Harvest

 "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."

Robert Lewis Stevenson

This fall's harvest, in part anyway. Tansy flowers at the back, safflower petals in the jar, horse chestnuts, acorns, and black walnuts.

I spared you the picture of the leaves being pressed and dried in a mountain of newspapers and cardboard weighted down by giant art books (see, the history of art does have practical uses) as well as the sleeping bag sized ziploc of avocado pits in the freezer. While not much into whole cloth dyeing these days it does pay to have some dyestuffs on hand to overdye with. The acorns are for tannin solution should the need arise and the horse chestnuts will supposedly make a laundry soap with a "blueing" effect-if you know what blueing was. Anyway, I thought it would be a fun experiment provided I can find the bookmark on my computer for the recipe. As I remember it is dependant on pH to a certain extent. The safflower petals are another experiment for the winter. While not known for being a completely permanent color (even though the ancient Egyptians used it as a dye) if done following exact directions it will impart pink to silk. We will see if I get it right. To my understanding even if I don't I will end up with a really lovely orange/yellow. Avocado pits also make a pink as well.

Over the last few years I have had a hard time making plans for the future. Can't imagine why, what with the Plague and all. I tend towards depression and anxiety anyway and wasn't doing all that well in 2019 to begin with. But, in the last few months I have decided to stick to my plan when I can't decide what to do. Pick the option that will offer the most options down the road. So, for instance, when on the fence about whether to do a particular art fair or not, go ahead and apply anyway. Burning $35-40 on an application isn't the end of the world and if accepted, I can decide at that point whether to accept and pay the booth fee later. If I hadn't applied, I definitely wouldn't be in the show.

That's kind of why I have been scurrying around like a squirrel this fall. As I said above, my emphasis is really on eco printing, not whole cloth dyeing. But having the dyestuff to work with does give me other options if an eco print doesn't "come out well", overdyeing can sometimes give you something so much better anyway. The other stuff just keeps me entertained! Last year the snow was so early that the leaves didn't change  color, they just turned brown and crumbly on the trees and then hung on all winter. Strangest looking thing. So this year I made sure to get out and pick up some of my favorites for winter time eco printing.

Even though this is harvesting, it is a way to plant seeds of ideas for the future.

A Spot of Tea

"There is something about the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life."

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living 

I am participating in an exhibition in May that is all about tea. Today I started the process to dye fabrics for this piece having no idea what the final project will look like. I am generally inspired by materials, so I figured the way to get started, was, well, make the materials for the piece! The first thing to decide was should the work just involve only traditional black tea. Depending on the strength of the tea, how long you expose the fabric, or what mordants/adjuncts are used, the possibilities are probably endless. People make tea out of many different leaves and flowers not only for enjoyment, but medicinal use as well. I decided to look through my tea cabinet to see what the other options might be.

In the event I want to use other colors besides "just tea" I gathered up bagged and loose teas that are also used in natural dyeing. After some research I decided to let them steep overnight to enhance (hopefully) the intensity of the colors. From left to right: Chamomile, St John's Wort, Comfrey, Hibiscus, Nettle.  I am only going to be dyeing fat quarter size pieces of silk broadcloth, so this should be plenty.

I also brewed up a medium size stock pot of plain old, very strong, black tea. This first go around I will be using a half yard of silk broadcloth treated with alum. I may do some sort of resists, various adjuncts, and vary the exposure time to get multiple tones. I have another untreated half yard reserved for other possibilities. 

Do it for the Process

 "Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work, All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."

Chuck Close

You hear the first part of that quote a lot, but I think the rest of it is just as important, if not more so. This week, so far, has been all about process for me. Over the weekend Urban Art Cooperative had their raku firing, a ceramics process that could be compared to eco printing in that there is a lot of serendipity. Being there, learning about how to steer the variables gave me about a hundred other notions of what I would like to do with it. Sorry, no pictures this time, it is a process that goes pretty quickly and there really needs to be a designated photographer! Google raku and you will get the idea, lots of heat and flame with flashy results.

