Raven and Sparrow

Reviewing failures

I have been accused of laziness all my life, first by my mother who had an insatiable need for help in dealing with six other small children, and then later by myself as I internalized high energy and accomplishment as goals of a worthy life. Unfortunately my energy levels have always been low to middling and my health issues lately have made the wide gap between intention and actual accomplishment very clear. Trying to keep up with the never-ending list of "shoulds" feels exhausting and, in the end, not possible. I feel like I have been running on a treadmill designed for some other more sparkling person which dooms me always to fall behind. Having had enough therapy to realize the futility of this makes me burrow more deeply into what I find important and consider anew the pursuits that have given me purpose and joy. That always leads back to textiles and tablecloths and the power of gathering, which still moves me deeply. Even in the midst of my greatest lethargy I want to make special places that embrace and enhance the connection between people. I still want to set the table even though the effort seems ever more Herculean.

Just lately a design for a winter tablecloth that I made several years ago but failed to bring to a finish, has been floating into my head. I was trying to come up with four square cloths that telegraphed the seasons in the most simple and essential geometric ways possible. Stripes for summer, polka dots for spring, squares for autumn and triangles for winter, done in appropriate colors to lay the base for any table set in that season. I started with winter because I thought it would be the most satisfying. Laying out the pattern on cotton was hard because keeping straight lines means drawing the pattern strictly on cloth that resists keeping straight, and then taping off every frigging triangle to keep the wayward wax contained in something like a regular pattern.

I went to my usual lengthy effort, waxed the pattern over many hours and several days and then dyed it. It turned out awful....a sort of beigey-blah that can result with natural dyes if you are not careful.

The wax broke so much that I didn't feel like I could just dye again without compromising the pattern. The prospect of re-waxing and re-dying was just too much and I gave up. I stashed it in my failures box and there it has languished, but now it is knocking on the fringes of my brain. Do I have enough oomph to go back and try again? Is the pattern worth the effort? I probably will never make a conscious decision, I will just go down and get it out or I won't. We'll see how insistently it continues knocking.

More Ruth

The stranger who appeared in my driveway in search of Ruth Penington's old house pulled me back to my own first impressions of the house, and to the research I undertook at the time to find out more about it. Some of the comments (thank you, as always!!) made me realize that there was now more available on-line than there had been twenty years ago. Ruth even has an entry on Wikipedia, which certainly wasn't there when I was first looking. Or maybe I am just a crappy researcher. Anyway, I found some pictures of her and her work which I hope you will find interesting.

The stones in this belt came from our beach.

The house that Ruth built

Although our long and obscure driveway keeps casual passers-by away from our door, I wasn't entirely surprised a couple of days ago to find an unknown woman standing on our patio peering down at the old house. It has happened several times in the years that we have lived here because people who are familiar with this place are drawn back by their memories. The woman who built it, Ruth Penington, was an art professor at the University of Washington. She bought the property in 1940 and used it as a summer get-away until she died in the 1990's. Lots of students and family members were invited here and she occasionally rented it to sailors stationed at the nearby navy base. This most recent visitor told me her husband had helped build the "new" wing in the 1970's and had brought her down then to show her the beautiful place he was working on. She also was a student of Ruth's at UW, and of Ramona Solberg, who was a Ruth protege. I never knew Ruth and the number of people who did is becoming fewer and fewer, so I was delighted to meet her. Her presence reminded me of the first time I was here and the powerful pull the house and the setting had for me.

It was a cold day in February when we learned there was a house for sale in this vicinity. It had been empty for about three years and was about to be torn down and replaced by something much more grand, but the owner, who had purchased the property from Ruth's nephew, changed his mind and put it back on the market. The doors were standing open, the roof was clearly not doing its job, and the whole place had an air of abandonment and neglect. It was hard to tell how old it was because the design was so contemporary, but there were tell-tale signs (like the light switches) that said it was much older than it looked (the original cabin was built in 1942). Even in its sad condition, it was charming. The windows, and there were so many! looked out towards the fabulous view of water and mountain, and let in lots of light even in the dead of winter. The rooms were pleasantly proportioned and rambled up and down over the topography of the hillside. One interior staircase was built into the rock of the island and ivy grew up the wall indoors. I loved it and I could tell that whoever had built it had a highly attuned aesthetic sense and had loved it too. Her hand was so strongly evident that I became quite curious about her and began to research her life.

