Thank You Arlee Barr

I won a prize- the Anniversary Gift from Arlee Barr's Fyberspace Naturally Dyed and Ecoprinted Fabric shop.


I tried to hang it all up under the arbor. I had to keep slackening the line to fit more on. And this isn't even everything.



And everything, each and every piece, is a singular work of art. A treasure.


A world of possibilities.


Full of contrasts and resonances.


Inspiring.


Thank you Arlee Barr. You are astonishingly talented, and you are quite insanely generous- for sharing your work with me like this, but for encouraging and inspiring too with a gift like this.

Something Almost Finished...

I started this way back in Jude's Contemporary Woven Boro class, to help me think through the process of using found cloth.

The base is made of this sheet, a strip of a flannel sheet, part of an embroidered tablecloth and the lace edge of a pillowcase. I dyed the pillowcase strips with black walnut husks.

The bits assembled as appliques on top- Jude's mosaic method- are some of these cloths I wrote about a couple of days ago, and some from a quilt I found in the garbage years ago.

This little jewel was a gift from Arlee, and fell into place one day after I saw Grace at Windthread use her similar shimmering orb from Arlee here on The Daughter Cloth.


Arlee's gift to me (not to mention her gift as an artist) is reflected by this little jewel printed on a cotton patch from the wormy train track quilt. This is THE flaming pearl so sought after by the dragons that often populate Chinese textiles, symbolic of the human pursuit of wisdom. This one certainly did give me plenty to think about.


I used lots of stitches on this, in part because the base cloth needed it. It is a poly-cotton blend (it is a hospital sheet, made to endure the rigors of commercial laundering), and so it is tough. It is also very worn, and so it rippled, pulled and gaped. The stitching makes it supple, smooth and soft. Kind of evens it out.




I also used lots of these cross stitches. The yellow ones are from the embroidered table cloth that makes up part of the base cloth, and to me they look like sutures. So they function to hold the seams together. And I think they look like scars.


My initial feeling was that I wanted the tablecloth and pillowcase here to refer to a safe domestic life- that is what they mean to me. And I wanted them to confront the tragedy of homelessness which the sheet carries. I wanted to fuse them (back) together.


But that impulse continues to make me uncomfortable, because it oversimplifies the meaning of the sheet. 'Homelessness' isn't just the opposite of 'homed'. Sometimes it is also a story of autonomy and being 'vagrant', as in unrestrained and exceeding control, trespassing. My own habitual trespassing is why I found the sheet in the first place, and brings my world and the sheet's previous owner together after all.


So the orbs and these little off-grid squares remind me of this trespassing and passages-that-aren't-usual, but that have their own integrity.

Where Most of the Cloth Comes From

Deb G over at Bee Creative showed a picture of a path she walked along the other day- a former rail line now converted to a pedestrian path. Our city is considering the same kind of thing with some of the excess edges of the railway lines that crisscross our neighbourhood. I like the idea, because it would formalize the way many of us already use this space. These informal uses are illegal, of course, and while not really dangerous (we only walk the edges), we are of course treading on private property, no matter how unmonitored it is.

The railway lines are treated as an informal commons around here- this is a car-free shortcut between two homeless shelters, a quiet breezy space in the evening, even on the hottest day, a place to rest and have a break, a place to walk an inquisitive dog. This is where we find most of the cloth I use, left behind by people sleeping out rough for the night.

The railway lines are also an unmanaged green space- a wildlife corridor linked up to the river in fact. Moles, snakes, mice, rabbits, groundhogs all make a home here. Falcons and hawks hunt here. We found the wing of a wild turkey not far from where this picture was taken, late last fall, so big predator mammals find a home here, too.

As an unmanaged green space, full of the native meadow plants that can thrive here, it is also prime pollinator habitat, and every summer evening you will see any number of butterflies.

I worry, a bit, about the potential of formalizing it. I won't miss having to know the shift schedule of the railway police, but I worry a bit that we will lose the commonality of access this place has. If you are willing to risk passing some time with the train cops....

So this is where most of my cloth comes from, where it gets its marks. I think this place gives it identity.

Indigo Has Passed Away...

And so it seems my indigo vat has passed away. I now realize I missed its fermentation- waiting for something more obvious. But I think I learned a lot trying even this, and have enough indigo left for one more try when the weather turns hot again. I did soak a strip of iron pre-mordanted cotton in the vat after I was sure it had stopped fermenting for about 40 hours, and here it is after two real launders.



The colour is not bleeding when it is rinsed, but I am pretty sure the colour is just sitting on the cloth, and did not actually dye the fibers. But it is so lovely hanging on the line that it attracted a lovely little visitor this morning, who stayed around warming up in the sun.


She cast a lovely morning shadow, too.

