Look What the Cat Dragged in, Phase III

Several years ago I documented our cat Stella Luna’s odd obsession with bringing wads of dried grass into the house and depositing them in various locations. Later, her interest morphed into transferring gloves, hats and socks we kept in a basket by the door to other parts of the house.

In the last few years, she’s pretty much limited her artistic efforts to a carefully placed toy mouse or catnip pillow, announcing each installation with a forceful yowl. This activity invariably takes place shortly after her staff has gone to bed for the night. We drift off to sleep mildly curious to see what awaits us in the morning.

As she did earlier in her artistic career, Stella’s now exploring another new medium. She’s been working with fabric lately, using scraps and strips from my work table to articulate her own creative vision. Frankly I don’t think it’s as strong as her earlier work, but at least somebody in this family is putting in studio time.

The Pattern from Hell

Many months ago I picked up a pattern for a multi-pocketed totebag designed for schlepping crafts projects around. It had loads of compartments and specialized holders for knitting needles or paint brushes and other accoutrements. When I finally started the project I was appalled at how badly the instructions were written, with ambiguous and unhelpful illustrations, missing steps, measurement errors, and -- my pet peeve -- an inefficient workflow overall. The tech writer in me wanted to redo the entire thing.

An inexperienced sewer would have thrown up her hands in frustration. Instead, I grumbled my way through the process, making notes and drawing arrows and asterisks for the order in which I wanted to proceed. What a hassle. I had to force myself to work on it, a sure sign that something's wrong. But I'm actually rather pleased with the result, and now I know that I'm perfectly capable of designing and drafting my own patterns, duh, at least for a stupid totebag.

Subtle

No, I'm not referring to Sarah Palin's performance (and that's what it was, in the sense of scripted and theatrical) in her debate with Joe Biden last night.

I've had this quilt on my design wall since last spring. Now that fall is here, I was determined to git 'er done. I posted about my original inspiration and design process here. My hangup was that the brownish squiggly fabric that I'd conceived as a unifying element just wasn't strong enough to do the job. I tried shadowing with fabric paints; still not assertive enough. (This is a very busy quilt!) Eventually, over the course of several sleepless 3 AMs, it came to me: dark organza.

The penultimate version is on the left, the finished product on the right. Unlike Biden and Palin, you can barely distinguish them, especially on a computer screen (though you can click the image to enlarge it), but to me, the sheer overlay makes a huge difference. I had just enough yardage from a natural-dyeing workshop (Was it walnut? Logwood with an iron mordant? Who knows?) to lay over most of the surface, quilt roughly along the seams of the problematic brown squiggle fabric, and then clip away the excess. Here's a detail of the overlaid and stitched-down organza:


I'm pleased with the result, and glad to get another UFO out of my workspace. It looks like fall is here for sure, and with it, quilting weather.

Breaking Through

I've had this piece on my design wall since early March -- literally six months ago, oy -- and finally finished it a couple of days ago. I began by pawing through my bag o' remnants, mostly commercial fabrics, pulled some out, arranged them by color and value, and strip-pieced a series of scraps into a long, meandering ribbon. Then I added the spiky shapes on the sides, piecing some into the background, and fusing others. The paler spikes on the bottom are sheers -- plant-dyed organza and a cut-up polyester chiffon scarf (thanks, Mom) -- that I appliqued on, last thing.

I still haven't decided which perspective to take; it could be a plant growing out of the ground or sunlight shining through a slot canyon. My husband suggested the name Breaking Through, which I like because it works either way. It also symbolizes for me the political struggle that's been going on in this country for most of this year; I hope it'll prove prophetic and that we'll truly break through into the light, come November.

Jer has been gung-ho about this quilt since the beginning, and had it up on the wall behind his comfy chair half an hour after I finished sewing. It's sort of a companion piece to Occasional Sunbreaks, which hangs across the room.