If you are interested in metal-working and jewelry you have probably heard of Ruth Penington because she was very active and influential in those fields in the fifties and sixties. She was the head of the UW art department and a founding member of Northwest Designer Craftsmen, a large organization of local artists. Ramona Solberg was probably more famous as a jeweler, but she was taught by Ruth and was her friend. I called Ramona, who was then still alive, and another friend who was important in local art circles, Lamar Harrington, and asked them about Ruth and they each kindly spoke to me for quite a while. They both said that the other was really closest to Ruth, from which I gleaned that Ruth was not deeply intimate with anyone. I heard from more than one person (not Ramona or Lamar) that she was terrifying and my most recent visitor echoed that, saying that as a teacher Ruth was very scary. Philip McCracken, the noted sculptor, said she failed him in the one class he took from her. There were some articles in the Seattle Times about her, including one with a photo of her working in the studio of our house (the windows are unmistakable.) The UW still keeps pictures of some of her work, which was also contemporary in style, and incorporated objects she found around her. One necklace features stones from our local beach. She was a serious and lifelong artist who clearly drew inspiration from the setting we are lucky enough to share. She came here as often as she could for decades, but one day went into a local store and said she couldn't find her house and needed help to show her the way. After that she didn't come anymore, but her house still shouts her name. The place she made was a magnet for many people, and they still think about it and occasionally wander by.

 

Nailing down the edges

Lisa's summer tablecloth is moving towards its finish and I have been embroidering as much as I can to get it done. After I did the dragonflies I felt like there was too much of a difference between the heavily worked insects and the slap dashy painted leaves. The foxglove flowers were painted too but seemed too delicate to encase in thread. I did a few experiments and finally settled on stem stitching around the stems and leaves with a thread that matched the background, switching to almost invisible running stitch in the same color around the flowers. The heavier stem stitching helped to integrate the leaves into the rest of the cloth while the flowers were more subtly defined, without creating a clear line around them. The dragonflies and the little white dots are surrounded by three rounds of running stitch, which implies (I hope) the movement of air around them. All that is done now, so I am going around the main body of the cloth stitching in the ditch to nail down the edges before I put a lavender binding around the whole thing and call it done. I'm not sure how I'm going to photograph it in its entirety since my studio has been given over to other uses and my hanging wall is to longer available.

It is sort of exciting to see the end of the tunnel on this project. (I called Lisa to remind her that her tables are coming, and she had understandably forgotten that they were even in the works.)  

Foxglove in indigo

I use Typepad as a platform for my blog and have been experiencing the same problems I have seen on other Typepad blogs lately....no way for people to comment. I hate computer stuff and actively avoid fiddling with the nuts and bolts of this activity, but I cherish the comments I receive and am worried that people are shut out. The only fix I have found is to change browsers. I have been using Chrome for quite a while, but can't get through to any Typepad bloggers without switching to Microsoft Edge, so that is what I recommend in the short term. I will be watching to see what happens to other people and may be changing my blog platform. For now, my email address is: anacowebb@comcast.net so you can let me know if you are having trouble reading or commenting on my blog. Thanks! I really appreciate your presence here.

 

 

I finally got set up to dip my foxglove tablecloth in indigo. I thought it would be pretty quick to do the dipping, but the size of the cloth meant I had to get out my big kettle, scrub the earwigs out of it, revive the outside propane stove and gather all the indigo accoutrements. It took a while to get those ducks in a row, but at last I was ready. You may remember that my favorite test cloth only took about forty seconds in the indigo to get a color I liked and hoped to replicate. Ha ha. Changing volumes of liquid always throws those calculations out the window. The actual tablecloth also started out a darker gold than the test cloth because the myrobalan formula I painted it with also changed with the larger volume needed. Anyway, there I was dipping my big cloth briefly and absolutely hating the color. Pea green! No! More blue. I stood there all afternoon, dipping and waiting and dipping and waiting, trying to get the green to go more blue. (You have to wait about twenty minutes between dips to allow the indigo to fasten itself to the cloth.) At last I got it blue enough, but then it was much darker than I had first envisioned. Oh well. The best laid plans and all that.....

After a couple days of curing I took out the wax....another trying chore.....and now feel okay with how it turned out. The many indigo dips corroded the wax enough to result in a batik-y effect even on the painted leaves and the fabric paint integrated much better with the dye than it might have done. I went back in lightly with white paint to emphasize the lips of the flowers since the indigo muted them too much, but mostly this is what I got. The next thing is to embroider the dragonflies. I am thinking of adding a checkered border to keep it light and summery.

Fox wax

Lisa's summer foxglove table cloth has been waxed and is now ready for mordant. It took a long time to wax over the previously painted bits. It might not be necessary because the paint will shed the dyes that are coming next, but after much thought I decided I liked the way waxing over paint helped integrate it with the colors to come on the trial piece I made. Other trials that got painted after the wax had been removed seemed more garish. The paint looked uncomfortable amid the dyes.

The waxing went pretty well, but there were a couple random drops that I couldn't integrate into the design. That is totally normal and usually I just ignore them and go on, but this time I wondered if more dots would help. I ended up adding semi-random dotlets around the flower stalks, just for fun.

