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.

ORANGE! (In a good way!)

 A few weeks ago I posted the start of an experiment with padauk sawdust my husband gave me-and here is the result!

The top is an overdye of an eco printed piece of silk crepe that I had done a "re-mordant" (is that a thing?) with alum; the next one down is silk twill that had a faint yellow dye on it (my guess would be tansy flower dye) to start with and thus some alum; the redish one is an overdye of an eco print on crepe with no additional mordant, just straight into the dye pot with it, and the vivid one at the bottom is another piece of silk twill that had an alum mordant applied. 

This is eco printed paper, front and back of the same piece. I have taken to keeping the "so-so" paper prints in a stack off to the side for "spent" dye baths. This particular paper was printed with poinsettia so the paper had alum applied before printing. I tossed it into the warmish padauk dye when I was all done and promptly forgot about it. So, imagine my surprise when I hauled the dye pot out to the compost pile and the last thing to come out of the pot was this piece of paper! It had sat in the dye so long it had sunk to the bottom.

I have another batch of sawdust soaking in vodka for another round of samples. This time I want to fiddle with the ph of the dye bath to see if I can get more of a red. Stay tuned!

Seeing Red

 "If I could tell you about Red

I would sing to you of fire

Sweet like cherries

Burning like cinnamon

Smelling like a rose in the sun"

Dixie Dawn Miller Goode, Rainbows Around Us: A Celebration of Color

I started an experiment with Padauk saw dust my husband saved for me. After some digging around on the internet, I did find several sets of instructions, but not much on how permanent the final color will be. So we'll just have to see what happens.

Here is the sawdust.

This is the type of pigment that has to be soaked out in alcohol, so here is about a cup of sawdust soaking in about two cups of vodka. It was such a beautiful day today I had to run the jar outside to give you the full effect. Most instructions said to let it set for a week or more, so I will be getting some small pieces of silk ready to dye later this week.

Padauk (pterocarpus) is the bright red strip in this cutting board my husband made. The tree is native to the African continent and is also called mukwa or narra.  

I will have several experiments going while waiting for the local leaves to appear. Somebody gave me some alkanet, which I think I left in the cabinet after I discovered that it will pretty much fade with exposure to air, much more so with sun etc. But, impermanence being the way of all things I decided that it would be fun to play with, I have some older scarves of my own that might like to be purple! When and if they fade, maybe they will want to be some other color at that point. I also have a bag of avocado pits going in the freezer, I am never sure how many it takes, but I have some paper and lace just waiting to that lovely shade of pink avocado pits can produce.

Decision Made! Well...Maybe, I Don't Know, Let's See What Happens

"This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it."

Dorothy Parker

and/or

"What fresh hell is this?"

Also credited to Dorothy Parker

There is not much eco printing going on since it is still pretty cold and the plants are keeping their heads down, as are we all at this point. I have been spending so much stressful time on the computer, that by the time I get around to this blog I am worn out and haven't been keeping up with it. Here is an update of life in semi-isolation.

Adding things to my Etsy site, next week's task is to explore other selling options. If nothing else, by the time this is over I will have a much better online presence. With everyone at home, and finances uncertain, I don't expect tons of sales, but at least I will get a lot of things done I should have been doing all along. Thanks to all who have been buying, even small purchases help a lot.

These two images are of a series of works regarding the effect of textile production. The series is called "Unraveling: The Effect of Fabric on our Environment, our Culture, and our Health". Or some such thing. It is scheduled to show in September. I will be writing more about it over the spring and summer. The top image is for a piece called Worry Dolls, regarding child labor (yes, this is still, unfortunately, "a thing") and the bottom is about what happens to first world clothes when they are dumped on the third world. If you donated clothing labels, this is where the lion's share of them went. Still trying to decide on that screaming pink thing dead center in the middle-may have to de-emphasize that.

 Life around the house goes on as normal.

Lots of wandering around, both in the yard and over to the river and back. 

Mr. Man is getting ready for gardening season. His health is good, we are trying to keep it that way by staying home. I am learning all kinds of new digital web skills because of this! (imagine frowny face here)

Buddha excels at self isolation.

Anyway, needless to say, I don't know what will happen with the show season or my intended class schedule. With no crystal ball it is hard to tell. Galleries, like the Pottery Place Plus and Essential Art will eventually open again and classes can be put together at the last minute, while not ideal, it is possible. The art fairs are another matter. Are they being held, is it worth the expenditure during a year like this, are all questions with no answers at the moment. 