Net arts, Ne tarts, Knee tarts, Neat Arts... Netarts

Netarts (KNEE-tarts) is on the Oregon coast, just west of Tillamook. My art quilt group spent last weekend there on its annual retreat. We rented a couple of condos right on the ocean; the photo illustrates our not-too-shabby view. Both Gerrie and Terry blogged about our doings in great detail, thus saving me the effort, thank you very much. They both got amusing shots of moi, getting in touch with my internal Resourceful Pioneer Woman, the morning that the power went out. I've posted a mere three dozen or so beach-and-environs photos on my Flickr site.

One morning, we visited the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center. Both Terry (in red, next to me) and Gerrie (in blue, on the right) have pieces in the current show, It's Good to be Green. Here we are gathered around Terry's entry. I like the way her gardener-girl seems to be part of our group.

Of course we made more than one stop at the Tillamook Cheese Factory, as documented on those other blogs, for our traditional ice cream lunch and discount dairy product shopping. This stunning example of cheddar-craft stopped me in my tracks. Tillamook: No Country for Vegans.

Here's another work of art, the dinner Chef Jerub prepared the evening I got home: Chicken in puff pastry and asparagus with a creamy pesto sauce. Yum.

I have not been not busy

This is going to be one of those catch-all, catch-up posts. Jer and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time, considering that it's still winter, in the backyard. We've been pacing out the configuration of the new deck, putting down (and repositioning) spare bricks on the so-called lawn to try to get a sense of the outline, switching the hot tub from the east side to the west side of the yard, figuring out where the privacy screen needs to be, and how high, and where the non-deck paths want to meander, and how wide they have to be to accomodate, say, a loaded wheelbarrow. This morning we met with Jim, our Deck Guy. This evening, we got a PDF of his antepenultimate semifinal plan. It looks good, oboy.

Here's a pic of my majestic, towering Portland Marathon tree, on which I had to perform an emergency transplant lest the hot tub (see toward the end of my March 7 post) roll over it and crush it to fragrant smithereens. With any luck, she won't have to be uprooted again when the deck crew and their lumber and tools show up.

Much of last weekend was spent prepping and painting exterior window frames. Once the old aluminum storm windows were gone, we were left with some exposed and highly visible areas dating back, I assume, to 1954, when the house was built. According to the archeological evidence recently unearthed, it was light green with an unsettling bluish tinge. Covering dull, chipped old paint with a coat or two of fresh semigloss has to be one of the most satisfying activities ever. It didn't feel like a strenuous effort at the time, but both Jer and I were aching and exhausted by the end of each day. We haven't yet confronted the bedroom windows on the south side of the house, which will require a serious ladder and perhaps some paid professional help.

Somewhere in there, we managed to finish the last bottle of Casa Jereva Chardonnay. In 2004, when we were still living in coastal California, we and a group of friends organized a winemaking co-op. We ended up with about 15 cases of various reds (pinot noir, zinfandel, syrah, cabernet sauvignon and merlot) and a couple of cases of Chardonnay, all of which we had to pay to move to Oregon. Bad planning, but no way around it. The labels (stock Avery neon; can you tell?) feature a photo-rendition of our Sea Ranch house.

Making the char was not a straightforward process. We tweaked the yeast hither and yon to get to exactly the right percentage of residual sugar. Bottling was a comedy of errors; due to some siphon mishaps, a substantial percentage of the bottles ended up with a cloudy sediment (we tried to drink those first and save the clearer ones for company). Jer and I saved back a couple of bottles out of curiosity to see how it would age. The verdict: Mmmm, not all that well. It was effervescent, which indicated, to me, that it might have been something else again (not necessarily something wonderful) a few years down the road. And now it's gone.

Oh yeah; I've been quilting. Years ago, before we moved here, I selected and Ziplocked (tm) fabrics for a table runner. I was intrigued by a traditional quilt pattern called the Ribbon block. Since we no longer have a dining table of runner-worthy dimensions, I decided to turn it into a table pad for the kitchen, similar to the coffee table pad we put down when we're eating dinner in front of the living room TV. I'd forgotten how tedious traditional quilting can be. I'm just glad it's done.

