Be of use

 

It was overdue and I was determined to find my black scissors. So far, they are still lurking somewhere else in the studio. But much of this cloth has gone into the scrap basket. 

I also uncovered a tablecloth I set aside from the Things To Be Dyed because of its perfection. Linen, maybe five by six feet. Hemmed to perfection on all four sides. Flawless. 

 

Without a pattern or template, I held it to myself, measuring neck to cuff just imagining the easiest path to what I had in mind - something to slip on after a shower or the pool. Construction was purely functional. 

What I was really looking forward to was doing some embroidery or applique on it. A blank canvas for unknown hours of mindless stitching. Foiled again.

The cloth said "No!". Linen, only a shadow thicker than cotton lawn, but the thread count is so tight and dense two layers laughed at my attempt to draw a needle through it. I think it's called Handkerchief weight. After I hand-hemmed it with silk, I decided that floor length is a foot too much. After I chop and rehem it, I'll use the excess for some pockets and an eyeglass loop. 

I also took one of those heavy cotton top sheets and started cutting it for a simple kimono. Both garments will be attending the next dyefest. All this white reminds me of a Korean funeral. Also reminds me that I'm a slob. If I'm wearing white, it's a given the menu will include ketchup, spaghetti or bbq sauce. 

All the sweet

The Grove. Still no great drifts of color. The three small ones have always been puny even before I stopped giving them the annual scalping. I have to do some research about them. What to feed them and when. Surviving as they have on dog piss and Georgia clay, anything has to be an improvement. Did I mention, that this is the pet cemetery? Karma, Voodoo, Orion, and Sweetie are there. 

I try to keep clean water in that little pan. Very glad of the daily rains.

My prime day haul was a new tent! Now if I can just keep on top of releasing the corners if big rain is due. 

The tulip tree is already starting to shed its weaker leaves. 

Yes. 10 wide. I should be able to walk on water, but no.

These are just some of my favorites. While I was working with the bottom one this morning the END of a short story I've been working on made itself known, as rich and simple as a skein of thread.

Now to breathe life into into the bones.

The events of the last few days prove that nothing is set in stone for our country. I will tend my own gardens with one eye on the horizon. Karma will have her way.

 

Storm chasing

 It rained hard for about twenty minutes. Not enough, after all these weeks of hot and dry. The crepe myrtles are just blooming. For the first time in a decade, South and East have hot pink and fuschia clusters. The first and largest, North, will break out in a white crown that will last all summer. Little West, closest to me, I can't remember it blooming but the only color left out there would be lilac. 

All over town, businesses and public parks favor the rich, dark red. Some lean berry red, others, fresh blood. Lawrenceville calls itself  "Crepe Myrtle City".

Jim planted these on the points of the compass so I could

"Do witchy stuff". Naked. In the dark. 

My man was a lot of fun. 

The weather radar promises this will be an all-night rain. My favorite kind.

The garden pots on the dye-deck have been neglected. 

I never did a cleanup after the last dyefest. The dye powders are safe inside. Everything else - the shakers, spoons, table moppers - is right where I dropped it. 

