anticipation

Even as March has plunged us back into what I've come to expect from winter in Georgia, I'm excited for the dye season to begin. I can't even put my finger on why and don't plan to try.  I had to reach back to '12 and '13 for these pictures. I'm scraping the bottom of the cloth barrels!

The cloth has come first. thrift shop finds and gifts from another artist who is downsizing. I'm still on the lookout for vintage, damaged and otherwise orphaned cloth. The stranger the better. Cotton, linen, rayon or silk.

I'm craving clear, strong colors and have been bouncing back and forth between Dharma and ProChem, window shopping, working very hard at NOT selecting my traditional base palette. I don't know why I bother buying the "pure" colors because I never use them that way. My dyestock always has at least two mother tones.

I already have soy wax I'm coveting those complex, layered colors banging up on sharp edges against snow whites islands. And textures from the usual bizarre sources. Buggy cereals, oatmeal, rice...you name it. My pantry needs a purge badly.

Back to window shopping for the dyes.

Charlie Monday

I'm going to have to hang on to this past Saturday to get me through the rest of this week.

Future engineer and I spent a nice piece of the day at the courts. It was resolved early that he could not play on the equipment without a bigger kid (and not Nana) to help him in high places, so he was content to make repairs on Spencer and chase a ball around the court until we were both tired. A sweet day,

Not My President

 Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia Butler

Friday things

Things in my line of sight and thoughts this Friday.  I litter my desktop with images and thought it would be something to share here.

These are camellias. They grow practically wild here in Georgia, but not on my land. I'll have to find some and move them here.

This is from an artist's studio that Colin is building. The owner wants to use recycled materials whenever possible. A stack of windows was rescued from a dumpster area yesterday. Today they are back doing their work.

Two very elder tuxedo cats that I know are hanging in there, living the good life.

We like to believe that they know how good they have it, but I think they are so perfectly self-contained that anything less would never occur to them.

Big Mama Blue now has a tribe and will get a fresh coat of paint herself, once pollen season passes. I waited a few days too long.

















And of course...........baseball!

stitching as driving

An experiment this morning.

After spending some time with the manuscript - and running into mental walls and dead ends - I picked up the stitch and decided on the passage, line and colors I wanted.

I wanted the thread to be substantial, but blend, I mixed three strands of machine rayon and one of the 12wt cotton. Experience said they would not play nicely, but I ignored that even as they fought me at the round-eyed needle. I finally had to switch to an embroidery needle even though the rayon is thin as hair.

First pass = a nasty backside nest. "STOP NOW! and go upstairs and get the damn thread magic.

Once the thread was dressed properly, stitching smoothed out.


 There was no TV or background music. My hands were busy with what was now a rote task with little course corrections and design considerations happening in small bursts without interference from cranky thread.

The revelation came when I started thinking about the story again. Missing pieces materialized. Emotions came clean, reactions true. Details sharpened the reality. I put down the cloth and went back to the little wireless keyboard that hooks to my tablet. Wrote for a while and went back to stitching.

And here I thought I was going to have to drive across country to get this book finished.