Dye Pots!

......and so, in spare moments, I decided finally to make good on the threat to dye some yarn. Sound of drums rolling.

My wonderful friend Ellen Minand (Ellen's Half Pint Farm in Norwich, Vermont) has been my coach -- so has Sybil Williams (an incredible knitter/weaver/natural dyer/chiropractor/cardiac nurse), also the source of my wonderful ginger cat, Sheba. It's a new variety of Rainbow Coalition.

A couple of days ago, I ventured into my third-floor stash (what a misleading word! It's a thousand square feet of YARN, for god's sake) and hauled out about a ton of fairly old but still sound Green Mountain Spinnery (Vermont) undyed, single-ply worsted weight wool in cream.......I won't tell you how many skeins I had, but the number rhymes with 'plenty.' That's not counting the natural gray wool (from the Orkney Islands) that I brought home from the studio with another dozen skeins of Michigan natural white yarn. From the basement came a number of huge enameled pots and my insanely huge plastic salad bowl (!). Into the latter went the first half-dozen skeins of natural wool with a dab of Soak (my favorite rinseless soap) to help the yarn give up its natural oils, dust, and general resistance to change (like some people I know?). An hour or two later, I was ready to go.

The big enameled pot eventually had about 3 gallons of boiling water in it and maybe 8 teaspoons of dissolved acid reactive dye -- a gorgeous raspberry. Into the pot went the skeins. I want them to be slightly variegated, so I didn't stir -- just pushed them down. They simmered for about 30 minutes, then another 10 for good measure. Then into a vinegar bath. Then into cooler and cooler (never cold) rinse waters. Gentle squeezing... Then back into the salad bowl for hanging on the second-story wooden deck railings. What a sight from the street this must have been, particularly as the colors multipled (raspberry, almost raspberry over the natural gray, tealy bluey, golden pear, etc.). Now there is a basket of wool at the studio with new labels that say "Sandra's Kettle-Dyed Yarn." The colors are soft -- I have deliberately cut back a tad on the dye -- not unlike the ones that a Maine woman makes with her son from local wool, dye, and vats of sea water.

What a wonderful thing to do. I made sage green with 7 parts golden pear, 1 scant part teal. When I have time to do it again, I'll add a bit of lilac to burgundy and see what kind of dark mauve results. Or maybe I'll add a tad of ochre to burgundy. Or maybe a dab of purple with teal....what would happen?

......all of which took me back (don't laugh) to finger painting. In grade school, I remember being completely mesmerized by the way the shiny primary colors from the finger paint pots merged on wet paper -- orange, green, purple, where once there were only red, blue, yellow. I tried to make a sunset once -- I remember all too well -- and the teacher actually slapped my fingers with a wad of paper because I was MIXING IT ALL UP. "If you want orange, use orange..." Really annoyed.

...but of course I'm a rule breaker, and nature mixes it all up every minute of the day....White light becomes a cascade of colors only partly captured in dyepots, the pigments of life imperfectly replicated by creatures who can't even see the entire spectrum of natural light. But we try, much as Chopin kept trying to write the perfect nocturne. He was right to think that, had he succeeded, music might have stopped, at least for awhile. So I will work toward Beet and Sky and Fern. To that damaged second-grade teacher, I say this: I am mixing it all up again, you poor fool, still being naughty, still making a mess. Taking liberties all the time with damn near everything. You should, too.

svb

An Amazing Poem by Ann Creer

Tapestry
by Ann Creer

In the needled clicking over mind
she knits with wool soft thoughts of yesterday
and weaves his wrinkled laughter
through her broken brow
slippered feet, rocker worn, retrace
remembered Sunday seams into the
sunstretched smooth of summers carpeted vows
she nods, replacing fraying fears
of loneliness with satin sounds of a
wedding gown and dream of his
Hand in quilted warmth upon her Heart
she purls the borders of their ribbed
separation, and gently kissing
casted lots upon the finished corners
Folds it over the Earth.

