Bewitched

 

Saffron

The last of the dirty threads of July are posted. 

I've named a few of them for characters from

 Dee Mallon's debut novel, "The Weight of Cloth" - Saffron, Melody, and July.  All women of color and consequence despite their enslavement. 

The book is still in pre-production and yesterday I had the honor of offering Dee some suggestions for the blurb - that powerful first taste of the story you get after the book's front cover has captured your eye.

I was up half the night thinking about those scant paragraphs. Woke up excited to be at The Work of moving words around to make a certain kind of magic.

Of course, the devil Technology tried to thwart me right out of the box, but I sat through 45 minutes of this laptop updating itself. My fault for letting one of my most important tools languish and get rusty. I have been warned!

It was 67 degrees when I woke around first light. Bailey was on me, poking his bony face into my hand and licking away my salt. It was a delight to walk around the house and open some windows. Let in some cool, unfiltered air. It will be a fine pool day later.

I'll be spending the last week of the month with Charlie. We will spin some new/old vinyl,  experiment with acrylic paint, catch up on a few old movies, and explore a new water hole.

I'm sneaking a second language up on him. He is interested in Japanese culture and language, but I think we'll start with the ground I'm familiar with, French. 

He reads to me from whatever has his fancy at the moment and stumbled across "Sacre bleu!" I looked up the translation and pronunciation for him and his accent when he repeated it was perfect! 

Stuffed cusspots and an overstuffed heart

 

Self-care, self-comfort, and ease. I go with the flow and make these while lying across the bed, reorganizing my wayward vertebrae.

Here's the origin story and some follow-up. I've been making these little catch-alls for a long time. Both of these are crammed with scraps of hand-dyed cloth and are available. 

For a few weeks now, I've been using up the last of a cone of Lily Sugar&Cream cotton adding little vestigial arms, legs, and eye stalks to make the tails look reasonable. I think I'm done for now. These are things I can do without really looking too hard or focusing. I was watching TV.

To not channel surf the news outlets, I remembered how much we liked NYPD Blue when I saw that Hulu offers the entire 12 seasons. 

Starting in September of '93, this was award-winning adult TV fare.  This was one you did not record to watch later. You sat through it, hands empty, eyes on the screen. 

Unlike most of the TV rolled through our living rooms before cable, this show has held up incredibly well. The writing, the acting, the streets of NY at their grittiest. A strong, ever-evolving cast includes secondary characters, mostly (my new old favorite words)  skels and mopes being played by some of today's leading actors in what might have been their first jobs on the screen. 

 

This time around, I've been watching as a writer as I struggle to get back into the word game. 

But this morning I got caught up in the story and found myself weeping at a city hall wedding, coffee gone cold. Midway through the next episode came a memory like an icicle through the heart - the terrible realization that not every romance gets a happy ending. Twice in one day, I cried my eyes bloody.  

I am now exhausted and I never even got dressed. Pool time has passed and another thunderstorm is shaping up. I might even get some writing done tonight. 

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.