At the home studio it was the week for indigo. Keeping the poor Japanese indigo plants alive this year has been a real challenge. While they do enjoy heat, they weren't tolerating Hell's front porch very well. Neither was I. Indigo is something I haven't done very often, so I am still learning. I decided to use Rebecca Burgess's Harvesting Color as I had used it before with pretty good results. 

Heating the leaves

The magic with indigo is that the water is kind of a yellow green, but when you pull the fabric out, it turns blue right before your very eyes!

And here they are, turning blue!

I had eco printed paper laying around that was less than exciting, so on the third day, when the last pot of dye was pretty close to exhaustion, I decided to throw in a stack just to see what would happen. It is just as much fun to watch paper turn blue as it is fabric!

In addition to the cotton scarves, I did two silk blanks with a lot of folding so there would be  large white spaces for eco printing later. Then I had a couple eco printed scarves that I thought might benefit from an overdye. Since the scarves had been mordanted for the original eco prints, I was not sure what would happen, but proceeded anyway. The results were mixed, they came out a screaming turquoise color, and it seemed to take forever for them to thoroughly discharge, so not sure if that color is going to be permanent in the long run. The paper on the other hand, is leading me in all kinds of directions!

"Sketch" Books

 " What is possible in art becomes thinkable in life."

Brian Eno

Tiny books

I did some samples with the padauk sawdust I had soaking today, and of course ideas lead to other ideas, so I am not quite done with that in order to do a post. But if it weren't for these little books I might never have started the whole process. I have been reading Sketchbook Explorations by Shelley Rhodes and am really inspired by it. When I used to make a lot of clothing I doodled ideas down on random slips of paper, but never really kept a sketchbook. Shelley takes so many approaches to a sketchbook, it is hard to pick something and get started! I have had these little books forever, I can't even remember where they came from. I liked the way they looked so much, just as they were, that they became too precious and I was afraid I would "mess them up" somehow. It's a sketchbook for crying out loud-use it!

They are about four inches square, the covers are heavy pasteboard, like a children's book. They are held together with gunmetal gray binder clips. The first thing to do was to take the original papers out of them. I started with the one in the center. The paper was bonded, or had some sort of finish on it, so when I dipped it in that kind of sheen that is on the top of indigo dye it ended up looking like marbling. The one in the center back is a mixture of the original paper and watercolor paper. All the pinks, blues, and purples come from hibiscus tea. The more yellow looking paper is the original paper in the book. Both were allowed to soak in the tea and as you can see, the watercolor paper "dyed" and the tea tended to puddle on the original paper. The tea changed color, from pink to blue and purple, as it dried. The other two books are all eco printed papers. The brighter on the left is poinsettia. The one on the right is the more interesting parts of some ho-hum eco prints that I cut to size. As you can see in the two center books I used hole punches and stamps on the pages. I haven't decided what the next step is for the eco printed ones.

There is no pressure with this-they aren't "for" anything. Working in layers and letting something from underneath show through pleases me. I also liked machine stitching on the paper and may do more of that, or some hand stitching-we will see. These little projects lead to bigger projects.

Anyway, just letting you know that the results of the sawdust dye are on the way and I had hoped to post those the next time, but now I am soaking more sawdust as I want to try a different approach to the mordant.

Eco Printing on Gourds

"Inspiration exists, but it must find us working."

Pablo Picasso

Eco printing with walnut leaves on a gourd. I was messing around with eco printing on porcelain and then decided to see what would happen to a gourd, since I have a lot of them. I never had figured out exactly what I wanted to do with them-maybe this was the idea that was supposed to come along.

I soaked the gourds, the plant material, and the wrapping all in iron water and used leaves that usually work well with iron, kind of stacking the odds in my favor. Getting a gourd to actually soak is kind of trick-they want to bob around. As long as they don't have any cracks or holes they do not get mushy.

Trying to figure out how to keep the leaves attached until I could wrap the blanket around it. This worked pretty well.

Wrapped up and getting ready to steam. Needless to say the lid wouldn't go on the pan, so I made it a foil tent and steamed it for an hour. Since we have now officially run out of summer here (13 degrees last week-yikes!) gourds will have to wait until next year. I am getting some things together with the porcelain, pictures soon!

