Inspired by Jude and today's comments on her blog ...
Harvest salad: bread, lettuce, blue cheese, pear, prune, olive oil and apple cider vinegar.
And...
Imagining all the things I want to do with the indigo this weekend.
And well...I just had to include this:
Inconceivable...
Chopped threads and a bit of wool added to some of the paper pulp and water.
What it looked like as paper.
I am wondering at what point would there be too much thread and not enough paper to hold together?
I am also thinking of wet felting. I have added threads to wool to make a textured felt and to make yarn.
This was made by laying the thread on top of the paper pulp while it was on the screen and then flipping it off the screen to dry. I will be doing more of this!
The threads that were placed on top of the wet paper and then pressed into the paper with my fingers didn't stay very well.
Now I know.
And for this one I made a piece of paper as the base, laid strings across the paper and then placed another piece of paper over the top. I have done something similar to this with wool felt.
When I am ready I will drop ink on top.
I am thinking a lot about how felt making and paper making are very similar.
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?
There were a few things I hoped to find as I was sorting.
This was one of them.
It's a strip of squares pieced together.
It will eventually be a fabric basket, cube shaped.
One panel is a sleepy baby dragon made during one of Jude's classes.
I am hoping to work on it for about 10 minutes each day until I can call it done enough to assemble.
I've been thinking about what it means to finish something since I wrote this as a comment on one of Jude's posts,
I think for me, when I think of unfinished…it’s the stage between started and useful for something other than the process of making (which is a useful thing for mental health!). Once it’s reached functional… I guess I think of it as in a process of change, and maybe just that? Maybe this is why I gravitate towards blankets/pillows/containers/clothing…. I’ve got to think about this more.
This continues to feel true to me. Once something reaches a point of telling a story or being useful, it feels finished to me.
But this doesn't mean that there might not be more to do. There will be.
The story might change; the purpose might as well. There may be mending to do. Everything is up for revision. Everything is always transforming as it ages, always becoming.
The garden is always growing.
Perhaps it is only finished when it is consumed? I have finished the last of the peanut butter...it is consumed.
Can an idea be consumed?
Alder: I haven't made it into a lake pigment yet but did dye some fabric. I was hoping for pink (as seen in my copy of Wild Color/Jenny Dean) but it's a soft yellow brown.
I am going to collect more cones (lots of them in the parking lot at work) as a supply for tannin and more experiments.
Playing with paper and colors.
Not quite done with this one, I'd like to draw lines across the windows.
I am still reading Interaction of Color, Josef Albers. One section had me going to listen again to an interview with Yo-Yo Ma on On Being.
Albers writes, "Our concern is the interaction of color: that is, seeing what happens between colors.
Yo-Yo Ma says, "You look at the sky and you start wondering: where are we? How do we fit into this vast universe? And to Casals saying that within the notes that he plays, he’s looking for infinite variety to Isaac Stern saying, the music happens between the notes. OK, well what then do you mean when you say music happens between the notes?"
Found in the garden today.
I'm just going to let these be...I think.
After all that cold weather and snow...I found this yesterday. Our high temperature was 62 F. The high today is supposed to be 64 F.
Strange, strange weather.
I thought I'd try sewing a cloud to another cloth and then turn it inside out before stitching it to the blanket. This works better for me sometimes. I need to remember to make these deeper angles for the clouds to be more puffy if that is what I want.
Good weather clouds.
Jude mentioned Klee so I went looking and found a collection of essays. From page one of Creative Confession, "Art does not replace the visible; rather it makes visible."
From my journal (the digital one, mostly private): I thought about how I’ve been conditioned to share by my education. I wrote that process is a river for me, we just hold it for awhile. I thought about how living is process. About how my big question is “what is creativity?” How does it show up? I believe we need it so desperately. I believe it is part of the definition of what it means to be human."
A little cloud for the Peace and Plenty Blanket.
It's right at home.
Not the best light but it's what I did today...
I did some sewing today on my Peace and Plenty quilt.
A magic feather inspired by Jude, for hope.
"Hope is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the Soul-"
I like the backside too. The contrast makes a difference, but also the sketchiness of it.
I've tried looking for the meteor shower a couple times but I think we just get too much light or there's been clouds at the wrong times or it's just the wrong time.
Another poem that I've shared before and love so much...
"Crepuscular midnight stands by the road,
Where the stars have spilled from it's purse.
You cannot go over the road past the fence
Without trampling the universe.
When did the stars ever grow so low
And midnight fall to the feather-grassed ground..."
Boris Pasternak
Mostly it's been a stormy weekend. Early Saturday morning there was a gust of wind measured at 63 MPH.
During this week's On Being interview with Christiana Figueres, Krista Tippett says,
"When I was growing up, when you were growing up, the weather was a matter of small talk. The weather and the seasons had a predictability that was a rhythm of our lives, and how quickly that has shifted, and we just kind of — It’s so interesting to me and a little bit terrifying how we so quickly move into accepting that there’s fire season."
I was stitching the edges of a cloud patch while I listened to this.
It is the wind season, the season of power outages and floods.
The cloud patch is now attached to my blanket that I call "Peace and Plenty." It's the name of the quilt square that is on the upper right hand side.
(There was another cloud close to this spot, it has been temporarily been removed.)
Somewhere on the blog I know I have shared about this blanket (it's mostly 2 layers so not a quilt) but I want to share again.
It started as a memory blanket for my grandfather. The chambray fabric in the Peace and Plenty squares are from my grandfather's work shirts, the ones he wore gardening.
Originally the plan was to have a whole quilt of the squares but I needed a blanket and started stitching everything that was handy together and they just seemed to fit.
I've been adding patches to it for awhile now and suspect that eventually it will be more patches than not.
It is becoming a story quilt, every patch and mend making the story more clear to me.
I am thinking about choice, and trust, and love...and other things too.
Yesterday Jude posted about audience and blogging. Early this morning I wrote a long journal entry about this that went off on all kinds of tangents. That is one of the differences between writing to an audience and something private. The effort to be coherent, to say something meaningful, to be thoughtful. I am still trying to wrap my mind around what I want to say but here is some of it.
Accountability and participation. While we can make goals and live without sharing in such a public way, it is helpful to be able to put what we are doing out into the world: "I have this goal and I am showing up as a way to motivate me to keep trying."
Community. An audience often implies information flowing in one direction, a producer and a consumer. A presentation. A healthy community invites participation and conversation.
Teachers, mentors, facilitators, caregivers. To teach is often someone imparting information to an audience. The others involve a more complex relationship, one where there is a possibility of learning from each other. Participation comes up for me again.
Validation. This is the messy and emotional part about sharing (Alfie Kohn,"Five Reasons to Stop Saying Good Job"). We all appreciate a "good job" as human beings occasionally. Buying something that someone has made is a form of validation. It's hitting the "like" button. And it can become about popularity... sometimes that is necessary for survival in the society we live in.
When I consider it, I am not very interested in being part of an audience (but I am not judging people who choose that role, it is a way to participate). I want conversation, space to be curious, room to grow and be creative...