- Dyeing to peek

Well, I'm trying dyeing again, inspired by India Flint's Bundle Book (which I bought in digital form) ...

this time using 14" squares of unbleached cotton muslin soaked in store-bought soy milk (I blush), dried overnight, rinsed and spun through the washer until  just damp.

I laid various dyestuffs (listed below) across the middle of each muslin square ...

folded over one-third of the muslin and laid out a second layer of material ...

folded it over yet again ..

rolled snugly ...

then wrapped each bundle in cotton or wire (detailed below) ...

The dyestuffs I'm using this time are fresh rosemary (shown above), dried red and yellow onion skins (combined), chopped red cabbage, windfall lichen (Parmotrema austrosinense), mealy blue sage (wild Salvia farinacea) ...

and a combination of cultivated Salvia amistad and S. greggi from Don's garden beds ... 

I made three packets of each dyestuff, then wrapped them in either copper wire, steel wire or crochet cotton. 

The copper wire bundles went into a copper pot with untreated well water from our outdoor tap. The smell of sulfur from our 900' well is unbelievable and I'm hoping there will be a chemical reaction with the copper. After simmering the bundles for just over an hour some blue is starting to show ...

After a couple of hours, I'll put the copper bundles and the sulfur-rich steeping water into canning jars with used tea bags and seal them up.

The steel wire wrapped bundles have already been put into canning jars with boiling tap water, used tea bags and fine steel wool. However, after one hour the color got so dark (see below right) that I chickened out and removed the steel wool (leaving a small bit behind, no doubt).

Finally, the cotton wrapped bundles were put into a solution of boiling tap water and pickling alum (1 tsp. per canning jar) along with the obligatory tea bags, which are also starting to show color (below left) ...

Now the question is, can I keep my hands off of the dye trials for at least a week?

Fortunately, I have a plan. Having finished the kantha stitching on Triangulation ...

I'm now "design mending" (a Jude Hill term) by invisibly basting strips of cloth onto the back along the intersections since the original cloth weaving strips don't meet closely enough ...

I started design mending with dyed sheeting, then decided to switch over to muslin for the remainder

It's gonna take a while ...

The bottom shows a 1" strip of muslin invisibly basted across the length of the cloth
which will be the method used for the remainder of the design mending

But my reward for finishing will be the dye trial reveal. Motivation times two!

- Remembering to keep things in perspective: A matter of scale

Triangulation has passed the three-quarter mark, so I'm now squarely in the southwest ...

I belatedly realized that a scale might be useful. As near as I can figure, Triangulation comes in at 50 miles to the inch ...

making the entire cloth 1800 miles wide by 1100 miles high ... which sounds way more impressive than 36 inches by 22 inches.

It's all a matter of perspective, which has been much on my mind since today is the anniversary of my mother-in-law's passing on April 19, 2010.

I may have learned "Food is love" from my mom, but I learned how to be a grandmother from Betty May Angus Ackert, who practiced love unconditionally.  Her granddaughters were the brightest, most beautiful children on the planet and absolutely without fault in her eyes.

They loved her absolutely in return. And what child wouldn't love having a sleepover room, a kitchen window that doubled as a fast-food drive-in, a lovable golden retriever to snuggle, and visits to the dollar store for fashionable jewelry ...

I could always tell when the girls were on the phone with Grandma, who knew how to ask open-ended questions that triggered an animated retelling of whatever was uppermost on their minds. They knew she hung on their every word and the proof of their shared love was clear to see, even in their teenage eyes ...

I hope I can live up to her example ...

- (T)riveting results

I auditioned some trivets and tiles on the cheese grater cloth.

The first one was too tall ...

The second one was too wide ...

But the last one was just right ...

- Potholder play: What it became

Mo asked some leading questions about Saturday's post, which led me to conclude I wasn't done with Trial 1. In truth, the potholder was too thin to deflect heat, too small to be doubled up, and too gnarly around the edges, where the purple-y grey wool looked ghastly next to the orange linen. Not to mention that it shrank unevenly during laundering, making the whole thing a bit too skewed for my taste.

So I trimmed the potholder down as much as I could without cutting into the edge stitching. Then I tore into another piece of rust-dyed muslin, basted on two layers of harem cloth, and began to attach it to the linen side of the potholder  ..

Lest this seem an inordinate amount of attention to bestow upon a humble potholder, I would note that it is hopefully a record of process that will help me avoid similar mis-steps in the future. Well, some of them anyway.

After securing the rust-dyed cloth in the middle, I turned the edges and hemmed the new B-side (note that the piece is still a bit out of kilter, even after the edge trimming) ...

then finished it with kantha around the perimeter of the A-side ...

Even with eight layers, it's still too thin and too stiff to be a proper potholder, so it's being repurposed as a cloth version of a trivet for the dining room table (put in the Table Series in August 2015).

Oh, and did I mention that the rusted cloth was taken from a cheese grater?

I think I feel a series coming on ...

- Talking through the process: Potholder take 1

I've been enjoying the detailed process posts contributed by some of the KINDRED SPIRITS of late. So here's a detailed look at the first of the potholder trials (now the Table Series) promised in yesterday's post ... laundered, air-dried and trimmed ...

As usual, there were some learning opportunities. I began with a piece of felted wool skirt sandwiched in muslin, which I would modify in the future by enclosing the wool completely in the muslin to keep it from muddling the edge ...

Since I intended to add layers, invisible baste wasn't needed from a visual perspective, but I like the stability of a small backstitch so I worked a row of Jude's invisible baste on one side and then, because I also like to work from right to left, flipped the cloth over to stitch the return row, with this result (which reminds me of the handwriting practice paper from elementary school days) ...

