Here’s that cotton shawl from the other day, after three dips in a strong indigo bath. As I’d hoped, the myrobalan tannin that was already in the fabric shifted the indigo in a teal direction.
Here it is hanging in the cherry tree:
Since I did all the seed-tying at my Tuesday night sewing circle, I’m saving the unwrapping until I’m back at sewing circle. The suspense is killing me but I haven’t even taken out one single seed to have a peek.
Two years ago my beloved Skeeter got cancer and died. I never mentioned it here or anywhere else online because I was too sad, because the world is too shitty, because I was sick to death of the internet and putting anything personal on it. Then maybe a month later a friend told me that her relative, whom I’ve never met, made a comment to her that I didn’t seem too broken up about my cat dying. That comment, received at a time when I was pretty broken up about my cat dying, actually, put me into a slow simmer that eventually ended in my taking myself off all social media, forever. And I’m a lot happier and healthier for it, so thank you, shitty person I’ll never meet!
Skeeter was the most difficult cat we’ll ever live with: sweet, loving, and stupid, crippled by anxiety and a bully to our other cat, who wasn’t too broken up at her disappearance from our home. We gave her a safe place to be herself and we loved her (and tried to keep her off the other cat’s back).
Skeeter was a great lover of textiles, so here’s a little collection of her coziest moments.
Here she is blocking a shawl.
She’s helping sew a heraldic banner (vairy gules and or).
Casually slipping her claws into a crocheted afghan my mum made for my Gramma.
In the printmaking studio drying rack.
She loved this rug so much I had to take off its fringe and stitch a clear vinyl binding strip over its edges to protect them.
Here she is basting a quilt.
Her last picture.
Today I refreshed the indigo vat with a new jar of starter solution, and while it was reducing I took today’s projects to be dyed out to the backyard to document the “before”.
The first is this old dress from a former life. I made this some time in the early 1990s and despite its ill fit I wore this thing A LOT. I even wore it to someone’s wedding although I can’t remember whose. It was ankle length then, with long sleeves, but I eventually shortened it. A couple of years ago I found it up in the attic. It’s going to get overdyed with indigo, then I’ll cut away all the fabric leaving just the seams behind. These seams will be stitched down onto the Two Sisters portrait quilts to “draw” their garments. It’ll make more sense, I hope, once the pieces start coming together.
Is a garment made in the early 1990s considered “vintage”? Because it feels awfully weird to have a vintage dress I made myself.
The second piece going in the indigo today is this tie-dye cotton shawl, a project I worked on over several weeks at my sewing circle. It’s a beautiful, very large cotton mull shawl from the Maiwa shop (link: Maiwa natural dyes) that I mordanted with myrobalan tannin and alum before deciding to use indigo, which doesn’t require a mordant but that’s okay because the parts that don’t get dyed will be this soft myrobalan yellow instead of bright white.
I marked out a staggered grid over the whole shawl and tied a tamarind seed in at each grid point. I kept track of the time while doing it; this is 10 hours, 20 minutes of tying seeds into cloth.
This piece looks so beautiful just tied like this, so I took lots of pictures. Here’s a closeup of the tied in seeds:
And here’s the back side. I love how the staggered grid pulls it in to look like some kind of glorious combination of smocking and sashiko.
These diamonds are worked like darning, but employed as embroidery on cotton fabric. I’m using embroidery floss, which as you can imagine is a real pain in the ass. I’m constantly having to pull out and redo rows of weft because of failing to get the needle over or under a single strand of the 6-strand floss. I think the final product will be worth it, but wow, this is tedious. I work at it a little bit several days a week and it’s going to take months to complete.
This is part of a six quilt series I’m working on for my upcoming two-person exhibition with Lisa Sylvestre (link: asil) in September. The works are, in part, about memory and comfort, as all quilts are in a way about memory and comfort. These quilts will depict a particular space in a particular room, drawn and stitched from memory in different states of abstraction. I’ll write a lot more about these over the coming months.
This panel of diamonds is just one method I’ll use to illustrate a red transom window in that remembered room. It’s going to be the slowest part of the whole project, which is why I’m working on it every day. This will eventually be pieced together with other fabrics (including the linoblock printed brocade, which is the wallpaper in that room of memory) and quilted along the lines that separate the diamonds. The real life red transom did not have a diamond pattern; it may have had a floral diapering pattern or it may have been plain red glass, but I can’t remember and every time I try to call up the image in my memory it shifts, which is all part of how memory works and also why the window will be drawn many different ways in the quilts. Some, but not all, of these will have portraits. All of them will have plants.
This is a fun project Peter and I have been working on together. It started when I was sitting on the porch watching some neighbours hanging out their rugs to dry over their porch railing. I thought the tile pattern on the rugs looked like a fun quilt block design, so I grabbed my notebook and sketched it out.
Of course as a printmaker I was stuck in the usual rut of a grid-like small pattern repeat, until Peter took the pencil and started shading the tiles in the shape of a large four-petalled blossom. Then he said, “this is the quilt I want on our bed”.
