primroses (primula denticulata). I discovered one that I planted last spring survived the year and popped back up to bloom again.
I decided to dip the sleeves of my sample shirt into the indigo vat. I like it...might dip them in one more time.
And of course just a touch of blue for the sky scarf...
It's a very powdery soft blue. We've had a small handful of blue dawns over the last couple weeks.
I always come back to connections. How do things connect in a sustainable way? Sustainable for me to maintain, for the environment...to sustain who I want to be.
I stitched my fish down. The fabric for this project was reclaimed from two shirts that had seen better days. The fish is made with fabric dyed with leaves from the garden, onion skins, and pomegranate.
I want to make more fish to be used on the other side of my Following Sea blanket...
My thought is to leave this side pretty much as it is now. I am going to stitch a few jellyfish on the top, moon jellyfish. I'm pretty sure these are the jellyfish I remember from my childhood.
The other side, that's where most of the creatures of the sea will be, under the water. A community...
So much to learn...
When will we have our last snow this year? Was it today? Last year it was the first week of April.
How long will the indigo vat last at 60 degrees Fahrenheit? This is day three.
How fast can I make a local, sustainable, organic dinner for the Dark Days Challenge? 20 minutes
This is hash browns, scrambled eggs, pear and sorrel from the garden.
Curiosity can drive creativity...
I'm dyeing roving in the indigo vat for the sky scarf. Tomorrow I'll plant indigo seed. Maybe this fall I'll have local organic indigo to dye with?
Over the next week I want to "unwrap" my last post a bit, starting with "reflect."
I'm dyeing swatches with indigo. As much as I love to experiment, I don't tend to keep track of details. The details that allow something to be repeated. Thinking about how I tend to see what I get and then see what makes sense, what might be done from there. I probably wouldn't be a very good scientist. But I do love to "think" and "reflect" on what I am doing...blogging is a nice way to make that happen. Thinking about how contentment and creativity go together...
Noticing: Pulmonaria in the garden. The Forsythia started to bloom today too.
And doing:
Mending a hole in my buckwheat pillow.
And:
Knit, fulled, and dropped into the cabbage dye bath. The shiny yarn is a banana fiber. The dye didn't take in the wool well so I tossed it back in. I rinsed the fabric sooner than I usually do.
One of my great-grandmother's lace doily's. It has some stains/rust spots. One of the interesting things about this piece is that the center medallion is crocheted in a heavier thread then the outside ring of flowers. I tossed it into an onion skin dye bath.
I have an idea.
This
plus this,
layered together in photoshop elements and then adding an "overlay" filter (found where the opacity is set on the far right hand side of Elements)
equals:
I was eleven or twelve the first time I thought about rings. I was (and am!) a huge fan of Madeline L'Engle and read A Ring of Endless Light as soon as I discovered it.
One of the passages quotes a poem by Henry Vaughan, "The World:"
"I saw Eternity the other night/ Like a great rind of pure and endless light/ All calm , as it was bright."
One of the gifts of poetry is how an image, an idea, can be caught in just a few words.
A few years later I read one of Ursula K Leguin's books and found a passage that just added to my love of circles. It's rather long so I'm not going to re-type it tonight. I posted the quote here a few years ago.
It seems I'm circling back...
Last Friday I walked home along the boardwalk...
This Friday I played a little bit...
It's been a very long week... but it's Friday again. And Monday will be a new week.
Jude's post today (Spirit Cloth) reminded me of something I hadn't posted yet. A little sample I worked on the last month of December. My parents found some local cashmere wool for me. It's a bit hard for me to spin by itself, but mixes in beautifully with some other wool that I have. A bit of the cashmere can be seen in the picture. It's a brownish gray and is so very soft.
Somehow my mind has started connecting my sky scarf and the Dark Days challenge. I think because I am knitting with local yarn (mostly!) and there is so much gray right now...
The sky scarf, month number five:
I've been wondering, once the scarf is finished, will someone look at it and think, "Hmm...that reminds me of the sky?" Will they look closer and see the fat white stripe, and wonder if that was our snow storm? Will they see the orange stripe and wonder if that was the morning after the lunar eclipse?
Yesterday as I was knitting, it became very real to me that a story can be told without images or words. That a color could hold a story...
As for food...
I didn't really join the Dark Days Challenge to explore eating locally, I already knew I could. I mostly wanted to check in with myself to see if I was eating as locally as I thought I was. To push myself a little further.