Just this afternoon, though, I finished piecing a much more interesting project, which started as an effort to use up fragments of fabric from my scrap drawer. I like the contrast of a rainbow-y gradient against very dark values. I did something similar with Occasional Sunbreaks. Now that I think of it, the bright, strong shapes against inky blueness thing goes back to my Bamboo/Midori series. I'm very happy with how this one's shaping up. It still needs layering, quilting and finishing, but the basic idea is there.

I uploaded a dozen or so pix, mostly from our daily walks around the 'hood, to Flickr. I've just downsized -- at least I think I have -- the default file size in my new camera; these images are ridiculously large.

On a totally different level, I went to a talk by Richard Powers last Thursday. He's a remarkable author and, as it turns out, as articulate, erudite and funny in person as on the printed page. He spent about 45 minutes reading a new short story aloud, then answered questions and, I guess, stayed to sign books and stuff. The line was long; I was hungry; I left. I used to seek out celebrity encounters (within reason of course). For the last few years, though, I've avoided most "meet the artist" opportunities because I've fully internalized the realization that autographs from strangers are pointless, their value as artifacts aside. Plus, it seems so bizarre to try to think of something original to say that will bond you, instantly, to the celeb, identify you as their biggest fan, or whatever. But I do admire this man and his writing.

We've checked a couple of excellent restaurants off our "to try list", too. On consecutive nights we went to Tabla, on NE (barely) 28th with our foodie friend Adele, and to Wildwood on NW 21st with Steve and Anita Kaplan, their lovely daughter Zoe and her husband Matt. Crossing them off the list doesn't mean we won't go back soon.

And with that double negative to bracket the one in the title, I think I'll sign off.

A year of quilts, for what it's worth

In the spirit of summing-up that seems inevitable at the turn of the year, here's what I accomplished on the quilting front in 2007. I like the idea of collaging my efforts -- a virtual quilt of quilts -- which I appropriated from Terry.

Quantity-wise, it was a meager year. The strippy quilt in the upper right corner and the one I call Infinite Africa, in the lower left, were UFOs (UnFinished Objects) from years ago that just needed quilting. All I did with the bed-size Double Irish Chain was sew the blocks together; it still hasn't been quilted, and this might not be its year either. That brings my output of totally-new pieces down to a rousing three.

Aesthetically, well, I'd say the year was mixed. The translucent number on the upper left I count as an interesting failure; I've blogged about it here. Crop Circles, on the lower right, was an experiment in using natural-dyed wool. I was horrified when I saw it hanging at the Columbia Stitchery Guild annual show; the overhead lighting was not kind. I've since augmented the hand-stitching in the four main panels with heavy channel-quilting (shown here) and I'm much happier with it now. The only piece I'm truly happy with is Occasional Sunbreaks. I see a few things I wish I'd done differently, but I hung it in the living room, which should tell you something.

So, onward. This year I'm going to try the deadline approach. By the 15th of every month, I intend (ha) to have at least one new quilt, however tiny, finished or near completion. The ides of January beckon.

Back in the studio, finally

One indication of how little time I've spent in the studio lately is the number of podcasts queued up in my iTunes library. I subscribe to This American Life, Livewire! and The Writer's Almanac, among others, and I listen while I work. When I'm feeling productive artistically, I'm almost up to date. As of a couple of weeks ago, I was months -- nay, entire seasons -- behind.

But I did finally attack one of the fabric pieces I discharged in Jeannette's workshop several months ago. What I did originally was apply a thickened bleach solution to a piece of salmon-colored fabric using squeeze bottle and bubblewrap. It was purely an experiment; I didn't think much about the composition at all. Later, at home, I brushed the fabric here and there with a dilute solution of turquoise Procion dye. Dang; blew it. I hated the results. But I liked the color combination, and decided to use the discharge pattern as a loose guide for some reverse applique. (For the non-quilters: applique = layering a cut-out shape of another fabric on top of the main piece and sewing it on. Reverse applique = layering a chunk of different fabric under your main piece, stitching an outline of the desired shape on top, then taking a sharp pair of scissors and skillfully cutting away the top layer within the stitching lines to reveal the underlying fabric.) I enjoy reverse applique because the result is always somehow surprising.

