thank you

now that i'm home 

after teaching the last class of the year

a big thank you 

to those who have organised classes and residencies on my behalf

to people who have kindly signed up to attend

and to the many many kind souls

who have shown me friendship and hospitality this year

in

New Zealand

around Australia

here and there in Canada

in Switzerland

and

across the United States

from the left coast to the right coast 

and back again

it's been a truly wonderful ride

i've learned a lot

met remarkable folks

made some good friends

and caught up with treasured old friends

filled my pockets with leaves

swum in various oceans

taken some opporunities

for solo wandering 

between engagements

making marks on cloth and paper

writing a novel for my own entertainment

and

making notes for perhaps another useful book

that might complete the trilogy

[we shall see what grows from those seeds]

meanwhile

happy birthdays to my fellow Centaurs

and

a safe and delightful Festive Season to y'all

thanks for swinging by

Dog Bless.

oh, what a waste...

clearly nobody who shops at the Woolworths supermarket on Lonsdale street in Melbourne has any inkling of the wonderful things that can be done with onion shells...i found them on my last evening in Melbourne while foraging for a lime, sadly only after our classes there had finished.

and the worst of it was, i couldn't collect any - there are huge penalties for transporting plant materials from Victoria to South Australia.

so if any of my Melbourne dye-mates are reading...and need a source of onion shells...you know where to go.

in Fitzroy

 

 it's been lovely to be back teaching at Beautiful Silks

and there's great news

when i came back from America

singing the praises of a silk broadcloth i'd found

Marion Gorr made a huge effort to get some made for me

today i tried it out in the dyepot

BLISS

better than the original sample

not quite so much shine

...brilliant hand,

fabulous in the dyepot.

i've bought a roll

and told Marion i'd be quite happy

to have this labelled as "India's favourite"

along with the #5 silk-cotton thread

if you're quick, you might just get some of the first batch...

time is my friend

Agonis flexuosa

bundled January 5

unbundled November 29

posted for the especial benefit

of my recent Blue Mountains class

as

the samples we produced there

from the same species of plant

were quite a different colour

being more of a pinkish beige

they have seen the light

during my brief domestic interlude in September i set up a little lightfastness test
a handful of fabric scraps, some naturally dyed other unnaturally coloured
yesterday i remembered to look for them
here's how they scrubbed up, after two months in the sun, wind and rain

the two at the top are synthetically dyed and weren't much affected
the third one is eucalyptus on wool...which actually darkened a bit [the exposed side is on the left]
the next was apple leaves on silk, which changed from green to gold
then an ice-flower dye, which clearly didn't enjoy the sun at all
and lastly some heritage carrots, blue purple in the original but then somewhat faded [but with the carrot prints still visible]

on the other hand
the black cotton bloomers that i forgot on the washing line
are no longer black.

riverstitch

it's funny, really

i'm often asked to arrange more workshops in South Australia

but when i do

it's rare for locals to sign up

riverstitch [planned for February 2012]

is very nearly filled

largely with folks from someplace else

but there are a couple of spots left

today i swung down to the brewery at Goolwa

so visit my lovely friend [and the workshop host] Jenni

and catch up with another good friend, Trace

who happened to be passing through on her way west

a fine instance of the Dog Above doing a bit of mustering

to read about a recent class

please visit Elisa Bartels

a bundle and a really exciting project

as those of you who swing by here from time to time may have noticed
i have a particular fondness for a cloud draped land just a little to the east of my island continent
and have more than once spent time in and around Nelson
where the amazing Judy Keylock
this year created a project for the Maitai School


Jo Kinross kindly sent some images

 

i particularly like the lupin prints on Judy's dress

in other news... when i was in Pennsylvania in September, Kelly McHaig kindly gave me a jar of chili jelly to take home. it looked fabulous so i wrapped it carefully in a silk scarf and then several layers of packing in the hope it would survive the trans-pacific crossing.

sadly the baggage-mishandlers crushed the jar. determined not the waste it, i scraped the broken glass off the silk and bundled a few extra leaves in it. this was a day or so before i was due to leave again.
for some reason i wasn't keen to open the bundle that week, so i decided to put it aside to await my return. it's so much easier to resist opening bundles when you're on the other side of the whirled.

 it didn't turn out too badly... slightly on the wrong side of aromatic, but not mouldy. and jolly nice colours.

fieldwork in the blue mountains

they were very kind to me in the Blue Mountains

[especially Marjorie and Loret, who carried the burden of organising]

i stayed with my friend Pam de Groot

who

aside from being a top class felter and

general Good Sort, understands that it's important to relax with
a little something at the end of the day
and to have a bit of quiet time

because the very last thing you need

after a day on the deck [or at breakfast just before]

is to have your brains picked over by an info-vampire

[...one of the reasons i so frequently camp in a helltell]

one day she even got up very very early

and took me for a wander into the bush

to this magical place

it was like standing in a William Robinson painting
[there's another link to his work on the side bar...]

the images above show some of the delightful colours
we coaxed into cloth from windfalls and weeds

there's another 'fieldwork' class next year
at the Geelong Forum in the last week of September 2012
part of a Design Focus Group
details should be on their website soon
because
it's already in the magazine

pond-hopping to the mountains of blueness

i dragged myself from the left coast of one continent

leaving a marker or two

to the right coast of another

where for the past five days

we have been experimenting with the local flora

rumour has it that someone [some time ago]

enlivened her train journey into the Blue Mountains

by slinging Coreopsis seeds out of the window

we did our best to reduce the weed burden

by harvesting for our dyepots