The ingredients that I find myself considering the most as I plan these meals are fats for cooking, sweeteners, salt, baking soda/powder, and spices. This is where I am at currently as I consider these ingredients:
Fats: I am using butter, hazelnut oil (very sparingly as it's expensive), or cooking with water instead of my usual olive oil for the most part. I have also used some bacon fat and might at some point consider rendering fat (don't look if you are vegetarian!). I don't eat much meat though. Today I experimented with making ghee.
Sweeteners: Honey or fruit (apple cider works great for some things). This really changes baking. Found a web site this morning that I want to explore more. But really, the bottom line here is that I need to bake less.
Salt: I am going to try making my own. Found this blog post for a resource. Just have to decide which beach seems best to collect from....
Baking soda/powder: Well, back to that baking issue. Sour dough anyone?
Spices and cultures: Certainly we could adjust to cooking without spices. Many wonderful herbs can be grown locally. I could either give up foods that made with a culture (some of the cheeses I want to make for example) or be really wild and see what cultures are hanging around (that could be dangerous I'm thinking). But that seems to be taking things a bit far. I'm pretty sure the shipping of cinnamon is more sustainable than apples from New Zealand to Washington.
The other thing that I am looking at is that I've given myself a bit of a break by allowing foods that are bulk to be exceptions to the local rule. This is the area that I can get better at. I think I can establish the same rule for bulk that I have for vegetables and fruits. If I can find it or grow it locally, I have to buy it locally first. If it's not available in Washington, then it needs to come from the west coast.
This week's Dark Days meal was an experiment in making pasta with whole wheat flour. This is one of the flour choices that is available to me locally.
I made a topping by sauteing onions in butter, adding a handful of cabbage and then sprinkling in a bit of rosemary. Tasted great, looks... well... And I cheated a bit. Used salt.
Born of friendship and conversation.
Hatched from a blue egg (barely visible).
Transformed by leaves,
under a moon and among the stars
A small little moth finds shelter.
Among mountains and blue chickens.
She might want to watch out for the paw though...
The "sole food:"
One of the things I've realized lately is that although most of my food is locally sourced, I do depend on a few basics that are not: olive oil, spices, and salt. For the Dark Days sole meal I've decided I need to make no exceptions.
Today's Breakfast: a local cereal that I noticed at the co-op and hadn't gotten around to trying yet, apple from Mom and Dad's, and hazelnuts. Yum.
No salt and no spices; not even some local honey as I'm trying to get my sweet tooth under control.
This would be more of a making the pantry more local update:
In my effort to replace some of the foods I've been counting as "exceptions," I decided to make some hazelnut butter as a replacement for peanut butter. I used the directions in Stocking Up by Carol Hupping, which gives the option of using water to start the clumping of the nuts from a flour (which is really what the nuts are at one point of grinding) to a spread.
I do have some ground nuts set aside to try as a flour as well. I've already done this with almonds successfully so the hazelnuts should work.
And then for local color:
My version of Jude's rings. I'm going to call it an egg ring or a seed ring. I used a local red cabbage for the dye bath.
It started out promisingly enough, it could have been feta (what I was aiming for). I suspect it went another direction due to temperature. It's still very tasty.
Today I was off work a bit early. It gave me a chance to gather a few more windfall branches and to finish off the wreath I've been making. It's becoming a tradition to make wreaths from whatever branches fall out of the neighbor's trees during November windstorms. The little reindeer was a gift from someone. It looks right at home munching on a few branches.
I also started a couple dye baths with red cabbage. One in an aluminium pan and the other in stainless steel. Red cabbage dye baths seem to change color easily, but I always like whatever shade they become. This one has a bit of local wool that I want to use in the sky scarf.
Thinking about how we can adapt to what is available.
For the last couple days most of my "making" has centered around knitting the sweater. Two more inches on the yoke and I'm done other than finishing up the underarm seams. It will be finished by the end of next weekend. The big mystery at the moment is, will it fit? I wanted this sweater to be a little less loose than the blue one, but I may have overestimated. Ah well!
I've also started to stitch on a little project. This is fabric I dyed with goldenrod. I laid the flowers across the fabric and wrapped it around a copper pipe. The tree pattern was pretty obvious to me when I unwrapped the fabric. A little bit of drawing confirmed that it was the right direction.
Lots of playing today, no shopping.
Here's one of my latest dye experiments ( from a container of leaf dye. ) For this one I made a ball out of dry fabric and placed it in the dye bath. This is the outside edge. I love the effect created as fluid wicks up through the fabric.
After washing and drying this piece, the colors are subtle and hard to capture on the camera, but it does have some fun patterns.
The more I looked at the fabric, the more intrigued I was by the creases.