Painted foxglove

The paint is on Lisa's summer tablecloth at last. I started with the green leaves in the first week of July, and now all of the flower painting is done, pressed and set as well. I practiced quite a bit on the smaller square samplers, but still found myself winging it in some places on the full size cloth. Even with the addition of an acrylic medium it was hard to apply the paint smoothly to the untreated linen, and the medium definitely added stiffness to the hand, but it is done. Yay. Hanging it up and stepping back gives me the best vantage yet for evaluating the design and I see some minor things I would now change about the pattern, but overall it is okay.

The next step is waxing, then mordanting, painting with dye, and dipping in indigo. There is still a ways to go.

Lavender bits

We are back from a week away caring for our granddaughter while her parents sequestered themselves in the guest room/study and worked from home. Ordinarily her other grandmother has this role, but she needed a break and we needed to reconnect with our baby, so we got ourselves tested (negative) and quarantined so that fears were allayed and we could take over. It was delightful and exhausting. Sophie is down to one nap a day, otherwise she is going full tilt so we were hopping all week long. We needed the daily nap as much as she did. She is growing and learning so much right now. 

I didn't touch my computer or do any needlework all week, but since coming home I have attached some lavender wisps back onto my patchwork runner.  I thought I would segue into darker purple wisps at the ends, but this seems to be all that wants to be included for now. I am experimenting with other overlays and wondering if the ends need more something, but here I am at the moment.

New old treasures

As the world unfurls across my various screens, I find myself without anything to say. I am struck with horror at the death of George Floyd and further dismayed by the continuing deaths of black people at the hands of the police, even in the face of the massive protests around the world.  The problems of our country seem way too overwhelming for any blah blah commentary from me, at least for now. Unfortunately, chatting about my own projects also seems uninteresting amid the turmoil. I assume this detachment will pass....at least I hope so.

One gleam amidst the gloom....I received a package from Nancy full of old family linens and accessories for the table. The items themselves are very fun and inspiring, but Nancy's greatest gift was her enthusiasm about my table setting. I often wrestle with the validity and importance of my obsession so it just meant the world for her to take the trouble to pass these things to me because she was touched by my efforts. How very generous and kind....Thanks Nancy! What a mood lifter!

The box(es) were full of possibility:

Beautiful crocheted linens, probably made by Nancy's great grandmother, and a footed brass tray from India. 

Appliqued and embroidered hand towels, and a Mason jar full of thread on wood spools. How long has it been since spools were made of wood?

A printed linen tea towel and linen cocktail napkins with quotes and characters from Dickens novels. Dickens? How literary. I like the way the blues go together.

Silver and crystal hurricane lamps...wow.  These are very nice indeed. As I unwrapped the bases I thought the pattern looked familiar. When I compared them to the silver candlesticks my great aunt gave me for a wedding present forty eight years ago it was clear that they were all made by the same company. (The shorter candlestick in the foreground is mine and the taller lamps are from Nancy.)

Besides the obvious similarities in style, the stamp on the bottom is identical. They all come from the M. Fred Hirsch Company of Jersey City NJ, made between 1920 and 1945. I find myself wondering about the tables these pieces have graced in the seventy-five to one hundred years since they were manufactured. Old things impart the weight of time to any arrangement and draw the imagination back along the threads of experience. This grounding in the past reminds everyone at the table of all the people who have been gathering for meals through the years, sharing food human to human. Perhaps this is a good time to be reminded of connection and community. It makes me feel a little more hopeful. Again, Nancy, thank you.

 

Back to squares one

After setting my blue patch runner aside for a little while I decided to remove the lavender silk wisps and begin again. Hazel suggested I start with a smaller area and work from there, so I picked out a low contrast "moon" that I had dyed on very lightweight cotton and attached it with glue stitch. I went through the usual fret about turned or raw edges. The patch seemed to melt into the blue background better with frayed raw edges, so that is what I chose. I hope it will hold. Once sewed on and encircled by a corona (sorry) of running stitches, the moon asked for companions so more pale gray squares with faint circles on them will be added. I still want to put lavender wisps somewhere, but what size, what shape, and what kind of attachment has not so far been revealed. I am like the traveler that crossed the country driving only at night. All I can see is what is immediately within my headlights. I am not sure what my destination will look like.

My other project, Lisa's Summer, is making no demands on my tolerance for uncertainty, but does require patient, repetitive work. I am transferring the foxglove dragonfly drawing to my linen square with a Pitts pen (warm gray III). I find that the underlying drawing I made from my giant computer photographic collage still has some enigmatic areas that will trip me up when it comes time to add color, so I trace and modify as I go. I find that I can't do it for too long. I have more stamina for waxing (the next step), but there is something about the drawing/tracing that tires me out. Still, I am inching forward.