I am suffering from overweening pride this afternoon.  I got all obsessive over the last couple of days and worked a lot on the rust-dyed piece, and now it's finished!    I mounted the quilted, stitched pieces on artists canvas that I had painted to resemble a patinated rock face, and added a few embellishments.  Some time in October or November I'll arrange a photo session with Rick Wells to record a few larger pieces. (My overweening pride is tempered by frustration as I cannot get my phone camera to send the photos to the computer so I can put them in this post.  I will keep trying.)

The cotton being mordanted is hanging in its second iteration; tomorrow I will soak it again and rehang.

I have finished fermenting  avocado pits in an ammonia and water solution, and today put white cotton pieces (not the same ones undergoing the mordant) into glass jars, firmly wrapped around the pit remnants, and submerged them in the dyebath.  I will leave them for a month or more, occasionally moving them around in the jars.  Pam said she got the best blotchy apricot color on the parts that were exposed to air.  Only time will tell; certainly it's hot enough on the patio all the way through September and most of October to encourage color migration.  I can honestly say that I'm "working on dyeing with natural materials" when really, I'm just letting stuff sit out in the sun and occasionally moving it around.  That's one of the beauties of slow cloth--there's a lot of time you can sit reading a book while the process goes its leisurely way.

So, what to undertake next?  The Mae project is still amorphous; it needs to sit in my brain a while before things coalesce.  I think I'll do some patchwork with indigo and yellow-dyed pieces, maybe some green as well.  Making squares is very satisfying--grounded, concrete-- and allows the back of the mind to simmer ideas about more intellectual projects.

One of the things I rediscovered last weekend was some great rust-dyed cotton in my bin of hand-dyes.  I'd been wanting some handwork for evenings, so embarked on a piece using these.  The rusted marks seemed evocative of cave drawings and the colors spoke of golden cliffs.  I've been stitching for the last several days while considering how to hang this.  Now to see whether I can get the photos to come to the computer from my phone (I took the phone to the dealer yesterday to get its guts examined, and then had to reformat the email, so this is the first transmission from there to here.)

The photo makes it look a lot whiter than it really is, but you can see the excellent rust markings.  I'm just doing simple, extemporaneous stitching with no particular plan in mind.  The little guy holding the spear really appears in the rust; I just stitched on top of the image.  The edges are all raveled and I'm going to leave them that way.  The title, I think, will be "They were here before us".

On Friday friend Pam drove out to Eagle Lake for a weekend of dyeing cloth.  I needed some green fabrics, Pam has some hand-spun silk yarn she's been working on for months, and we wanted to try some new techniques.  I had washed a bunch of white cotton and an old white wool blanket that had come on hard times (the cat peed on it, Pat washed it in hot water, then the cat chewed holes in it).

To get greens with natural dyes, you dye the fiber yellow, then dip it in an indigo pot.  There really aren't good natural greens from leaves or moss as one would assume.  So we put out pots of bois d'arc (osage orange or hedgeapple), and turmeric, which we hadn't used before.  Each gave  very different yellow; the turmeric was much more vibrant and tended toward orange.  However, when we dipped the dyed yellows into the indigo, we got really weird results.  The osage, as we knew, gave a reliable green, tending toward blue-green if you left it in indigo too long.  The turmeric, on the other hand, gave blue with pinkish blotches and no green at all.  Later we put those blue/pink pieces back into yellow pots, and got good greens!

On the left is one of the successful green pieces.  In the background you can see Pam working on her spun silk yarn.

Pam is a weaver and spinner who demonstrates her craft at the Sam Houston Museum throughout the school year.  She spent months spinning this silk yarn for scarves, then began dyeing it at the Folk Festival in May.  She wants the yarn to show variegated colors in the weft, while the warp will be a solid.  Each segment has to sit in the desired dyepot for hours, then dry.  Some segments were put in side by side dyepots while we watched the dye move up the yarn and make lovely blended colors.  Today Pam filled in all the white segments and deepened the color on some that had come out light.  I think she's done with dyeing and can move on to rinsing and then winding the yarn for weaving.  It should be spectacular.

In this photo I'm trying to get the dye to move up the fabric into the white space between the rose (cochineal) and the brown (cutch) dyes.  It didn't quite work, so we ended up dyeing the middle part in the indigo vat.  The black pot in the picture is the osage orange shavings with a lot of cotton soaking in it.

We did all this on Friday and Saturday, occasionally retreating into the house to cool off.  Rain was predicted, but didn't materialize.  We both like uneven, blotchy dyed fabrics and welcome unexpected results, so we've never been scientific about recording our methods.  Instead, we "see what we'll get."

The other project was to initiate a new mordant process to enable us to obtain darker, richer colors with madder on cotton.  This one is a doozy.  Pam had made castor oil soap, which I chopped into pieces; this was dissolved in softened water, and cotton pieces massaged and soaked in it for a while.  Then the cotton was wrung out and stored in a container overnight, then hung on the lines to continue to absorb the castor oil.  It has to hang for 3 days, then repeat the soaking, wringing and hanging 5 times.  I have this marked on my calendar lest I forget!  Then it's suggested we anoint the fiber with dung--but we decided to skip this step.  Next, it's rinsed twice in softened water, then mordanted with tannin for 6-12 hours and dried.  I quit reading at this point, as I can return to the instructions in 3-4 weeks and initiate the subsequent steps.  At some future date, we should get vibrant reds and violets with the madder. 

