Month: May 2026

drinks diary 18 february, 2014

sketchbook drawing of a coffee cup with cartoon bird and chupacabra

Drinking tea on the patio of Big City Bread in Athens, Georgia with Mary Jessica on a very warm day, glorying in baring our legs before heading back home to cold Canada.

This wonderful sunken patio is lined with concrete planters with huge bushes of rosemary in them. During my second year of grad school, when I lived in Normaltown, I’d occasionally grab a sprig while biking past, on days when I wanted to roast potatoes. Here in Cold Canada we have to plant new rosemary every year.

Black, blue, green, red ballpoint pens + markers.

indigo diamonds

After two sessions of my weekly sewing circle spent untying and removing the tamarind seeds from this cloth, it looked like this:

indigo dyed fabric covered in tiny yellow puckers, hanging against a seafoam green garden shed

I half wished I could keep the bobbly texture forever, but it wasn’t going to be all that practical for the flowy summer throw I want to make (pattern link: Cris Wood Sews throw jacket). So here it is all pressed flat, blowing in the breeze in the cherry tree:

indigo dyed cloth with an allover pattern of tiny yellow diamonds, hanging from a cherry tree in an overgrown garden

Time spent on this project:

– measuring and marking the grid: 2.5 hours
– tying in tamarind seeds: 10.5 hours
– dyeing, washing out, neutralising: 2 hours
– untying and removing seeds: 4 hours

total time: 19 hours, not as bad as I’d feared because limiting the tying to just during sewing circle made it feel like WEEKS

a little blue update

indigo cotton with seeds tied into it, laid on a hardwood floor

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:

an indigo dyed cotton shawl with seeds tied into it, hanging in a 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.

the sweetest girl

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.

a tortiouseshell cat sitting on a triangular blue shawl that is laid out on a mattress
Here she is blocking a shawl.

a tortoiseshell cat lying on a yellow and red banner
She’s helping sew a heraldic banner (vairy gules and or).

closeup of a sleepint tortoiseshell cat on a white crocheted blanket
Casually slipping her claws into a crocheted afghan my mum made for my Gramma.

a tortoiseshell cat lying in a pile of fabric in a drying rack
In the printmaking studio drying rack.

a tortoiseshell cat lying on a red carpet
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.

a tortoiseshell cat lying on a blue and gray quilt, with scissors and thread in the foreground
Here she is basting a quilt.

a tortoiseshell cat lying curled up on a gold velvet rocking chair
Her last picture.

future blues

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”.

a loose cotton dress with short sleeves, in a small blue and pink floral print, hanging against a seafoam green steel garden shed

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.

a pale yellow shawl hanging against a seafoam green steel garden shed

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.

a pale yellow shawl hanging in a cherry tree

This piece looks so beautiful just tied like this, so I took lots of pictures. Here’s a closeup of the tied in seeds:

a panel of pale yellow fabric with seeds tied into it in a grid pattern

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.

pale yellow fabric with seeds tied into it

red transom

white fabric in an embroidery hoop with woven stitched diamonds in shades of red

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.

white fabric in an embroidery hoop with woven stitched diamonds in shades of red

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.

in progress: dogwood quilt

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.

a pincushion, red thread scissors, coffee cup, and pencil with grid paper notebook open to a drawing of a tile pattern

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.

closeup on pink and white blossoms on a dogwood tree

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.

a colour sketch of a floral quilt block in a grid paper notebook

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.

a quilt block in a large 4-petalled flower design, in gray-pum, coral pink, and off white fabrics

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.