All will be fresh tomorrow. 

~~~

        I breathe "O    Shun" and the rasp of saltwater flashes through me.

Slow rollers, black with weeds, furl out across the beach. 

Crabs cussing

scuttle back to the waterline

or decide to stay and stink.

From a cottage away, cigarette and meat smoke. 

A woman steps out the back door, slips off her wet suit, and hangs it on the line.

She doesn't yet know how sunburnt she is. 

Bewitched

 

Saffron

The last of the dirty threads of July are posted. 

I've named a few of them for characters from

 Dee Mallon's debut novel, "The Weight of Cloth" - Saffron, Melody, and July.  All women of color and consequence despite their enslavement. 

The book is still in pre-production and yesterday I had the honor of offering Dee some suggestions for the blurb - that powerful first taste of the story you get after the book's front cover has captured your eye.

I was up half the night thinking about those scant paragraphs. Woke up excited to be at The Work of moving words around to make a certain kind of magic.

Of course, the devil Technology tried to thwart me right out of the box, but I sat through 45 minutes of this laptop updating itself. My fault for letting one of my most important tools languish and get rusty. I have been warned!

It was 67 degrees when I woke around first light. Bailey was on me, poking his bony face into my hand and licking away my salt. It was a delight to walk around the house and open some windows. Let in some cool, unfiltered air. It will be a fine pool day later.

I'll be spending the last week of the month with Charlie. We will spin some new/old vinyl,  experiment with acrylic paint, catch up on a few old movies, and explore a new water hole.

I'm sneaking a second language up on him. He is interested in Japanese culture and language, but I think we'll start with the ground I'm familiar with, French. 

He reads to me from whatever has his fancy at the moment and stumbled across "Sacre bleu!" I looked up the translation and pronunciation for him and his accent when he repeated it was perfect! 

Stuffed cusspots and an overstuffed heart

 

Self-care, self-comfort, and ease. I go with the flow and make these while lying across the bed, reorganizing my wayward vertebrae.

Here's the origin story and some follow-up. I've been making these little catch-alls for a long time. Both of these are crammed with scraps of hand-dyed cloth and are available. 

For a few weeks now, I've been using up the last of a cone of Lily Sugar&Cream cotton adding little vestigial arms, legs, and eye stalks to make the tails look reasonable. I think I'm done for now. These are things I can do without really looking too hard or focusing. I was watching TV.

To not channel surf the news outlets, I remembered how much we liked NYPD Blue when I saw that Hulu offers the entire 12 seasons. 

Starting in September of '93, this was award-winning adult TV fare.  This was one you did not record to watch later. You sat through it, hands empty, eyes on the screen. 

Unlike most of the TV rolled through our living rooms before cable, this show has held up incredibly well. The writing, the acting, the streets of NY at their grittiest. A strong, ever-evolving cast includes secondary characters, mostly (my new old favorite words)  skels and mopes being played by some of today's leading actors in what might have been their first jobs on the screen. 

 

This time around, I've been watching as a writer as I struggle to get back into the word game. 

But this morning I got caught up in the story and found myself weeping at a city hall wedding, coffee gone cold. Midway through the next episode came a memory like an icicle through the heart - the terrible realization that not every romance gets a happy ending. Twice in one day, I cried my eyes bloody.  

I am now exhausted and I never even got dressed. Pool time has passed and another thunderstorm is shaping up. I might even get some writing done tonight. 

Haints

 

Textilians know this. 

A scrap that follows you around, insistent.

On the floor in the bedroom, you pocket it. Then on the stairs. In the dryer. Stuck to a kitchen towel. On the kitchen table for a week. Back in my pocket. A short stint as a bookmark, this little purple wing torn from an expensive bedsheet. 

Appalling because I've hoarded its two, king-sized cousins for my winter bed. Too heavy for summer these sheets blanket thick and warm. How this little shred became so small and so grapey is a mystery.

The yellow is a mid-century service weave. Table cloth or napkin maybe.

The tiny Cascade moon from back in the day when I bought yards of PFD muslin from Joanns with a 50% off coupon no matter how the cutter sneered and ripped.

Under it all a stained little square of exquisite, vintage damask from some noble house of means. 

Players? Maybe. The story? As yet untold. I've pinned them together and tossed them in the River Basket to wait for the next neap tide. Or hurricane. 

                                                                                ~O~

two views of the stack of new cloth headed for the scrap basket. 

An old school Friday

 

Once the sun comes over the ridge, I'll start documenting this batch of threads - the Independence. 

Beyond that reference, I'm forcing myself off of social media, any "e" for that matter, except email. I can only account for myself and my immediate loved ones these days. 

Callous some might say. What good am I to the world if I am overfraught and cranky. Scratch my surface (and the world has been scratching) and you'll find Kali. I worry that she burned herself up from the inside out and wasted her potential. 

This last lot of threads has an impossible-to image iridescence. I take comfort in the fact that people usually tell me that they are even better in person than any photo can convey. Good luck taking pictures of Kali's fire.

A good number of them go through three or four color shifts and, for once, I know why. Those new gloves! For the first time, I'm using nitrile gloves. The medical-grade blue, large fit my oversized mitts snugly. Once clumsy grabs became precision picks. A great deal of the color character comes from handling. The old food-grade gloves called for as little touching as possible. The blue gloves let me touch and guide the process in a new way and the results speak.

I've also sprung a bit of whimsy. The utilitarian lumpage of cusspots has evolved into these little headless devils, recalling  the Creatives.

They lift my heart.

a fraught third

 

Our AC crapped out sometime yesterday afternoon. I hate how acclimated I've become to having it, so I was on the phone first thing. This company installed the HVAC system for us in 2016, still going strong so I chose wisely. Tech Tyler was here on the dot of one, found the errant capacitor (seems like you CAN stop a Trane), and replaced it in fifteen minutes. 

Doomscrolling does lead to a negative mindset. While I waited for them to come, I was ready to go to the credit union to take out a four-figure loan to get a system. I forgot that the outside AC unit was new-ish. 

The studio was a stuffy 85 so I decided to kick the ceiling fan up a notch from its lazy swooping. Two minutes later, the whole thing fell to the floor with a mighty crash! Camilla was sleeping in the desk chair and I had just sat down in the stitching chair. Your soul CAN jump out of your body, people, and cats. No one was injured but the fan. Mortally.

Later the same day, I gathered in the latest round of threads. A fitting end to a day with a rocky start.

The why of a thing

 (Shopkeeping note. All the threads from the most recent dyefest have been posted. If you missed out, there will be more soon. I'm on a roll!)

There were other words here when I posted this yesterday. Some existential dread spilled over as if I needed to share any of that crap. Funny how things conspired to wipe those thoughts away.

It was my mistake (no mystery) that I opened the page on my phone,  looked at one picture, and then closed it before saving.

How quickly much of what we labor over these days can disappear in a flick of a switch. Bits, bytes, and pixels evaporate in a nanosecond. 

These thoughts give me a lot of satisfaction when I hold cloth and thread, working the needle like a paintbrush. 

When I'm writing, I use a fountain pen on paper for the same reason. After this, I'll tackle transferring all those notes into electronic ephemera. Someplace where I can stand back, see it all in tabs, and make some order. Remembering to SAVE as I go and not trust the app. 

