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.