Raven and Sparrow

The wedding

For a year now we have been working towards Joel and Becca's wedding, which was held last Thursday at the Roche Harbor Resort out in the San Juan Islands. One hundred and six people traveled by plane, car, float plane and ferry to get there. It wasn't cheap or easy, but the separation of the island location from everyone's daily lives heightened the wedding spirit.

The intensity of the preparations has been increasing steadily and the last month has truly been very busy. It didn't help that Mike developed acute pancreatitis and had to spend two days in the hospital the week before the wedding. We were afraid he wouldn't be able to fully participate, or maybe even attend, but the doctors pulled him together and he was feeling quite well.... enough to resent all the admonitions to please take it easy. I am not too bad at managing my own time, but I am not a good at delegating or asking other people for help. Thankfully my family didn't wait for me to ask and pitched in with much appreciated enthusiasm. I couldn't have done my part without them.

The ceremony itself was really powerful. Never having attended a Jewish wedding before, I found the rites to be anchored in tradition, but still fresh, meaningful and inclusive. There were a couple of glitches...the microphone had to be abandoned after some horrendous shrieks, and a bug (a big one) flew into the kiddish cup just before the bride took a sip of wine...but the imperfections just grounded the ceremony in the absurdity of life and added to the buoyancy of the occasion. The most moving part for me was the love and tenderness in my son's eyes for his bride. This is what a mother most hopes her children will find...true connection and a partner for life. I have no reservations about these two being right for each other.

We are so grateful for all of the family and friends who went out of their way to come celebrate with us. The gathering created a palpable atmosphere of joy that we all will remember for the rest of our lives.  

  

Chuppah done

The wedding is next Thursday and the chuppah is done. It has turned out to be very hard to photograph, but I am reasonably happy with it. We'll see how it works on the day. After outlining the yellow leaves with chartreuse I needed to add more green so I went around each fiddlehead a couple times with a sharp yellow green and then a variegated yellow-to-green which makes them look a little glittery. Six inch white borders surround the whole thing, with buttonholes in the corners to slip onto the frame. Here is the other side:

It is backed with harem cloth and has the white-on-white feeling I originally envisioned, but I like the more colorful (barely) front better, I think. I have ironed it once and tomorrow I will do it again and then wind it onto some pvc pipe for the trip to Roche Harbor. Here comes the big day!

Addendum:

The day before we packed up and headed to Roche Harbor we took the chuppah outside and stood it on its poles to see if it actually worked. It did.

Chuppah progress report

I've been embroidering the chuppah every day and have finished the white outlines of the basic pattern. This helps bring life back into its post-wax blandness, but it isn't enough. The original idea was to keep the chuppah quiet, even monochromatic in color, but from the first (almost) it has been hinting to me that it needs more. Specifically, I have envisioned spring green. Accordingly I have just begun to outline the background fronds (silk screened in tannin and kind of yellowish) with two strands of chartreuse floss as a lower profile variation from the whites, which are #3 and #5 perle cotton. It is very subtle but it introduces a greenish haze without competing with the main pattern, I hope. 

As I hold this cloth in my lap, stitching and stitching, I keep thinking it needs more green and more darks. I have thought of running words in a darker green up the fiddlehead shapes and adding contrast, but when I hold it up to the light more contrast doesn't seem so critical. The white shapes jump out and the pattern is clear.

 

The wedding will be outside (please, please, no rain!) so I think this is how it will be seen on that day. I makes me hesitate to add green, or any stitching that will block the white parts, but the piece needs to work with the light and without it.  I will continue to outline the yellow fronds and listen for suggestions from the cloth. At some point, time alone will shut me down.

 
 

Pulling strings

Another wedding project I have in hand is the runners for the reception dinner. When Becca chose long banquet-style tables covered with standard white tablecloths we decided to add runners for color, texture and general interest. I found some lavender open-weave linen that coordinates well with the flowers and other elements and have been working to produce enough runners to cover the projected table set-up. The linen is 56" wide so I can get three 15" runners out of that width. That means that I work in sets of three. The beauty of the open weave is that it makes it easy to measure and mark the cloth by pulling threads. (Thanks to Liz for the suggestion.) I pull a warp (lengthwise) thread along the selvage and then measure in 1 1/2", pull that thread, measure 15", pull that thread, measure another 1 1/2" and so on. When all three runners are thus thread-marked with seam allowances and cutting lines I cut them apart and fold on the 1 1/2" marks. That makes the hem allowance. It eliminates all pencil marking and insures that the grain is straight. Also, getting them exactly 15" wide is easier because I am measuring from thread to thread. Consistent width is important because they will be placed end to end in some places. 

