a strong contender for new favourite skirt

after my students all packed their bags and headed back into the whirled
I spread out my bits and pieces and began work on a few garments, pieced together
from bits of other garments

this evening I unbundled my new skirt...realising too late that I hadn't made any "pre-dye" pictures.
dang.

the dyestuffs are all locally gathered.
predominantly eucalyptus with a little casuarina and the odd acacia pod tossed in to spice the mix

the skirt is made from two pairs of mens trousers. the labels on both stated they were a silk/wool blend.
the dyepot says otherwise.

still, I'm fond of silver greys and taupes so I'm not losing any sleep over it

the skirt was stitched by hand using merino+silk thread. it's picked up the colour rather nicely

there are eleven pockets on the skirt, so it will be an excellent wandering garment
room for leaves and drawings and poems and a clean hankie or two
along with a small notebook, a pencil and the camera that thinks it is a telephone

the picture above shows the lining. it's a silk+linen mix I had from Beautiful Silks

something in the chemical history of the cleaning of the pants that make up this skirt has pushed the usual red tones of the Eriococcus coccineus infesting the twigs of one of the eucalypts to yellow

two patches of silk stitched on to the skirt show that the fabric of the original trousers was either not what it stated on the label OR had been drycleaned so often that it responded oddly in the dyebath

this bright bit WAS wool. it's part of a jacket I was cutting up, now a nice detail on the hem of the dress

part of the waistband of one of the trousers became pockets

and unfortunately I didn't have a real body to hand so this shot of the skirt on the dummy will have to do for now.
I'm planning to wear it on the New Mexico adventure, just in case it snows. but not with that top (which is really an apron in gestation)

for the record : no plastic or ferrous sulphate used, but there were bits of iron in the dyepot - which is all you need, really.

day of rest? que?

it's been a rather hot Sunday here

fortunately not too much smoke in the air

i decided that the waterbag i am making for the 'muddy waters' exhibition

needed more embellishment

which [because i usually work in white] meant dyeing some thread

my little grandmother and my great-aunt Rose both stored odd lengths of thread

on paper spillikins

and so of course i did that too

but

my friend Roz is the clever bunny

who began slinging such thread-and-paper spillikins into the dyepot

[while i was still winding thread and leaves together around popsicle sticks or around the outside of dye-bundles]

they all four went into the same pot.

the two on the right are wool, clearly still wildly in love with eucalyptus

the far left is Japanese silk and the next one toward the middle is Chinese silk

all protein fibres but responding differently to the one brew

 to keep myself from pacing like a tiger while the dye was being absorbed

i decided it was time to start making a new cardigan

- i have a few woolly ones but need something cooler to

keep the mosquitos at bay and snuggle into on long flights

so i dug out some nice American-grown cotton knit fabric that my friend Claudia

had sent to me in a care parcel while i was enjoying my residency in New Orleans

i also ferreted out a pattern from the last century.

eighties, i think.

i wanted the cardigan to be loose and quite short, with three-quarter length sleeves

so i simply folded the papers a bit

and took a few corners wide

[and at speed]

naturally Martha decided to supervise proceedings

after all, her paws tone in so nicely with the general arrangement

 i stitched the pieces together by hand

making sure to "love" the thread [thank you Natalie Chanin]

and [perhaps unusually] using a quite thick pure silk floss [thank you Rachelle]

 it occurred to me that i could use a scrap of this cloth

to have a quick play with a stencil and some milk and that hot eucalyptus dyepot

 success.

but i am not going to stencil on to my cardigan

much as i love Natalie Chanin's exquisite work

my gut feeling is that it might be a little formal

for scruffy old me.

my friend who lives over the rainbow has shared some of her interpretations here

i think she is very brave.

for now i am adding a button or two [from a moth-compromised silk thrift-store blouse]

and what i fondly think of as an "Isobel" pocket

[in case someone needs to discreetly slip me a note while we are dancing cheek to cheek]

i shall be enjoying a few more weeks of stitching on this cuddly garment

making snailtrails with that lovely silk

before it goes anywhere near a dyepot

clearly though, this post has been far too long

so Martha has gone back to sleep.

the flotsam dress

i promised my students i would show them how it turned out
so here are some quick images of the flotsam dress
now that it's dry and the shibori stitching has been removed

Kaz Madigan over at Curiousweaver has some shots of the bundle being undone [in the rain]

rather better images than mine
shot against the sun this morning

doesn't look too spectacular from a distance
the devil is in the detail

sea fossils on cloth,  perhaps

transamerica

here are some pix of my transamerica dress

a story that began here on August 19th
with a baptism of sorts in the Pacific





bundled in a garden on the left coast [but not quite on the edge]

continued at Long Ridge Farm

with several immersions in cauldrons

[some merely to quell the growth of microfauna]

arrived at Haystack
and wandered down to the Atlantic



by way of a puddle or two



concluded with an unbundling
on the evening of August 31
and looks like this

and a detail, with a bit of an odd yellow glow due to dim light whilst taking the pic

found something

pootling about in the studio

i found some things that were forgotten

and 

out of curiosity

opened one of them

it had been forgotten since January

and the contents were quite exciting

i found a few favourite bolts and stones

and 

discovered a means of colouring alfoil yellow

although at first the cloth looked quite black

it turned out to be green

reputedly the hardest colour to dye using natural dyes

[the jar in the middle of the image is where all the pieces had been stuffed]

and then a little later on

The Precious came indoors, to report that she had found

this

an extraordinary fungus growing on a fallen piece of bluegum [Eucalyptus leucoxylon]