~~~O~~~

Spawn Prime had a birthday yesterday. The number on that old shirt is coincidentally correct.  I'm so proud of the way Colin seems to be accepting adulthood, but I worry that his big heart will cost him some pain. Jade him some. There's always someone ready to take advantage of good intentions. Happy birthday, Sun. 

Charlie is having a fine summer. I will get to spend the last week of it with him. Do you know what he gets for his birthday? The first day of fifth grade!  We used to say "What a gyp!". 

My cusspots overflow.

Batched babies

 I've been out running errands including buying a new box of gloves. When I got home I remembered these were still simmering so I turned them out. I'd forgotten about the intensity that sometimes happens. 

Another round of thunderstorms is due so I'm leaving them out there another day. 

Some of these are going to be hard to part with.

Some of the murkier ones a prime candidates for discharging. Nothing is carved in stone until they are hand finished. No more machine disasters. I need a rock by a river, but I'll settle for the kitchen sink. 

Just this side of blues

 Update. It's pouring! I can feel all the plants and creatures go "Ahhh!"

Well. Half of them. Maybe.

As ever, the colors had their way with me. I did lean hard on the blues. 

A return to past proven moves: batching was a Thing. The kind of thing that made me take an unannounced turn. Today, I'm all in. Those threads will lay there. It might even rain on them later. And the bundles in the jars? Maybe later tomorrow. 

Thanks to everyone who ordered. First order of business tomorrow is the post office.

This is Old School 

We had a frog-strangler! First rinse, done.

Eyes closed, hoping.

I'll be posting these in sets of four here. 

Also prepping a run of just blues provided the spirits of color are in a generous mood.

 You never can tell. Until then..

