Home from the weekly away

 

After a night of flood and tornado warnings, a bright, humid day is spawning. I'm home from a visit with Charlie and we had a great time.

This is that large piece of linen I hemmed and used to wipe my hands and mop spills during the last dye fest. It has a lot of interesting patches of color here and there, but there's a lot of white space still going on. I'm going to keep it considering some soy way resist and more dye in the coming weeks. 

I'm tired in a way that sleep doesn't seem to remedy. My mind still prone to wars of anger and self pity. 

Spending time with Charlie helps as did the celebrations for the Knicks and the opening of the Obama center yesterday. Every speech brought tears to my eyes.

It was the perfect antidote to the 14 million dollar paint job sloughing off the bottom of the refecting pool. A perfect metaphor for the rot and dissolution of the current regime. His deranged antics at the G7 has the whole world snickering at the rotting carcass that doesn't know enough to lay down. 

Together, we delighted in an animated series called "Among Us" based on a video game which, in turn, ripped its entire premise off the film The Thing with a nod to another film Alien. Both of them mirroring Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. 

There were cut-throat UNO matches and lots of wide ranging conversations that started with "Ask me anything". His questions dig deep.

The pool is calling me.

Later I will get some thread sets and cloth posted. 

They serve

 

These pieces are the Carriers. 

I fold squares or rectangles of dry cloth in half and lay the wet skeins out, then apply the colors. You can see their ghosts. 

Sometimes, I leave the skeins in place and roll them up in the Carriers and leave them to stew for a few hours. Days, if I forget.

I'm going to photograph, measure and post the best of this batch and post them for sale, whole. They usually get ripped down to hand size and dropped in the scrap bin, but a few people have requested larger chunks.

a hot bunch~update

This one is a bit special. It's probably closer to twenty yards rather than the twelve yards skeins that I sell. A keeper.

When I'm winding the thread onto the glass I count off the turns to keep an honest measure. But when I see that the cone is dwindling down to the end, I keep going. Then I mark it by using a colored thread to tie it off instead of more white.

In an effort to get over myself, right myself, (there's an interesting expression) I stayed away from social media last night except to check on the weather radar.

A good bit of the finishing process happens under water so murky that you can't see what's in there. Imagine handling a lot of overcooked lasagna being careful not to break any or it get tossed in the compost heap. 

Today I'm washing out a LOT of excess dye and the skeins are proving that chemistry and matter don't give a fuck about your emotions, attitude, or situation. Molecules will do what they do. 

The sun came up, hot and gorgeous and I'm grateful for every moment. 

 

Here's  a sneak preview..

High Summer

 I have hopes and fears in equal measure for this lot. Preperations, materials, and weather were all optimal. (I've been watching Star City and my prose is feeling Soviet.)

Rather than work with a smaller set of blended colors, I used as many colors as I had shakers and was heavy handed with the dye powder. There's a shadow whispering "How many more days like this?"

Like everything else, the cost of thread has gone up. Soda ash is almost twice what it was the last time I bought it. I was heavy handed with this, too. Is more better? I've been looking for reasons behind weak results. Is it the dye powder? My too casual measures?  I haven't looked at dye prices. 

Don't get me started about the post office. I may run screaming, a machete in each hand. 

It was humid and hot--94 degrees in the shade. Last years tent collapsed under an unexpected rain storm, but Colin set up my old market umbrella, more than enough shade when I started. 

What was off--really off--was my state of mind. Unfocused. 

Anger, sorrow, self-pity. These things at war with the Buddhist concepts of compassion and empathy. Even having the feelings, judgements, and opinions at odds with Stoic philosophy. 

I am neither Buddhist nor Stoic. They just have some useful lessons and, for the sake of my own well-being, I need to go back to study.

It's easy to say that we should control how we respond to situations that we have no control over. Talk is cheap. The body really does keep the score. 

I woke up with a sinus headache at 4:30 in the morning and wasted an hour fretting before I got up and took something for it. Fell back to sleep and woke to some unhappy felines wondering why breakfast was two hours delayed. I didn't even start the work until noon. No breakfast, just coffee.