So I seamed a piece of medium-turquoise hand-dyed Kona cotton to a piece of dark turquoise silk that used to be part of a jacket lining (thanks again, Francine) and used this as the backing fabric. Some freemotion quilting, some snipping, and... it looked like a dropcloth that had been folded down the middle while wet, then unfolded. Better vertically, maybe, kind of a sky-sea suggestion? Nah, not really. I considered overlaying portions with organza or another translucent fabric to get some movement, some kind of interest, going. Or maybe chopping it up, just treating the fabric as background, and piecing it together with a strong design element -- for some reason I'm picturing a heavily skewed X shape -- in the foreground.

But a comment from my amazingly astute husband led to the realization that some dark blue spots needed to migrate to the lighter side, and vice versa. So I patched additional fragments of the silk and cotton on the back of the cotton and silk sides, respectively, then cut through, selectively, to the third level. Subtle differences, but much more interesting, and the horizontal orientation works better now, I think.

I took the piece to Jeannette's house the other morning -- she'd invited the OCAC critique group she spawned a couple of years ago for tea and pastries and to meet the lovely and talented Ailie Snow. Surprise, my meager show-and-tell received considerable praise and comment. Definitely horizontal, keep the rough edges, and hey, look what happens (I'd already noticed) when you hold it up to the light! It reminds me of one of those heavily embroidered Indian fabrics with tiny round mirrors worked in.

The current plan is to back the piece with organza or something equally sheer. (I've targeted as raw material a huge but unspectacular gauzy shibori experiment; yep, I have a rotary cutter and I'm not afraid to use it). That way it will meet the Official Definition of a quilt (three layers held together by stitching). More important, the backing will help stabilize the patchwork of fabrics on the reverse, not to mention hiding some of the ugly quilting stitches.

Then I guess I'll hang it in a window. With light shining through it, it actually looks kinda swell.

Garden Party

Last night we attended a dinner/art opening at the Japanese Garden. I'd gotten tickets because the thought of a summer evening in that exquisite location sounded really appealing. It was a pleasant enough affair, with a jazz trio, friendly folks to chat with, good wine, and a light, Asian-inflected supper in a tented area adjacent to the Pavilion. I ran into fellow STASH member Linda, an unexpected bonus. The view east, across the city and toward the Cascades, was spectacular, as always. What a spot, as Jerry likes to say.

I was surprisingly put off, though, by the gathering as such. I hated the fact that a crowd of people were eating, drinking and generally yakking it up in "my" tranquil green garden, my special retreat, my single favorite place in Portland. I had no idea I'd react in such a proprietary way. I'd never been to the Garden this late in the day; I was looking forward to it, and I'd brought my camera thinking the evening light might show me something new. There was no evening light to speak of -- it drizzled, off and on, all day and into the night -- but the Garden was still beautiful.

I felt better after we left the party for a while and took a short walk to the waterfall and koi pond. And I did buy some Art, a piece by Jan Rentenaar. It's a tiny ceramic sculpture of Usagi, the rabbit who lives on the moon. Here he is posed on some appropriate fabric from my stash.

Speaking of small creatures, China Rose has been particularly nesty recently. I just posted three more "awww...." shots on Flickr, for you cat people, starting here.

And speaking of art, I've had fabric on my design wall for the last few weeks, but it's been too hot and/or I've been too distracted and/or uninspired for any compelling ideas to emerge. What I am going to tackle, maybe even this afternoon, is a quite traditional ribbon-block table mat (think of a single large placemat). I'd set aside my fabric selection for this project years ago, before we even had a yellow-and-green kitchen. We have two sets of purple napkins, which will tie in well.

Sometimes it helps to work on something straightforward and mundane while the more interesting projects percolate in the subconscious. That's my theory, anyway, and I'm stickin' to it. It couldn't possibly be that I don't have a single creative idea left in my head.

Lawn time comin'

Work got underway this week on transforming our scrabbly front lawn into some kind of horticultural paradise, or at least an attractive garden with interesting and sustainable plants. Here's how it looked at the end of the day yesterday. The new path defines the route that most people already take to and from our house. It'll be flagstone, and the pavement in front of the stairs has been stained a subtle terra cotta to go with the warm colors of the stone. The project will probably still be in high gear when we leave for Kauai this weekend; our friend who's house-sitting will have a front-row seat as the landscaping drama continues to unfold. All going well, Jer and I will return from the Garden Isle to a new garden of our own.