The holidays are coming! As promised I did put some scarves in the Etsy shop, along with many new buttons, pendants, and papers so be sure to check that out.

The Only Constant in Life is Change

"Man cannot discover new oceans  unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."

Andre Gide

Low tide

High tide

Home Made Ink

I use winter for messing around with the ideas that have been haunting me all summer and have had no time for. The truck is all loaded up for Custer's Christmas Arts and Crafts Show at the Spokane Fair and Expo Center November 18th, 19th and 20th; I now have time to play before working this weekend.

I unearthed a book called "The Organic Artist" by Nick Neddo. Nick is a very talented artist and this is a very cool book. He generously gives instruction for all the hand made tools and supplies he uses. Making ink peaked my interest, mostly because I had some Oregon Grape berries in the fridge. Not nearly the amount he calls for in the book, but enough to see what I thought of the idea. For those not from the Northwest, Oregon Grape has leaves like a holly plant and the berries are a dusky blue instead of red. There is creeping and upright variety. I was curious to see what color the ink would end up as when you smash the berries they make a purple, but when I tried to include them in eco printing (with iron or rust mordant) they made kind of a gray splotch.

Oregon Grape berries, partially smashed

As per instructed I mashed them with a mortar and pestle until totally mashed. Then I worked them through a fine mesh strainer. If I had enough berries I would have also worked it through a coffee filter to get rid of the remaining bits, but since this was just a fun rainy day kind of experiment I figured I would lose too much juice. Even so, there wasn't a whole lot of solids floating in it. Nick used vinegar and salt as a preservative/mordant as he feels since you can't make alum at home it wasn't what he was interested in doing. Since my mixture seemed quite thick I added some vodka (thought it would flow better than vinegar) and a tiny amount of salt. Since vodka will kill about anything I decided vinegar wasn't necessary, although acid is used as a mordant in berry dyes without much color shifting.

Nice flow!

A very nice pink flamingo

As you can see, it came out a lovely pinky purple color, which turned more purple when it dried. Not only did it have a nice flow, but I had some clean stamp pads laying around (see what happens when you clean? You find toys you forgot you had!) so I put some in one of those and it stamped pretty well, although if I were going to do this again I would do the extra strain through a coffee filter as the floaty bits did show up in the stamped image.The color seemed a bit different depending on the kind of paper used, but I could not get that change to show in the pictures, it was pretty subtle. I used watercolor paper, bristol board and Japanese calligraphy paper to paint and stamp on. Although all are probably archival, they do have different chemical make-ups so it makes sense that the color appears differently, just as it would on different types of fabric.

I got so excited I put these pictures up on Facebook and a friend commented that she could see this done on silk. Nick does state that berry inks will fade with exposure to sun, which with paintings and drawings you try to avoid anyway. So, yes I could see this done to a fine silk that was to be used in a wallhanging or art piece, being conscious of the fact that it is in no way permanent or archival. That being said, what if one was to add alum, either pretreating the fabric first or to the ink itself?  Since no heat is used in this process in order to get this really vivid color, it still wouldn't be washable (probably) but might be worthwhile for other types of art or craft. I think it warrants more experimentation at any rate. When I come across berries again I will try to have suitable fabric at the ready.

What does an Eco Printer do in the Winter?

From the looks of this blog, not much! Actually, in addition to activities like cleaning the studio and the show truck, catching up on book work and housework, I also catch up with other art forms and friends. I have been hanging out at Urban Art Co-op, a ceramics maker's space in Spokane. Mostly, I have been doing pendants for future eco print projects, but I did get a chance to help with the holiday fundraiser and that was fun.

This one is a raku pendant with an eco printed scarf, it took me forever to figure out how to do the clasp, but I finally found the right parts, I am happy with the way it came out. When my Etsy site comes back from holiday vacation, it will be on there.

These are pendants that will get put onto lariats eventually, lots of experimentation with glazes, this has lead me to a lot more ideas, so I had better get on it!

I had done all these little hand pendants last winter and never knew what to do with them. Voila! Handbags! These are currently available at Pottery Place Plus in downtown Spokane.

