Tag: Maiwa Natural Dye Class

Vernal Equinox

Tuesday it was 85 degrees. Today it was 43 degrees, cold, windy, and bone chilling. This is spring in NJ.

Still… My son came and helped me clean out the vegetable garden, and I got my lettuces planted. It felt wonderful to play in the mud…

My goal was to finish the natural dye class I started a year and a half ago, through Maiwa in Vancouver by the time spring came. I valiantly plowed forward, through the winter, through the snow storms, creating color and embracing knowledge, and it has been a fantastic journey. I have a huge pile of samples, that have been washed, ironed, and are ready for final tagging, putting in a journal, and putting on the shelf. I’ve learned so much. I’m going to try to keep the indigo vat going, we will see how successful I am with that. I have an herbal friend, whom I’ll be taking a medicinal herb class starting the end of April, through the county arboretum, coming tomorrow to help sort and label all the samples. She has lots of dye stuffs, and I look forward to dyeing with a friend in the coming weeks.

As the weather allowed, I started wandering the gardens, looking for things popping up, digging under all the leaf mulch from last fall, to find smothered ground cover. I was rewarded with a lovely snow crocus, not sure where they came from, not something I planted, but a beautiful, lovely surprise.

So of course, I grabbed a bunch of yarn and dove in. Cause I had an empty loom…

I wound all the skeins into cakes, noting how much I had of each.

I wound the warp…

I threaded the loom…

I beamed the warp…

And I started sampling wefts, deciding on a lovely brown wool, though I probably won’t have enough to do all 10 yards. I’ll see how far my stash takes me and then come up with plan B…

My pond guys came today. They do a spring cleaning, drain the ponds, removing fish and apparently I had a frog, who knew, power wash, refresh, hook up filters, and get everything ready for the spring. I have two ponds, which I’ve talked about extensively, I got to see the tank holding the goldfish (and frog) while they cleaned one of the ponds. I had to leave for rehearsal so I didn’t get to see all the very large koi from the second pond.

Considering how brutal this winter was, I was so happy that it looks like all my fish survived. I had some damage to the second pond, a huge crack in the upper spillway, which my pond guy tried to repair. I may have to take a hair dryer out there by the weekend to get the patch to dry. It is damp and rainy at the moment. The waterfall had a leak, which he fixed as well. I’m crossing my fingers the water level holds. I hate mucking around the ponds when the water is freezing.

The end of March, I had my first of many spring concerts, this one with New Jersey Early Music. I played both bass recorder, and cello. That’s me in the back row on the right. It is so much fun to play/perform, with some really great, talented people. We all spend countless hours practicing, rehearsing, dressing up, and performing. All volunteer. They have all been so patient and kind as I try hard to learn the cello. I’m finally at a point where I don’t wince as I draw the bow across. Much of the time now, I love the sound I get.

My next concert is April 19th, with Montclair Early Music.

I took a drive down to Maryland last weekend, to have a good visit with my almost 95 year old mom. She has had some issues this winter, which was tough on everyone, and spent much of it in and out of the hospital. I couldn’t believe how fantastic she looked when I got down there, I want to be her when I grow up.

I’m hoping any day now to hear the Sweet Georgia Yarn Podcast I recorded a few weeks ago. And a week or so ago, I was a panelist on the Handweavers Guild of America Careers in Textiles Symposium. As I sat staring at the screen, in my best professional expression, Mulder is getting into all sorts of situations to grab my attention… This basket sits on the desk where I’m recording… He makes me laugh…

We have had some pretty rainy weather, and earlier in the week, on the way to one of my many rehearsals, it started to rain, even though the sun was shining. Sure enough, as I headed southeast, every time I turned a corner or went around a bend, there was the most spectacular rainbow waiting for me. I felt like it was a sign from the universe that all will be well. At one point, I went around a bend and there was a double rainbow.

The world is a mess right now. I’m sick with worry about things I can’t do anything about. But spring is here, and nature has a way of thumbing its nose at the stupidity of man, and blossoming forth in spite of us. I’m energized, and hopeful. My daughter gave me a portable watercolor set with sketchbook, so I can draw my garden wherever I am. I drew the first spring flower I saw.

Stay tuned…

Bittersweet Farewells…

Don’t worry dear readers, I’m not going anywhere. But there have been some changes that have me saying goodbye to things that impacted my life in some way, in many areas of my life.

The biggest news is a bittersweet farewell to the Duchess. I’ve blogged about her many times, this is a 12-shaft 54″ wide Tools of the Trade loom, a monster of a loom, challenging to weave on with this aging body. But weave I did. My daughter brought her here to live, picking her up from Rochester, NY, in the middle of Covid, and I was able to clear the warp she put on shortly after that, along with one I transferred to this loom, from a 12-shaft table loom, (which is now safely in Michigan) using a pattern I purchased from Denise Kovnat. I referenced that in my previous blog post.

I cleared the loom of that warp in short order. It is a very gorgeous piece of Tencel fabric, and no I don’t have any idea of what I want to do with it. It will sit quietly and be, for now.