I want to thank my friends and local art community for all the help thus far, you guys are the best!

Floating Along

"That bit between Christmas and New Year where you don't know what day it is, who you are, or what you're supposed to be doing."

Seen on Facebook

I love this time of year. It is kind of "floaty". Yes, technically the days in between aren't holidays, but the two celebrations are so close together it seems silly to do anything really serious with them. Even when I worked retail it had that sort of feel. The Christmas rush was over but there were still too many customers in the store to start getting ready to take inventory. In the way back machine, when my kids were at home we would use this time for movies and other things that there wasn't any time for during the school year. We just kind of floated along. I have been taking walks and puttering in the studio. Puttering differs from actual working in that it is perfectly acceptable to pick up one thing, mess with it for awhile and then move on to either a snack, a nap, or another project. There has been some half-hearted cleaning going on. Yesterday I decided to haul out various scrap piles and start sorting by light, medium, and dark for a planned landscape. I got distracted by the abstract patterns in the prints and had to take a few pictures.

Willow Herb with rusted nails.

Filbert leaf and rusted nails.

As to what plants, your guess is as good as mine, but I loved the watercolor effect!

Iron blanket, the oval shape is Japanese Butterbur.

The green is knapweed, the purply leaves are probably blackberry. This is one of those pieces of fabric I just take out and look at periodically, I don't think I will ever be able to cut it up and make anything out of it.

Today I went to the Norman Rockwell exhibit at The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.  They also had one about Mount St. Helens blowing its cork in 1980 and a lovely textile display. My husband has been playing with his Christmas present, The Instant Pot (at our house he gets the kitchen gifts and I get stuff from Home Depot-it all works out). We had some very tasty chicken last night and this evening he is making some sort of ham and bean concoction with the leftover Christmas ham.

Have a Happy New Year!

New Weed

And no, I am not trying to increase my SEO (search engine optimization) with that title-although it did cross my mind. Any-hoo, I thought I would show you my results using Watson's Willowherb.

This is what it looks like, sorry it is not the greatest picture, by the time I decided to try the plant it was at the end of its season. Those long curly things are the seed pods.

I decided to throw it in a stack of paper. I was alternating sheets soaked in iron with sheets soaked in alum. I do like the burgundy red with the mint green and I was really excited to see the wispy seed pods printed too.

Of course, I had to see what would happen on fabric so I went scrounging around in the weediest garden border on the north side of the yard and lucked out-there was some hiding behind the sour cherry tree! Since it worked really well with the iron/alum combo on paper I decided to do the same with fabric. This is silk crepe de chine pretreated with alum using an iron blanket.

And this is the iron blanket! I was so surprised this printed so well.

Be sure to check out my Etsy shop, there are lots of new things and I have been restocking the old. 

And Now We Wait

I taught a class last weekend and while I was gathering plant material I grabbed a couple of "experimental" ones. Meaning, either by some miracle I had never tried them, or, I did and couldn't remember whether they worked or not. I like to include an unknown as I think it gives students the "permission" to go out and take a chance on something. It is not the end of the world if it doesn't print; and then I remind them that just because it didn't work with the mordant we are using, or at the time of year the plant was picked doesn't mean that it wouldn't print under other circumstances.

We are living in a jungle of  flea bane (Conyza canadensis), also known as Horseweed as supposedly it is irritating to horses. There doesn't seem to be a consensus as to whether it actually repels fleas, but our dogs never had any!

Conyza canadensis, also known as flea bane or horseweed with antique tractor.

I simply love it when I find something that is everywhere, in the way, and generally making a nuisance of itself, prints. In this case it is a member of the sunflower family, so it does make sense that it printed yellow or green.

On paper. On the left the paper was soaked in alum water and the flea bane was soaked in iron water. On the right the paper was soaked in alum water and the plant material used as is.

Top photo silk crepe de chine pretreated with alum plant material used as picked. Middle photo silk crepe treated with alum, plant material soaked in iron water. Bottom photo silk twill soaked in iron water, plant material used as is. Be sure to click on the pictures to enlarge them in order to see the details.

   Since it is a member of the sunflower family and it "should" do this I have no reason to believe the paper would change much over time. Fabric can be a different ballgame so I will leave it hang on my studio closet doors until next spring to see what happens to it. Once the out of control grapevine has been put back in its place for the year that wall will get moderate morning sun through the windows until we really hit the depths of winter so that is a pretty good test on "wearability". I will wash it out then and see what it looks like.