Speaking of tropical flora, a particularly weird and gangly rescue cactus I took off a friend's hands at Sea Ranch has bloomed spectacularly, proof that the sun does shine in Portland.

And speaking of vacations in Paradise, I've been meaning to blog about my soujourn on the coast a couple of weeks ago with five of my art quilter friends. It was new territory for me -- Oceanside, OR, a few miles from Tillamook -- and I really enjoyed seeing the ocean again, as well as getting better acquainted with these interesting and creative women. I posted some of my artsy beach photos on Flickr, but I can't add much to Gerrie's and Terry's excellent accounts of the weekend itself.

Crop Circles and UFOs

So here's the art (remember art?) I've been working on lately. I finished the piece I blogged about last month, doing a ton of machine-quilting to begin with, while contemplating how on earth to tackle those four big blanks in the center. After a couple of false starts and do-overs, the pattern emerged: Crop circles. So that's what I'm calling it. You can see the hand and machine stitching I did by clicking on the photo to the left to enlarge it. Ditto with the detail shots.

I unearthed a fragment of striped Kaffe Fassett fabric that I thought would be perfect for the binding (I love binding with stripes) -- maybe a tad too bright, though I figured I could get away with it. Unfortunately, that fragment -- no more than 2" x6" -- was all I had. It's been discontinued, natch. But the Glorious Color web site still lists the stock number (NS-17, if you're curious), and with that I had a hope of Googling a source. Maybe some little fabric shop, somewhere in cyberspace, still had a supply. Yup; found it. But when they went to look for it in their brick-and-mortar store, it turned out they were out of stock, too. No, wait; they had a few fat quarters left, though it might not be quite the same color. A different dye lot, perhaps; a shade more muted, for sure -- and of course, perfect for my binding. Here's a shout-out to Mama's Log House Quilt Shop in Huntington, Arkansas. Lordy, I love the web.

Speaking of crop circles, I'm determined to deal with my UFOs (unfinished objects) this year. This last photo is the "after" of a quick-and-dirty quiltlet (maybe 15" x 18") I did several years ago to be sure I had the basics of fusing down before a workshop with Melody Johnson. I didn't put much effort into the composition, to put it mildly. So I fused on a few more shapes here and there, overlaid a couple of areas with scraps of dyed and discharged organza, and quilted the beejeezus out of the sucker (as we ladies say around the sewing circle). It's more presentable than it was when I started, which isn't saying a whole lot.

Doing the "Artist's Statement" is Less Fun than Doing the Art

I'm planning to enter a couple of pieces in the Columbia Stitchery Guild's annual show next month. They require an artist's statement, which I know some people dread and hate to do. But I approached the task confidently; I am, after all, a professional writer and editor. I figured it would take 15 minutes at most to string together some art-speak BS and ship it off. It turned out to be a lot harder than I'd imagined. To begin with, it's a pretty ambitious theme: Who you are, what inspires you, what your work represents. You don't want to come off as foolish or pretentious. You try to avoid clichés and pat phrases. You aim to sound creative and original because you are, after all, an Artist.

What I submitted is true (write about what you know), concrete (don't tell; show) and coherent (first person narrator, minimal artsy jargon). I feel more secure about my writing than I do about my art. Here it is. But dang... how did all those passive constructions get by the editor? And I see I used the word "gravitate" twice, which is once too often. As we say in our household, "the editur never sleeps." But sometimes she nods off a bit.

My work is inspired by the natural world in all its manifestations, and by human-built structures that resolve into interesting abstractions -- in other words, by anything that catches and holds my eye. The pictures in my “ideas” file range from Hubble telescope images of towering galactic clouds to electron-microscope photographs of cells and tissues. I carry a camera almost everywhere to capture the center of a flower, the veins in a leaf, a silhouette of tree branches against the sky, a pattern of cracks in a crumbling wall, moss on bricks, peeling paint, the geometry of windows and roof-lines.

