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 wrap [and what happened to a dress that was in the river]

yesterday i left New Orleans

it was a wonderful four weeks "in residence"

during which i found new excitement in my work

and gained a bit of an understanding 

 of some of the local flora

but it also went a good deal deeper. 

i first visited New Orleans in 1983

in the year of the Ash Wednesday fires

our family home had been one of the casualties

and the option of travelling to North America to help my grandparents pack their belongings for a return to Australia after some 24 years residence in Canada seemed a very good escape from a life that had become a merry-go-round of working at my job with the Arts Council during the week and then helping with the rebuild on the weekends when i wasn't on tour

in this month, hearing stories about what my friends and others went through after 'the storm' i've learned to be grateful

in comparison to flooding, fire is relatively clean. things are burned instead of being distributed across the region

and while there were some toxic things to be dealt with [ie piles of arsenic+copper ash from "green" pine posts] the earth and the remains were not soaked with chemicals and oil and sewage and ghastliness.

we didn't have to deal with refrigerators full of rotting food

or be evacuated hundreds of miles away from where we belonged
there were a few looters
but by and large people behaved in a civilized fashion
 

within a few days of the rain that followed the fires

lilies were pushing their way up through the blackened earth

and almost as soon as the ashes had cooled

the telephone company laid a line across them

so my parents had a phone amongst the debris

i'm telling you all this to give you an idea of [some of] what i was thinking while this new body of work was brewing.

 Chris Rose's book, "One dead in Attic" puts life very sharply into perspective.

and now on a much lighter note

here are a few details of the work in the Riverside gallery

the two below aren't in the show

as they were opened after it was hung

and the last bundle i opened

was a dress that had been to the river

i gave it a thorough wash test

in Schiro's laundromat

and am delighted to say

it "came up a treat"

i think i am beginning to get the hang of dyeing cotton

so enough already with da dress

i hear you.

enough with the dress already.
what about the LA class?

i have carefully avoided Los Angeles for years and years
flitting through the airport in the fastest possible time
on my way somewhere else

but now

thanks to Claudia Grau
[proprietor extraordinaire of the Grau Haus]
i am here, where i never dreamed i would be

we are working primarily with things we found at the Hollywood Farmer's market
supplemented by street windfalls
and
some gatherings from Runyon Canyon

all of which are yielding delicious colours

 i wore my new dress to work

and the Queen of the Night smiled on everything

weather or not

two months is a long time to be out in the sun, given that 2 weeks in Australian sunshine is reputedly equivalent to about 25 years under museum conditions
so
as i'm away from home again [soon] for a while
and therefore shall not be able to sneekpeek inside the metal box
it seemed a good time to [once again] put some cloth to the test
the two pieces on the left are commercially produced cottons, the third from left is eucalyptus-dyed milkymerino, the four on the right snippets of silk dyed using the more delicate 'northern' plants

they are half in, half out of the box

assuming no birds try to steal them
or helpful family members decide to move them under cover

i shall open the box when i return home in November
and publish the results on these pages

scouring, or not

pootled over to the Maiwa pages today and discovered a post about the scouring of cloth before dyeing.
Maiwa are very firm about the need for this.

folks who have wandered with me will know that i don't bother with this process
unless
i am dealing with greasy wool straight from the sheep
or
i cannot resist something silken from a thrift store
but
can tell [using my nose and fingertips] that some clot has permitted the garment to be maltreated by a "dry cleaner"
[i use the wiggly bits because the process is not dry at all, it involves having your precious garment sloshed about in a vat full of petrochemicals along with filthy garments belonging to complete strangers who have been doing goodness-only-knows-what in them ... eeeww]

here's why...

if we look at the Japanese system for mordanting cotton ie soaking in soy solution then alternate dips in soy and ash, drying each time so as to build up layers
then
having a layer of starch on new cloth [they apply it so the fabric will look good in the store]as a beginning could be an advantage.
at least i think so.
and if it's so strongly attached to the cloth that you have to boil it off with dangerously strong chemical assistants then you might as well leave it there.

if you're using thrift store cotton/linen/hemp then every wash that the garment has been through in its life will have helped to build up a mordant layer on the surface [very few washing aids do not contain sodium carbonate aka washing soda, an excellent mordant for yellows...]

and for bundle dyeing aka ecoprint [my preferred method] it doesn't matter...dye is forced into the cloth directly from the plant matter by steam and seems to bond firmly anyway
except of course if things have been drycleaned

in which case a good hot wash with dishwashing detergent is quite helpful

i don't understand why folks have their clothes chemically cleaned anyway. silk and wool can be handwashed. no problem.
treat silk the way you would treat your hair [teaspoon of vinegar in the rinsing water works the same way as conditioner...they just make conditioner gluggy so it won't run out of your hand in the shower]
and as long as you don't vary the temperature of your wash/rinse water by m ore than 5 degrees C or 9 degrees F or jiggle it about too much you shouldn't have any problems either.

here endeth the lesson
and
have a nice day.