more texture! more color!

A fiber scout in the wilds of Georgia/Alabama left a bag of potential on the back deck yesterday. Boiled, bleached and soaked overnight in soda ash, I'm not entirely sure all of it is cotton but there's gambling in the air.

I'm taking advantage of a warm afternoon and letting these rolls poach in the sun for the rest of the day. We'll see who or what drops by to investigate the grains in the night. On the menu, some brown rice, very old oatmeal and a box of cornstarch that's at least five years old.

fun with technology

"Sunny Jim"

We spent the morning at the hospital yesterday, as scheduled,  getting Jimmy's heart back to beating a normal sinus rhythm..it got out of sync somehow a while back.

After a load of paperwork and the usual BS sugarcoated with smiles, they manscaped his chest, promised to wake him when it was over and then put me out of the room while they gave him the Frankenstein zap.
He "converted nicely" as the doctor put it.

All is well and I am deeply grateful..after all, his heartbeat is mine too.

a step or two further

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I picked out about a dozen pieces that were pretty flat an uninteresting and put them into treatment. They spent the night bundled up with rice, oatmeal, grits, orzo and dye powder.

Something came to investigate a possible food source and knocked over one of the containers.

They pulled a log of cloth across the deck rail but were interested in it enough  to find out what was inside.

The fabric got the next step this morning and I'm pretty excited about the results.

I've been asked about techniques...nothing new or extraordinary here that I haven't used or written about in the past.

Natural fibers that have been dyed with Procion MX dyes, colors of my own mixing.

Over dyeing using a mechanical means of carrying the dyepowder; old dry cereals that are usually infested with bugs.

Discharging too much color using bleach, a stop watch and a practiced eye.

None of my techniques would meet the approval of the manufacturers of the ingredients. Kinda like taking a Honda Civic with grain alcohol in the gas tank and running it at Daytona...and winning.

sweater weather

Sweater weather took us by surprise here in Georgia. I dragged this brutally overdyed cotton sweater out of the bottom of the closet to use as a guinea pig to see if and how much it would discharge with softscrub.  

See my little favorite bugflower resisted in the middle?  I hope it works as well on the black one, my favorite, when I can find it.

Just Maybe you know them...

Jeez, it would drive me around the bend to spend a day at a fiber show buying treasures with my hard earned cash only to absent mindedly leave it at a booth where I was momentarily captivated by something else shiny and new...it's happened to me for real.

I know I have a few readers in the UK so they just might know who it is...see

this post at Purple Missus