Harvesting and No NoKings

These three are here to haunt.

After punking out of the NoKings gathering in one of the nicest (read safest, most liberal, easy access) locations. I came home to stew and funk. 

I drove all the way there, dressed for the chill, my banner and chair tucked in the trunk. Arrived early and snagged a prime parking spot right across from Mellow Mushroom. 

For an hour, I watched people enjoying the sunny day. None of them looked like protesters. Just families with kids playing like all was right in the world. Alone, that's hard to pretend.

At three o'clock, I could see a few people with signs gathering on the far corner of the park. It looked like a field trip for a local nursing home. I know. Some balls for 77. The turnout looked very thin compared to the last one.

My back hurt; my head felt mushy, and I did not know how I was going to lug my shit from the car and tie the banner up to the stanchions. No heart for any of it.

I left. Made a guilty donation to Ossoff when I got home.

I like funk as a verb. Because of some imagined dread, it's a low-grade form of (mostly) mental self-abuse. If I drank, I'd be drunk. God knows there's enough real shit to have dread about. As rage and imagining wreaking violence on evil-doers are my go-to response, funk was as much as I could muster yesterday and I still had hundreds of thread skeins to process.

The dyefest wore me out, and the very sketchy look of the wet threads was like a gang of vultures perched on the fence just waiting for my eyelids to flutter down one last time. (Sounds like a line from Dungeon Crawler Carl. I just wasted my initial freebie from Audible, which I will cancel quickly before I forget.)

Rinsing and washing out the skeins, twenty or so at a time, is both tedious and contemplative. There was an awful lot of dye in the water - a sign that the chemistry was off. 

Rather than dance with the fiber, the dye molecules just flung themselves into the void. In this case, down the drain. Old dye powder? Old soda ash? What felt like 80 degrees to me was not nearly enough for Turquoise to make a statement. 

I also made the mistake of letting Bubble Gum and Cotton Candy out of the box, forgetting that Demon Fuschia is their godmother. 

But I didn't really forget. I just looked the other way and hoped for their best behavior.

"Silly woman." I can still hear Jim's voice chiding me. 

Today, I thought I was going to be flexing the herculean copywriting task of turning a flock of sow's ears into silk purses. But, no.

After a summer of wildly buttery exuberant color, this batch has come back down to earth to comfort and console us.

Speckled and freckled. 

Muted with the smoke of distant fires and the sleepy haze of October. I can almost smell the cider and donuts.

After the last of the threads were set out to dry, 

I saved a little color for myself. 

Painting updated.

These are the bits and pieces that I put under the threads. Why waste dye? 

Once all the thread is processed, I'll start on these. Rinsing and washing by hand. One by one.

But, as we all know these will lose definition and intensity when they are washed. 

So maybe I won't. Not all of them. 

There's time to consider 

Many years ago I used dye like paint on a piece of muslin. Bold strokes and colors. 

I was in a class with my dyeing mentor, Elizabeth Barton.

Couldn't wait to wash and iron it and get it under the needle.

The only problem was that I had forgotten to fix the dye with soda ash solution and my dyes completely washed away. I was devastated. 

Colin took these pictures for me. I was too tired to go back downstairs.

It looked a lot like this.

 

I found it. Fourteen years ago. Almost to the day. I wonder what this means?

Early returns

 

I chose these randomly last night, spent a half hour rinsing and washing, then letting them soak. Dried overnight on a shelf up out of cat reach. Bong is filled with insatiable curiosity, and anything new in his world gets a paw-on inspection. 

Not the strength of color I blustered about before I set to work. Still these have a lively variation within the subtlety of hues I hadn't expected and am grateful for. The lesson of the Tax of Time is a hard one to face. Dyes lose their kick. Some colors more than others. The soda ash may even be off. The first rinse water was very murky, mostly because of the Raven that I used up. I used up most of my dye stock. 

Later today, I'll ask Colin to hang the dryer from a hook out on the high deck. Today will be the last of the mid-eighty daytime temps, but still sunshine every day all week. In small batches, I'll get the threads and the cloths finished and into the store.