Wouldn’t it be nice to have a space online to keep a little diary, out of the hands of billionaires? It’s been a while but I’m ready to write here again even if I’m the only person who looks at it.
Here’s Girlie, one of our local stray cats, viewed from the porch behind the mess of our late summer garden. This is just after she tried to run up our young hackberry tree after a bunch of sparrows, because Girlie isn’t exactly clever about what’s worth her efforts.
It’s been difficult to muster up any motivation to work in the studio with all the summer art fairs cancelled. I feel fortunate that I made the decision to close my brick-and-mortar shop just before Coronavirus put a stop to normalcy, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any urgency to make new work. These prints are stalled in the early colour stages with about half of their screenprinted colour layers printed, still a ways from having their linocut key layers added. In the meantime, I printed them in red on some previously printed fabrics. Thinking about a bright, blinding quilt.
This is the goldenrod that grows behind our neighbour’s garage, overhanging our driveway. I didn’t ask before I took it but I freed up a whole parking space by cutting it down.
The yellow it yields is as intense as its flowers (wool roving with alum mordant):
I’m not confident about its fastness on cotton but it looks good for now:
I didn’t even intend to make dye this time, but I can’t help myself. This week was time to trim down the leaves from our irises, and as they were cooking down in soda ash, a step in hand papermaking that separates organic matter from the cellulose fibres that form the paper, I noticed that the water had turned a beautiful strong green colour. A bell went off when I realized that soda ash is also used to set dyes. Once the cellulose pulp was drying on a screen, I strained the remaining liquor and threw in some cotton fabrics, some premordanted with aluminum acetate and some with soy milk, and this glorious spring green was the result.
It’s not a good idea to leave fabric piled in a printmaking studio drying rack, otherwise this could happen:
I saw a face in the tree, right about here:
See it?
Here:
Peter didn’t see it but he did see a rooster head, which he helpfully drew in red.
But wait, there’s another face, with a void on its cheek which contains the first face, or the rooster face, depending on what you see there:
This is essentially how most of our summer evenings on the porch go, unless there are interesting bugs in the garden or birds to look at with the binoculars. Also we talk constantly about time travel (why it isn’t possible but if it were, how it might work) and consciousness (on the scale of universes, as in, what if the universe is one giant organism). There are worse ways to while away a summer stuck at home.
After a few abortive starts and design failures, the shawl I started just as we went into isolation is finally conforming to my vision. It’s going to be way too huge but that’s okay; “swaddled” seems like a good goal right now.
After testing out a few compatible lace stitches that did not excite, I fell back on an allover arrow pattern with a gradient slide through the different yarns.
Here’s one of the earlier attempts, the best of a series of boring iterations. I know gradients are all the rage in knitting at the moment, but these yarns clearly wanted it.
Yarns by The Green Button Jar except for the pale blue at the top, which is by Indigo Dragonfly.
Cotton and cotton blend handkerchiefs dyed with turmeric, using a soy milk mordant. After I boiled up a handful of dried turmeric root pieces, which didn’t seem to let much of their colour out into the water, I put the softened bits and the water into the Vitamix and made a slurry. Except for staining the Vitamix jar yellow and getting gobs of root bits all over the fabric (hi I don’t strain things enough) the result is a pretty good gold.
Left: Soldotna sweater by Caitlin Hunter (Ravelry link: Soldotna Crop), steeked and cardiganized, in yarns by Indigo Dragonfly (shop link: Indigo Dragonfly).
Right: Boobholder by Stefanie Japel (Ravelry link: Boobholder), elongated into a cropped cardigan, in yarns by The Green Button Jar (shop link: The Green Button Jar)