I added a layer of lichen-dyed linen (it started out orange, the lichen contributed the rusty brown spots that are more visible further down) ...

and basted it down perpendicular to the first basting pass, making all the invisible baste stitches on the linen side, with the long basting stitches visible on the muslin side ...  

The final layer of rust-dyed muslin was invisibly basted into the middle layers so the stitches wouldn't show on the linen. Then I trimmed down the cloth to the desired size, although now I know to be more careful with measuring next time so I can leave the torn edges as is ...

I had a decision to make since the pattern in the rust-dyed cloth wasn't in line with the selvedges. I chose to do a discontinuous back stitch with two strands of floss following the rust lines rather than the grain of the fabric. And because I was working through five layers of cloth, I began to appreciate that the Japanese term "sashiko" translates as "little stabs" ...

It was at this point I discovered that the linen was curling along the edges ...

so I invisibly basted down the edge on the linen side, stitching only into the middle layers, then did a discontinuous backstitch with two strands of floss through all five layers around the edge of the cloth, also on the linen side ...

The cloth steadily became firmer with each additional layer and stitching pass, so I decided to stop at five layers. Since the hard-trimmed edges weren't very pleasing, I pinked them, thinking that would rough them up more than snipping through the edges might have ...

Then I ran the potholder through a blue jeans wash cycle to be sure it got plenty of agitation, with the final result pictured at the beginning of the post.

It's a bit thin and more puckery than I had hoped. And I suppose I could try adding more layers, but I want to see if the cotton diaper gives a better result before investing more time in this trial.

The good news is the potholder does fold nicely in half, so the plan at this point is to give it some real life testing. On the menu tonight: fresh asparagus from the farmers market, rotisserie chicken, and homemade bread.

Life is good.

- Searching for a solution: A potholder poser

I love this old potholder, but even after laundering it looks pretty sad ...

One of a pair, it's almost perfect: the size and the thickness fit my hand to a tee and it keeps the heat at bay when I'm slinging pans in the oven.  However, I've never been wild about the heavy binding. And so, as my potholders got shabbier and shabbier, I kept an eye out for replacements ... thick terry cloth cotton in just the right size without a heavy binding. No luck.

Then I decided to try making my own and bought some "metalized polyester" insulating material. Hmmm ... wasn't really thrilled about that. On a mission, I looked through my fabric stash to see what else was on hand and came up with a felted wool skirt and a cotton diaper (unused). 

It was a short leap to the idea of a competition to see which would work best ...

I decided to use Japaese zokin (dust cloths composed of layers stitched together boro-style) as a model, which would eliminate the edge binding. Having made unbound burp cloths for the latest grandchild last summer, I checked in with my daughter who reports that the edges have held up well to repeated laundering. They have also held their shape better than the earlier bibs and burp cloths that were made with a turned edge ...

 Of course, those were machine sewn, so it will be interesting to see how hand-sewn edges hold up. 

Turning my thoughts to the outer layers, I decided to try rust-dyed cotton versus lichen dyed linen ...

But before I go too much further, I'm doing a reality check. Does anyone out there have any enlightening experiences to share?

- Remembering

My mom left the world seven years ago on April 7, 2008 and though the ache of that loss has long since receded, still I found myself looking through things today ... remembering.

In this picture of the two of us dated 1958, she is younger than my daughters are now and I am the same age as Jackson and Griffin ...

I still have some of her clothes, mostly skirts that I wear less and less these days, and her jacket that I wear whenever the temperature drops below fifty ...

her quilt, first written about here ...

and the sampler I made for my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary that hung in their dining room on Shelter Island until my dad passed away in 2012 ...

                                     

I uncapped a bottle of moisturizer, given to me by my dad when I helped go through mom's things and was transported by the scent that was a part of her for as long as I can remember ...

I also found my planner for 2008 --a year filled with sorrow and joy-- with lesson plans for school and wedding plans for our daughters interspersed with questions for doctors and lists of meals to cook and freeze at Shelter Island ... the last letter from my mom, when the neurological decline that had begun two years earlier was accelerating --stealing away her ability to speak and write and walk, but not her mind-- in which she wrote prophetically, "I'm not a very good patient and want to go out on my own" ... and the eulogy I delivered at her memorial service less than six months later ...

Re-reading those words, I realized once again it was cooking for others that was the essence of my mom and continues to be the best part of me. A mantra to live by: Food is love.

- Way finding: Triangulation continues

Triangulation definitely needed a compass rose and I also wanted to put a sun symbol over New Mexico. In the end, I melded the two notions into one ...

Sketched in permanent ink, it wasn't perfect, but I'm getting better at accepting that. 

So now that I've reached New Mexico, I'm pondering whether or not to use the Desert Sand DMC floss I picked out ...

Finally, having passed the half-way mark in Kantha stitching, I decided to try draping the cloth, which is really too large for a flat-on-the-floor shot ...

To be continued ...

- Easter traditions: Old and new

Lapsed churchgoer that I am, I feel slightly hypocritical participating in religious holidays, but when it comes to passing on traditions to kids I'm all in.

Last year we were invited to an Easter potluck and were delighted to be included in the festivities again this year. I sewed up some goodie bags for the kids, labeling them with pictures from last year's egg hunt (amazing how much they've changed) ...

And Don cooked up a wine bottle label using Kendall's "Stay Cheese-y" sign-off from the Antonelli's Cheese Shop newsletter ...

Since it's a potluck, I'm baking Simnel Cake, first written about in this post and finally photographed for posterity ...

Don also cooked up a smoked turkey, which we'll carve tomorrow to put on a triple-batch of warm Apple Onion Walnut Muffins pictured here.

Guess we're ready to let the good times (and the Easter eggs) roll ...