Another innovation (for me) is the use of my walking foot to machine sew these long (8', 10' and 12') pieces. On the first one, in spite of careful pressing and pinning, I found the fabric bunching enough to make little pleats in my hem allowance. Grr. Then I remembered the walking foot I bought for my elderly Bernina almost twenty years ago when I was trying to make quilts.
It took a while to find it and get it attached correctly, but now I think I will never take it off. No more bunching!!!

This is pretty elementary sewing, but I have complained in the past about my trouble keeping my edges neat and my sewing straight. I am hoping this project will sharpen my skills 

Basting Bee

This weekend was my birthday, and Mike's too, so Brendan and his girlfriend Michele, and Joel and his fiancee Becca came to visit. It was great as always to have them here. On Saturday I pressed Michele and Becca (the bride-to-be wearing the red jacket) into service basting the chuppah cover onto a harem cloth backing. It was delightful to have their help, which made a tedious process go much faster and more pleasantly than it would have otherwise. It reminded me of stories about women gathering to baste and quilt and talk, so I felt connected both in the present and through the generations. Thank you Michele and Becca! (Pictures by Brendan sorry, Joel.)

Adding the backing cloth is new for me. I am hoping it will stabilize the shape of the cloth and will help keep the coming embroidery from puckering. This every-four-inch removable stitching seemed necessary to keep the two large lengths of fabric from sliding about. I thumbtacked them both to the bare plywood surface of my table and found that it was easy to rock the needle and make a basting stitch, while keeping them in place. It was not easy to do Jude's disappearing glue stitch this way. This preliminary baste will allow me to do the invisible glue stitch in my lap with both hands if I want to, but I am worried about time. I expected to be on the embroidery by now and I have a lot to do. I am also worried about the expanses of cloth that may not have any stitching in the end, after this basting is removed. So...will there be glue stitching or not?

 

Kinda pink

After two days of work...one to dye and one to de-wax, wash, and press, the chuppah cover is ready for the next step. What a tense process! Taking all of my test pieces into account, I just sat for a while and let a dye formula work its way to the surface of my mind. I decided to mix .5% walnut (using the weight of the fabric as the base), .25% tannin, and .025% logwood gray. This was based on my perception that walnut (at the light values I was looking for) was red, tannin was yellow and log gray was...purplish. Combining those should give me a neutral that was in the middle, I hoped. When I got out my big kettle and made the dyebath for the full-sized piece, intuition told me that the logwood gray was too much, and I only added half of the solution that I had mixed. Before just leaping in, I skimmed a half gallon and dyed a scrap of linen to see if I was in the ballpark. It took quite a while for the dyes to bite, and I was constantly trying to judge whether the value was right, but finally the scrap looked pretty good, so I made the leap, fired up the big pot and put the fabric I have been working on for a month into the color. I had used up the linen test pieces that I made from the same length of cloth as the main piece. The sample I was using as a guide came from a piece of white linen that has been sitting in my refrigerator for quite a while, mordanted with the same alum acetate, but from a wholly different time and company. There was no guarantee that the two would come out the same, but at least I knew I was close. I stood over the kettle and stirred constantly for an hour and a half, when finally the color bit and appeared to match the wet sample scrap. I let the pot get hotter than perhaps was best, so at the end, at about 180 degrees F, the surface of the pot was covered with clumps of wax that were starting to melt off.

I rinsed off the crumbly bits, stretched out the mangled looking cloth, let it dry and took the first picture yesterday. It looked pink. The fronds that were screened with tannin came through much better than I expected; in fact they were more vivid than the waxed parts, which now looked dirty and unappetizing. I was afraid too much wax had come out in the hot dye-pot and that all the main design elements would now be brown. The whole thing looked sad, but I could only proceed.

Today I boiled the cloth and dunked it in a solution of sodium silicate, or water glass. This is messy and horrible...absolutely my least favorite part. When the wax was gone I was relieved to see that the white base color it had been protecting from the dye mostly came through, with the broken marks that wax always imparts. The main color looks darker and browner today, but even after pressing it is not entirely dry, so it will probably be lighter (and pinker) tomorrow.

Now the spirals and forward fronds look white and the tannin-screened fronds look yellow. I am surprised about that but I did make the tannin pretty strong because the last time I tried using it, it disappeared. Not the problem this time. The whole thing looks dull and insipid at this stage, which I did expect. It is tentatively successful, although I'm not sure I like the color, and I'm still not sure the value is right. However, the thing is now what it is and good enough to take forward. The various marks do show, there is a layered effect and I still like the design. My mind is now leaping ahead into thread weights and colors, but first I will try to attach it to a harem cloth backing with Jude HIll's glue stitch. That will take at least a couple of days I think. Onward.