Women and Renewal

You know, women were the original recyclers -- for centuries past. I think of this today because, in between writing stints (book I'm trying like h___ to finish), I am taking the final steps toward remaking a half-dozen wonderful, old wool jackets. I bought them at a thrift shop for prices like 1.50, 2.00, 2.50. Wonderful wool. One of them is Ralph Lauren and I STILL bought it (I hate this preoccupation we have with Fancy Brands). I had a tailor take the sleeves out and serge the edges to prevent raveling, and to keep lining and fabric together. This kind of broke my heart, because I'm a pretty good wool tailor myself, lacking only the time, I'm afraid. But then, tailors have to earn a living too. So I gave her the work (I won't do it again -- she charged me a very steep price...I need to be less trusting about things like price and get it all battened down first). So now I will refashion the sleeves, using the old sleeve cap as a template. I think I'll make the sleeves for the first one in modified trellis (crochet) and make 'em long and wide enough so that I can draw the bottoms together into a big ruffle with a crocheted drawstring (edged of course with something nice). But I think now that I'll also add some free-form crochet motifs here and there on the trellis fabric, and perhaps over the old pockets. The buttons will be changed to mismatched vintage. The question is: What to call this line of jacket? Not Second Hand Rose -- too hackneyed. Take Two? All ideas are welcome. The next one will be knitted. It's a boxier jacket -- nubbier fabric. Looks like some kind of wonderful drop-stitch sleeve to me.

But as I think about all of this, I'm remembering my mother, and her mother. Mum was a great church bazaar (and Eastern Star bazaar) person -- made things out of nothing, which is what women have always done. Amazing enough that she could make dinner happen with nothing in the cupboard. She also could transform refuse into cute, sometimes beautiful objects. Sometimes we laugh at all of this. She made crocheted and skirted dolls for teapots and toilet paper rolls. She covered Quaker Oats boxes with all kinds of decorative things and used them for storage and sometimes for gift-giving. She made old curtains into clothing. She created such astonishingly beautiful Christmas stockings from scrap felt that people told her to start a small company -- which she did. She called it VanBee Originals. She actually SOLD quite a few stockings, and then kits made up of all of the materials needed to make stockings and picnic tray covers.............on and on. It was brilliant. It was what poor people have done for as long as there has been poverty. Women have yard sales. It's all recycling, creating wealth where other people see only trash.

If I live 100 years, I'll never be as resourceful as that woman was. Her name was Gladyce Bessie Beedle. She lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, ended up an executive secretary for the president of 3M and then Continental Telephone, and STILL had time for all of those charitable works and creative refashionings -- and she had only an 11th grade education. We should remember women like that as the embodiment of everything that's good in human society.
svb

MIDWEST FIBER AND FOLK ART VOYAGE, Part III

The final part -- and what fun this has been:

HERE ARE SOME PEOPLE -- by no means all, just a handful:

First: The smilingly gifted maker of some of the most beautiful Blueface Leicester yarn I've ever seen, from Bellingham, Washington-- Scarlet Tang. Brand is Huckleberry!

Second: The two owners of the Frontier Fiber Mill in Indiana -- makers of utterly ravishing alpaca yarn, and a new alpaca-merino blend that I trust will walk off of the shelves. I don't know of a finer small American mill than this one. Their yarn is drop-dead gorgeous., and they remember who people are from year to year! Even after three years.

Third: A lovely woman who beads shawl sticks. I bought every one of them. GREEDY.

Fourth: One of my all-time favorite people, Kim Leach, who is another frighteningly gifted hand-dyer. The brand is Happy Hands. She makes a sock yarn called Toe Jams (!) that actually DOES walk off of the shelves. But that's not all. Kim is just a wonderful human being -- about three feet tall in her stocking feet (!!!!) and sweet as sugar cane. Look her up.

Fifth: The owner of Ursula's Alcove, who makes really FINE vegetable-dyed knitting yarns. I bought more than I can sell (people don't really know what they have when they see yarns like this, and typically they're not brightly colored, so they sell very slowly -- but they are SO kind to the skin, and SO good for the planet). Her name isn't really Ursula. She does Renaissance fairs, and so...........Ursula.

That's it, folks, as Daffy Duck used to say. Or was it Bugs Bunny? Hugs all around. svb

MIDWEST FIBER AND FOLK ART VOYAGE, Part II

.......moving right along (this is thrilling! I feel as if I'm truly OUTWITTING all the smart people at Google, who think they've effectively limited the photos I can post.......!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can tell I have a Ph.D., so damned clever am I.....):

First: Polly Ester, a PERSON created by the Windy City Knitting Guild some years ago. For the same number of years, I have been threatening to bring to life a sister, to be called Molly Ester, or some such rhyming thing, in Detroit. I learned, talking to some people from the Guild, that she is getting too big (i.e., her skirt is too long and heavy), so I have offered to move her to Detroit. Need to talk to more people about this. The question will be where to put her, and how to make sure people still add to her raiment. The idea, in a nutshell, has been to remind people that clothing used to be hand-made, and to create community. People add bits of knitting, crochet, weaving, etc., on the spot (years ago, I added a crocheted flower to her skirt on the spot and met two lovely women in the process).