I wondered what if I played a bit with the image in Photoshop...
Sure glad I decided to find out. The only thing I did here is add a layer called "fresco." The patterns were created by the wrinkles and the color.
No Photoshop involved in this one:
This is what happens when a book is put in a sun room that contains slugs (I didn't do it!). Luckily this was the only damage to the book, on the inside cover. I suppose slugs could be considered lace makers...
equals
I decided I needed to learn how to do something new this week.
So I taught myself how to fold a paper boat.
And I set it to sail on a piece of cloth that was a gift. One that I had left folded in the sun this summer and then dyed in indigo.
And then I played a bit more.
A good thing to do under the full moon.
Cold and sunny. A perfect day to work in the garden, start a new dye pot (it's the water that the goldenrod was in with a variety of leaves added) and go to the farmer's market.
There is snow/rain mix in the long range forecast. That has to be "taken with a grain of salt" around here. But it has been cold. We are certainly moving into another season.
I never thought celery would become a seasonal food for me. I had an apple/blue cheese/celery salad for lunch and peanut butter and celery for a snack.
I'll be making celery salt with the leaves, a season of another sort.
Holding the sky scarf up to the light really shows where I have spun the yarn tightly and where it is looser. I like this...it reflects how days go. Some tightly packed and some loosely structured. It reflects the quality of the atmosphere as well...
I've gotten behind the last few days with my spinning and knitting and will need to catch up (big project at work that is now done). I knew this would happen sooner or later and that I'd have to decide whether to pick up with whatever day I was on or keep track of the days and make up rows. I've decided to make up rows, so that there is at least one row for every day of the year.
The sleeve to the sweater is finished and the pieces are all now joined together. Moving forward one stitch plus one stitch at a time.
And then there is this:
Using up the last of the goldenrod dye. I'll pull this out on Saturday. The blue line is from paint. I used this fabric for a bulletin board at work and doodled directly on the fabric.
And...goldenrod flowers and fabric wrapped around a copper pipe. The water has turned yellow.
I don't own a car:
It forces you to walk more. Even when you are tired...
(These pictures are from earlier in the week.)
And to look closer.
(This one is from today.)
Some of these leaves are heading for the dye pot.
And a video that I found this morning while I was looking around.
More layers, more storytelling.
The latest sock to join the family.
From the garden. Beginning and ending and cycles.
Jude recently reminded me of something I made several years ago. That reminder inspired me to play with this again. And really, this time I need to keep going with it, to play more with doodling on dyed fabric.
So what did I do? Basically I'm stippling on fabric. I used a micron brand pen to make a design with dots. What I find the most fun is to dye my fabric first, with folds...
and then follow the patterns the dye makes to create patterns.
Fun!
Here's a few samples I've dyed recently. The greenish-yellow is cotton dyed with goldenrod and the orange-ish fabric is cotton dyed with elderberry leaves.
Play, play is good!
I decided it was time to try making a different kind of cheese. I chose Feta. This is after it was drained and before I cut and salted it. It won't really be ready to eat until Friday. Right now it tastes like mild goat cheese.
I also made farm cheese with the last of the milk I had. This recipe for ricotta is a great place to start if anyone is interested in making cheese.
Made a yummy lunch with pesto, tomatoes, and walnuts. The basil and tomatoes are from the garden. The last of the basil and the tomatoes are winding down.
This experiment had mixed results. It's gluten free foccacia. One of my favorite uses for the grapes from the garden is to use them as a topping on bread. I'm not sure if the moisture from the grapes made the bread gummy or something else (since I've never made this recipe before), but the middle is still a bit raw. It did, however, taste really good and I'm hoping it will toast well.
As for the tale of two pots:
My sample fabrics are the same color.
This morning.
Thirty minutes later. I was walking along a chain link fence surrounding one of the schools and noticed it was covered with spider webs. This was my favorite. A spider web on either side, billowing just a bit in the breeze.
Today's yarn for the sky scarf. I like having patches of barely spun yarn in this projects as it really does create a "cloud like" effect.
The afternoon was glorious, but no long summer with a touch of fall. Now it is the other way, fall with a touch of summer.
I gathered my golden rod for the next dye experiment.
This will be a tale of two pots. One stainless steel, one aluminum.
A feather for Jude's Magic Feather Project.
It's a print of an elderberry leaf that I doodled on a bit. It's been "aging" for a couple weeks and has now been washed three times and run through the dryer.
I'll add stitching as soon as I have thread that is something other than green or red. Hmm... maybe green would be good.
The idea to do a feather this way came from Acey, who had used a leaf as a template.
