Raven and Sparrow

Goodbye to calico

One of the things that has disappeared this last year is my calico overdye project. I was taking high quality quilting cotton and overdyeing it with natural dyes. I thought quilters would be interested in buying it and learning to make it themselves. I packaged fat quarters of four different prints overdyed with the same color together. The original color and pattern of the calico influenced the outcome, but overdyeing made very different prints come together cohesively, and gave them the beauty of the natural dyes. I thought they would be very useful in quilting, and offer something different as well. Well. My first obstacle was the water here on the rock. We have a well, and the water is heavy with magnesium and iron. As I have mentioned, natural dyes are very sensitive to metals, and iron is especially dulling. Town water here comes from a massive river, and is beautifully clear, but I had to carry it in 2 1/2 gallon carriers and when you are dyeing yards of fabric that gets to be very hard work in a hurry. I talked it up at my local quilting guild and gave one class to its members, but it was clear that the response wouldn't be overwhelming. What was overwhelming was the effort of working full-time and trying to do this kind of heavy production dyeing when it wasn't what I really cared about in the first place. It took me a while to winnow this realization out of the larger cloud of depression that has been hanging over me, but when I did, I decided to let it go. It hurt, because I had already put a lot into it. I sold all of the remaining bolts of undyed fabric on Craig's List, and gave my overflowing overdyes to my sister-in-law. She is an avid quilter who belongs to a local group that makes quilts for people undergoing chemotherapy at the hospital. They make  beautiful small lap quilts by the dozens and give them all away. All my extra cloth, both pretty and ghastly (some of my early efforts were pretty bad) disappeared into their stash and that was that.

   This week Lynne, (my sister-in-law) dropped off a package. One of the quilters in her group (I don't know who, I'll have to find out) used my cloth to make this simple, but charming quilt and she wanted me to see it before it is given away. It was so thoughtful of her, and sort of a bittersweet experience to see my fabric come together so well.

  It reminded me that I have another quilt made by a highly accomplished artist named Patti Dever. She took some of my overdyes when I was just beginning and made a lovely little quilt which she showed with her other amazing work as the featured quilter in the local quilt show. After the show was over, she gave the quilt to me.  I wish I had a better picture of it, but when I decided to write this post I had to rush home and photograph it in the last rays of the setting sun. I'll try again when the weekend comes.

  So my ill-starred calico venture has ended, but not without some positive results. I am back at work on table linens now, trying to avoid all expectations and hopes, just making what I can. I re-mordanted my bird runners and painted them again, trying for a deeper color. I put two more of that pattern, plus some other old stuff into indigo this weekend and will show it all  when it has been rinsed out. 

Island Summer

This was such a wonderful summer here in the San Juan Islands. Day after day of clear sunshine and warm temperatures. After a freezing winter and a chilly spring the change was very welcome. As often happens, summer continued through September and into October, although the shortening days were an unmistakeable warning of approaching autumn. This week the switch was thrown and now it is definately fall. On Saturday we had a record rainfall. Over an inch in one day...it was pouring! You can tell by the brown grass that it was needed though. This little buck comes into the yard every day. We thought it was for the apples that fall off the old tree in front of the house, but it turns out that he prefers the bird seed in the feeder.  

Not prepared

It's been so long since I have done any dyeing that I found myself bumbling around like bee in a bottle today as I plunged back into color. I found two new fabrics (linen/silk combo at Thai Fabrics, and linen/rayon combo at Dharma Trading) that I just had to try. The linen silk feels kind of thin and shiny...more like silk than linen although it is mostly linen, and the linen rayon feels like linen, but softer. I wanted mostly linen blends because I am more experienced with cellulose than protein fibers and have more of the proper mordants etc. Pure linen is good, but often expensive. My old source for linen dried up and in my search for a replacement I came upon these two possibilities. I decided upon runners (15" X 70") rather than squares and designed a very simple bird pattern for each end, which I waxed on. 

 The linen rayon was much easier to wax than the linen silk. I did two of each and put them into mordant. Today finally I had time to deal with them, but as I set up to add color to these long, skinny things it felt like I had never done it before. All my logistics had to be re-thought, and I kept forgetting details, like soaking my brush before beginning, and what color I actually wanted to apply. I finally chose a combination of osage orange (yellow), madder (browny red) and cochineal (sharp pink) because I could reach them easily and they dissolve quickly. Actually, madder doesn't dissolve easily, as I remembered by doing, but I kept ploughing ahead. I just eyeballed everything, ignoring all the best practices stuff I spent so long learning and of course ran out of dye half way through. It was a train wreck as far as reproduceable results are concerned, but I just wanted to see some color on these two fabrics and get something.....anything going again. So stay tuned.