and let's not forget about the giveaway~!

morning stitch

Work continues in the shirt. this morning at least, Voodoo was not insisting on sitting on my lap as I worked. Do cats get senile as they get older?

I took the distant treasures out of the soda ash and hung them up to dry because I want the whites to stay strong under the wax this time. We don't anticipate feeling any affects of the hurricane here so I hope to do some more work with soy wax and dye over the next few days.

Is anyone else feeling a seasonal ennui?  Just when it cools off to the point when you don't sweat from breathing  I'm feeling a mental and physical lethargy  that seems to go to the bone. It's too boring to contemplate for long.

cool mornings..

...not created by artificial means are delicious but make falling back to sleep all too easy.




My upstairs deck garden has fallen into weedy mayhem but still produces magic like this when I'm not looking.

I like taking advantage of the morning cool to work on my MCD project. (I've awarded myself a feather for participation)  I'll be wearing this before it's finished, no doubt.

The morning light comes through the open front door just so for just long enough. But it's errand running day so I have to put the stitching aside and get on with the day. Too much of my computer times has been taken over by mulling the pros and cons (are there any?) of taking social security with this next birthday. I guess I will have to bite that nasty bullet and go there...the web site raises more questions than it answers.

gifts from afar

 The mailman snuck up and left a box of beautiful cloth on the front doorstep sometime yesterday. I will have to reconsider taking off my wet bathing suit on the back deck and and strolling through the living room bare assed even though I do shut the front door when I'm out back swimming.

Exquisite cloth - and the best part is I now have a scout in distant lands who knows exactly what I am on the lookout for !

"Rêver 3" is finished. Stronger colors than the first two, more complex shapes.

Stepping back and looking at how this one turned out I recognize that although none of the units touch, they all relate in some fashion to the ones closest to it, something I don't think about consciously when I working on it clutched up so closely.

I'm sure there will be more.

Big Night at Turner Field

Jimmy and I went to Turner Field on friday night and watched the Braves beat the Diamondbacks. They have fireworks every friday night but I can tell you they look much more spectacular when the home team triumphs.
Jim agreed they were Grucci  lite which is pretty good for ATL.

That's Jan K., my usual partner in baseball crime (her neighbor gives away season tickets!) my husband Jim and self. It was hot and smarmy but that's baseball in the South - always worth it.

soy & dye experiments cont.

 
I washed out those two napkins last night and then decided to discharge to see how the color "uncovered".

Lots of lessons here. To spare myself yards and hours of waste time and cloth I bought
Jane Dunnewold's book on the subject last night.


It won't arrive in time for the weekend so there will be further wandering in the dark!
"Not Moons" and more are  for sale in the store.

....DING!

ps - thanks to all who replied. I bought Jane's book last night but will keep messing about all weekend, all uninformed!


OKAY! Here's the first one all crunched up. I thought I'd get a lot of the hardened wax off it before getting into the hot water.  Hand washed it in very hot water & Dawn several times and have no intention of machine washing it.

here it is, still damp but I don't anticipate it being a whole lot lighter when it drys which is a nice characteristic of woven cottons like huck, sack cloth and damask.

I'm really tickled with the results and have lots of plans including reworking some finished quilts that have become tired in my eyes. A few things will be disappearing from my main gallery.




I was looking over a prospectus yesterday and had a horror when I realized that nothing in my gallery is less than three years old!  Something has to be done...

Even the second one, which I immediately christened "Nasty" came out very interesting.

And a big bonus.....

...the soywax+dye crumbs are everywhere and the dye seems to be still active. These are two damask table napkins wet with soda ash that I used to clean up the work table.

I'll stuff these in a jar and leave them for tomorrow.

soy & dye experiments

The dyes and soy wax that arrived yesterday kept me up thinking about them last night.
I've long wondered about mixing the dye/resist process somehow, as counter intuitive as it seems.  I know someone had written a book about it and can't find the thing - so here I am re-inventing the wheel cause I can't wait to read about someone elses discoveries..if you know the book I'm talking about please email me.

Meanwhile, I set my trusty muffin tin in a rusted frying pan of water on the side burner of the gas grill conveniently located on dye deck.

For the first one, I waited until the soy way was completely melted and stirred in a teaspoon of dye into each muffin.

It blended pretty quickly and working fast, I applied the colored wax directly to a huck towel that had been soaked in soda ash.

The backside is even interesting.  It's going to kill me to wait to wash this out but what a great excuse to get some chores done!




Below is the other half of the huck towel, also damp with soda ash. This time I spooned the dye into the muffin tin while the wax was still melting and it did not blend as well or easily with the wax.

I started out wanting some "white space" and used wax without dye (covered over now)  but it was looking so nasty that as soon as the wax cooled I rolled it up and put it in with a quart of monkey blood.

washout will be lunch-ish.

monetizing?

Have any of you fellow bloggers taking the invitation from Adsense to "monetize" your blog and, if you have, are you needing a wheelbarrow to take your money to the bank?
Somehow the term "Monetize" conjures up visions of Jesus kicking the moneylenders asses on the temple steps  or Miss Cleo taking folks' grocery money for bogus card readings and spells. Am I crazy, stupid or both?

On a happier note, the UPS man just dropped a box from ProChem on the doorstep. And me with almost no white cloth!

PS....Yeah, I've decided that monetizing sound a lot like a case of the cooties.

signs of fall

This is view right over the back edge of the pool. there are several trees even closer than this one off screen right. The shade keeps the water cool and relatively algae free right through the summer but they (and the critters that live up there) drop endless loads of crap into the water.

Since I am the daily swimmer, it falls to me to keep ahead of these Augean stables and now that the buses are rolling the signs of fall are setting in.

But today I witnessed first hand where these leaves keep coming from. I mean, do you see one single brown, yellow or sickly leaf in my woods? Not.



Right on the other side of the fence my neighbor has a towering tulip tree  and the leaves are coming off it like confetti on New Years Eve...

catchup

I was not as fully divorced from electro-doings as I wanted these past days  but  still, lots got done.

On the other hand, there's nothing like a new bed to make one think about becoming an Olympic class sleeper. You just don't how bad the old bed was until you get a new one! I wake up feeling taller each day.

Work continues on Rêver 3 but there are stronger value changes in this one and I am anticipating even more vivid ones in the future. Dreams will sometimes pass into nightmares without you noticing.

A pair of swan feathers underway...I keep telling myself "less is more"

  and finally, finally
I am tackling the construction of this large piece. Getting these very disparate types of cloth to lie down and true up is crazy pesky.

The darkest one in the foreground is vintage cotton sackcloth (thanks Rosemary), the middle part is the last of the Nantucket flea market damask tablecloths and the pale strip on the far edge  a vintage percale - a sheet from my Aunt  Jo's lodge in Flint Michigan.

These three pieces of cloth have been only been joined because of the colors I gave them. The whole process seems to be against their individual wills but I am taking the wheel with a firm hand.