Blue hour, Pink Sky

I wove while it snowed all afternoon. Thinking about cooking supper, there was 5 minutes of this. 

How I Celebrated MLK Day

I look out at the woods and an idea comes to my mind's eye.  Once I have a visual thought like that, even lazy as I am, I can't resist it.  What would it look like if I put some weaving out there in the snowy woods today? I have to see it.  I take some rag fragments I found in a drawer out to the woods, and put them in some branches.  It looks all right, but here's another version, a longer story.

Monday.  Martin Luther King Day.  We had our first wintry snow fall.  I decided to go on a rag bombing walk up to the quarry, with some rag scraps, needles, threads, my new camera.  I picked some trees to bomb, sort of back from the road, and started in.  As I edged my way into the thorns and bushes, I found the trees I'd picked from the road, to sew my rag weaves to, were actually across a ditch, on a ridge in front of another much deeper ditch.  I decided to take a few pictures of my weaves suspended on branchlets,  to test the idea.  I did notice then that I'd worn rather smooth bottom boots for this outing, and the upshot was a sudden downslide into the deeper ditch, protecting my camera with my elbow as I plunged down.  Ouch.  Ouch. Ouch.

I came to rest feeling hurt.  My knee hurt, my elbow hurt. But my camera was ok.  I crawled back out on my hands and knees, back up to the road before I noticed my face felt strangely empty where my glasses should have been. 

" Funny, I thought I was wearing my glasses when I came out here."

 So, I crawled back out again, to where I fell, and searched around in the snow, but couldn't find them.   I headed back down to the shop, with my rag bombing kit, to see if I'd left them safely behind.  No glasses.  This time I put on my good kicks, black suede boots with deep waffles, left behind by my daughter a few years ago,  and heavy gloves.  I hiked back up the hill, and back to the ditch-ravine,  back to the spot where I came to rest, and searched again, and this time I found them, buried. 

No photos were taken of my accident.  I thought I'd go back out again today,  to sew my rags around my chosen trees, but now it's snowing horizontally.  Miraculously, my knee and elbow are feeling fine.

Another thought came to me while floundering around out in the woods: I realized how much I love Martin Luther King, Jr.  He ignited the imagination of oppressed people, he shared a vision that compelled them to unite and take action. Together they had power they'd never before imagined.  I get it.  He was an artist and a great socialist, and my hero.

At work

Our sturdy little town plow truck does it again.  I'm at work on a new scarf warp, calculating and winding on to my little Norwood studio loom.  The threads this time are silk, 16/2 Bockens Swedish cotton, and tencel.  The design, Finnish Birds Eye, a diamond twill.   My spool rack is the side of our old baby crib.

Black Bird

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

Spring Backward, Wisconsin!

 

This is a dark spring, so far.  Complacency is out the window. Newly elected hard line, Tea Party Governors, in midwestern states are vandalizing the institutions we crafted to protect our  resources:  our people, our land, our water. Just two months in office, and our new Governor, Scott Walker,has threatened most of the citizens of  Wisconsin with teacher lay-offs, loss of the right to collective bargaining, loss of health care, and using our National Guard against us, in case we're unruly and protest.

But, the banks and Wallstreet have already bled this particular turnip dry.  And, they got away with  the pot of gold, too.  The working class has turned its pockets inside out already.  The poor, elderly and disabled are just not that lucrative a source of money, unless you take away their medicaid,  their home health nurses working for $9 / hr.   Our Governor has already handed out $117 million  in tax cuts to corporations and wealthy backers.    His great political miscalculation is to think that the teachers, nurses, lunch ladies, etc, will be the ones to pay for it.  Over 100,000 outraged people turned out daily over 3 weeks  in Madison, and across the state, to protest. They were non-violent protests, that felt more like a 4th of July parade, but they were deadly serious. 

Dark,  maybe, but also Spring, because we are standing up to fight back, and more than that, we are winning.  After all, we are people of the Heartland, and this new legislation is nothing if not  heartless.  When I woke up  one  morning this week to go visit our State Senator, Dan Kapanke, a supporter of the Governor's bill, at our courthouse, it was hard to think what to write on my sign. Riot!  was the only word that came to mind.  No wonder I accidentally cut  through 8 (!) warp threads when I got back to the loom.

Above images:  a soft blizzard at midnight, pink-nosed and pink-toed, possum in the birdfeeder, and weaving linen on the barn loom