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!

Experiments with Indigo

I grew indigo this year and decided it was time do something with it. I used the recipe that is in Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess.

I planted it in big pots this year, about 4 or 5 plants to each pot. Since it does require a fair amount of water it was much easier to maintain it this time around. This is Japanese Indigo (polygonum tinctorium).

This method calls for cramming a pound's worth of leaves into a large jar. It does not need to be quite this fancy, but this was the biggest one I had that was clean. Indigo requires no mordant and from what I have read can be come displeased with residues etc.

You then put the jar of leaves and water into a big pot of steaming water. You don't want it to boil, thus the thermometer. The water in the jar is turning dark in this picture, the water in the pot is clear water. I thought this was a great way to do this as it makes it much less likely that the indigo will get too hot. The only downside to it is that it doesn't make a ton of dye, but there is still enough left to do some other small pieces. Once I got to the point where I alkalized, oxygenated and then reduced the dye, there wasn't time to take any pictures. But that is ok, I highly recommend getting the book (link above) and following it step by step.

This was the end result! I was so pleased with it as I haven't done much indigo and at different times it didn't seem like the process was going the way she said it would in the book. This is silk crepe de chine and I am just going to admire it for awhile before making it into anything.

Remember you can get handmade supplies in my Etsy Shop and there are scarves available at The Pottery Place Plus online store.

Blue Monday

After a busy weekend (some of it good busy, some of it the bad type) not to mention that catastrophe in Florida, I was out of sorts today while trying to get normal stuff done around the house and get ready to leave for the Edmonds Arts Festival. I got the suitcases packed; heaven only knows what is in them-it is probably worth stopping by the show just to see if I am wearing pajamas out in public. Then I decided maybe what was needed was to go out for a bit. I hit the post office, the bank, the drug store and was about to go to the grocery store when the phone rang. It was my friend Juaquetta, who owns Garden Party Fibers and she said " I was going to call you earlier, but I wasn't sure this was going to work, its old dye, but it is and I wondered if you wanted to come see it-I mean come see the indigo happen!?!!" Not an exact quote but if you read it really fast and out of breath you will get the idea. Who needs groceries?

The fiber goes in white

It looks all swampy and green

Expose it to air and the magic starts to happen! From green to blue!

Woo-hoo Blue!

It lays out in the shade to dry