Inspired by Windthread

After Grace over at Windthread, who posted her ecodye set up, and shared lots of beautiful thoughts about working with what is around.


Grace's post made me feel pretty brave. Helped me see a dye spot in the sunshine. Pot, jars, table top, table legs, bucket all found in the garbage. Copper and iron found too. Sunshine makes it all work.


Geranium petals that the guy who lives here has saved all winter.

But I'm in over my head with this. I bought two ounces of indigo last year, on a whim. The only thing I bought for this enterprise. I'm using these instructions, which seem to put me at less risk of somehow poisoning or chemically burning the loved ones.

This is Day Two. I want to batik borders for a long cloth...

Rag of the Day Special Edition: Working with Ecodye, Shibori and Found Cloth

I'm getting back to work on a long cloth that I started in Jude's Contemporary Woven Boro class over the winter. I'm drawn more and more to working with the found cloths I've collected, and looking at the similarities between the ecodyed bits I've been doing with found cloth, and the found cloths themselves. This is a little walnut dyed shibori ah, 'moon'?

The ecodyed bits I have been making remind me in so many ways of the marks on the found cloths. Wear, age, fading and staining all create marks that are like those on ecodyed fabrics.

But it is the undeliberate nature of the ecodyed marks that makes me want to match them with the found cloths. Each is unique, a product of processes that aren't controlled. Each of the found cloths bears marks that tell something of its past. These are all cloths that have fallen out of use, and spent considerable amounts of time outside before I found them. The sheet at the top is heavily mildewed, to the point that I thought it was ink-stained.

This faded and abraded velvet and the red below are from a Crazy Quilt- a beautifully stitched, mesmerizingly composed Crazy Quilt- that has spent the entire winter crumpled under a tree in a strip of brush beside the train tracks.

Part of the story of almost all of the found cloths I have is that they have been left behind by a homeless person, someone who likely has a bed for a night in a shelter, but who spends some part of the day seeking some privacy away from an institution. Some place they can kind of make their own.

There is so much grievously wrong about this. It sometimes keeps me from wanting to work with these cloths, keeps me from wanting to see them as beautiful. They aren't just 'lost things with nice marks'. They each are part of a difficult life.



This is a sun-faded shirt- I know it looks like sun and shadows, but these are permanent marks on the cloth. The marks on these cloths are more than just 'wear' or 'age' or 'stains', the kinds of things that normally happen to cloths. I think I want these marks to be information, to be the specific stories of how they were lost.

This little scrap came out of the Crazy Quilt too. You can just make out what I think is one Dragon claw holding on to a pearl.

Finding this familiar and beloved symbol under the mud, well, sharpened my resolve to keep working with these bits. In part it is that there is something to them that I can't replicate with my dyeing experiments- their singular beauty reminds me what I'm striving for.



And maybe it is just a fact that the information they carry around is just there- I can't add to it or subtract it. I can just take them as I find them and see what to do next.

Update on Foraging-Scapes: Food

This is an update on 'foraging-scapes', my little cloth project to help me think about pollinators and the work they are doing in our gardens. I'm thinking a lot about the ways their work is creating the landscape that our gardens are part of.


Most of the cloth is made from stuff I have found, except some cast off bits given to me by family and neighbours. I've dyed the cloth using stuff we've found, too- berries, leaves, walnuts, washers for shibori dots, a segment of copper sheeting. The thread is mostly single strands of bamboo yarn, waxed with plain beeswax. This update is about how I've chosen to represent pollinator food- you'll recognize Jude's stitches from Heart Whispering below....


I have been working on representing pollen. While pollinators eat nectar, they rely on the nutrients in pollen for growth, to feed their offspring and to fight off disease.


And pollen comes in the most eccentric shapes. I'm particularly taken by the pollens with hooks- microscopic little curved rays that stick out of individual pollen grains. One of my favorite native plants, Cardinal Flower, produces such wonderfully shaped pollen.


My fascination with these spiny pollens aside, pollinators require a diversity of types of pollen- they are malnourished if they don't have that diversity. So lots of different kinds of pollen are getting worked in too.


These are Jude's thread beads, and at first I was making them as a mass of little bits of pollen, but then I started to think they look like the little clusters of honey pots that the social bumblebees build as food for their offspring. So I'm going to make more of these little clusters here and there.



A note, also, on colours. As far as I have read, bees and hornets and wasps don't see colour, and in particular don't see red. On the other hand, most pollinators can see light in the ultraviolet spectrum. This means that there is stuff in the world, in the garden, that they see that we don't.

The spectacular thing about this- wondrous even- is that many plants produce flowers marked with ultraviolet reflective and absorbent compounds, producing patterns and markings that only the bees can see. So I'm working on this idea, too.