Side by side comparison

Remember to take a look at my Etsy Shop, Facebook page and Instagram

Eco Printing from the Deep Freeze

I hope you had a lovely holiday! But it is time to get back to work. Trouble is, when everything is covered with snow and the plants are asleep, it can be a bit of a challenge to get anything done.

What with art fairs and then my husband's mishaps last summer I couldn't get to all the iris, so I froze them by taking the flowers apart and placing the petals between layers of wax paper and sliding the little packets into upcycled plastic zip bags from the kitchen. As you can see they start to bleed as they thaw, so it is advisable to wear gloves and work quickly. You could probably press and dry them, I haven't done this with iris, but I have with hollyhocks and the color is not quite the same. Freezing them gives a result more like fresh flowers. There always seems to be enough room in the freezer for our food and to tuck in a few flowers here and there. The fabric is silk crepe de chine with pre-applied rusty nails.

I also used some spiral eucalyptus from the florist and left over poinsettia leaves, both red and green. Iris petals don't print, but do dye the fabric

So with a little pre-planning it is possible to eco print when the weather outside is frightful.

Have a wonderfully prosperous New Year!

Decluttering the Studio-Yes or No?

All I am doing these days is putting the final touches on work for the holiday shows. I can't imagine anyone wanting to see pictures of a woman doing bushels of laundry and miles of sewing. So what to write about? An article appeared in our local paper recently that was entitled something about decluttering and creativity. As it turned out the article was chock full of advise along the lines of buying lots of storage tubs and a label maker. 

I have noticed a gentle push back against Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. This would be the cleaning method where you hold something in your hands and if it gives you joy you keep it, if not, out it goes. There was a meme going around not too long ago that said "I tried that Japanese cleaning method where you throw out everything that doesn't give you joy. So far all I threw out were the bills and the vegetables." Then an artistic friend of mine put up a post ranting about how she liked having all her art supplies around her, and her other stuff, and poor old Marie could buzz off (paraphrase of post). She got slightly under a zillion likes and a truly mad amount of comments on this. It struck a nerve.

Artsy-fartsy types tend to collect things. We all seem to have packrat tendencies. Although some family members may disagree, it usually doesn't amount to full blown hoarding. Just hoarding of certain things.

A few years ago, during the financial crash, I was doing some serious analysis of what we owned, why it was there and pondering how much it had cost us vs. how much it actually got used. This included the studio. The top layers of the onion were pretty easy to peel off and throw away, but then when I got into the heart of the matter it became more and more difficult to really slice into the issue. I started by simply going into each part of my studio, fabric cabinet, beading table, under the sewing tables, and on down the list. I really took a hard look at things and thought deeply about whether I would really pursue the projects for which the items were purchased. I thought about my freshly written artist statement-did this item pertain to who I said I was? With that in mind, was it practical to think this item would ever get used? If not, I thought about who might use it or enjoy having it. For instance, a mixed media artist had just joined the artist cooperative and was thrilled to receive all sorts of acrylic mediums that I had purchased that were now sitting there turning hard. She said she had a great rainy afternoon sorting through the box and figuring out how to work this new treasure trove into her work. This method of purging does make it easier to get rid of stuff, but I did finally decide that since I enjoy shopping at thrift stores it was perfectly ok to give some total stranger the gift of finding my treasures at a great price. Into the donation bag with it.

As part of this, I actually tried to get rid of all the plastic tubs or as many as possible. For starters, when things are hidden from view they are less likely to get used. It was astounding how many projects I came across, that I would have finished-if I had remembered they were lurking around to begin with. The other problem with plastic tubs is that when they get old, they seem to get weirdly sticky or get brittle and crack. If their molecular structure changes that much-are they off-gassing toxic fumes too? I decided that there were plenty of other ways to store things that were a lot prettier anyway. My studio, by the way, would never be described as beautiful or lovely, it is a practical space meant to get things done. The softer touches of baskets and old suitcases I already owned helped warm the place up a bit. My husband appreciated the tubs for hauling stuff around in the garden.

I think what turned this into a creative process was seeing all this stuff laid out together. I did think about the objects or supplies in different way than I may have when they were procured. It encouraged me to put things together in ways I had not thought of before. As it turned out, this was such a worthwhile activity that now I do it every winter when the shows are over for the year. It also provides a reminder when I am out "procuring" to think twice before buying. It helped me to actually use the stuff instead of being buried by it. The other interesting thing is that after 4 years of this, I haven't pined away for any of the things I gave away. No regrets.

Then again, there is something so intriguing about multiples.

What is a girl to do with over a hundred gray one inch buttons?