He later sent me a photo of a dogwood tree on campus, with the blossom colour we’re putting in the quilt.
Here is the colour sketch of one full repeat, with a map to the blocks that make it up. These blossoms will be quite large, at least the size of a vinyl record, and tumble in a repeat over the whole quilt on a background of mixed indigo fabrics.
And here is a test block I made just to try out the scale for the blossoms. I’ll try for better precision in joining the pieces on the real quilt (these pieces were torn in rough strips rather than cut carefully). I tend to prefer simple variations on basic blocks like snowball and log cabin, so this is probably the most fiddly quilt I will ever make.
The actual quilt will be mostly indigo, with a slightly off white achieved by simmering the cloth in coffee, and a hot pink from cochineal and sappanwood.
I’m finally back to working on those stitched portraits I was playing with a while ago, making up a couple of small quilts to test out some processes I’m hoping to use in some bigger work later this year. These two small studies will be part of an upcoming exhibition to accompany a jazz festival at Mackenzie Hall this summer. The larger quilt works that these are serving as practice for will be exhibited in September. I’ve got a lot of quilting to do this spring and summer!
I’m hand stitching the portraits onto a colour blocked background of various naturally dyed cottons and some of the white-on-white brocade I printed recently. These will be composed like formal portraits, and each figure will be holding a potted plant. No conceptual reason for the plant, it’s just an exercise in making stitched plant portraits, again practice for those larger works to come, for which there IS a conceptual reason for the plant. Phew.
Despite the blue hair, this isn’t a self portrait.
Here is some of our student work from a fun workshop I taught last week along with Lisa Sylvestre at her studio (link: asil). We’ve taught this before but this time we’ve really nailed the tricky business of drawing loads of intense colour out of our dyes, and getting them thick enough to work with easily with no bleeding.
We made extracts from nine different dyestuffs: buckthorn, osage, sappanwood, Himalayan rhubarb, lac, madder, eupatorium with iron added, cutch with soda ash, and cutch with iron. I have some ideas for expanding our palette for next time but just look at what our students achieved with this beautiful range!
These are all a combination of printing (with round felt blocks) and painting with brushes, on cotton bandannas pre-mordanted with gallnut tannin and aluminum sulfate.
These two above were done by the same person, and I love how one is like chemistry and the other biology.
This one has a lot of nice blending that we weren’t sure would come through the steaming process intact, but it did:
We were all very excited at how much of the texture of the original drawing came through in the final product in that central area here:
There were a few more we didn’t get photos of, but hopefully I’ll be able to show them to you soon. Spoiler alert: they’re gorgeous.
Lisa made up a few samplers, the first simple blocks of each colour we used, and the second a chart of colour combinations to get a sense of how they might blend:
There’s still some dye left over, so later this week I’m going to do some screenprinting with it, on plain mordanted fabric and on some that’s already been dyed. Stay tuned! And keep an eye on our class listings at asil.ca if you want to try this yourself; we’ll soon be adding a few more sessions for spring and summer.
this post is cross-posted to my studio weblog (link: levigator press)
Ballpoint pen and marker. Dinner at Transmet with Brian, a lovely person I knew in grad school. Coffee the next day at the Waffle House in 5 Points, which I think may not be there anymore.
Red and blue markers.
The verso page was cut out around the drawing of plant forms and glued down onto the previous page, where Sharpie marker bleedthrough from the previous drawing is visible.
The recto page was drawn from a tiny advertisement at the back of an old McCall’s Needlework magazine from the late 60s or early 70s, text “Mrs Virginia Wareheim used her Fabricon Reweaving earnings to help put her two boys through college”. The Fabricon Reweaver was some kind of tool for mending wool fabrics, with two little hooky things for pulling strands back into place. When I was cleaning out my Gramma’s sewing room after she died, I found one of them in a drawer of her sewing machine table. I still have it but have never tried fixing anything with it.
I’ve written about some of these already, but don’t they look lovely all folded together in a box?
This is all of the fabric I’ve dyed in March and April, not including that from the perpetual dyebath, which is still waiting to be washed.
From left to right:
A few olive greens and pale greens (they look kind of whitish here) from exhaust baths of pomegranate and turmeric with iron. Adding iron to the used dyebath initially shifted it to murky olive greens, and dyeing in the exhaust from this produced soft, pale springy greens.
Cutch (reddish) and cutch + iron (olive-brown, a bit purpley looking here).
A few pieces of cotton printed with rusty metal, using the vinegar-salt-oxalic acid method and left bundled in a basin for a few days.
Indigo, loads and loads of indigo. This is about half of the indigo fabric I’ve made recently; the rest of it is still waiting to be neutralised and washed.
Everything to the right of the indigo is pomegranate and turmeric: a straight 50/50 mix for the yellow, then a series of reheating the exhaust with iron to produce swampy dark olives, acidic lighter yellowy olives, and some lighter soft greens. There’s a mix of cottons and linens here, all reclaimed fabrics, destined either for clothes or quilts, and a stack of (new) cotton bandannas over at the right of the frame, which I’ll probably piece together into a dress.