As a journalist, I was trained to “get it right.” Writing fiction was difficult, because it meant giving myself permission to make things up. As a visual artist, realizing that my landscapes didn’t have to be literal -- that I could take liberties with how objects really looked, rearrange them, add elements that weren’t really there, play fast and loose with the “facts,” abstract-ify and invent -- was a profound and liberating revelation.

I gravitate to hand-dyed fabrics in part because they don’t impose (although they sometimes suggest) an agenda. I’m also drawn to the ethic of re-use, recycle and re-purpose, which lies at the heart of the quilting tradition. Several of my pieces incorporate worn denim, suede from a much-loved jacket, or damask from a family tablecloth. I enjoy altering commercially-printed fabrics, making them more my own, through discharging, overdyeing, painting or printing. Recently I’ve been experimenting with wool, which takes plant-based dyes beautifully, adds textural interest and is soft and fun to work with.

A given piece typically draws on a combination of construction techniques, including appliqué, reverse appliqué, and piecing. My decisions are based on structural integrity, aesthetics, and the simple matter of getting the job done. I often lie awake at 3 AM mulling design options and puzzling over the practicalities of assembly. I conceived my first wool hanging, for instance, in terms of reverse appliqué rather than piecing, primarily because I was concerned about the bulk that might result from sewing wool to wool. But the material proved surprisingly malleable under the needle, I liked the look of the resulting seams, and I ended up piecing more than I thought I would. In general, I gravitate toward piecing as a construction method. I appreciate the nod to traditional quilting, the reminder that I am working with fabric rather than some other medium, and the element of discipline, and perhaps left-brainedness, it imposes.

What I'm working on now

I wanted to do something with those luscious wools I cooked up at the OCAC natural dyes workshop before they acquired that aura of "too special to cut into." The soft yellows, greens and browns reminded me of a photo I clipped from the paper several months ago and stuck in my "inspirations" file. It's an aerial view of fields separated into quadrants, really just a simple four-patch, but very textural. So I started with that idea and then began improvising, using a combination of piecing and reverse applique. The blacky-gray and dark green strips are, respectively, hand-dyed by moi and hand-dye-look commercial cottons.

This is a much more muted palette than I typically use. I thought at first it needed a touch of lime green (doesn't everything?) to zing it up. But what it really wanted was some of the lovely soft brazilwood red wool I'd dyed at the workshop.

It still needs quilting to bring it to life. I'm thinking of doing some seed stitching with variegated perle cotton (I have a skein in colors that would coordinate perfectly). Regular machine quilting would probably be swallowed up in the loft of the wool, though it might add some interesting surface texture.

I'm not sure it still reminds me of fields; something about it also suggests media -- four TV screens or computer monitors, with a border of slides, photo negatives or perhaps movie film -- though I would've chosen entirely different colors if I were doing a "media" quilt. Oh well; it'll probably tell me what it wants to be during the quilting.

Double Irish Chain

Five or six years ago, I won my quilt guild's Block of the Month raffle. You get one chance for each block you submit; I made two, and ended up with mine and everybody else's -- 22 blocks in all, almost enough for a queen-sized quilt. The pattern is called Double Irish Chain. I'm not much into traditional quilting these days, but the compulsive, checking-items-off-lists part of me was whispering insistently "Finish it!"

That's easier said than done; "finishing it" involved piecing two additional blocks, which was insanely tedious. NPR, my default studio sound track, barely put a dent in my boredom; I had to resort to my iPod and full-out rock 'n' roll. Then I had to sew the blocks together, four across and six down, lining up all those tiny squares along the edges. Matching seams and corners is exacting enough when you're piecing your own work, but each quilter interprets a standard 1/4-inch seam somewhat differently. Ergo, a 15-inch block might actually measure anywhere from, say, 14-1/2, if you're generous with your seam allowance, to 16 inches if you're skimpy. Reconciling the individual variations means ending up with seams that are stretched in some places and wavy in others. No matter how much "easing" you do, some squares just won't line up. There's a reason I don't do much traditional quilting anymore.


