Opposites?

Valentine’s Day today got me thinking, are our closest relationships based on similarities or differences?  This is a photo of my daughter and her boyfriend.  She just recently entered a “cutest couple” contest using this pic and they won by a landslide.  She described the photo in opposites…he’s the marine and she’s the princess…he wears boots and she wears heels.  They are opposites in so many ways but are truly dedicated to each other.    To celebrate their relationship (while she and beau are 7,500 miles apart) I needle felted a couple of wool ducks to add to her duck collection.  I also think it’s fitting that she had her eye on the Valentine SweeTarts while we were shopping one day so there it is, opposites.  But in our case I’d say that the apple was swept by the wind when it fell.  It fell far from the tree.

Rage!

How do you represent an emotion in a tangible way?   At my last spinning guild meeting we had an exercise to help us expand our creativity.  We listed a few nouns and then came up with adjectives to describe them.  Our challenge was to pick one of the nouns and then spin yarn that represented it.  I spun “ice cream” - vanilla, my favorite flavor, with chocolate chunks, mint and strawberry for added color.  This was a very timely exercise since I was in the process of trying to deal with a bit of anger that I had been feeling for the past few days.  So, I decided that I would spin anger!  What does anger look like?  Anger is powerful so bright fiery reds, oranges and yellows were my color choices.   To the colored wools I added some gold tinsel to feel like lightning striking in all its power.  Not good enough!  I stripped the seams out of a red silk tie belonging to the person who my anger was directed to and ran my rotary cutter over it until it was only shreds.  Then I ran all of my representations of anger through my drum carder to make a batt to spin from.   The finished product – a skein of rage.  Makes me smile to look at it gracing my coffee table and calms me when I feel the anger surfacing again.

Natural Fiber Dyes

Dyeing fiber from nature can be full of surprises.  I learned this while attending a natural dye workshop on Saturday taught by Dagmar Kloss.  We used mostly plants but also flowers and insects.  The repertoire included weld, osage, madder, fustic, logwood, cochineal and marigold.  Yellows come mostly from woods and leaves, reds from roots and insects, and blues from fermented leaves.   

After doing a value study with 3 different simmers in the dye we overdyed half of the skeins with indigo.  We got some really gorgeous greens and near browns.  What was interesting about using the indigo is that there should be a minimal amount of air in the dye pot for it to work.   You can tell that it’s ripe for dying if it looks green.  When you pull the skein from the dye pot it comes out green and when the air hits it, it turns blue.

We worked in teams and my team was privileged to work with the cochineal.  This is not something for folks squeamish about insects.  We ground the dried insects in a blender to a powder.  They appeared grey going in but the powder was a beautiful red.  Our fiber turned a bit purple, which Dagmar suggested came from having some iron in the water.  It could have come from the pot we made the extract in or from the water that the fiber was mordanted in. 

Now that I’m completely inspired to work with natural dyes I’ve begun collecting daylilies from my garden.  No loss for the garden, I collect in the evening after the flowers have had their show and will be wilting overnight getting ready for the next day’s bloom.