I started packing the loom, stripping it down to reduce weight. Fashion Institute of Technology, in NYC was sending a moving van to pick it up and move it into their new weaving space. The movers came last Tuesday in the icy rain, two strong guys with a big truck and a lift gate, and within two hours, it was loaded…

…and installed at FIT. It looks really happy with the other multi shaft looms, looks like mostly Macombers. I hope it helps a new generation love weaving. Or at least get a good workout weaving on it!

Of course that left a huge chunk of space in my studio, which I filled by just rearranging some of the furniture that was already there.

I had moved my teaching set up, for zoom meetings, to the back corner of the studio, away from light and traffic, and that was fun staging a new look behind me as I taught or just tuned in to Zoom.

With all the space, and rearranging, I’m seeing things I haven’t looked at for a while, and getting psyched to start getting more things on the remaining looms… I have a couple that are empty…

It is also a bittersweet farewell to winter. It’s probably not completely done, but it reached 69 degrees today. I will say, that though for the first time since my husband died, I’ve given thought to how much this house is to care for by myself. This latest snow storm, of 14 inches, on the back of another one that produced about 15 inches, almost finished me. I worked doggedly every day to try to clear a pathway to my house, and to try to dig out the cars. Snow days are fun until you are the one removing the snow. My daughter was on her annual Star Trek Cruise in the Caribbean, and my son was in NC at Ft. Bragg for leadership training with the military. So they were absolutely of no help. This is the picture from the Ring Camera on my front porch, after I managed to clear the front deck steps.

I shoveled daily…

But it was really beautiful. The snow was heavy, and covered the trees, and one morning, after the first snow storm, after the roads were clear enough to drive, I actually pulled over on my way to the Shakespeare Theatre to volunteer, and just looked at the stunning landscape of everything covered in a blanket of white. I didn’t even try to get a picture. It would have never done it justice. This was the view out the window in my music room.

So a farewell to this winter, hopefully there will not be anymore storms like this for the rest of the season. The snow is gone now, with the warmer temps, leaving behind a dreary muddy landscape (we got 3.25 inches of rain in the last 24 hours).

And a sad farewell to my beautiful vine covered gazebo, which didn’t survive this winter. I’m debating what to do, I can’t fix it myself, and I can’t find a handyman, and I’m just sad…

But I did go out today, and start to clean out the vegetable garden, and planted some arugula, lettuce and spinach seeds. Spring is coming…

Meanwhile, I had hoped to say goodbye to my natural dye class I’ve been doggedly working through for the last number of months. I managed to use up all the exhaust baths I saved from my 18 dye adventures.

I washed samples that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks before I divided them into thirds.

I divided up all the samples, these are the cellulose fabrics, into thirds, one third for an extensive dye notebook, one third for Iron Modifiers, and one third for an Indigo overdye.

I thought I’d be through the indigo unit by now, but alas… I needed 7 pounds of very ripe bananas. Really…

There are many ways to create an indigo vat, and Maiwa teaches making Banana mash and using it to feed the indigo. I’ve done other methods, but I’m good at following directions. You would have laughed hysterically at me trying to carry what I hoped was 7 pounds of bananas across the produce department in my Shoprite, in the very thin produce bags, to weigh on the scale, nowhere near the bananas, and watching the bags rip as I tried to lift them onto the scale. The other shoppers were quite aghast… The things we do for our craft…

So I wait patiently for them to over rippen…

Meanwhile, I try to weave every day. I’m doggedly working through the Quigley course Diane Click was gracious enough to send me a few years ago, when I mentioned in a blog I had put a Quigley threading onto one of my Structos. Having transferred that warp to a floor loom, I threaded it based on Diane’s extensive handout from a class she taught in Florida in 2015. I do a new sample every day. I think there are 19 samples in total. I love this structure, a four tie unit weave, though it is very slow and tedious, especially in 20/2 cotton.

And dearest gentle readers, this will sound really silly, but I’ve been in mourning every since I binge watched the latest season of Bridgerton, which for those who have never seen it, is a Regency era romp through life on the ton under Queen Charlotte, turn of a couple century’s ago, (you might remember she was married to mad King George), and it is so gorgeous, so decadent, so utterly ridiculous and so addicting, that I couldn’t stop watching until the last episode. Now I have to wait probably another year and a half for season 5. The costumes are incredible. The sets lavish and stunning. And Queen Charlotte’s head pieces, are the highlights of any scene she is in. I don’t have a TV, and I don’t watch television, but I started watching Bridgerton during Covid, on Netflix, and it has been the one decadent treat every couple years. I’m sad the season is over.

And finally, I took a one day workshop in Broom making at my weaving guild. It was so much fun. The teacher, Sue Muldoon, stayed with me and I realized how much I missed the one on one I used to have with my hostess when I’d travel. Always a new friend, with an amazing story, and I’m a better person for each of the wonderful people who hosted me over the decades I taught. Sue is a wonderful teacher, very prepared, and I made some pretty cool brooms…

And there you have it. My daily life at this point, with the coming spring is now a check list of ‘Weave every day’, ‘Finish the dye class’ (when the bananas are ripe), ‘Play in the muddy gardens every day’, and of course practice every day for all the music groups I play with at the moment, spring concerts are coming up, and the set lists for each group are growing. There are multiple rehearsals each week, and I’m improving in tiny increments each time I sit down with the cello. One day I hope to be competent…

Stay tuned…