fraught

The day started well enough. Coffee with an insistent kitty. Stop petting her and suffer the hooks.

The view of the pool that soothes and encourages me even if it's too cold to get in and clean yet and there is a tree looming over it threatening destruction that I have to have professionally removed as soon as possible, but I can't afford to sell a kidney.




And an hour of stitching on these dancing devils that I have been fooling with since forever. Someday I'll call this one done. Not today.

I went to the park to walk and stretch my miserable aching hips. Saw monsters from the deep in the turtle pond. That's another story.

Then just after I got home, things took a bad turn for some too close by neighbors. An eviction, heartbreaking enough, turned violent when shots were fired.

Before you know it, SWAT had the neighborhood locked down and all I could do was watch from the studio window. Although the house is two down and one over, I hardly know the people. No children, thank goodness. Snipers in camouflage were posted up and down the block and if you poked your head out the door you were warned back inside. Bull horn pleas to surrender went unheeded. Armed robots rolled up and down the block. Concussion grenades went off repeatedly. I watched and waited here alone. with cats. He surrendered a few minutes ago.

 No one was harmed.

my front yard

the habit

It's very easy to let this habit of reporting slip away when nothing creatively shareable is going on. Writing is like that. Raw first drafts are hard enough to share with other writers in small groups. You are lucky if you can find crit partners who will be both straight with you and instructive. I've recently been that lucky and have been giving most of my free time over to the first draft, which is morphing into its first major revision.

my peonies have bloomed and gone!

Stitchers, imagine, if you will, a piece you've labored on, mostly in secret (shades of Quilt National!) - an epic piece, say 8 feet by 22 feet - that's right, I said FEET, not inches.  And so the powers that be have let you know that No Way will it ever see the light of day in that form and you have to make a triptych out of it. Somehow hacking it into hangable pieces.

At first, the rebel in me said, "Fuck you and your pony!" but after looking at this steaming pile of  222+k of words for a while, I think I've found a way to serve both the muse and the commercial masters, namely, publishers. Only time and whole lot more writing and rewriting will tell.

In the meantime - Life!  All these wonderful things and more.

Charlie and I steal his Dad's car and go the park and Publix for lunch!

I don't know what I would do without him, the Pollywog Savior of L'ville.

Partners in crime.

shopkeeping

Packed up four very tasty fat baggies just now including chunks and bits of some of the recent dye+soy wax experiments and more from my personal stash.

They will go fast! As ever, first come, first served but rest assured - there is no shortage of fabulous hand dyed cloth in the House of Lacativa.

It's going to hit 80 today with a stretch of the same weather promised for the coming week. I'm anxious to get started on some texture work - buggy oatmeal and rice, so huge-grained rock salt and even beach sand as dye carriers - but first I have to evict and relocate a couple thousand tadpoles from our pool. It was hot times at Froggy Club Med this year!

ps- Karen....I just got you email and am walking out the door to the PO with your fat baggie.!

heart felt

Thanks to Jude for reminding me of the shape of my hearts. My heart has been pinched up a lot by the world lately and I need to make some fences.

There are a few to finish and some not yet made, but going forward, the messages will be my words from the book I've been writing.


"It's the heart that makes the heat."

color salvage

It's so shitty and cold out, 65 degrees and raining.  I've dug my heavy cotton sweater out of the closet. Didn't think I'd get to wear it again until winter. Yesterday we were running the AC, today..no I will not put the heat on.

To combat the dreariness, the shitty news from Washington, and to keep from going back to bed, I decided to follow through on transforming this Vera Bradley bookbag
my sister sent me earlier this year - amazingly useful, with a myriad of sections and compartments, but hideous. I was going to just plunge it into one color, dark gold maybe, and overdye the whole thing, but I got industrious and found my paintbrushes. It's in the washing machine right now...I'll post the finish pictures tomorrow when it's dry.

soy wax frenzy

You know how it is when inspiration strikes. Common sense, experience, and even safety get left in the dust.

Well, I didn't damage myself or anything else so far today. Give me a minute, it's only 1:19.  Checking fingernails...no glove failure even!

This scrap has been floating around the studio and this morning it got to me. I've been a two-week long total immersion getting ready for a competition - a writing thing, but you textilians all know about getting a last-minute, down-to-the-wire entry finished, shot and shipped.

This was pretty much the same thing. That last minute heart-lurch before you hit the send key, wondering if there was something you forgot or screwed up and so kiss your entry fee goodbye.      

So, by way of recovery, I dipped into the stash of white goods that has been hanging around so patiently and set up shop in the kitchen. It's muggy and overcast out and didn't want to waste any personal energy on fighting the elements. (AC has ruined me.)

I layered the cloth right on my kitchen table, trusting there were enough layers to catch the soywax as it steamed it's way on down to the wood.  Anyway, a light skin of soywax on pine feels a lot like bacon grease. It'll work it's way out over time.

I started with the Raven, but it had a bluish cast under my white light and I over-warmed it, I think. Won't know til everything has been washed and dried. I forgot what a monumental pain in the ass soywax work was.

My hot water is blistering, but it still takes three or four washes on the more dense cloth. I won't trust the machine with this, it all has to be done by hand.  My mind keeps coming back to my biggest fail, especially since the author of the drawing tool took down his website. So far, I can't find Scribbler anywhere else. I sincerely hope he got a really good price for it.

 I'm out of personal gas now and I have to nap before the day job so the rest of the baker's dozen piece down in the sink are going to get a good long steep in the color. I just had to see how the black turned out. greedy I am.

fat baggies

Picking from these tubs all week. If you ordered since Sunday, your order will ship tomorrow.

Some great stuff, I might add!

breathing color

You would think the dyefest would be underway by now. It just hasn't been hot enough. All revved up and nowhere to go....

rescues

These were from the marked down cart at the grocery store. touched with today's sunrise. They may only have a few days of glory left, but I will appreciate each minute.

Same day I rescued a half dozen snapdragons and a gorgeous Boston fern from the "less than perfect, less than half price" aisle at the big box store. I'm really glad that people are stupid this way.

toast

Several times I've picked this piece up and couldn't find what I wanted to do next. Generally, that means, done. finished. I need to back it, square it up and set it free.

testing

mostly because I had housework to NOT do.

This is post wash, rinse and dried in the sun. Gives me a good idea of what it in the jar, no matter how it thinks it looks. Some need doctoring but I rarely use them straight anyway. The black, Raven, by Dharma, is rich and promising.