past time to stop

I don't even want to know how hot it is. You just know it's time to stop when you start making messy mistakes. Oh, I know the red-headed devils always turn out to be my favorites but who needs a whole stable full of them?

Lots of mad scientist notions in play this morning - using up a bag of played out epsom salts  to carry dye powder. Mixing up pearl-ex gold and silver into binding solutions for some Pollock style homage. Several levels of bloody mud colorwise and a batch of silk prepped with wine vinegar because I had no white.

Some new approaches to finishing the fabrics too including decanting them from the mason jars and just letting them bake dry in the sun before any rinsing or washing.  Lazy labor saving devices for the most parts but dye batchers will call it wisdom. Time will tell and I am in no rush.

I found what might have been someone's hippy wedding dress in a bag back in the closet. A dimly recalled Goodwill purchase. Hastily deconstructed with scissors, now well represented in the jars. Lawn at it's best.

and now tea, plums and pooltime.

too hot to dye?

Not too hot for the dye or the cloth but too hot for humans. It's supposed to be 103 degrees out by midday so I spent the early morning just making preparations for tomorrows earliest hours (more triple digits are forecast) .

These are the wet samples that I hastily crammed into mason jars yesterday. The heavy markings are due to the lack of manipulation and a nice variable.

       All these are varying weights of linen and this cloth is FIERCE. My arms are tired from ripping. Most of the larger pieces have been put into the sauce and a few are in a soywax experiment. I'm trying to take advantage of the severe heat by settting a few pieces (with soywax chunks and crumbs folded in) out in the full sun in a black plastic garbage bag. Think it will get hot enough out there? Where are my crayons, now that I think about it....

dyefest prelims

It's been a long time coming! I snatched off little pieces from the box of goodies that arrived yesterday, let them soak in the soda ash solution all morning and plunged in the colors by lunch. They will poach outside on the deck in this heat for the rest of the day. Tomorrow morning we will see what is what....

truing up

My sense of balance gets disturbed when I try to leave a piece "as is"-  whacked, as it was, out of the whole cloth in the first place. Like an animal skin.

 I was in Autozone the other day and actually pulled two hideously expensive genuine chamois out of their packaging to find the outlines of the critters they came from. Not satisfying shapes at all and the thought of needling them had me cramming them both back into their tiny plastic capsules.

So the edges of this one have been determined but
I'm still undecided about mummifying (or not) but that beige has got to go and will most likely be painted, or maybe paved over if I can find some more loosely woven linen.

 the answer to my quest just arrived from Texas! Thank you Barb!

summers day off

I spent a few hours at the Honda dealership this morning. Seems like something in the airbag will kill you rather than save your life. Supposedly they fixed it while I stitched in the waiting room. A little girl about seven came to observe and, after a minute, asked me what I was doing as if she had never seen someone embroidering before. Sensing that she was asking just to be polite, I gave her the one word answer. She sniffed and sat down to poke at her device but kept an eye on the proceedings with no further questions. Maybe she looked it up.

 After a while, I ran out of white thread, packed up and wandered around the lot marveling at how most of the current models are so much bigger than my 01 Civic...and I still get better mileage than all but the hybrids.
From the opulent Crosstour, a fancy box of air, to the snappy little CRXsi which would surely land me in the pokey, they were all beautiful. I told the salesman that rather than choose between them, I would take them both when the first lottery check cleared. A man of faith, he gave me his card with a smile. 

And when I got home I spent the rest of the best part of the day drifting and dreaming here.