rough night=low daytime activity

i had one of those strange nights, slept maybe three hours. ugh. so i'm a bit of a zombie today, fit for little. so i took some pictures of the bloodroot experiments. i have more to go, but this was today's work.

this photo is oddly disturbing...

this one has a bit of that quality, but you can see the ecoprints i started yesterday. only yesterday. it will be a month!!! yikes.

and this jar just has some silk, some linen and bloodroot in water.

old sol doing his job. too cold outside for being still, which is what i want to do (a sun nap would make me very happy).

ethiopian board book

i sometimes spend a little time in the archives and special collections of the owen d young library at st. lawrence university. there's a small book in the collection that i visit. 

it smells of smoke and the desert and places far away, and i can't read the text. but i can look at the pictures. and touch the wonderful, thick thick vellum pages, 

the broken and mended front cover.

there is one mend in a text page: front

 

and back 

this wonderful book has details that keep me looking:

this is the back cover

an ingenious way to strengthen the sewing, also to retard the back cover from breaking.

the librarian, mark mcmurray, asked me to include this citation:  "Ethiopian Book Collection, Mss. No. 120, Special Collections, Owen D. Young Library, St Lawrence University, Canton, NY". mark also runs caliban press in his "spare" time. 

my second shifu book, this day, also lives in here. it, too, has an old style binding, and the cover, not the pages, is vellum, dyed a soft green.

reuse, repurpose, recycle, harvest

these "shibori" scraps are actually gussets from two pair of old gramicci cotton climbing pants. and here's the small coptic bound blank book i made from the "shibori" waistline of one pair. 

pages of mohawk superfine. linen threads, davy board. about 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.

outdoors: 

bloodroot, puccoon, sanguinaria canadensis 

freshly broken and "bleeding"

freshly washed and waiting for action

waiting. this is actually quite a modest harvest. i have a hard time digging up this beautiful plant. perhaps because i know that this will kill the plant. i know better, if there is some rhizome left underground, it may regenerate.

i haven't got much energy at the end of this day, after yoga and walking wendy. we did see louise and family out back this evening. 

naturally dyed lokta and kozo, rust, black raspberry, and indigo on shifu (cotton and lokta) textile. i will try bloodroot on some spun paper, as well as cloth.

while this kind of inspiration is kicking around in my imagination. vellum books in arabic, in a leather case. from the inspirational gary frost's future of the book site. 

mini and macro

being on spring break is lovely. i can go to bed late, or early; get up early, or late. i can think thoughts through to their end and breathe with ease. i have no huge commitments or things hanging over my head. i can haul brush and work on firewood at an easy pace. i get more done that way, but it doesn't seem like it. 

bloodroot is in blossom, here in my cold spot perennial border it's just new, down the road it's doing better, in spite of my wobbly photography.

after looking for bloodroot to harvest, and not finding a roadside spot that was under imminent threat from construction, my friend and i drove around the south west part of st. lawrence county. and these lovely, stately clydesdales were trotting about and grazing. five of them. magnificent. and when they were moving, with the intense sunshine on them, they took my breath away.

these horses are mostly black, gorgeous white feathers all around, huge and perfectly proportioned. one was a roan, and had a short tail. i can imagine riding one of these giants. i bet the stride is unbelievable!

from the huge to the tiny, back to bloodroot. you have to look for it, unless you find a large patch. but it still grows close to the ground, first a white sprinkling, then the huge leaves open up and show their stuff, then they're gone, and evidence of the root is covered up for another year.

bloodroot is a surprising plant, i first saw it in wanakena, near the oswegatchie river. it was all around a yard at an old camp. i was there for a household sale. what i found: artifacts of all kinds, adirondack memorabilia. snowshoes, pack baskets. inuit carvings. typical stuff. what i came away with was a start of bloodroot, a gift from the family, to plant at my home. puccoon, bloodroot's old name, is a fun word, native in origin according to douglas b. elliott in roots: an underground botany and forager's guide. 

but bloodroot makes a wonderful dye and that's what i'm after this week, a little fresh puccoon to dye with. if i can't find some fresh, a hunt through the freezer is in order. i have some gifted organza that i envision using bloodroot on.

as you can see from the date, this sample of bloodroot dye or stain was rubbed into a drawing seven years ago. the paper is a strathmore charcoal paper, a nice quality, but nothing spectacular. i was camping on an island in the st. lawrence with my students and other staff. i made a simple pamphlet stitch journal to take along on the trip, and tried to record some of the finds from the trip. what else i found: a cache of reddish rotting tree/earth. i hauled home a plastic bag of the stuff, and used it also as a pigment on paper and fiber.  

