bee creative

good stuff

A lot of yesterday was spent in the garden and scraping paint off the house to prepare for painting.  I really like how this bed turned out...dahlias and bachelor buttons for dyeing, calendula for salve (and maybe some dyeing), mint (also a possible dye), borage for the bees and because I like their twinkly blue star flowers.  Borage is good for other things too. 

There are peas to pick...some of them I will freeze. Also blueberries, the earliest of them. 

I will be out in the garden soon.

 

It rained overnight so I started today with sewing. 

Some of the indigo fabric is being used to make a tunic. I didn't have enough fabric for even a short top with any of the fabric so I pieced fabric together so that there was enough.  My plan is to add some embroidery around the neckline and where I pieced the fabric together.  There is no pattern for this, just two squares with a neckline cut out. 

 

I fell in love with this fabric several years ago and made a top and a skirt.  Neither was worn much as the neckline on the top ended up being bigger than I liked and the skirt never felt right.  The fabric is a double gauze.  My thoughts are that while double gauze is recommended as a skirt fabric, it's not a good skirt fabric for me.  

This morning I cut everything apart and tried again.

This is the One Yarn Minimalist Top pattern. The skirt makes up the body of the top and the shoulder pieces are made with fabric from the top.  I also cut fabric for sleeves but decided that I like it better without sleeves. 

So much better!

And then there has been pound cake (made to use up the eggs), berries and cherries, and yogurt.  The raspberries are from the garden and the rest of the fruit from the farmer's market.  So good...

moments

Gibson in a box...I looked up and saw him there, framed.

Filter added to adjust the color.

At Mom and Dad's. 

They have a small pond in their front garden with a few gold fish. I love the lilies and also love the color contrast of lily with the yellow greens. 

And isn't this magnificent? 

In my garden I am celebrating celery (along with every berry that I find!).  Some of the celery is planted in my mini-hoop house with an olla and some in a raised bed without the olla.  This is in the hoop house and is doing very well.  The olla's in the planters are working wonderfully and I am going to use more of them next year.

And...

A dot.

Last month's flower moon ink and the ink made from black/deep purple pansies.  I think I added a bit too much clove oil to the flower moon ink (as a preservative) and it made the ink separate some. 

Always learning...

more blues

Much cooler today but the indigo vat is still happy.

More dyeing. 

The only piece of fabric that had a white base is the blue in the middle, the rest had a yellow base.  The yellow is either marigold or buddleia from last year. 

For comparison.

Waste not: 

I've been adding the indigo rinse water to the paper pulp I've been making (on the left).  Some of the pulp has been used for paper sheets and some as "paper clay." 

The square on the left has a paper basket as a base and the one on the right has a plastic container as a mold.  They both seem to be drying well.  I added flour to the paper pulp to make it clay like. 

I was inspired by an Instagram post (Sibster) but it's something that has long interested me...

I bought this book which has instructions on paper making and paper mache, along with other paper projects, over thirty years ago. 

Somethings just take a lot of time to get to...

 

light is magic

This photo wasn't altered in any way, the layering of buttercup and poppy are just from the light and the way the petals fell. 

Today there has been 16 hours of daylight and it reached 81 F, hot for us. 

The date/indigo vat is happy and I did a second dip for the fabric that I've been dyeing. 

The reflection in the indigo vat shows the current house colors...shades of blue. 

Today I painted the front of the house, bottom level. I never thought I'd paint a house pink...and yet I am doing it. It's a fairly small section but large enough to give me a good idea of what it will look like. 

The pink makes me think of peonies and roses and sweet peas; some of the things that I love about summer.

In her essay, Summer Solstice, Nina Maclaughlin asks readers to consider what is the season that calls to them the most, summer or winter?  Mostly I love the in-between seasons.  I don't like the heat, but do love so much of what summer brings...

The first of this year's raspberries, picked this morning.

 

confession number one, I keep things too long.

I feel like I lost a week and am not sure quite where it went.  Maybe it's just that the grass pollen is high...the garden is amazing though. 

(cucumbers and celery...trying celery for the first time.)

It's been raining so a lot of time yesterday was spent cleaning and organizing.  I am not sure it looks much better than it did before but two big bags full of things left the house so something must have changed.

There was also a lovely surprise visit from Hazel (the second in two weeks!)...just when I needed a break.

I also made a new indigo vat with some dates that were way past "best by."  This is dip number one; the fabric (dipped today) will go back in for another dip tomorrow and/or the next day.

Today I used some shredded junk mail for paper pulp and added some of the pansy ink the water. 

Just for a moment it was purple and then it was blue. 

This is some of the pulp flipped out onto watercolor paper.  It doesn't matter if it sticks...I have an idea!

Some of the pansy ink was saved in some tiny bottles that I've had forever and found while sorting.  Maybe this is something I kept for just the right amount of time? But it's the "it will be useful someday" that gets me into trouble.  

