A heart of darkness

 

I frighten myself. I imagine I frighten a lot of you gentle souls. For that, I'm sorry. 

Like many, I couldn't sleep last night. Charlie has a little cold. An earache from swimming. Every time he coughed in the next room, I was reminded how being a parent, even a grandparent, is having your heart outside of your body for the rest of your life. In its place, I have a black hole full of lightning and lasers.

Awake, I kept imagining the terror in that classroom. Do you really think they all died instantly? There is no god that good.

If anyone says "thoughts and prayers" to my face, they may well experience the wrath of Kali.

 

When I did fall asleep, I imagined myself moving through the night with a machete in each hand. Finding the NRA puppets, one by one. Slashing. Laying waste. I have never been more furious at being an old woman.

All I have is my vote, and I did earlier in the day. What money I can spare will go to the Blue candidates who need it most.

Beto was magnificent today. And I can't wait for the 1/6 findings to be televised. The revolution WILL be televised. 

And over all of this, the sweetness of summer.

Store update

 

This one is ready and one other.  I've left the pieces larger than I used to pack in the fat baggies.  Hand-sized for the most part, some larger. I've tried to put a large variety of cloth and colors in a bundle. Likewise the threads.

You get to chop them up as needed.  

Details here.

Email me to order.

This one is SOLD.

Summer still new

There was a Spring this year. Brief, flirty, but we had it. 

The heat and humidity snuck up on me yesterday.  I've had a cold for a couple days - sneezing and runny nose are the extent of it. Not enough of a bother to get tested since I live like a hermit and still mask if I have to go out. 

This may be the best investment in good clean fun that I've ever made. 

Everything flourishes. I have sunflowers for the first time. Now all I have to do is keep the climbers from strangling them. A daily battle with a potted garden.

There is a ton of dyed cloth. Enough to go around for a long time. I still haven't done up the muslin for my summer dresses so there will be at least one more round of dyeing.

School is almost over here. Charlie went in the pool for the first time yesterday. 15 minutes and his lips were blue but still, he had to be dragged out. It's going to be a fun summer.

All of this busy-ness is a distraction from a clutch of admin-type stuff that I'm not doing. You, know, wills, taxes - that sort of nonsense.

One accomplishment has me all full of self. Finding a tolerable new. local primary care doctor/facility. Bloodwork all came back astounding normal. My health coach, a charming leprechaun of a boy, wants me doing cardio in a pool somewhere to spare my miserable skeleton.

So, we will swim till we sweat  WHEN the temperature comes around. Sushi replaces the roast beef hero, ginger ale traded for seltzer, and some vitamins for slightly elevated triglycerides. 

There are still books to write, cats to herd, a child to see raised. Life.

 

Day 2 - the cloth

It's starting to look like rain. A perfect end to a special dye adventure. We started on Beltane and will end under a full lunar eclipse. I will leave all these outside tonight to receive the moon's blessing.

I lift each wet bundle and shake out the oatmeal. The dye is exhausted at this point. I sweep the crumbs up and toss them out into the weeds. I don't compost this stuff because I also use salt in the mix. 

As much as I've read about salt killing plants, the weeds that grow so fiercely under and around my deck must not be hearing that conversation. 

None of the colors will transfer to the plastic and only stays a few rains on the deck boards.

I can't wait to wash and dry this large piece of lightweight linen from an online resource. I don't usually buy new cloth but I wanted to try using linen for some summer shifts. Couldn't leave it plain old white.

 Somehow my favorite linen blouse got mixed in to this lot and I didn't realize it until I flipped over the wet cloth on the deck (which was already strewn with dye-dusted oatmeal) and saw the row of mother of pearl buttons and the Structures label. 

Oh well. 

Day 2- more dirty thread

 

There was a clutch of thread skeins that I didn't get to the last time I was making dirty threads. Today they partied with the vintage cloth.

I should have shown how this goes from step one, but here's the reveal. 

Some of these I call over-cooked, colorwise, but I shouldn't rush to judgment. Cloth and thread always appear darker and more intense when they are wet.

These should wash and dry out to some nice strong colors.

Color from the closet- Day One

 

modern light linen

For me, dye days rely so much on the weather. 

I need early morning light to gather materials and decide what colors I want to work with. Then the day needs to cook up hot and bright - I have a great market umbrella for shade this year.  

As I'm working this year, I'm talking to myself, taking notes paying attention rather than running on autopilot the way I usually do. 

Telling and showing someone who's never done this before because that's how the book will be. 

There are so many random little bits that I don't even think about.

