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.