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.