 

More like baked and blanched

 

Every time I dye, there is something to learn and more to remember. 

I like to flex, that is, improvise. But sometimes flexing causes me to lose focus on what should be hard lessons from past fails.

Do NOT wash out vintage cloth in the washing machine. There is no setting gentle enough to prevent tender fabric from disintegrating and coating everything with a layer of lint like so much cotton candy. It was the worst mess ever! I 

This was especially bad for the handful of crocheted cusspots. I'm hoping that when they are fully dry I'll be able to work them over with a lint roller or the vacuum cleaner. 

As for color, I'm always hoping for more. 

I shouldn't dwell on or share wet textile images. So much eye candy!

Still, there's a chemical mystery that I have to solve. What happened to the blues? Was I too cheap with the dye powder? Was the magic sauce too weak?

Did the cloth have a fabric softener on it? 

-I did not scour the cloth with HOT water and Dawn

-I was distracted and hasty when I was making up the dyes and way short on table salt. Kosher coarse should only be a special effect.

-It may have been optimal weather for dyeing but not for this human. 

-Wrapping the threads in cloth and kneading the bundles was overkill. But they are lively.

All things to consider.

I'll be getting all of this into the store later in the coming week. 

Poached

 

 Wiping off with a piece of lovely old tablecloth.

 I wonder why no one ever uses damask to make garments? I can see it being winter wear. Supple, weighty, and warm. Maybe a caftan.

It's hot. 90ish. Nothing like the rest of the country has been suffering. The heat here is typical for this time of year. Even the cats are smart enough to stay inside with the AC.

For all my prepping, I forgot to ask Colin to get salt. No worries, I have a big box of coarse kosher salt.

That will do.

Sure it will.       Wishful thinking.

Right off the bat, I knew problems were brewing. Not enough color distribution. Too many voids call for a lot of handling, never good. So I flexed and batched the threads between two pieces of cloth giving them a second blessing in the magic sauce and little kneading. 

Too much of a good thing and some of these look overcooked. I won't really know until it all dries.

 

Here's where I usually get lucky and leave the cloth outside in a thunderstorm for a natural rinse. No such luck this time.

Once I had everything where I wanted it, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the pool.

Quite the perfect summer afternoon.

This is Way...with music

ProChem and USPS came through! 

Sending and receiving via the post office has been sketchy for a while here in Georgia thanks to a 'new' processing center in Palmetto, GA only one hour away from me with the city of Atlanta smack in between.

No excuses have been forthcoming, but I imagine the Postmaster General, Louis Dejoy, (a Trump appointee) is laying the groundwork for disrupting mail-in ballots. 

That's enough poison for one morning. I'm sneaking up on a dyefest. Late that I am, I'll call it the Solstice Special. 

If I write a book about dyeing dirty, it will have to be fiction because I'll be damned if I'll pay lawyers to write up disclaimers. Here is the one I wrote years ago: 

My "Law & Order" law degree dictates that I give all the inane and obvious warnings up front - Don't huff dry dye powder. It will gunk up your lungs. Don't drink dishwasher gel or soda ash solution. Don't make any of it into meatloaf and don't use it to cure crabs. 

Being a carbon-based life form myself, chemicals bother me so I work outdoors and wear gloves and glasses. Duh. This stuff will kill you as quickly as most anything else under your kitchen sink. 

If anyone chooses to disregard common sense (so what else is new?) the gene pool thanks you for getting out.

Here endeth the lesson.

The Braves beat the Yankees like a rented mule last night. Pity on the mule. 

I spent most of the game measuring off forty turns of thread onto my treasured Luminarc tumbler. I got them as a wedding gift so long ago and still have three shorties and three tall ones.  Just a tool that I favor. 

No science here, but I think the handling and the smoothness of the glass sets up a uniform surface on the thread that may cause the shine mine are known for. 

Or it could be the devil's bat piss. 

I'm not trying to kill myself out there in the sun today so this is going to be a short run, which is a good thing in the long run.

There's still a lot of summer ahead and the pool beckons.

Listen. So much magic in his lyrics.