A long season

 

I feel bad about not getting in the water today.

Maybe tomorrow before we get hurricane dregs.

The second shot is so you know how serious he is about me not moving for a few minutes. 

Gathering myself

 

Shirker- updated 8/24

 

Now comes the hard part. Sharing. Keeping my mitts out of the cookie jar. But there's a hella lot of cookies this trip.

I've already indulged my need for some bloody reds, but I had to pack this set out of sight quickly because I could feel my fingers getting sticky.

And I'm running out of names. Going forward, they are going to be fairly obvious. 

That's Claret   (now SOLD!)

This is my thread box six hours later. It was an emotionally stressful day. These helped. An hour of driving with good music. A big glass of lemonade. A nap. Some 🌿. 

Now replaying "Springsteen on Broadway" and shuffling these around. Seeing tomorrow's stuff.

Conjuring colors

There is a line somewhere between production and manifesting. I don't care for either word, one being too "widget" and the other too "woo".  Neither word nor anywhere in between describes my process.

Once I've set the pallette of colors, all my intentions get very flexible. If I get sick of seeing that yellow and that purple, I'll dump one on top of the other and come up with a warm olive that I never planned for. 

Has that blue slipped too cool? Bring on the goldenrod. There's never too much green because I never plan for any.

It's going to take time to process all this cloth and thread. After four days, I am out of personal gas and will take a few days unrelated to dyeing.
 

There's still a ton of cloth to be hand washed and dried.

The best part of Saturday? A surprise visit from Charlie and Jake. We went out to lunch and got caught up. Since they moved, time with them makes the minutes we get more precious. 

Today, r&r includes a little stitch, some reading, pool time, and some walking. Putting those needles in my back to the test. 

Ripe fruit

 

Despite weather reports promising another perfect day for the dye deck, Colin sent this sunrise from the airport where he works. "Red sky in the morning, sailors warning." 

Scientifically, more humidity in the air will affect what I'm planning for the day.

I washed out one piece of lines last night and hung it up with the threads to dry. Just one.

Because there have been requests, I'm going to experiment with selling these pieces whole. See how that flys for a while before I rip or cut them up smaller and blend them into the general basket.

The blue/green threads were hiding in the dryer from the last dye-fest. This wire and mesh contraption, which folds up to take up almost no space in the closet, has become an essential tool. 

I somehow tricked my phone camera into giving me an accurate (to my eye) rendering of the colors in this one.

It's part of a light linen blouse. Most of these will be parts of deconstructed garments. 

This one is 12"x 24".  

High Adventures in August

I used flag-shaped lengths of that midweight linen toweling to cover the table and catch the dye leaking out of skeins and bundles. The famous table moppers. 

BIG LESSON - do NOT wash out the cloth in the machine. As tempting as that is, these will get hand washed in a bucket with Dawn and cold water. One by one.

Tomorrow. 

I'm pacing myself. 

 

The mids of August

 

About four, I ran out of threads and called it Good for the day.

 

Left the mess as was.

I see a very hot field. There was rock music.

Tomorrow* I will dial in the Blues.

*tomorrow being now. Me recovering horizontally from back treatment. Gimme a few hours. I'll do the Blues when it's hottest out.

Dharma

 

Evidence of a life well lived. 

Before dawn, I opened all the upstairs windows and doors to the fresh air. 68 degrees, clear and dry. A gorgeous day in the making. James Lee Burke would write "Aborning". I don't think I've ever seen that word in print beyond his novels. 

The post title set me surfing for meaning and I have never gotten back such a load of conflicting crap. I won't even dwell on it.

At the post office, an elderly (listen to me talk) gentleman from Pakistan proselytized gently while we waited in line. I usually have a "Praise Beelzebub" for such conversations, but he was doing his thing and I let him roll on without dishing any snark. He was there for a passport picture.  I advised him. "Don't smile."

