Raven and Sparrow

Linens for Lisa

Having finished the tablecloths for Lisa's seasonal series, Mike and I had to clear away furniture in the living room and take down our biggest picture to make a place to photograph them. It was enough trouble to make me put it off for quite a while and now that it is done I can see that I didn't get the lighting right. Oh well. At least I have pictures of most of the pieces I've made, starting with  foxglove and dragonfly Summer, which is a large enough square to use on the table without an undercloth.

For Spring I have the quilted square in fresh yellow green, to go under a runner that Lisa and I purchased together in one of our favorite shops. It is a woven wool scarf that we both agreed reminds us of Northwest springtime....darks and grays shot with the bright colors of flowers. When I started working with it I realized that the colored bits were a little too understated, so I tried to punch them up with embroidery in chartreuse and turquoise.

That still wasn't enough, so I added a 24" square of navy blue with bright embroideries. There are similarly embroidered napkin holders to go with it. The colors are not the usual spring pastels, but I hope the green undercloth will send the right seasonal signals.

For Winter I purchased fabric in a pattern of brown, gray and black leaves that I first thought would be good for autumn. The more I thought about it, the more it looked to me like the ground under the alder trees in winter after the leaves have fallen and turned to a brown jumble underfoot. It will go over the full sized undercloth in grayish natural linen that I made ages ago, with french seams.

I have recently shown the autumn runner, but here it is again to complete the set, with its quilted undercloth dyed with chestnut. Click on it to see the detail.

These are the textile pieces I'll be using to set her tables. I am down to the final details now. There is one bonus piece I purchased with a subdued broad stripe which looks really good with her dishes. It will go over the same gray full sized undercloth that I will use for winter. I am not sure how to accessorize it, but there is something simple and carefree about it that I like. I keep imagining geraniums with it, but it could be used in any season.

Now I have to set a date with Lisa.

 

 

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.

 

 

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: 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.

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.

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.

Quiet time

As these months of restricted activity have stretched on it feels like a time set aside....like a placid pool in the onrushing river. I miss seeing people, especially my family, although I do visit them occasionally and carefully, but I also feel some satisfaction in days that belong to me. I didn't realize how much time I was spending preparing for and cleaning up after my social life until it disappeared. Almost every weekend involved going somewhere or receiving people here, with many weeknights also engaged in one way or another. Now it has fallen away and I am lonelier but more free. Time is malleable and can be shaped more thoughtfully. I have watched myself decide what my days will contain and then evaluated whether I achieved what I imagined or liked it if I did. I don't want this time to go on forever, but it has offered gifts for which I am grateful.

So what am I doing with my time? In the morning I do projects around the house. I am almost done washing all the windows in the new house indoors and out, a few every day. I weed and water the gardens, sweep the terraces and scrub woodwork. I helped Mike spread and compact a load of gravel on the driveway. In the space between the old house and the new, long neglected and weedy, I've started pulling grass and blackberries and honeysuckle to tidy up and reveal new possibilities. The amount of work is overwhelming in this place, but I don't think too much about the big picture, I just do what I can every day.

In the afternoons I paint on my tablecloth. I am about three quarters done with the green of the foxglove plants. It is very slow and I can't do it for more than a couple of hours at a time. After the green is on, I will paint the flowers and then set the paint with my iron. After that....wax. I thought at one time that I would paint the foxglove after I had waxed, over-painted with dye and dipped in indigo, but as I worked with my trial squares I decided that doing the paint first and waxing over the top pulls it more cohesively into the whole. I am keeping the leaves as uniform as I can while still allowing for some shading and movement by using combinations of only three colors: dark green, light green and fawn brown. Its not the most skillful painting, but will be enough to suggest the plants in a lively yet graphic way (or so I tell myself).

I am still working on my patchwork runner, attaching open weave linen scraps among the lavender wisps. I am not sure if i looks all that good as a whole, but I really like seeing how the shredded linen takes a new form as it is couched down to the cloth so I keep doing it.

Nothing is exciting, or seems worthy of commentary, so I don't have much to say, but I am grateful for these still, quiet days.