Summer dress

Fun to sew a new dress, this time using Japanese fabrics, from Kokka (Melody Miller's Ruby Star Rising collection). This dress has hidden interior pockets inside the large patch pockets. Dragon flies in the medallions on the front. It's 95 in the shade today, the perfect day to wear a new summer dress.

Testing

So far, so good. Plainweave, log cabin, and Rosepath samples.  I really thought I was going to thread up Goose-eye, but it came out Rosepath.

White and Black

Today it is clear blue skies, a cool north wind, and dry weather.   I'm looking at rosepath rag and yarn  samples, again, and planning a new black and white warp.  Also, I came home from my favorite fabric shop, Gayfeather, in Madison,  with a yard of a vintage print Liberty Cotton, and several yards of black-and-white check cotton/linen fabric.  Black coffee in my Moomin mug.  Happily, I'm feeling like my old self again.

Heat

Late afternoon in our house, the shade pulled to keep sun out of the dining room.  A cigar box smells dusty, and is the perfect metaphor for my brain.  Got any-thing? No. No-thing.

The old farm apron is my favorite cotton print, even if I don't feel like cooking.  I like its pocket, with the round ric rac trim. Coleslaw for supper, with a Bloody Mary. Lost kittens found napping near their big project, Hole to China.  Both are alarmed when Carl sets up a ladder to scrape and paint the peeling siding from past winters' ice dams.

Still feeling bored at the grocery, I see my friend and neighbor, Elizabeth. She said it's a distressing holiday so far.

She's been taking care of her neighbor's animals while they're gone.We are living through an epic magnitude of raccoons this summer. I read Sterling North's Rascal when I was 11, and for many years  wanted nothing more than a tame raccoon for a pet, and a tame crow to live in a belfry of a church next door.  I've always loved wildlife, and still do.  But, I've discovered, there is a them and us, when it comes to numbers.  A few lady bugs are charming, a wall full or a window full is a terrible situation for all of us.

Raccoons entered the chicken house of Elizabeth's neighbors, two nights in a row.  The first night 3 chickens were killed and maimed, the next night the rooster disappeared.  It was a bloody mess, she said, and there was a one-legged chicken that had to be killed. She had already trapped and killed 7 raccoons in her own yard.  To tell you the truth, she said, it's kind of depressing.  Boring seemed a better kind of hot summer day, actually. I didn't mention to her that someone had recently seen a mother skunk and a litter of babies crossing the road to her barn.

Cowbird

An especially handsome male cowbird was sitting in the tree near the footbridge. He had with him two light gray, slim female cowbirds. I don't know if cowbirds are polygamists. If there are birds that mate for life, mourning doves, geese, for example, then other marital arrangements could be possible in the bird world. Or, this little fellow is just exceptional.

His coloring is exceptional, a brown head, with a wreath of indigo around his chest and the top of his wings.  The rest of him, to his tail feathers, is a dark, ash gray. He was all the colors I was looking for.
I suppose I fell for him, too.

The scarf is made of unbleached and washed linen, and cotton, and silk. The weave is my summer favorite, Swedish myggtjäll, or mosquito net. The scarf is a simple, rustic check, and Japanese inspired. Fresh from the loom, it has a lot of body, but, as with all linen, will soften with time and wear.

Blue Bird and other signs

Have you heard that, once again, the world is due to end?  May 21, 2011 is Judgement Day. That's coming right up, but I feel that it's not likely to happen so soon, because, in a barn, in SW Wisconsin there is a small miracle. I've told just a few people about the new kitten I've been waiting for. Sometimes cats around here have noticeably big, fan-shaped feet, due to extra toes. I have acquired a strong desire to have one of these cats. I heard of a cat in the neighborhood that often has kittens with extra toes on their front paws.The cat-daddy is feral, and he's the one with the extra-toe genes. He comes around every spring, and this year he made his visit on schedule.

This must have been the longest gestation in cat history, but at last it's born. It was a 2-kitten litter, and just one kitten has extra toes--on each of its feet!  Four big paws!  It's mauve! I'm the first on the list, maybe the only one on the list, but the farmer's wife said I can have it.   It's just 2 weeks old, and its mother has it and the other kitten, without extraordinary feet, high up in a spidery hay mow. It takes a ladder to get up to find them. Just a few more weeks to wait, unless an owl, or some other mishap (end of the world?) comes along.

My old Mama Kitty hasn't heard  any of this news.  I'm going to call it Smoky. (What color is mauve anyway?)

Rag mad

More we're not out of the woods yet rag and yarn panels, in Rosepath. When I have woven enough of them I plan to sew them,  cushion covers, and a deerskin bottomed sack, probably a back pack. My fascination with thready, raggedy weaves isn't wearing off. I hope I never find my way out of this woods. (On a walk up the road today, I practiced a little skipping, which felt pretty good).

Black Bird

Snow is good weaving weather.  Black Bird scarf is my last on this warp, and  I'm  still crushing on Swedish Rosepath. 

uphill

The wild clematis is a little garland of puffs along the hill road. The woods on the side hill of the valley is not so leafy now, but the Witch Hazel is in bloom with its small yellow starry flowers.
I wish my weaving could merge into the rough fissured bark of the century (at least) white pine. I don't try to copy what I see. It's usually after I've woven something, that I see what I have been looking at.

Rags and Mushrooms

 Look what popped up under the spruce tree this week.  Could I eat them?  Or, dye with them?  Probably both, eat and die.

I'm weaving my favorites again,  a little bit of rag, a little bit of linen,  leaving the edges raw. They are  a set of cushion covers I'm designing for modern concrete benches.   Good textures to combine, smooth polished concrete, with rags and linen.

out of chaos

What my brain looks like, on the wall.  I look at other artists' inspiration boards and realize that most take down what they had up last, and assemble new things to look at.  I layer.  The first things were pinned here 10 years ago when we built my shop.  I want to see at a glance if I still care about the same things as I used to, and if I'm still on track.

Out of this scramble emerges some pretty orderly weaving, with organized color, and balanced designs.

Eating Bread and Honey

That would be me, like a queen in her parlor, eating bread and honey.  Mr. Pike, the beekeeper, delivered these  bottles of honey from the hives in my yard, gathered in the flowers in our fields and woods.  There's still quite a bit of honey left in the hives for the bees to use to get through the coming winter.

Scarf # 3 is drying on the line.   I'll call it Sugar Maple, for the color the maples are about to turn on the hill.  One more to make on this warp, but it will be back to the shadows with my normal nocturnal plan:  copper,  light olive green, dark orange and deep teal blue.