Business accomplished, I met a friend for lunch and we cackled and rattled our scaly claws over the indictments. Naming the prosecutors one by one. Cackling some more. 

Came home to a smorgasbord of sense delights. My garden, run wild with some alien-looking weeds. Cicadas tuning up. The big Joro spiders webbing up the windows again. Sleeping cats. 

And a fat package on the doorstep.

I am so in love with these colors. Imagining what they will do dancing together!

 

This is going to be a very special dyefest. 

dynamite

dragon fruit

bright yellow

marigold

blue violet

houdini blue

peacock

but right now, the Braves are still in NY slaying them.  I listen to the game on an AM radio station. The closest thing to time travel I know of. 

More scrapping

Let me preface this post with a statement: 

Yee haw! Fani Willis! Ride that mangy mango down! 

I had a pneumonia shot yesterday morning and slept blissfully when the indictments broke the news. The world keeps spinning, hopefully leaving that turd to dry up and blow away. But the lessons? Never.

Orders packed and off to the post office later. I anticipate walking into the lobby (usually relatively empty late Tuesdays) and cackling loudly knowing most of the counter staff will join me.

I dug through my personal stash and liberated a lot of cloth into the general fund. Think of how all of our days add up to so much making time! One by one, not so much, but as a group? Amazing. 

That little snitch of green? Silk or rayon, I can't be sure without a burn test.

While I was working, the pieces in the last photo got chummy and asked to be transferred to the River Basket. 

I'm easy.

Stormlight

 

We had a hair-raising series of thunderstorms Sunday afternoon. It caught a lot of people off guard. The cats were annoyed because I rounded them up and locked the cat door.  

These pictures are just after the storm finally passed. Very odd light for six pm.

My poor dye deck needs a custodian.

Those hotel pans on the high deck were empty before the storm. I collect water up there for the indoor plants. And thirsty cats.

Threaded

 

That's the rest of them., except for a few that somehow found space in my thread box.

All posted for sale here and here.

I wandered on the supplier path this time.  Two years since I last visited Dharma Trading. New colors this late in the year? Why not.

Dynamite red, Houdini blue, Dragonfruit, Marigold, Blue Violet, Peacock and, of course, Raven.

Let me know if anyone has any raggedy old table linens, cotton, or silk garments headed for recycling. Color fixes almost anything.

The other path

 I'm on it and it feels good.

Prophets Tango was first published in July 2021. Beyond writing the thing, I hardly knew what I was doing.

Now, I'm scouring through it and making small changes. Not enough to call it a second edition. Just small things that I've reconsidered. The very few typos (bless all the betas). If you've found any that I haven't and let me know, I'll be eternally grateful.

Dee recently posed the question "Tell a dream, lose a reader"

From the response, I don't believe so. 

Too late for me anyway. And what would you call eavesdropping on the thoughts of a person in a coma rather than dreaming? How far removed from reality is that?  Witness:

Shifting povs

Is it still a heart?

When it filled up this way.

 "Chaos Leaning In"

Nine

 

It's hard to take in this span of time. 

Some of you may know that Charlie was born about nine months after Jimmy left us. One door closed. Another sprang wide.

Yesterday morning I took him on a snipe hunt for records. He's interested in "ancient" technology, so a visit to a vintage junk shop with a record room was entertaining. I told him that record albums were interesting even though I had no way to play them because of the printed information, including song lyrics. We picked through the three and six-dollar bins and came away with a few gems in good condition. 

Side note - Jazz records, even used, are very expensive. We stuck with pop and rock. 

By the time we got home, there was a big box on the doorstep and I got to introduce him to the sublime pleasure of spinning a platter. The sound from this little portable is terrible, but he had nothing to compare it to. As much fascinated with the mechanics as the music. Fortune smiled - this player has the ability to wirelessly connect to Bluetooth speakers with great sound. Jake will set that up.

It was such a delight to watch him so absorbed in something that was my teenage lifeblood.