Raven and Sparrow

Score!

Twice a year our local scarf importer Asian Eye has a clearance sale in their warehouse. All of their beautiful textiles are priced below wholesale, which makes them irresistable. Not all of their pieces are suitable for use on the table, of course, but this time I found several that will be fun to play with. New things are so often the spark for new ideas.

A wonderful surprise

Look what came in the mail! One of Dee Mallon's beautiful houses. I had forgotten to expect it, so it burst upon me most delightfully. I love the way the house moves in and out of its background, its bent, organic shape that reminds me of mushrooms, and the way the celestial orb (sun or moon?) tries to escape the frame. I also love how the rusty washer that serves as a hanger echos that orb. It feels great to touch and having something to touch brings Dee and everyone wafting about in the interwebs closer somehow, which is gratifying.

I was wondering where to put it in our house...we don't have too many small, intimate wall spaces that would do it justice. As I wandered about with it in my hand, my eye fell upon the little wicker rocker from the twenties that belonged to Mike's mom (we have pictures of her as a baby sitting in it) in its corner by the fireplace. I have been thinking that it needed something to liven it up and when I put the collage on it that was the spark. The color, the texture of the wicker and the scale of the scene all clicked for me, and I think they frame the textile in a suitably domestic way. Thank you Dee!

Winter scraps

I've been slipping over to the studio as time permits to move my rainy winter experiments forward. Last weekend I brought up an indigo pot and dipped the stitched cloth packets in, first one end and then the other, for various lengths of time. This first one is the white linen piece I first dipped in pomegranate to see if wicking would work.

This is the little gray scrap I slap dashedly waxed to test the colors on gray.

This is the larger gray piece I waxed even faster to see how a wider piece could be handled.

The greens appeared where the indigo penetrated into the stitched packets. The blue was pretty, but too sweet and lively for the look in my head, so I re-dipped the blue ends of each into a pot of logwood gray. Then I took the wax out and washed everything pretty severely (hot water).

When I finished pressing them, I liked the colors much better, at least for the my current purposes. Look at the difference between the gray ends on the gray cloth and the white. I like both, but I'm pretty shocked at the value variation. The log gray did not wick very well compared to the pomegranate.

So, have these experiments revealed a process that will work? Will the colors look good and wintery with the dishes and undercloth? I pressed the wider cloth into a square roughly proportional to the larger piece I'm planning to make. I like it well enough to move forward on gray cloth. The raindrop/water marks need to be considered more carefully and rendered more graphically. I also think it will need a dark border if the colors come out similarly on the big square. We shall see. Next step: gray cloth into mordant.

 

Tablesetting code red

We had some good news this week...my son Joel is officially engaged to the lively and lovely Becca. Its not exactly a surprise, but feels satisfyingly real now that there is a ring involved. On Sunday we hosted Becca's parents here for dinner. This has been on the schedule for almost a month, with its shadowy (now overt) Big Deal overtones and I have been thinking about the table all that time. I decided to use the spring leaf checkerboard square tablecloth I documented here a while ago; it is cheerful and seasonally appropriate. Because there would be eight people at the table it would need an undercloth and without thinking about it too much I chose the soft green cloth I made last year. I knew white tulips would be available and so...table under control...until Friday morning when I started to get everything together for ironing and placement. Eight people means we have to use the leaf in the table, which makes it too big for the soft green undercloth. For some reason, this detail never registered in all the time I was planning until the leaf went in and the lightning struck. Uh oh. 

I only have three tablecloths big enough for the extended table: an off-white with glossy spots, a dark green and a dark blue. None of them looked good with the checkerboard square. I brought out all of my runners and squares, and lamented again the paucity of springy colored ones. One possibility was the oldest square in my collection. I made it when my waxing skills were so wobbly that I had to use tape to keep my lines straight. Its pattern is therefore rigidly geometric, but its grey-green color might work. Then I remembered the huge length of grey linen I had just bought for Becky's table, plenty long enough for my use now. The linen and the square went together well, in a subdued way, so I hemmed the linen, ironed it, and started gathering stuff to go with it. A little tray with flowers and birds was given to me for Christmas and turned out to have just the right grey-blue-green colors. It also had some brownish yellow on it, so that gave me a contrasting color to work with. I found some ribbon in just the right shade (a miracle) and also appropriated the faded green iron birds that usually sit on the kitchen counter. White tulips still worked best for flowers and green plates and little green leaf dishes echoed the fresh green of their leaves. As the table came together I wondered if I should do place cards, as eight people tend to mill around if it isn't clear where they should sit. I then remembered the cards my sister Erin gave me months ago, waiting in the drawer for the right color scheme to present itself. The time was now, and I was delighted to see that they had birds on them too. Everything came together in a fresh and springlike way, even though the foundation cloth is almost twenty years old.

Becca's parents turned out to be as charming as their daughter and the dinner went very well, marred only by the wailing of the fire alarms when I forgot to put the stove fan on high while browning chicken. We try to impress, but in the end reality wins.

Further experiments

Wishing for less regular markings on my "wide" sample, I placed my rusty metal straps in different places on the cloth and re-wrapped the remordanted gray linen around them. It stood again in a dye bath of mixed pomegranate and myrobalan, holding at 160 degrees for an hour, cooling overnight, re-heated quickly to 180 degrees and cooling overnight again. I wondered if I could induce the strap marks to retain their quirkyness and color diversity and achieve a more random effect. I also wondered if the wax would stand being remordanted and redyed.

Answers: the wax stayed on pretty well. The pattern is still undeniably rectangular, but less stripey than before...more evocative of a forested shore. I like it well enough go on with my plan to make a square cloth instead of a runner.

The next thing is to make an indigo pot and dip my experimental cloths in it. I don't want an even blue influence, so I have done some folding and stitching on each one. My rough and ready shibori will allow the indigo to penetrate some parts and not others. We'll see what kind of patterns I can get.

Tulip time again

Its hard to believe it has been a year since my sisters and I met in the tulip fields, but here we are again. Spring is a month early this year, and we are at the beginning of the bloom instead of at the end like last year, but the color is as glorious as ever. We also lucked out on the weather again. My mom and sisters drove through pouring rain to get here, where the sun shone generously through the brilliant petals.The intensity of the color is thrilling.

We always go to the display gardens where the bulb growers plant over a quarter of a million bulbs every year, and then take a trek out into the fields to soak up the vistas of flowers, mountains and sky. What a grand way to welcome spring!