Raven and Sparrow

Summer shibori

This weekend I used the gathered shibori cloth for the first time. I have made this pattern before, on cotton twill with fiber reactive dyes (the bottom one.) At the time I thought fiber reactive blues were too bright, so I added a lot of black hoping to bring it closer to indigo color. Since the top cloth is actually dyed in indigo, you can see how close I came. Despite its grayish tones, the cotton cloth has been very useful over the years, especially in the winter, so I was anxious to try it again in linen with natural dyes. The new version is bluer and simpler and definitely summery. I combined it with daisies and yellow dishes for a blue, white and yellow color scheme and I think it is effective. The linen fabric is having a hard time giving up the wrinkles that it acquired from being so tightly gathered. I ironed the cloth carefully, put it on the table, set it and then had to do it all over because it looked so dishevelled. It never pressed out to my satisfaction, but I'm hoping more washing will relax the fibers in the future. 

Let us praise lettuce

A couple of days ago my friend Julianne offered some extra lettuces from her farm out in the Skagit Valley. There were five different kinds, each one bursting with life and captivating in their variations. I only took three, there being a limit to the amount of salad Mike and I can eat, but I must admit I respond to them more like flowers than food and had an urge to gather them all into my arms. Individually, their intact roots made perfect holders like a bridal bouquets, and elicited an impromptu rendering of "Going to the Chapel" amongst those of us present. I have been wondering how to present one or more on the table as centerpieces. The timing of finding, preserving and presenting them would be the problem, but how unusual and lovely they would be. Beauty shines out of everything, but not always as vividly as this.

Fine paper from way back

I've been working pretty hard but I'm not sure where my work is going. It has seemed necessary to review my ideas and patterns so I have been making 12" x 12" paintings of them, grouping them according to seasons. It has been a change to work on paper instead of cloth, but I'm enjoying it. When the idea dawned to render the original simple geometric patterns with paint I rooted through my old art supplies in search of paper on which to begin. I found two sheets of  22" x 30" inch 140 lb. Arches hot press natural water color paper that must be at least twenty years old. They were lurking in my old paper portfolio and surprisingly, they were in perfect condition. Nice watercolor paper is as sensually pleasant to handle and work with as fine fabric. I especially love the watermarks. The infinity sign is encouraging, but cryptic. Those found sheets were enough to do the first set of four paintings, but when I decided to go on I needed more. I adjourned to my local art supply store (these are getting much more scarce) and discovered that the famous consistency of Arches paper persists to this day. They are still making the paper in the same sizes with the same watermark. The difference is the price of course. They now list for $10.00 each. Whew. The store was having a sale, fortunately. I've been transferring the patterns onto the paper and using Sennelier watercolors to color them, thus my renderings have distinctly French underpinnings. Its satisfying to play with these fine materials, although my expertise in watercolor is limited. Hopefully when I'm finished, I'll understand something deeper about what I'm doing.

The garden on Memory Lane

Lately my thoughts have been looping back into the past. Someone requested a photo which I know I have, but my poor snapshot organization means I have had to go through boxes and boxes of pictures to find it. I have been looking at our old houses, our friends and family events, our vacations, and the boys as they age from infants to young adults. So many memories have been revisited, producing the inevitable melancholia that evidence of the passage of time evokes. Although, seeing the big picture, so to speak, also reminds me of how fortunate I am. 

As I thumbed through the photos, I came across just a few of the garden I made behind our old house and found myself setting them aside. When we bought the house in the suburbs east of Seattle, it's acre lot had just been carved out of second growth forest. We were the second owners, but the first ones had done only minimal landscaping and the blackberries were already trying to take over. All of the topsoil had pretty much been removed, and the only sunny space was along the back of the house where a fairly steep little hill delivered a flood to the foundation every time it rained. I wasn't a very experienced gardener and was quite overwhelmed by the size of the site and its problems. After floundering around for a while, I realized that I only wanted to intensively garden a small part of the space that I had. My neighbors, the phenomenal gardeners, adroitly manage big sweeping garden beds all around their properties, but that was too much for me. We left most of the standing woods just like they were and sowed grass where the bulldozers had scraped. Using the sun as our guide and the need to handle the run-off as our prod, Mike and I built a sunken garden along the back by putting in a wall that paralleled the house. The wall took the slope out of what became the lawn, so less water ran down to the house, and the bottom of the new garden had big drainage tiles underneath a gravel path to take away any accumulated run-off. Mike built flower boxes up against the house so there were tiers of planting space and you could stand up on the (new) deck and look down into a sea of flowers. The height of the wall enabled us to add a full twelve inches of good soil to make the garden, which was a real luxury in that area of clay hardpan. I loved being able to jump on my shovel and feel it slide smoothly and completely into the rich composty soil I mixed myself. The plants liked it too. Not everything grew well, and there were definitely cycles of success and failure, but over the sixteen years that we lived there, my garden gave me so much satisfaction and pleasure. When we moved I hardly missed the house at all, although it was a nice one, but I still dream about the garden.