Screening tannin

My dye trials for the chuppah may not have been as informative as I had hoped, but they did reveal that oak gall tannin is the best dye to use for the resist design. This is an element of dyeing with natural dye extracts that is unique to them, as far as I know. Dyes that come from trees often have a lot of tannin in them, and if you thicken those particular dyes with gum tragacanth (natural dyes don't work with sodium alginate like chemical dyes) and paint or screen a design, then over-paint or immersion dye, the tannin pattern will remain (see yesterday's dye trials). I use this method very often to introduce a sub-pattern into my pieces. It makes them more layered and interesting, I hope. This may not actually work on this cloth, but I spent all day screening background frond motifs as shown. The cloth is sitting overnight under plastic to keep it damp and allow the tannin to penetrate thoroughly, so tomorrow it will be ready to dye. Nervous!!  

The trials of testing

I'm wondering if there is a short circuit in my brain that makes precision impossible. No matter how I struggle, my sewing is never straight, and no matter how careful I am about measuring and labeling my dye trials always dissolve into a mess. To find the best neutral background for the chuppah cover I am making for my son's wedding, I carefully set aside a half yard of the linen I am using and processed it just exactly like the main piece, then cut it into smaller chunks. I silkscreened the trial pieces with leaf shapes using a selection of thickened tannin-based dyes, to wit: tannin (made from oak galls), myrobalan, a tannin/myrobalan mix, quebracho yellow, pomegranate, walnut and walnut/tannin. Finally I introduced various browny/beigey dyes over the top, first by painting and then by immersion. Argh! Everything turned out peachy, yellowy, and/or way too dark. I took all of the lighter colors and immersed part of them into an iron post bath to see what happened. Grays happened. Nice grays, but not what I had in mind.

The biggest surprise was walnut. The only other walnut dyeing I have done is with actual black walnuts taken from the most impressive and gorgeous tree out on Fir Island, the delta of the Skagit River. At the turn of the twentieth century a lot of farmers settled on this flat, hyper-fertile triangle and planted various shade, fruit and nut trees that they brought from their homes in the east. Now some of those trees rooted in river sediment ten feet deep (with no rocks!) and watered without stint have grown into giants of their kind, and the black walnut is the king...truly magnificent in size and graceful in shape. When I was teaching natural dyeing to the local weaving guild, the class hostess was the neighbor of the walnut tree owner and arranged for us to have as many of its just dropped walnut pods as we could carry away. We dyed a selection of yarns and I did one length of linen in the walnut liquor we extracted from those pods. All, without variation, dyed a grayish brown reminiscent of monks' robes. My access to the King of Walnuts disappeared when my friend moved away, but I assumed that the extract I got from earthues would give the same color. As it turns out, it does, but only in the stronger values. The lighter I tried to make it, the more red it appeared. In the photo, the three pieces on the bottom right are all walnut. Even as a tint the color is lively, but reddish, and still too dark in the sample above. I added some logwood gray to the one on the far right and got a color so hideous I had to avert my eyes, but as it aged it got softer, grayer and more like the walnut color I was expecting. Now I have used up all of my practice fabric and I still don't know for sure what to do. All this work and I will still be dyeing by the seat of my pants.

 

Waxing on

The main pattern on the chuppah cover has been waxed. Now what? It can be just what it is....that is, dyed a beigey off white with the pattern in white (the brown wax will hold the dye off the areas where it appears) or I can attempt to add another layer of image with tannin based dyes. The very low contrast aim of this cloth makes the tannin step problematic. It could just be a waste of time, because tannin resists are quite pale and may not show against the dyed background. However, if they do work they will add another dimension to the design. If I don't do it now, it won't happen at all. I have put the cloth (and some test pieces) back into mordant and I will try out some possibilities after it has had time to soak in.

Waxing chuppah

Well. This is the fourth day of waxing on the chuppah cover. Going fairly fast for such a big piece, it is like coloring with a runny crayon. I usually outline with the finest number 1 tjanting tool, which is more controllable and then fill with a larger one. The bigger number three size is a wilder tool and a few stray dots have occurred. I only use the copper-headed tjantings from Dharma Trading. The cheaper brass-headed one is not worth anything. (In my opinion.) Sometime I'd like to work with an electric tjanting. I'm thinking about what dyes I will want to try and wondering if I should re-mordant. Onward.