weather weirdness

yep. it's in the air, too. one week ago exactly it was 89 degrees. i knew it was strange and odd and weird. but then the leaves on the brush out back sprouted, so i can't see the land and i knew it was truly an early spring. i took the down comforter off my bed (but didn't put it away!) but today, this. (i slept under down last night.) 

workshop news

last night's workshop was amazing. i was soooo tired, but i loved the class, five beautiful, intelligent, and dedicated women. radio bob announced the class on my drive over to the new arts council classroom at the old clarkson university campus. and i took no pictures, i was that busy. we got started weaving but two hours, while a long time to sit and weave, wasn't quite enough. two more wednesday classes! these women rock!


some walnut dyed wool socks and silk. the silk will go into my magic spirit bag.

magic spirits and forgetfulness

i am teaching a class at our local st. lawrence county arts council. i knew that. except it's tomorrow, sorta crept up on me. it's called magic spirit bag, and it's about weaving a long cloth, folding it and seaming up the sides. to embue it with magic it will need items that inspire the user, bits of rag, bones, wild fiber, beads, wire, feathers, fur, whatever can be included that has meaning to the user. i envision it as small, big enough to hold something, if only dreams. a useful tapestry. 


my bag is packed, and i'm ready to go. a saddle bag, first time i've used it to to haul stuff.

query: rock tripe

eva over at tinctory wrote to ask me if i'm the same person whose work appears on a page in the book Natural Dyes- sources, tradition, technology, science by Dominique Cardon. she had just purchased the book. well! that was news to me. so i've ordered a copy, and i intend to find out what's up. it seems that someone sourced a very old sample from the midwest weaver's conference that i prepared for the handspun sample swap. in 1985. citing the wrong lichen, no less. (of course the names could have changed in the intervening 25 years). i am exceedingly curious and have eva to thank for cluing me in. i will let you know the results of my ongoing investigation. (perhaps i'm playing harriet vane or kate fansler. no bodies, please)

the interesting bit? i remember attending that conference with my friends jean and jerry from wild meadows angoras, six months pregnant, my first time away from three year old ian. this is how mothers mark the passing of time!Cardon

heat and a dear friend, not a duck! well, maybe a duck.

89 degrees here in the north country. the ice is barely out of the rivers! i'm felling faint! the light is surreal as well. supposed to be in the 60s tomorrow. 

i came home today from yoga and car maintenance (removing snow tires!) to the mail and this note from carol. i met carol blinn in the 80s through the mail. i saw a review about her book: Once Upon a Time, Book Two. i knew a tiny bit about letterpress printing, and the fact that this was funny, made by a woman, and about a duck blew me away. so i ordered it.

 i read with delight the tale of sipper.

sipper is transfigured in this tale:

she becomes three dimensional. and so, over the years i bought some of carol's books and  all of the once upon a time series. and the magic that happened is that we became friends by correspondence. one day when i was traveling through massachusetts with hannah and ian, i stopped at one cottage street, and we met. she gave us the grand tour of her shop, a place not to be believed, magical, ian and hannah still talk about it. carol taught me to make paste papers at wells college, and there we also attended the summer book arts institute. 


a few years ago i wrote a narrative about making an edition of handmade paper from birds' nests. i was struggling mightily with it, my graphic arts skills are less than rudimentary. carol offered help. i sent my ideas and text to her, she liked it and gave me some ideas. i still was stuck, this job was bigger than my skills. one day she gently said she would love to publish it. i would have to let her be in charge. that was a little scary, but i decided to do it.

24 nests is the small book, a booklet actually, with text, sample of the paper, sample of my record sheet, a drawing of a nest and an afterword by carol. the book, a slim story, became much, much more with her designing, editing, and afterword. 

in the afterword carol writes about our friendship ("My file is bulging with little notes written in Velma's almost indecipherable script on her homey handmade paper. There are sheets of folded milkweed paper protecting a braid of horsehair from her beloved horse, Mist.") more beautifully than i could ever. but i can still say here in public that carol j blinn, as my students say, rocks! go take a look at her press:

www.warwickpress.com. 

83 degrees

if this was yesterday i'd say it was a joke. but it was 83 today. i got sun on my skin and can feel it still. it's about 20 degrees too warm. tomorrow the same they say. egad. it hit hard this afternoon, and i needed a break. hannah washed the winter grime off the cars, i hauled the water. papermill pipes are still broken.