One
Most of my childhood summers were spent out on a fishing boat or running around the docks with my brothers and any friends we had made.
I'm not quite sure what inspired me, but one summer when I was eight or nine I decided to find out whether salt water could be made to taste "un-salty." For some reason I thought baking soda would do the trick. And for some reason my mother was supplying me with baking soda for my experiments. At least until she found out that we were drinking it....
I'm still experimenting with concoctions, and funnily enough they still involve soda.
The baptistia has changed color and is now dying fabric to a shade of yellow.
I'm not disappointed that I haven't come up with blue. I knew that was not likely with what I was doing.
I did decide to pursue this a bit further after reading a post at wake robin. I poured a bit of ale into the dye bath. Smells really good right now. And interestingly enough the leaves have a bit of a blue sheen to them.
I'm going to let it sit a bit longer...
Plus one
My "Many Moons" blanket started as a way to salvage a few moth eaten blankets. Now the holes needing to be mended are from Lola the nester and the fact that the grey wool is fairly fragile. I've decided that I won't leave it where Lola can find it anymore.
As for the mending:
What if I lay a left over square over a corner that is particularly ragged?
What if I lay a piece of lace crocheted by one of my great-grandmothers and that I had stitched to a piece of wool on top of another corner?
What if I crochet a circle and push it into a hole and then stitch it into place?
I like all these solutions, especially the crocheted dot. For a long time I've wanted to come up with a way to work a crocheted/knit piece of fabric and a woven one together. This might be it.
Wool roving that I added to the elderberry dye bath. I knew right away that I wanted to add some to the sky scarf. It's just the pink-peach of dawn on the horizon.
Close to the color of Chattanooga's eggs too.
Scarf at day seventeen.
A fragment of a poem I've recently found (and a poet that I want to read more by):
"But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light."
Billy Collins
Elderberry leaf dyed and avocado pit dyed fabric. Left the fabrics sitting on the porch for two weeks. Washed with my usual soap and dried. Very happy with how colorfast the elderberry was.
The very back piece of fabric (the cut work? eyelet?) was the one dyed with avocado pits. A very nice soft pink.
The bottom fabric is the elderberry.
Amaranth. This was not a success. Maybe with a mordant?
Next up: Baptista (False Indigo).
Didn't expect this. Cotton dyed with elderberry leaves in an aluminum pot. Solar heat only.
Last year my results were brown.
The difference would be the aluminum.
Hope it's color fast.
First tomatoes harvested.
They were bitter sweet.
My mother found some local wool for me from a new source.
Seems that it would be perfect for a project suggested by a friend (thanks Sherry!).
The idea is to "knit a stripe in colors to match the sky" every day for a year. (Leafcutter Designs)
I'm going to tweak the idea a bit by spinning yarn that is a mix of the colors I see in the sky at some point during the first hour after dawn. It just seemed more meaningful to me to choose a time of day. That and on any given day we can have everything! Started this on Monday so I'm at day three.
I did start with one stripe of hand spun that someone else did, but I'm going to try to do the rest myself with local wool.
And then:
Arranged in a nine patch for Jude.
For the last three days I've collected three eggs. All the chickens are laying now. The ones to the left are from Chattanooga and should be blue/green. Not quite yet.
Does anyone know if Ameraucana chicken eggs become more blue as the chickens get older?
The other thing that is fun about this is the difference in size. Chattanooga has been laying for about a week and her eggs are tiny. Rosemary has been laying for a month. Her eggs started out small too but are already getting larger. They are in the middle. Jitterbugs eggs are on the far right. She is two years old.
One more nine patch. Blackberries arranged on top of wool dyed with elderberry leaves.
I rolled it up and tossed it back in the dye bath with the elderberry leaves.
The paint color really was named "sunshine." I used it for a dark corner in my living room.
Not going to be able to keep it to one photo tonight:
On staycation for the next week. A little earlier than planned but that's okay. The next week should be good gardening weather.
The yeast/sugar indigo dye vat worked! The first piece of fabric that I put in the vat didn't take much color. The second, so much more. I'm going to put another piece of fabric in tomorrow.
This is not as easy as using the color remover. It's going to take practice to get reliable results.
One thing I know for sure, this is an outside project. Stinky.
What I suspect, this method takes some time. Be patient, lazy or forgetful.
Found floating in the water I've been rinsing fabric in.
Indigo moth...
The background fabric is one of the first pieces of fabric that I put in the indigo vat. The star is from a later batch. I originally dyed the fabric I cut the star from with rose leaves.