But the worst is over. Too late, I realized that one contributor made a big mistake in assembling her block. There it is, the only one with a tiny white square surrounded by blues, just to the left of center. If I'd noticed in time, I would've moved it to a less conspicuous spot. Oh well; I remind myself that quilting is a folk art and imperfections add character. I was such a novice when I acquired these blocks that the possibility that someone else might actually have put theirs together incorrectly never entered my mind.

Now that I step back and look at the top, it's actually an intriguing pattern with a lot more interest than I expected, thanks largely to the various contributors' fabric choices, their individual interpretations of "medium" and "dark" blue. I'm thinking it wants a triple border in different shades of blue. That'll go fairly quickly, once I get in the mood to sew something mindless. I have plenty of blues in my stash, and matching seams won't be an issue.

The big issue is how to quilt it. A queen-sized quilt is at the outer limits of what my sewing machine (and its operator) can handle, though it's not completely out of the question. I'm certainly not going to hand-quilt it, not in this lifetime, anyway. I know I could shop it out to someone with a long-arm machine, but I'm resisting the idea because then it won't be 100% "mine".

I'm delaying the quilting decision for now. We really don't need another queen-sized quilt. But I don't want to give it away, since it's a keepsake from my old guild, and so many of the signed blocks are from good friends without whom I wouldn't have gotten sucked into quilting in the first place. I'm considering alternative uses. Shower curtain? Room divider? Table cloth? This is so not a crisp blue-and-white house. A friend suggested overdyeing it (light green or violet might work), which I thought was a brilliant idea, but it seems sacrilegious, somehow. I'm mulling the possibilities.

Dyeing the way you live

I spent most of the weekend at the Oregon College of Arts & Crafts, immersed up to my elbows in Judilee Fitzhugh's workshop on one-pot natural dyeing. "One-pot" means that the entire process -- cooking up the dyestuff (usually plant material), mordanting, and dyeing -- happens in the same pot. It's easier and less messy, in some ways, than Procion (tm) dyeing, and generally less toxic, though it takes more prep and the results are less predictable. The leaves, stems and flowers of the same plant might all yield different colors; time of year and water source figure in as well.

A mordant, for those of you who haven't been hanging out around the dyepots, is a substance that helps bind the dye to the fabric (though not all dyestuffs require the extra help). Simply using an aluminum, copper or iron pot will often provide enough mordant to do the job. We used powdered alum, as well as a copper vat and a nicely-rusting iron pot. Different mordants skew the results toward darker or brighter shades; iron, for instance, "saddens" or grays the color. (This process goes back to medieval times, and some of the terminology, wonderfully, does, too.)

An amazing array of vegetable matter will yield worthwhile dyes. Queen Anne's lace, dahlias, daffodils, rhododendrons, manzanita and madrone are all good dyestuffs. There are dozens of books on the subject; I picked up a lot of information (some of it contradictory) browsing through Judilee's collection. You can dye with turmeric, saffron or annatto -- which has been moldering in my spice collection for years -- rhubarb leaves, which are poisonous when ingested, red cabbage, spinach or chard, and of course coffee grounds or old, cold tea. Hey, throw it in your dye vat before you put it in your compost bin!

For the workshop, though, we used three colorific crowd-pleasers that come pulverized and pre-packaged: osage orange, logwood and brazilwood. They tend toward yellow, purple and red, respectively. We also stewed up some walnut hulls (brown) and a mess' o' Japanese knotweed (red-brown). I even brought in some of those hateful spiky seedballs from my sweetgum trees, hoping to find some redeeming value in them. Nah.

Judilee mixed up some freeze-dried indigo, by popular request, just to have on hand. The proximity of a vat of indigo, ready to go, is very alluring, and I ended up with more blue fabric than I'd intended. We also used the indigo to overdye some of our yellows to a lovely green. Ironically, despite the grass-stained clothing of our childhood, not many dye plants yield a good clear green.