Second: Members of the guild, who kindly asked me to share a bench at lunch IN ONE HUNDRED DEGREE HEAT.

Third: Two wonderful button necklaces made by the nifty woman on the right in the guild photograph -- photographed because I think that other people might like to try it.

Fourth: The owner of Ewetopia , a wondrous shop in a small Wisconsin town between LaCrosse and Madison -- and one of the most gifted young dyers I've encountered. I walked off with some of her lace-weight alpaca and LOTS of her amazing mohair. See below.

Fifth: The mohair! At least two of the colorways. And in the sun, to show the colors.

Move on to the next installment. svb

MIDWEST FIBER AND FOLK ART VOYAGE, Part I

Well, here goes, as promised. I have to do this in stages; Google's blogspot software doesn't like dozens and dozens of photographs. So let me first share these things. First: One alpaca giving another alpaca a nice peck on the cheek. I'm sure of it. Second: One of the many workshops with dozens of students. Knitters knitters knitters. Third: The interior of the rigorously rectangular building (see previous post). Fourth: A tractor in one of the parking lots. Now, I promise you that, in any of Detroit's well-heeled northern suburbs, you would NOT find a tractor. But there it was, in one of Chicago's northern suburbs. Finally: The aforementioned rigorously rectangular building in which the wonderful festival was held. Shoppers shoppers shoppers.

Now, go on to Part Two, where I have some things to say about people and their art.

svb

.....On the Road Again...

....the Willie Nelson song is in my head and I can't get it out.....Just got back from the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art festival. For those of you who don't know much about it: The festival started several years ago at Crystal Lake, Illinois at a community college. The location was actually fun -- vendors in the school auditorium, up and down the hallways, spilling out into the lawn areas. I'm fairly sure that the vendors thought it was a bit less fun. Running electricity into hallways was a problem; lighting was terrible; and costs mounted because of these logisitcal problems.

Now, the festival has a new home in Grayslake, Illinois, in a big, airconditioned building at the Lake County Fairgrounds. I had a fascinating (read "infuriating") time finding it -- the GPS has old maps in it, and it just couldn't find the address, so I ran around in circles for almost an hour until I just decided to follow Peterson Road. The decision: Either I'd find it, or I'd go shopping in Hyde Park. All those bookshops! Galleries! Coffee shops! Opportunities to GOOF OFF!

I found it. The vendors are much happier. I will have pictures by tomorrow. Everything except the food vendors is neatly contained inside. Today, it was ONE HUNDRED DEGREES outside, so that was a mitzvah. When I went out for some lunch, I honestly thought I was going to melt. And the asphalt parking lots were soft as old bubblegum underfoot.

But I guess I like it less well. On the one hand, the festival itself is just marvelous. Quality is very high. I will have much to say about some of the vendors, once I have the pictures up and ready. But the building is a perfect rectangle, the lot is perfectly flat, everything is brown and black outside, and....well, I guess I'm a fan of idiosyncratic, interesting spaces. I LIKE it when vendors are all over the place, in odd corners. The Southeast Festival (near Asheville, NC), for example, is held in a huge agricultural expo hall -- with vendors stuffed into every square inch, strung along the upper, middle, and lower tiers like beads on strings.....very odd, very fun to navigate. More vendors in small stalls up the hill. The airport across the street. It makes for visual interest, atmosphere, surprise. So I'm glad the vendors are more comfortable. The festival also is getting both bigger and better year by year -- people should GO, and bring lots of money! But I wish the setting were more stimulating and less uniform. It's all oddly industrial. Exception: I almost ran over (and quickly photographed) a big ol' tractor in the parking lot. That kind of thing doesn't happen in Detroit.

On the way home, I noticed a perfect coincidence (I hope I'm wrong) between areas of Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan known to be heavily Republican and the ABSENCE of the signs that mark the projects funded by the Federal Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Goodness. If I'm right, that could mean that Those People don't want Obama to get credit for roadway improvements. I'm sure I'm wrong...nobody would do that MERELY for political gain (:

In Marshall, Michigan, I actually pulled off the road, thinking that I was maybe too tired to finish the drive.......5 hours on Friday, 5 hours on Saturday, 65-year-old bones. Both of the motels at that particular stop were full! A clear omen. So I went home.

More tomorrow when the photographs are available and when I've slept. svb