Every day is Sunday

 

When the fireworks go off every night for a week.

Four in the afternoon yesterday. This was the third thunderstorm of the day. It got so dark that the solar Christmas lights wrapped around the mailbox garden came on. Within the hour, the sun was back out and everything was steaming.

The girls love hanging out on the high deck in the sun. They know I'm not likely to come out there after them. In case I forget, they have a big pan of rain water.

 See my sunflowers on the dye deck? 

The fireflies and bats come out at night.

Inside, I've cleaned and replenished my stash. Now I have to wait for my right arm to rest and recover.

I'm adding new sets of threads to the store.

 

Time stands still

All and all, a very good save.

I'll be putting most of these up for sale in the store in the coming weeks.

I wish there was some way to show them one by one, but I really hate the shopkeeping that goes along with that.

Will she ever get over harping about those bloody blues?  Not any time soon.

Meanwhile, I'm staring at the color charts again.

 

We had an overnight and half a day that was a delight. There were no electronics and I discovered that he's never seen Harry and the Hendersons.

We drew up an impromptu family tree so he could understand the great-great thing.

He likes nothing better than making stories up on the fly. 

Three weeks before we meet again.

Camilla is going room to room looking for him.

Summer thunder rolls on.

My boys of Summer

 

Do overs

 

As tasty as things looked yesterday, about half of the skeins were insipid at best. It was kind of disheartening sorting through them. That blue I'd been searching for fizzled badly. 

The Lesson: Don't buy more dyes than you can use in a season. They lose their potency, some colors more than others. I realized that most of my inventory is three years old, or more.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but I keep seeing this color as a theme in movies and TV.  First it was "A Little Chaos" with Alan Rickman and Kate Winslet. Dashes of it everywhere in the costumes drew my eye.

Then the remake of Perry Mason and most recently,  the Bear. 

It's a teal blue, on the dark side, that vibrates on the line between warm and cool the way some people's eyes will. 

I got close. 

(Somewhere between East and West below.)

Overdyeing is risky business especially when all you have to work with are other old colors. I resisted the "more is better" approach and made my choices. It has gone badly in the past. I have thrown away many skeins of pure mud. Today, I'm celebrating. I'm also off to ProChem to look at some new stock.

The Junes take wing

 

Wrapped, rolled, and ready to rock.

I had maybe half a cone of DMC left and decided the time was ripe. Hot, humid, and no inspiration pouring from my own stash.

Right out of the gate, the fates conspired to mess with me. I messed with them instead. The little tub marked RAVEN was empty. Lesson: is the container empty? Throw it out!

Using what I had, I cooked up my own black, as neutral as my internal color wheel could make it.

When it came time to mix three primary colors, I made a point of taking a left at each turn, NASCAR style instead of my predictable course. Once I made enough of each, I used those to set up three complementary colors  - the weird cousins got to sit in.

They look really good at this stage. Crispy. I ran out of salt and had to add sugar. Remember, the crystals are just a means of carrying the dye to the thread. I've read that a little salt goes a long way in pushing the dye molecules into the thread molecules, but you can't prove it by me one way or the other. Not like I'm standing there with an electron microscope and a stopwatch as sweat drips into my eyes.

They are washed, rinsed, and rinsed again. Now hanging in the herb dryer on the high deck. 

I have to keep an eye on the weather because there's no cover anymore. 

It's still hot and humid, but now overcast and I think we are starting to experience some of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires.

I'll be spending the rest of the morning getting the rest of them out to dry. So, good folks who were expecting me to get to the post office today, I'm sorry. But, you will be reaping the benefits of a fresh lot of dyed cloth and thread in your order if you left the choices to me.

And when all was wet and resting, I took my roasted carcass into the pool to dig even deeper into this terrific novel. 

I finished it this morning and I feel like I've stepped out of an old-time cinema where I watched an extended version of "Casablanca" and now I'm blinking in the hot sunshine wondering what year it is. 

A while back, one of my readers commented that Prophets Tango made her feel like she had just discovered the work of author Amy Harmon for the first time. I made a mental note and promptly lost it. 

Last week I was in the library and this was propped up with the librarian's summer picks and I took a chance. Looking forward to reading more of her work.

If anyone has read my book and reads this one, let me know what you think. Colin called it a "Cosmic Coincidence"