There were only three of us in the workshop, me and two women named Amy, which made it easy for Judilee; she already knew me, so everyone else had to be Amy. A class this small gave us all room to experiment, ask questions and compare results, and made it so much less of a hassle to find space to work and to hang dripping pieces of fabric. And it was quiet. It felt luxurious. On Friday in particular, when it rained hard all day, it was lovely to stand over a steaming dye vat, thinking that I had nothing to do at that particular moment other than what I was already doing.

Anyway, we dyed a variety of silks, from organza to dupioni (yum), plus some wool that I'd bought at Mill Ends and shared around (that's the wool hanging to dry in my laundry room at home). I dyed the rest of the cream-colored, rose-patterned damask tablecloth that I used last year in my Mom Quilt. One of the Amys brought in hemp, which took the dye well, too. By the end of the class, each of us had an enviable stash of fabrics in a range of gorgeous, lush colors, as well as some yarn and thread that we'd wound and dipped, plus a few skeins that Judilee had prepared for us.

Weeks ago, when I registered for the workshop, I couldn't see myself stewing up vatfuls of miscellaneous stalks and stems on my own stovetop, but I figured that this would be a good opportunity to find out what natural dyes were all about. The workshop not only met my expectations, it fired my imagination. I am my mother's Saran-Wrap-washing daughter, after all, and the idea of using stuff that's free for the picking, pruning or scavenging is very appealing. Plus there's the hippie granola Berkeley/Portland sustainability thing -- reduce, re-use, recycle -- which has been part of my psyche, if not always my practice, ever since I can remember. So I came home yesterday and ordered two natural dyeing books. Now I'm eyeing my rhododendrons.

Road Trip, Sky Trip

It's been a busy couple of days. I finally made it down to Coos Bay, with my friends Beth and Mary, to see a pair of art quilt exhibits, Speaking in Cloth and Fine Focus '06, at the museum there. Mary's husband Farley drove, and we made a two-day art tour of it, taking in the Coos Bay art walk (such as it was) on Thursday night and some galleries in Eugene en route home on Friday, after breakfast at the excellent Zenon Cafe.

Speaking in Cloth was co-curated by two local textile artists, Jeannette DeNicolis Meyer (with whom I've studied) and Ann Johnston, and includes their work and that of four other artists. Fine Focus consists of small works (no more than a foot or so on a side) by 50 different artists. Both were inspirational in the very direct sense of making me want to get back into my studio and create.

Apart from the art, the Coos Art Museum has, in its lobby, the largest angelwing begonia plant I've ever seen. A typical leaf was six or seven inches long, about the size of an entire plant, in my experience. As I was oohing and aahing over it, the volunteer receptionist pressed a cutting on me, which of course I had to baby for the rest of the trip. I'll try to make a good home for Little Bertha.

Speaking of large plants, we called in a tree guy to prune some low and otherwise iffy limbs from the two sweetgums on our parking strip. Most of the work happened before I got home on Friday. It sure makes a big difference; lots more light in the living room, for one thing -- and, I hope, fewer of those hateful spiky seedpod balls to deal with during the fall and winter. We also gained some firewood, which Jer toted around back and I spent an hour or so stacking. Yes, I did ache the next day.

The city is still offering free aerial tram rides on Saturdays during February, so yesterday we decided to check it out. The new tram connects the South Waterfront area with the OHSU (Oregon Health & Science University) complex on Marquam Hill. It was a controversial project for all the obvious reasons -- cost, neighborhood impact, and so on -- but, from what I've read, it's quieter and less obtrusive than originally feared, and most of the neighbors seem to have made their peace with it. The line was long-ish, with lots of kids and a definite Disneyland vibe. It moved quickly, though, since the ride is just three minutes long and each of the two cars (cabins? capsules? gondolas?) holds more passengers than you might imagine.

The view en route is spectacular, and the structure itself a gorgeous piece of engineering. I took the equivalent of two rolls of film and posted a bunch on Flickr. At the top, we strolled along the observation deck, which is studded with sculpture. The adjacent corridor is hung with some interesting paintings and prints. Who knew? Obviously we'll have to add another stop to our standard tour-guide itinerary: "We'll take you to the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden, the Classical Chinese Garden, Powell's Books, and then we'll go to the hospital."