Raven and Sparrow

Cautiously optimistic

I got the waxing done on the viney checkerboard cloth and did one quick dip in indigo. The greens of the checks and the greens of the leaves are a little different, but not quite different enough, so I must wax the leaves to keep them the same color and then dip again to get a darker background on the checks. I think it is okay so far.

When I put the wax on the leaves, they turned a darker moss color which gives me an idea of how this cloth would look with dark leaves on light instead of light on dark. On this one I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that the next indigo dip will result in just the right value change.

The runners are too light, but I think both still have a good possiblity of working out. There won't be any more indigo for this one. When it gets washed we'll see what we've got and what needs to be done. I put the other one in an immersion pot of quercitron and got a strong clear yellow, but I didn't get a picture. The saga continues.

Getting clean for company

The other day Mike and I revived a chronic argument about how much housecleaning is required when we entertain. His point is that frequent, even spontaneous socializing is prevented by the excessive (he thinks) amount of work needed to make the house neat enough for company. "Why does everything have to be so clean?" he says. "Isn't it more important to be together than to be neat? Who are we trying to impress?"

My standard retort is that his "clean" and mine are different animals. What he considers excessive cleanliness is my idea of a lick and a promise. I also say that an invitation to our friends is like a gift, and the more trouble we take, the nicer the gift we are offering.

We have never resolved this little difference. He is always in favor of more company, and while I also love company, have never learned to be comfortable with entertaining in chaos. I do sympathize with his position though. It would be so much nicer to receive our friends without being self-conscious about appearances. It's not about "impressing" people....in fact I think that is a sure-fire way to lessen the fun of any occasion...but there is a level of order that I don't like to be seen to fall below. It does have to do with other people's perceptions and some of that, I'm sure, is the residue of "look at me, I'm a good girl" that I have tried so hard to shed over the course of my life. But beyond the trailing chains of shoulds and ought-tos, I crave the calmness of a clean, beautiful environment. At heart, it is the truest way to welcome my friends. Their experience of my house as a pleasant, inviting setting makes the interactions that take place there more satisfying to everyone, I think.....or maybe its only me.

The real issue is that we are both messy people (he's worse, but I'm bad) who don't maintain our house very well on a daily basis.It is always an uphill climb to get the house back to a guest-appropriate level of neatness, which is how I would like it to be all the time, but don't have the good habits or energy to keep that way.

So we go see-sawing back and forth between clean and messy - welcoming and embarrassed - with no finish in sight. I am always carrying my ideal home around in my heart. It looks very much like my actual home, but it's neat and serene, and my friends can come in any time. There are always tea and cookies....and sometimes margaritas.

Kantha cloth

I have mentioned Asian Eye before....they are wholesalers of beautiful scarves and shawls imported from India. It is fun and interesting that a business like this can operate in our small town. Our print shop does some of their work. Recently they gave me an embroidered silk cloth decorated with the kantha style running stitch, and this weekend I set a table with it. It is intensely colored and a little rough, so I thought casual things would be best with it. I have orange geraniums in a purplish pottery vase, and I got out my everyday dishes because they are in coordinating colors and very simple. The little bouquet wasn't enough, of course, so I added ivy in silver vases. The shiny metal looked unexpectedly pretty and so I also added the silver candlesticks we received as wedding presents. I even polished them. I started to enjoy the contrast between the casual things and the fancy ones so I got out the sterling flatware with the pearl handled knives. I also found some blue sanded glass pebbles I bought years ago and never quite found a use for and scattered them under the plants. The only candles I had were chunky square ones, but they were good...better than round ones I think. I felt pleased with the overall result, but had a lot of trouble photographing it. I need to get better at photography, but I also dropped my camera recently and I'm afraid something has broken. This poor camera is the one Mike dropped at the beach, so it goes from one calamity to another. You might need to click on the last picture to see the whole table. I'm never sure.

The dinner was fresh grilled salmon with spinach salad and brown butter rice... a good summer meal eaten in lovely company. Happy July!

More yellow

Since I mixed so much quercitron I have been wondering what else to put it on. I decided to make another runner with Lois's circle in a different color. I silk-screened the round pattern with Presist and then painted around it with slightly thickened quercitron. After three coats I mixed a little more weld and painted the inside of the circles as best I could without getting the silk screened pattern too wet, since it is water soluable. I dripped a little cochineal in the very center and let it spread.
As with the squares and vines tablecloth, a lot of the interest in this cloth will be the different greens that the two yellows will make when they go into indigo. The Presist will not last very in the indigo bath, so the runner will only get one very quick dip. I hope it will be enough.

Painting leaves and squares

After a few weeks of entertaining and other activities, I have finally returned to my tablecloth. I finished the waxing a while ago and re-mordanted in preparation for painting with dyes. This weekend the cloth was in just the right dampened state to begin. I have been thinking that the dark squares (now the unwaxed ones) might be too dull without some patterning. I pawed through my stencils and stamps and found a purchased rubber stamp with an abstract wavey pattern in a small square. I mixed some tannin with gum tragacanth thickening and stamped all the empty squares, masking off the leaf shapes with paper cut-outs so the patterning wouldn't come through on the leaves. The idea is that thickened dyes containing tannins will resist any thinner dye applied later, so the pattern will show through whatever is put on after. I don't usually use tannin; I ordinarily prefer myrobalan, but wasn't sure if I wanted that particular yellow on my cloth.

Once the stamping was done, I mixed a very strong batch of weld and thickened it also with gum trag. Then I painted all the leaves. When weld is mixed it is a gross greeny brown and that is how it goes on the fabric. As it sinks in, it slowly turns a strong yellow with green overtones. Weld is the yellow dye that I have found works best as a paint. Osage orange is the workhorse yellow of immersion dyeing, but it has washed out of everything I have painted with it. Weld just sticks, and with a light dip in indigo it turns chartreuse, which is what I am hoping for.

 

Now, I have been wondering what other yellow to use for the dark squares, looking for a darker, different green than the leaves. As I said, osage orange doesn't work too well and myrobalan is too greyish for the look I want. When I was immersion dyeing calico I used quercitron and got a beautiful, soft clear yellow, but I have never painted with it, and it is not an extract, but shredded bark. I decided to give it a go anyway and simmered 50 grams of bark in 2000 ml of water for an hour to get the color out. I ended up with what seems like gallons of dark brown liquid. When I painted it on the color looked just the same as the wax - tan. I was fidgety and worried, but just had to go ahead and put it on, going carefully around the already painted leaves. When I left the whole thing looked like it had been waxed, but the next morning the same magic had occurred with the quercitron as with the weld, and the unwaxed squares were yellow....a soft and lovely yellow. The one bad thing is the complete disappearance of the stamped pattern. Apparently the tannin wouldn't stand up to the quercitron. Maybe after indigo it will reappear, but for now its gone.

So now, I'm just leaving the dyes to attach themselves as firmly as possible to the cloth until I can start an indigo pot and make some greens.