Raven and Sparrow

End in sight

With the purplish gray napkins for Lisa's autumn table finished, I am very close to the end of this incredibly drawn out project. I still have to photograph the foxglove square, and should probably do the winter and spring cloths too, just for documentary purposes. I have to iron everything and pack it up so as not to have to iron it again, and tote all the elements down to Lisa's house, about an hour and a half away. There I will take pictures of all the settings with her dishes and silverware and then hand them off to her and keep the pictures for myself. The centerpieces are the wild cards, since I won't know what flowers are available until the last minute. It will take a full day to get it done, not counting the packing and list making. It has really been a long time since my last seasonal project for Becky. Lots has happened, or stopped happening, in the interim. I am thinking ahead to future ideas, and wondering if my pace is so slow as to make the whole idea unfeasible. I don't know. it does feel satisfying to get Lisa's table to the finish line. I hope the settings will be worth all the time it has taken.

Paris gray

It has literally been years since I have dyed any fabric. My studio has been dis-assembled and my projects have been limping along using whatever energy I can scrounge from daily life, but little by little Lisa's project has been taking shape. I have all the tablecloths finished and am now pulling together the accessories....centerpieces, napkins, etc. It always surprises me how much time and effort this part takes, but I have come down to one last hurdle...the napkins for Lisa's autumn table. All of the table linens I make are washable but I prefer to use commercially dyed linen for napkins because they always bear the brunt of heavy use at the table and must endure lots of time in the laundry. This time though, I just couldn't find the right color. It took a while to even decide what color I was looking for. The autumn runner I made has gold, red-peach, and purple gray elements.

I had to set up the whole table with dishes, centerpiece and glassware to figure out what accent color would blend cohesively with the table as a whole. I finally settled on Parisian gray, which is a very gray lavender, but then could not find anything that wasn't too red, too blue, too bright, or too dark. I realized that I would just have to dye it myself, using the same colors I used when I made the runner in the first place. Easier said than done, of course. All of my studio stuff is piled high in one room of the old house. It took awhile to find the dyes themselves, and then I had to assemble the fabric (yay, two yards of lightweight linen were lurking in a tote), the kettle, the stove, the scale, the beakers, the thermometers, and the stirring spoons and sticks. Also gloves, mask, and oops, order more mordant. Finally, I mixed equal amounts of logwood purple and logwood gray and returned to the age-old stance of vigilance, stirring my steaming pot and peering anxiously at the developing color. 

It came out okay. The dye is even and the color is good, if a little dark. Whew.

 

 

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.

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.)  

Back to dragonflies

 

 

After being wadded into a bag for months and months, I finally dragged my tablecloth for Lisa's summer out into the light of day and began to embroider the dragonflies. It was a nightmare. I had envisioned the wings done in silver thread and was excited to find a couple of options at my local fabric store but the DMC silver that looked the best was hard to work with. No knots could be counted on to stay and the thread frayed badly so I had to work with very short lengths, hence more knots. Aargh. Embroidering the insect bodies in two grayish shades was like going on vacation after the wings. I got them finished and then began to worry about what the silver thread might do under the iron, having forgotten to test this before the marathon struggle. Fortunately the silver behaves very well even when the temperature is quite high. Whew. I used my few remaining scraps of harem cloth behind the dragonflies to stabilize them and I hope they will not pucker the fabric around them too much as the needlework goes on.

The next step is to add a gray and white checked border around the outside. This is supposed to be a summer tablecloth and was intended to be quite a bit lighter in the beginning, but the dyeing came out darker than I meant. I still like it, but I think it needs something to make it more lighthearted and checks remind me of summer picnics, so I've scrounged all the gray and white scraps I can find and sewn them into this alternating ladder, which will then be cut into a two and a half inch strips for the border. Getting the strips straight has led to lots of thread pulling to produce reliable and uniform (eventual) squares. 

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: [email protected] 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.

Dye painted on

After a day in mordant and two weeks holding in the refrigerator, the foxglove tablecloth has been painted with myrobalan, a natural dye made from trees that grow in India. I tested this a while ago and followed my notes from that experience, but the test was on an eighteen inch square and this is fifty-seven inches. You wouldn't think that keeping the proportions the same and changing the volume of dye would yield different results, but sometimes that happens. The gold color on this cloth seems quite a bit darker than my test squares even though the formula was the same. I am reminded that testing is never as precise as I expect it to be. The next thing is to let this set under plastic for three days or so to allow the dye and the mordant plenty of time to lock into the fibers. Keeping it damp helps that bonding to continue. Afterwards I will let it dry and see what value I actually attained. Then...into indigo.

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.

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.

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.