Instead of scraps to wipe my hands, I chose a full yard of new linen. Hand hemmed on all four sides. What else was it doing? Nothing. 

Usually, there are one or two jars of color that dissappoint me from the start. I set them aside. Dump them even. Not this time. I also didn't survey my own collection of threads to see what colors may be missing. 

I used a few new handling techniques for the first time and didn't fuss over whatever music the algo of my playlist handed me. Double gloving makes handling the phone difficult. Taking pictures was pesky enough.

It's creepy that AI has inserted several hours worth of AI generated jazz and classical music pieces in my favorites. I have over fifteen hundred songs marked favorites over a wide variety of genres. When the AI pieces come up they go on and on almost hypnotically. I have to weed that list.

There was a break for a nap and more meds and some watermelon. I have no appetite. The sun was still strong but coming at me on a slant when I resumed the work. 

Historically, I'm rinsing out juicy looking threads over coffee the next morning. Not today. I let everything just lay there while I shopped for lunch and had pool time with a friend. We had an good hour in the water when the skies opened up. Rained out of my first swim of the year.

Rain rinsed thread and cloth is always a good thing. 

Now I have the rest of today and all day tomorrow to get these and the cloths washed and rinsed. Friday before I get anything posted for sale. 

I'm excited about the cloths. I used a premium, if vintage, white sheet manufactured by a company that went out of business in the sixties. A thick, heavy plain weave cotton with deep, precision hems, I was going to make myself a robe, but the fact that I could tear it by hand tells me that it's time for function is over. 

Time to become art. 

That is a shitpot of thread!

I hope I can drum up some excitement about them in the coming days. 

reconnecting with me

 

I'm not dead or in prison and some might suspect.

Like many, I'm feeling the burden of my years and the burn of the times. 

But the NY Knicks have lifted New Yorker's hearts out of the gutter, and they are taking his name off the Kennedy Center as I watch. The rain interfering with those precedings is really going to make that 8647 in the grass show up more intensely. Salt or herbicide, it doesn't matter.    I'm Spartacus.

I've been spending a chunk of each week with Charlie. 

I never knew what a gerund was until I started cutting  flash cards out of a workbook they want him to look at. Dungeon Crawler Carl has overtaken the whole family, but I don't think I'm going to dive in. It's only been two weeks and I am over saturated with Futurama and the Simpsons.

I sneak latin prefix and suffixes into the conversation while we are driving to the math tutoring that will go on most of the summer. No backsliding.

I should have gotten into our pool today, the sunshine window is shorter than ever as those trees get taller. Someone may get a chain saw for Christmas this year. 

And I may have referred to a basement troll in the past. 

For the better part of three years, a guest, who was in desperate straights, became an unwelcome squatter. For a while the situation got on my last nerve. With the help of the walking Monks and some Stoic reading I did my best to ignore the situation. 

The troll has decamped, taking most, but not all of her crap with her to some other sucker's basement. If she tries to return without appointment, the monks and the Stoics will have to write a new chapter about an over-the-top response to aggression. Basta!

My house is deliciously quiet. You can hear cats fart. And if I want to, I can put NPR up loud while I have coffee. Park my car casually. Run the vacuum whenever I want. Use the downstairs bathroom if I need to. The list is longer than I realized.

Again, Basta!

We move through life in delight.

Remember that horse? The other day we pulled up to offer an apple and she was on the far side of her pasture in the shade. I've never seen this horse do much more than plod about grazing. Charlie called to her and held up the fat Fuji. She pricked up her ears and ran to us. A trot became a brisk canter. For half a second I though she might take the five foot fence but she pulled up short at the wire and made short work of the gift. It was amazing to see. 

He takes my elbow when we go from the car through the parking lot. Real manners handed down from his grampa through his father. There's a summer haircut happening as I type this.

Jim would have been 71. His sister called and we burned up the afternoon catching up. 

And tomorrow? A dye fest!

Still in the works

Thanks for your patience for the words on this post. The piece itself has finally pushed me to silence. Because of the irregular edges, I'm considering hard mounting this one to a canvas. Like these.  I might have a blank canvas in the closet. I know there's plenty of gel medium. The many layers of this one will give me the option of protecting the hand here and there.