I love YouTube

Neil Diamond has been all over the place promoting his latest album. This morning Jimmy reminded me of this performance during the Grammy awards so many years ago. I was watching it, he was trying to sleep beside me. As Neil and Barbra started to sing I nudged him "Wake up...psstt. Lookit this.This is HOT...they are way more than just friends...pssst". You Tube is getting to be my memory keeper.

Shoot

I pulled this piece out of storage so I could use the backside as a backdrop for a photo shoot of a flock of smaller pieces that I have decided to sell. It was conceived for an assignment in a typography class I took a few years back. The teacher walked around the room and drew scrabble letters from a cloth bag.We each got two letters that we would be stuck with for the whole term. Like my S&M?

On this overcast day, the backside was more interesting than the front and a good backdrop for these pieces.

raw materials finally exhausted

OK. Now I have to stop. All the latest batch of tablecloths have been committed to the colors and I'm just about out of dye stock. For a while I'll be working with whatever is at hand. What pleases me most is that I can reproduce these results anytime I want to. This knowledge makes me kind of greedy to make more. For the moment I have other things to focus on as I will be leaving for NY on Tuesday to spend some time with my parents. I have to put together some kind of handwork to take along. I suppose clean laundry is in order too. Thanks, Kitty, for booking me on Airtran instead of Delta. And don't forget to order the new washer and dryer from Sears today - I'm packing light! There will be lots of things to do and think about while I'm in NY. Many changes are afoot. I'm determined to plant a small vegetable garden down by the lake. Gardening in Georgia is way too much work. Little survives without major intervention on the gardener's part and I am too lazy. In New York I used to put seeds in the ground, wave my arms in some vague blessing and walk away. The soil was so good that things grew and prospered without so much as a second look from me. The Pilgrims didn't know how good they had it landing in New England. If they had landed in Georgia they would have starved to death. Here's an exception. After we moved here in '93, I brought down some cuttings from a peony plant growing behind my parents house that was originally cultivated by my Grandfather in Armonk, NY . I put them in the ground up by the mailbox where they survive on dog piss and benign neglect. Someone once told me that peonies needed ants to help them bloom and now I have the proof.

Mmm mmm good.

Some outstanding results of a process that involves dirty rock salt . This is going straight into the private stock. We're expecting some wicked weather shortly so I decided to hatch these out early, wash and dry them and then scuttle upstairs to the studio and get to work.

batching damasks

This is the last group of damasks bagged up to batch in the sun until the storm breaks over us later this afternoon. I let the other group go overnight and was thrilled with the results until I washed the whole gang together in the machine and got the dreaded FUSCHIA contamination. So a couple of yesterday's pieces will get some additional over dyeing and the rescue will be complete and lessons learned.