 Like, let the cloth have a good soak in the magic sauce before dyeing. Mixing a big batch and throwing the cloth in is the first order of business on dye day. 

There was a tub deep in the closet filled with pieces that I didn't get to last year. Some from the Italian Bridal collection, an embroidered cotton lawn nightie. Embroided damask napkins. Vintage sheets and pillowcases. A lot of varying weights of linen, some garment weight, some service weight. I have whole bolts of 22" wide coarse weave toweling. A natural fiber too coarse for cotton. My best guess is linen.

A lot of it got color today. 

Again, I will be hand washing/rinsing this lot.

Most of these will be for sale. I'm still thinking about the format. 

Stuffing it all into a plastic bag isn't working for me anymore.

My thought was to get a card table, 36" square.  Lay out a single layer of pieces until the table was covered. So a square yard of cloth and two skeins of dirty thread to a bundle. How to wrap it? How to ship it? 

It seems like the Christmas card method of sending threads is working out well. 

I suppose if I had to choose what color dye to fumble all over myself, this would be in the top two only because I have enough to waste.

Note to self - kitchen gloves are too clumsy for  dye mixing 

Color by Buggy Oatmeal

 

It's been so long, that I had forgotten how easy this technique is. And how satisfying the results are. I should STFU now because things are still drying in the sun. 

I am paying strict attention to that Demon Fuschia, so each piece is being hand-washed separately to prevent that creeping pink contamination. More handwork, but worth the trouble.

I found a box of all that vintage Italian bridal stuff from last summer that I didn't get to dye. Some of that lightest weight linen I bought online and a few test pieces of some premium bleached muslin from HoAnns. All of it taking up the dye like drunks in the dessert.

I'll be adding most of this to the store, so check back.

And there WILL be a book because there is no way I can keep up with the demand for my cloth. 

Dirty Threads!

Finally.  

And there's a bunch. Plenty to go 'round.

Some changes. 

I won't be posting photos of sets, it's just too time-consuming. Most of you have trusted me to choose for you, so I'll be starting there.

The hanks will be coming this way as I won't be winding them onto cardboard bobbins (I'll send them along until I run out). I'm sure everyone can handle that part of it. Or should I make a video?

I'm experimenting with new packaging options - kicking those floppy old plastic bags to the curb.

Each skein is still 11 yards of DMC six-strand cotton hand-dyed with Procion MX dyes. 

A set of FOUR skeins is 23.00 which includes postage in the US. 

Sorry, I'm still not risking the PO boogie for international shipments.

I'm having issues with receiving electronic payments so checks or money orders will be the way to pay. You were wondering what you were going to do with all those checks anyway, right?

I'll be moving all these details to the shop page shortly.

There is still not enough hand-dyed cloth to offer for sale, but I'm thinking of making up some smaller kits that include thread and cloth.  Just a taste to get you hooked, if you already weren't. 

 And thanks for all the interest. 

Questions? email me.

dye deck big time

Something new, on something old. I laid out torn lengths of cloth and put the wet skeins of thread directly on them. Made the magic with the dye, then rolled the skeins up in the cloth like burritos and put them in sun to poach.  Dyers call it batching. 

I never put much stock in batching. I've washed out cloth within an hour of dyeing and left cloth crusty with dye for days and never observed a big difference. I did it today because I bit off more than I could chew. Too much of everything- cloth, thread, dye, heat- so batch it will, under the stars with owls serenading. A little extra magic never hurt. 

It's been years since I've used the mason jars this way.  This is just the first step for these pieces. And there's still an acre of premium white muslin that I'm going color to make myself a couple of summer schmattas. 

real time

It looks like it might be longer than I anticipated to get the store restocked. Smaller batches take more time and less energy. I have the same amount of time that everyone else does, moment to moment. How I use it is different these days. 

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This cloth is just a by-product of the most recent thread dyeing session. I put scraps down on the work table and then lay out the skeins of thread right on the cloth as I work. 

This time I folded the pieces of cloth over the skeins and rolled them up like burritos and left them in the sun.  Forgot about them until late in the day which added another whole day to the process. No more getting it done in one day. 

The ties with fringes and bits of cloth flagging on the ends are very interesting. Holding on to them in hopes of something speaking to me.

The threads are turning out beautifully. I'm in love with Bluebird. Not very promising when first applied - muddy almost. I was never a fan of warm blues - extreme me always rolled right over into purple- but this blue is glorious.

I promised myself I wasn't going to wind these onto bobbins, but here I am. Stopping now before my fingers and wrists make me sorry later.