There also has been some stitching; trying a technique that Jude shared in the Forever Zone.  The fabric is some that I dyed using a clay resist for the circles.  It will make a nice pillow once all the circles are stitched

Hmm...where did that clay go? 

 

 

 

 

 

June arrives

While standing on the porch one minute before a sunrise that was too cloudy to see, I notice that the paths around and in and out of my garden form a nine patch as they intersect.

It makes me think of Jude.

Still playing with the pansy ink.  The purple on the left is where I squished the flowers into the paper. 

The ink is dry; I think the color is different because of the paper.  It also gave me purple fingers for a day.

This morning's mark making.  Flower moon and charcoal ink along with the pansy ink.

And then digital layers, more charcoal.

June is when everything grows so fast here; along with the typical rain, it is warm and the days are long. 

It's also when the roses bloom...

serendipity, also ka-boom!

Serendipity...a word that came to me this morning. 

It's a fun word, kind of bouncy and happy.

I've been working on organizing, making some things more accessible and putting other things away. 

There is more time for play if the materials are easy to find and there is a clear space to work.

(I am a horrible stack maker of things...this is a kind of making.)

One of the books I am reading very slowly (how I tend to read the books I like the most) is Mary Ruefle's book Madness, Rack and Honey.  A thought from one of the essay's that has stuck in my mind is about how we organize our books. 

"One of the ways you can tell there's more to people than you might think is to go to their houses. If they have a lot of books, well, that means something.  But don't just look at the books, look at the way the books are organized on the shelves, for there are many different ways to do this."

This is where I keep the books I am wandering in out of for various reasons at any given time.  There is also a stack beside it (the ones I am reading the most).  I love keeping books in an old dynamite box that says "Highly explosive, Dangerous." 

Ka-boom! 

I also have a box full of books about pigments, one of cookbooks that I am most interested in at the moment, a book shelf for books about nature (mostly guidebooks but this label strays a little bit), a shelf for most cherished books, an old metal revolving book/magazine holder for beautiful books and then the rest is a free-for-all.

I suppose this says something about me...

In Austin Kleon's newsletter this morning (the serendipity), a link was included to a post titled "The art of finding what you didn't know you were looking for," and the benefits about not organizing things too much.

A good reminder for me as I approach a rainy weekend that will mostly be about inside projects. 

Don't worry about the books.  Don't organize the stashes too much...be open to finding what I might not be looking for.

Also...here is the pansy ink dry.  The darkest dot was a more concentrated dot of ink that took about 24 hours to dry.  I see just a hint of blue in the gray dot...an underneath layer of color.

 

 

heart's ease

Yesterday it rained and rained and rained some more. 

By late afternoon the sun came out.

I wandered the garden pulling bindweed (which is determined to strangle everything).

And then I picked the darkest of pansies,  which I am guessing, because of it's tiny size, is probably related to the Johnny Jump up version of pansy; also known as Viola tricolor or Heart's ease. 

The marks on the lower right were made by pounding one of the dark pansies.  The pansies above are another type.  There are a few lobelia too, broken off as I was untangling the bindweed. 

And then I made two kinds of ink, one with water and a bit of vinegar (there is a sample too of just the water and pansy) and the other with vinegar and salt.

 

This morning both had changed...

The pansy + water + vinegar is a greenish gray and the vinegar based ink is blue!

The purple/pink dot is what the ink looks like this morning.  I am guessing by afternoon it will be blue too.

This ink isn't supposed to last long.

Like wandering in the garden, it sure eases the heart.

For anyone who is interested, Jason Logan's Substack newsletter is a wonderful exploration of color. I've followed some of his advice making these inks.

continued

The flower moon ink is, indeed, yellow.

The pink is pigment I made from a rock.  I found it on the floor and was trying it out for contrast.

A moon for the journal that I keep samples in.

Something else I worked on for awhile today. 

The base has been in a pile for awhile.  When I first started putting it together, I saw the possibilities of a woman, a dragon eating a moon or...a cat under the moon. 

There is a little bit more to do, maybe some flowers along the bottom. The blue is indigo dyed, the yellow onion.

thinking of the full moon, the flower moon

The flower moon was right outside my kitchen window at 3:00 AM. 

I am simmering a mixture of black tulip petals, the deepest of purple pansies and the last few blossoms from my favorite auricula primrose to make a flower moon ink. 

At the moment it is a deep dark liquid about the color of the flower petals but a piece of paper dipped in the liquid comes out yellow.  I will share the results tomorrow. 

Other flowers...the dog rose. 

I will make more rose hip ink from it in the fall.

By September it will be the harvest moon. 

 A flower bud the shape of the moon. This is a new peony for the garden. 

The flower should be about the color of the yarn I am knitting with.

Silk so it has a shine.

Thinking of all the transformations.