I'll post some other photos of the process later.  It was an excellent weekend.

Last Saturday three creative friends (not fiber artists) came to my house for lunch and discussion of the creative process.  They have been studying at the Jung Center in Houston for some time and know each other (but not me) quite well; it was a bit of an adventure for them to venture way out to Eagle Lake to a stranger's house, but everybody was game and we had a fine time.  I enjoyed showing off the Jungle Corridor and all the art work.  We ate delicious salads and brownies, then adjourned to the studio where I had set out lots of fiber art books to familiarize them with what can be done, and some of my work as well.  Each person had a set of photos of Mae (see "Mystery" in the July postings) as a focus to discuss creativity.

So here is Mae in a studio photograph with a woman who can only be her mother.  I have a collection of photos of Mae and no further information at all; we had no choice but to hypothesize/fantasize about her and the life she led (and the corsets she wore!)  What could we learn from her body language and facial expressions?  I have a lot of books about costume and customs in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to provide context.  Trying to identify tags allowing us to relate our lives to hers encouraged some intense discussion.

That evening we gathered again at the house of Shirley, who had been the spark that organized the gathering, to make pasta (first time for me), drink wine and make small collages.  The three stayed at Shirley's and I went home to bed, really tired but well on the way to designing a piece around Mae.  A few days later Shirley emailed me with her ideas for going forward; I don't know whether she will embark on a "Mae piece" of her own or not.  My own thoughts are in the stewing and boiling stage right now, though I'm eager to get started.

Tomorrow friend Pam is coming out from Huntsville to do a couple days of natural dyeing in my back yard.  We have some new mordanting techniques to try.  This has compelled me to clean up the back patio so we'll have room to work.  It's a very good idea to have guests occasionally for decency's sake.

There are so many opportunities to avoid the studio.  I've always been a bookworm, so there's the book I must finish--or begin--or should have read long ago and now is the time.  There's the morning newspaper and the morning TV shows, because I should keep up on what's happening.  Errands, of course, laundry and planning what to buy at the grocery store.  Do I need an oil change (this takes a full morning, as the dealer is 40 miles away so I should also plan to visit the craft store)?  Church, civic meetings, friends.  All good things in moderation, but still the studio sits there humming softly in my mind.

I read an article on facebook this morning about grieving, how it's lifelong not transient, how it can be transcendent.  Made sense to me--19 months in, and there's still that hole in my chest, not likely to go away.  It's not that I'm unhappy; I believe that people choose to move toward happiness, and in my daily inventory I have found that most of the time the message comes:  "I like my life."  But it seems that grief inclines toward lethargy, and I stay in the chair reading or watching or surfing.

I'm determined to turn the feelings into transcendence.  Do the work.  It's waiting on the table.  Doesn't matter whether it's great or mediocre, only time and effort will show.  Do the work.  In the Huntsville house my studio was upstairs, and when I was noodling about something Pat would call out, "I don't hear any sewing going on."  And I'd reply, "I'm thinking!"   Thinking is work, creating is brain and heart work as well as handwork.  Do the work, do the work.  It makes a chant one could dance to.

On Monday I met with the art quilt group that I've enjoyed for several years.  The membership has waxed and waned, the meeting place has changed several times, and the emphasis has evolved from learning techniques to mutual support and encouragement in reaching beyond our usual concepts.  My level of involvement and the influence this group has had on me has deepened over time.  We have all attempted things we wouldn't have thought about without the group's discussions, and we've been successful to a gratifying degree in gaining acceptance to exhibitions and publications.

I look forward to the meetings, and this time, took the "orbits" piece with me.  People liked it and encouraged me to work more on it, and that evening I figured out how to tell a story with the piece and make it more interesting. I'm doing some hand stitching and machine quilting now.  Probably tomorrow I'll see about cutting it up again.  I know just how to proceed--it's such fun to be on a roll.

So here's a process photo, clearly with a lot more stitching to be done.  I'll post more as things move along.

Having finished the scapular except for the hem and any desired trim (have to confer with the wearer about that), I decided to do something with the shibori remnants left after I cut out clothing.  In my silk stash were a lot of cut up pieces of clothing I used to wear when I was a real person, working in an office and many of these had purple, lavender, or red tones.  Pressed and cut, stitched into squares and trimmed, joined and now sitting on my table awaiting the next step. It's interesting that the blue bits come out turquoise in the photo--they're really a nice slate blue.  The whole thing makes me think of orbiting a large planet, maybe Saturn. Or Mars.  That feeling of hanging beneath a huge, heavy orb in a tiny spacecraft

I will cut the whole piece up again and insert some orbit strips, I think.  Then lots of thread and couched yarns.  More process photos later