The indigo distracted me from the round-up that I wanted to do yesterday so I'm posting more than one photo today...a sort of intermission.
This is the fabric pictured hanging over the rail in yesterday's post, washed and dried. I know what I see there, but I bet we all have our own ideas.
I've described pretty much how I did this and with what in the comment section of my last post. Look here if you haven't and are curious. I do want to add that if you have been wanting to try indigo and haven't gotten around to it for whatever reason, don't be afraid...give it a try!
I finally got a picture of my hanging baskets that I am pleased with. This is another project that I've been wanting to do for awhile and hadn't until this year.
Actually the toad stool baby rattle has been on my to-try list for awhile too.
I added a little something extra to the stuffing. The pattern for the rattle is at The Pearl Bee.
It was a lot of fun to knit and used up some small pieces of sock yarn.
Why? Why did I wait so long to try this...
Jude recently posted a very interesting question, "to dye or not to dye?"
It is a question that has been lingering in my mind. And my answer, for myself, is yes I need to dye with plants.
I had suggested that maybe dyeing with plant material was a way to camouflage (blend in) ourselves in the natural world.
But the more I think about it, the more I realized what I meant wasn't really about avoiding detection, as the word camouflage conveys, but rather that by gathering color from nature, I am reminded that I am part of nature. And that like growing/gathering plants for my own food or to make my own medicines, collecting plants to color cloth with is another way to connect with a larger existence than my own. The more connections that are knit together, the stronger they become.
This isn't yarn I dyed, but it was hand dyed and perhaps the next pink-ish yarn I have will be.
The madder germinated and is doing well. The safflower I've planted keeps getting eaten by the slugs. I'll try again.
From the book I'm currently reading:
"Perhaps we may make our stand along the edge of that civilization, like a magician, or like a person who, having lived among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to his own. He lingers half within and half outside of his community, open as well, then, to the shifting voices and flapping forms that crawl and hover beyond the mirrored walls of the city. And even there, moving along those walls, he may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier..." The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
This surprised me. I used pansies in an aluminum pot (India Flint's technique for frozen flowers).
The pansies I used. I just kept saving them as I dead-headed. The cheesecloth I used for straining turned a lovely periwinkle blue so the green might be from the aluminum pan. Just a theory.
First batch, soaked for one day. A faint green. Tested on cotton, silk, and wool.
One week soak.
I hope it lasts.
On Sunday I was sorting fabric scraps into piles and I found a few things...
The fabric on the right was once the same color as the one on the left. The left side is a scrap that was added to the stash many years ago. The right side was the jacket that I had made and then left in a window sill for a couple months because I wasn't happy with the way it fit. I want to try a more deliberate experiment...inspired by something Jude (Spirit Cloth) tried.
I'm not sure who gave this to me or what I'm going to do with it (it is a sun-faded curtain) but the pattern on this fabric gave me an idea. What if a quilt was made with alternating woven nine patches and strips of hearts? Could be interesting...
A couple days ago I wondered how much a heart could absorb?
I think the answer might be as much as it needs to.
Tonight's experiment: a handful of daffodils.
This weekend I saw some wonderful t-shirts made with a stripped fabric. I started thinking about ways to make thin stripes and thought about just drawing them on. After I see what kind of dye results I get I may decide to stitch over the lines.
I may not be on line much for a bit, having connection issues/browser issues. Big sigh....
Update: Keeping fingers crossed that problem is solved. Sometimes updating causes more problems. I was able to reload my old browser so I think I'm okay.
Another pair of finished socks for the collection.
It was a recipe for homemade goldfish crackers (at Smitten Kitchen) that took a slightly different turn since I didn't have a goldfish cookie cutter.
Made me think of cloud seeding and Kate Bush's song "Cloudbusting."
The crackers are very good and worth making again. I used a very sharp local cheese called "River Cheddar." It does make a very small batch of crackers though. You don't need a food processor as the recipe suggests, I used my mixer.
Little bits of color starting to show up in my garden. I think there will be something new to discover every day now. Every winter I think I need to work more evergreens into the garden, but there is pure magic in how the garden wakes up and transforms from brown and gray to lush green each year.
Started playing with the onion skins today too. Scattered the onion skins one direction the first time and then turned and scattered them the other direction for the second.
Playing a bit... With weaving and photoshop elements. I probably could have blended the edges a bit more in the "wash" photo.
I hope the slight variation of color shows up for everyone. The "white" center is really a mixture of tan-yellow (eucalyptus) and pale blue (cabbage) dyed fabric. I want to remember that a "solid" is more interesting when built with layers of color, with a bit of variation.
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