Raven and Sparrow

Details, details

One of the details I have been working on for Lynne is napkins and napkin rings. I have undercloths in two different colors...the light green and the navy blue, and I originally thought I'd just provide napkins to match. When the accent cloths began to take shape those two colors weren't quite lively enough for summer and fall, so I added napkins in darker green and rust for those seasons. Getting these things square was a challenge, not to mention my perennial trouble with mitered corners, but now I have made so many that I am starting to figure it out. 

All along I had been wondering about napkin rings. I hardly ever use them because I change my tables so often and never allow the time to make or buy them. I just rummage in my ribbon box and hope for something suitable. For these settings though there is as much lead time as I want to take and it seems a little unfinished and slap-dash not to attend to this design point. I stuck with ribbon, but made actual bands with snaps and decorated them with buttons. The grosgrain ribbon makes a good base for this and comes in many colors, although not enough when you really get into the nitty gritty of matching. Only the autumn ones had to be made from linen scraps because the ribbon was close without being close enough, if you know what I mean. I used buttons to pull more colors in and add that dimensionality that beads and buttons provide. You could really get into this if you liked beading, and the ribbon can be embroidered as well, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so I just did a little. I hope they will work as I imagine they will.   

Winter is coming

Making table linens is great, but I'm glad I'm not restricted to my own efforts every time. For Lynne's table for winter I will use a woolen scarf from Asian Eye. I have had it in my closet for a while and thought of it when I was looking for dark blue things. The colors, design and fiber go well with Lynne dishes and give them a wintery feel different from the stuff I am making for the other seasons. I have used wool on the table many times and have found it to be as washable as other fibers, with a little care. This scarf is reversable; I am planning to use the dark side (Luke, I am your father...) but could change my mind at the last minute. I like the uneven edge and the concentric circles remind me of winter winds. If Lynne doesn't like it on the table she can wear it.

Autumn angst

This tablecloth has been a bear. I have undone it, lost sleep over it, experimented with it and finally finished it. I think I just had to say "Enough!", although I have not achieved the level to which I aspired. When I added the borders the first time I thought they were too much....that the edges drew the eye more than the leaves. I thought more darks in the embroidery would balance the edges. When I tried to add darkness by embroidering both sides of the branches, it immediately calcified the lines and the design lost its airiness. I added navy blue shadows to the leaves, but after a stitching a couple a voice inside me roared "No!" so I stopped. Then I decided to make the navy border more narrow, wondering how I was going to control this finer line when I couldn't make neat edges at twice the size. I ended up attaching freezer paper to everything and sewing it all together with the paper in place. It seemed for a while that it would work (smug rejoicing), but after soaking the paper off, the seams were no straighter than the originals. I did remove the "air" around the edge of the embroidered leaves and bring the blue borders right up against them, which focuses attention where it needs to be. Overall, the colors and design are pretty much what I envisioned at the beginning, so this is not a failure, but I want my finish work to enhance, not compromise my designs. For now, though, I'm done.

Seasonality

Its funny how people are most conscious of the turn of the seasons in autumn. There have been some very eloquent posts on the subject lately, especially from Jude and Peter Hopper. I have been thinking about the seasons a lot myself as part of my mental housecleaning. I chose to design place settings for each of the four seasons because it seemed intuitively right, but recently I've been asking myself to explain more fully...to me.

What makes the seasons so captivating? Why do they seem deeper and more elemental than other themes? I think the seasonal round helps us deal with the passage of time. Like night and day and the phases of the moon, the seasons are facets of our life on this planet....completely reliable, yet ever changing. The longer cycle of the year allows us to experience the shifts of the earth's orbit slowly and more consciously as we move through spring, summer, autumn and winter. Like little silver fish the days flicker past and any one season may not conform to our expectations; we may have a chilly spring, or a mild winter. However, the progression never alters, and in this madly spinning world that is something to which we can cling, and that we (all earthly organisms through all time) have in common. As frightened animals trying to figure out who we are and what we are doing here, the seasons offer powerful evidence of underlying order and that consoles us. Even as they sweep us along in their endless metamorphosis, they form a pattern we can recognize and that allows us to relax and appreciate the beauty of change instead of struggling always in fear. By watching and anticipating the annual growth and decay of the natural world the beauty of mortality is revealed to us, and that is quite a gift. No wonder we love the seasons so much. They show us that we belong to the whole and allow us to see through the swirling clouds of change to the still center that anchors everything. Nothing could be more profound or more reassuring to our hearts.

Creeping pomegranate

Although I am regularly excited and inspired by what I see on my favorite blogs, I'm not usually too quick to follow because I've always got lots of work for my own projects. This week though, Jude's pomegranate dye goaded me into immediate action. She had a pot of pomegranate skins simmering on her woodstove and draped cotton scraps over the edge, letting the dye wick up into the cloth. I just loved the uneven edges that resulted, and was curious about how the fabrics I routinely use (linen and silk/linen blend) would work. I happened to have some damp mordanted scraps of my fabrics resisting mold in my refrigerator so I, for once, could just play around. I made a small but potent dye liquor bath with pomegranate extract because that is what I had on hand. There is a bucket of metal straps rusting in the yard from the concrete work that is in progress, so I grabbed a couple, wrapped the cloth pieces around them and stood them in the shallow dyepot. For further experimentation I hung a dry, unmordanted strip of off-white linen and one of cotton sateen over the kettle edge, likewise allowing one end to drag into the dye. I took the temperature up to 190 degrees F and then just let the pot simmer all day and stand all night. Today I took everything out, washed and dried them and voila! almost instant gratification. Although it wasn't apparent while they were in the bath, the damp, mordanted pieces wicked really well and developed exciting, watery marks made more complex by the interplay of dye tannins with the oxidized metal from the straps. The molecules in natural dyes are large and usually don't form the kind of interesting, washy effects that chemical dyes can offer, but this wicking process makes a lovely edge. The dry cotton gave a pale, but even gradation, with no particular markings, and the dry linen had a clear high water mark, but otherwise not much interest. So....I learned that my fabrics work, damp mordant helps, and the metal straps are good. Now, how can I incorporate this into a design?

  

Return of the bete noir

I am so close. After all the dyeing, painting and embroidery, the autumn cloth for Lynne...the last one... is almost done. I always planned for a an inset border of navy blue to match the undercloth, with an outer border of something....the something finally resolving itself as more of the gray blue background color. I had to dye more linen and used the same dye formula, but fabric from a different company. It took the dye more strongly and less evenly than I was expecting so I didn't get a match, but I thought it would be okay. Now I am struggling to sew all of these strips together (straight please!) and produce nice looking mitred corners. I always, always have trouble with this. Why can't I sew lines without wibble wobbles? It isn't as though I'm being sloppy with measuring or marking. Deep sigh.

Now that I have put the borders on and stepped back, I'm thinking they may be too much. The outer gray will have to stay, but the navy blue is too thick.... maybe even unnecessary. I will increase the gray blue embroidery on the branches to bring more dark into the main panel. Since I have to take everything apart anyway, why not? I'm not as close as I thought.