bee creative

and then

Still cold...

The quince I harvested were close to spoiling so I made quince paste today.  And applesauce bread and blueberry jam because I needed some space in the freezer.

And tested my baby vat of indigo. 

This is indigo that I grew.  I fermented it (for much longer than I needed to), strained it and composted the leaves, added Calcium hydroxide, then fructose, and then tossed in some cotton fabric. It worked!  Happy, happy, happy dance! I wasn't trying for an even dye, this will be used as the center square for my covid/log cabin quilt.

And then I played with some of my paint

(garden soil not well sifted)

and took photos and did some digital layering.

So much fun but now it's time to get back to some sewing and knitting too...

books and soup

Woke up to just a bit of snow....

Still more cold weather in the forecast.

Soup weather:  squash + water + tomato chutney topped with paneer and pumpkin seeds cooked in olive oil and paprika spice mix.

I finished reading another chapter of Ways of Being. One of the things I've loved about the pigment class I took was that there were reading materials.  At least two books mentioned in Ways of Being were also recommended reading for the class (Braiding Sweetgrass and Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta). 

And then, another connection... he uses a short story by Ursula Le Guin as an example, one that I was familiar with.  I pulled out my old yellow paged copy of The Compass Rose, bought when I was probably 13 or 14, read the story and remembered yet again why I love Ursula Le Guin's writing so much...

"The first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks:  each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space."  From The Author of the Acacia Seeds

a tiny forest

Last week I planted tulips just before the ground froze. 

While digging I found a patch of clay, an interesting branch, and a bit of lichen.

It seemed like the beginning of a tiny forest...

One possibility.

(The green layer is watercolor paint I made with onion and indigo pigment.)

citizen scientists

After being intrigued by Nancy's post mentioning the blue hour, I've been taking some pictures of the sky just before dawn. 

I first discovered the term citizen scientist (more information about this here) when I was reading A Sideways Look at Clouds, found it again in Ways of Being, and then had someone mention the term in the pigment class I've been taking.

The term reminds me of a book I didn't read but was intrigued by and plan to read someday, The Scientist in the Crib by Alison Gopnik, Andrew M. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl.

The scientific method:  Observe, research, hypothesize, test, analyze, and report.

The last instructional/discussion group meeting for my pigment class was last night.  While many of these things can be done without knowing the science, there is so much science involved.

It makes me think of the layer of science that is part of all that we do as humans, of how we experience the world and participate in life.

Field notes:  27 F/17 with the windchill.  Winds NNE 11 MPH, gusts to 20.  Clear skies.