Spirit Cloth

making the best of it

so what happened today was i was thinking about this machine stitch that i had tried way back when, as one of the experiments in cloth to cloth. an alternative to hold it together. and well i am stitching , filling in the embroidery, building on  the shapes created by the machine stitching, going right up close to it, and in some ways i think it will remain a quilting stitch but also a design guide, disappearing in the process but staying functional. and i like that actually. i do.  and because of this, the circles are starting to sympathize with the squares. there is nice crossover here. evolution.   a little thing but something i will explore more. but what else is new?

transparency in october

the seeds are like little weightless stones

honesty is transparent

moontime again

with the moon comes thoughts of the moon so ...

a leftover from sun moon stars sits on the worktable. for a while now.

walnut over a flannel glennis moon. dipped yesterday.

stone moon wrapped in stone clouds. spotted this morning on the way out.

i am just spending these few days outside with no deep thoughts (glorious indian summer here) tidying up the garden. wondering and looking... i keep trying to prepare the planting beds for  winter but summer keeps returning. a little rice and beans and we got dinner.

this is definitely the photo of the day. guess i am not the only one wondering.

a natural order of color

another study . letting the shape of the dots relax into something more stone like. and recording my naturally dyed rainbow as a sampler. stitched to a machine stitched trial for cloth to cloth which has been stained with pomegranate/oak. all parts of some sort of evolution of components. but i am not finished yet. nope.

greener

it is october and still incredibly green here...  reports of record breaking warmth are in the forecast for this coming week.

even so, yesterday was quite chilly and i built a fire in the morning just to take the chill off.  heating the wood stove is just an opportunity for a heated dye pot. cooking up something that has been sitting around outside.

 

pomegranate skin and rind have been collecting because they are the Man's favorite food. most often it yields a buttery yellow on its own with just a long soak. With a soymilk mordant and a bit of heat and some oak water, i managed to deepen it a bit. this piece is wool. 

not so long ago, on a long walk, i came upon a million black walnuts. 

i have a permanent set of pots outside. getting darker everyday. preparing for a very brown new year.

but really i am delighted to say that cooking the pomegranate and oak in the copper pot is again giving me green, an olive sort of shade. i should try to find the logic in all this but really i am just enjoying it all. i gave up on keeping records, i figure if i keep at it i will probably just gain a feel for it. after all the fire is there and so is the pot. top left is silk. right is linen, a short cook and then an over night  cool down soak on the darker shade. the lower left shows a contrast to the pinker brown from walnut. the lower right, last years clamp and stitch resist dyed in the same sort of brew shown with this year's brew and a piece of fresh leaf indigo from the last leaves of the season.

so dyeing will go on in the background i suppose through the winter months.

because it can without a lot of to do.

i would love to try growing madder next year but may try some powdered madder that was gifted to me not so long ago, just to round out my personal rainbow here.

my woad was a flop. not sure why. i got lavender. i am sure it will come up on its own next year. i will try again.

i did save some indigo seeds for next year as well.

by the way i am using rain water for everything, because there was a lot of that.