gardening madness

 

Here was my big excitement for the weekend. The garden place. I'm admiring my own restraint. No fooling around with any vegetables this year.  Only came away with a Carolina Jasmine and some moonflower seeds for the upcoming arbor. I'm thinking about some kind of mosquito netting and proper seating so I can spend more time out there. More about that in future posts.

I lost half an hour looking for a photo from the film "The Postman" - I'm a sucker for Kevin Costner - but couldn't find the one I wanted, where he comes riding by to snatch a letter out of a little boys hand.

 I would be only too happy to stand at the top of my driveway to hand off my letters and packages to someone trampling by on horseback. Tomorrow it will be me going to the post office. 

On the runway

 

The first. *Not* typical of the rest, just first readied because there was some special handling. 

I know I'm going to need more along these lines.

Sets of six are up here.

 What are you looking for? Eclectic? Close cousins? 

Regrets. International customers, 

The LOSS rate of small packages both in and out of the US is still staggering. The bottleneck seems to be US customs. I'm still doing research, but it may be a bit longer before I'm comfortable shipping overseas. 

Conjuring Dirty Thread- the Pixies

 

That's right! It's finally TIME!  The first 2021 dyefest on the Lawrenceville  Frankenstein Burning Dyedeck is underway.

(Not this lot. These are long gone. But you get the picture.) 

The blanks are in the magic sauce. There are 2 yards of fairy weight linen on the work table and that Ralph Lauren top sheet waiting to receive them as they get their Blessings.

If you have a color in mind, let me know. The colors won't fly until the sun grins over the yardarm. 

This batch of Dirty Threads named in honor of yet another unsung woman, Pamela Colman-Smith, also known as Pixie. She is responsible for the artwork on the Tarot that most are familiar with, my home deck, the Rider-Waite. 

Pixie may well find her way into my next novel.

Down in the kitchen making Walt & Jesse proud.

summer soon

 

Good things from small packages. The cat crew helped me find my missing address book by barfing in the small traveling stitching bag and knocking another basket over in the process. 

The mail brought small, tender wonders. 

There is so much going on right now that if I let it, my head would spin. Instead, I fix my eyes on the near future. Hyacinth vines and flowers overhead shivering with honeybees.

Years ago, Jim turned a 10x10 slab of concrete into a haven by building an arbor. These vines and others covered it, the blossoms hanging down. Roses climbed up the outside. All I had to do was give water and enjoy. 

I'll build a new one, sit under it, stitch and write. Like George Washington and his figs. 

We have a winner!

  There were 81 entrants! Thank you all for playing!

And the winner

My copirate will be here tomorrow for a bit and we will be drawing the winner of the giveaway around noon. 

If you haven't already entered, just drop your email in that loud turquoise box over there on the right. You get one shot at some Dirty Threads and no spam, only a heads up for when Prophets Tango is available.

done, but for the maker's mark

 

mummification, day 2

 

All the tools and materials responded just as I remembered except I couldn't get the lid off the jar of liquid matte medium so I gouged a nice little hole in it, poured what I needed, and plugged it with tape when I was finished. No studio should be without a roll of duct tape.

The heavy matte gel is as thick as library paste. The kind that was so tasty in elementary school. I only needed it for the edges and in places where the cloth was three or four layers deep.  It's easy to thin to whatever consistency is called for.

I stayed away from the bright white stitching. The stitch lines stayed crisp.

The damasks soaked the medium up like kitty litter.

I was even able to convince that uneven edge that closer to a right angle would be more pleasing to the eye.

This piece will be ready for its photoshoot tomorrow.

the process

"The Bruised Heart" will be my first guinea pig. Finished back in the Fall, it's my favorite from the year. October, when the country seemed to be eating itself like the Ouroboros. We were all wound up pretty tight, especially here in Georgia.

I still haven't settled on the orientation for this one. My perennial problem, deciding which end is up.

This is the easy part. I've left the edges of the finished piece loose so I can fiddle the edges into line when I start working the gel medium into the cloth. 

I'll keep going back to the tutorial so I won't forget all the little nuances that I worked with and around all those years ago.

Being mindful of how the next step can darken the cloth. 

Slowly. slowly.

I have a lot of detail shots of this piece to document how it will change. See just how much I can control. And how much the cloth will do what it will.

Kill your darlings, they tell all writers. The scene that inspired this piece lives on. Dark and dangerous. A switch tripped for the main characters. Everyone right at the place of no return. 

 

so, anyway...

 

Before anything else, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell has totally sucked me in.  

Late last night I finished reading a scene that went on for three pages before I realized I was reading a love scene. When it was over, I clapped the book shut in despair. That's how I should have written it. Damn, it was delicious and she never even took off her boots.

Yesterday's post all full of bluster about what would go on today? Such hubris to have written it. The piece I wanted to work with is much larger than any of the canvases I have on hand. I need to go back to Goodwill to score something large enough to carry it. 

On a side note, I went there for the first time in a year. Scored a Ralph Lauren flat sheet that will become the first tablemopper of the new dye season when the sun finally graces these parts. 

Instead, I spent a little time prepping this one. It needed a piece of light batting to keep the finished piece off the canvas. Give it a little dimensionality. That was cut, fit, and stitched into place in no time.

Know your tools.