The next thing I will be doing is cleaning the plant material out of the freezer-I got "the look" from my husband the other day as whatever he was searching for in there was buried by bags of frozen flowers. Can't have Mr. Man on a tear, now can we?

Sea Glass

When I decided months ago to tumble my own glass shards I had no idea it would  turn into  such a project. First the saved bottles  need to be stored. This morning  I realized  just exactly  how many there were so I had better get at it before I end up on Hoarders.  Or an AA meeting. Of course  the  first one I smashed had all the really good chunks stuck to the label. Since I didn't  really want to slice up my fingers trying  to  get those pieces off, I have resorted  to soaking the labels off the bottles  first. Now to begin the peeling process. I feel the same way I do when faced with making potato  salad. I want the salad, but wish the elves were here to make it!

Nesting

Birds nest in the spring, I nest in the winter. The art fair circuit is done for the year, and it is time to rest and reflect. The days here are very short, it gets dark around four in the afternoon. Since there is nothing that has to be done outside there is time to nurture ideas that have been waiting their turn. It is also a good time to look back over what ideas I did make come into to reality and decide if they worked, or if they could be expanded. Several years ago I decided that I would also use this time to experiment with new materials and it has turned out to be a good decision. Even if I don't pursue any of them to a great degree, I always learn something or am inspired in some way. This winter's experiment is with ceramics. I have no interest in making my own coffee mugs or dinnerware at this point, but I have been searching the world over for earthy buttons, beads and pendants to work into my scarves and accessories. I am having some success (pictures coming soon I hope-ceramics can take as long as eco printing) and have had many insights into my fiber work; not to mention meeting an inspiring group of artists.

On this morning's walk I found this little nest resting in a branch over the Spokane River. It does remind me that I should also probably think about cleaning and reorganizing my own little nest. After a year of eco printing, my studio does resemble a pile of sticks!

Coreopsis Verticillata, Part Two

This is what happens when you use alum as the mordant! Cha-cha-Cha!

What Happened to September?

Or, from the looks of this blog, most of July and August as well?? Lots of travel and then racing home to make more stuff and then going back out again seems to be the answer. Mostly fun and successful like the Anacortes show, some very wet like Sequim ("No, those are not bunions on my feet they are just barnacles!") I also taught sun printing to a group of Japanese students from Mukogawa University that were here in Spokane and had a blast; their choices of colors were so different than mine and were so wonderful! I went to a friend's paper making soiree and ended up doing a botanical transfer method on silk. I want to play around more with that, but the weather is changing so it may have to wait until spring. Why can't I ever find anything that is not dependent on good weather? Maybe this is a sign I should just hibernate all winter.
Tonight I have been delving into a filing cabinet drawer. I do actually have some new pursuits but I am having a bit of trouble getting started. I decided to attack the drawer as I knew there were things in there that had inspired me in the past. WHOA! This was like an archeological dig! Finding all this stuff was just as powerful as looking at an old photo album. Seeing the magazine pictures of quilts that had inspired me, some enough to actually make them, along with toys for my kids (where did they get to? The toys, not the kids, I know where the kids are-more or less), holiday decorations and stuff for the house. One thing that touched me was the pattern for a wreath I had actually made for my mother, I know it had to be shortly after I got married so that was 25 years ago or so. I know there was some frustration and cussing going on as I remember my new step daughter asking me what "that word" meant and my husband looking at the ceiling. The other mind blowing find was a cut out from a magazine called "New Ingenue" that was out briefly in the 70's. Although it was a fashion magazine it was not like "Seventeen" at all and they always had section about making stuff out of thrift store finds (hummm.......that upcycle thing isn't new after all!). When I look at this pile of ephemera it amazes me how much of a part of my current life many of these things still are. The other thing that cracked me up was on the back of a 15 year old quilt picture-it was a magazine article explaining to quilters how to "explore the web". It made it sound like you needed safari hat and a flash light-who knew?
Well it is time to get ready to go out on the road again, this time to Issaquah Washington for Salmon Days. As you can see Gladys would prefer I stay home.