landscapes

I took a weekend off last week, heading over to the western side of the state to gather dyestuffs and write. NaNoWriMo is a few months away and I came so close to finishing last year that I want to give it another, more planned out, try. I have a few new ideas about how I want to format the story. Maybe as a zine? I'm also narrowing the physical range of the main character, making it more local.

 On the way up to Grand Mesa I stopped briefly in the desert, up above the canyon where I grew up. I followed a hawk down this draw and found several patches of rabbitbrush, one seeded juniper and horehound. I didn't realize it was horehound until I got it home and was able to look it up. I thought it was a prickly sort of mint. Now I wish I had picked more, but at least I know where it lives. It felt like stumbling across a whole glass bottle from the 1800's.

 When I got home I put all of the plants in the dyepot together. It smelled amazing! The rabbitbrush can be overpoweringly medicinal on it's own but the rest of the plants balanced it out and it was like having a giant potpourri crock going on the stove all day.

respect the cycle

 I've been thinking a lot lately about the cyclic nature of my process. I can get frozen trying to start my day because there are so many tasks between fleece and finished object to choose from. Clarifying the steps, right down to dorky diagramming has helped. Having a timeline does, too. Yesterday I watched Tara Swiger's creativelive class and the math at the beginning helped even more. After plugging in some numbers I discovered how doable it would be to achieve my production/financial goals on a quarterly basis. As long as I respect the cycle.

Blue spindles! I had a notion to dunk some spindles in my now ever present indigo vat and it turned them gorgeous. I'm going to put them up in the shop as part of the kits. They should be on display at the farmer's market next month, too.

The garden produced a lot of garlic and shallots this year, despite the wildlife slowly developing a taste for the sweeter shallots. It's the first year I've tried such a large crop of them. Aside from a few I left in the ground just to see what they'd do, I've been curing all of them on top of the fridge and putting them into everything. The garlic are all hardneck, so I'm nervous I won't use them up before they go bad. I suppose I could make dried stuff, but I love it best fresh.

high summer, deep shade

My focus has been on the dye pots lately. There is so much to gather, so many things are peaking, flowering, on the verge of fading. My goal is to have a studio full of plant dyed fiber that I'll mix up into yarn during the fall and winter.

It's not just dyestuffs, though. We found a dandelion patch on a walk to the cemetery a few weeks ago. The red stemmed kind that I swear taste better than the usual green stemmed sort. It's also a good mushroom patch. There were scads of puffballs, even a few alien looking orchids. They look like orange-red asparagus before they bloom.

I don't have a shop update this week. Toby's scarf took up all my productivity. I do have a few new things to introduce. A new twist on the spinning kits, maybe some new yarn. On a less than fibery note, I've also been Desire Mapping. I'm not usually one to go in for woo, but the woman behind the method passes my bullshit test and the message speaks to me so I'm giving it a go. My core desired feelings are: illuminated, shakti, prolific and quixotic.

I am rainbow-freaking-brite

 I think of what I do as art, even if the outcome looks like a bit of craftwork. I think it okay to be both, but in my heart I call my self an artist before I correct my inner monolog with 'artisan'.

Whatever I am, my work seems to be moving toward accepting how much I love the minutia of the process of building a finished piece.

To that end I'm building up the studio's supply of naturally dyed fiber, because the process gets stretched out more going that route. And because I like it when my actions reflect my values. The past couple of weeks have been focused on working through what dyestuffs I have on hand, stashed away in bottles and jars. Aspen liquor and black walnut tea from last year. Madder root and cherry bark. A dormant indigo vat brought back to life with yeast and sugar.

Last week I spotted lupins on a walk with friends up to the cemetery and went back the next day to gather enough to experiment with those, too. It's given more of a yellow than that gorgeous inbetweeny green I've seen other dyers get, but I'm glad to add them to my list of wildcraftables up here. I'm headed to the western slope this weekend and plan to bring back some big basin sage for a dye workshop I'm leading on the August 1st. Sages give off a yellow, too. but it's a brighter, acid sort of yellow that shifts to greens with copper or iron. It's one of my favorites.

Things are turning green, even up here at 9000'. I've been poking around looking for potential wildcrafting spots. So far I've found pokeberry thickets and plenty of sages. I'd love to ferret out some elderberry and some weld or wild woad. Despite how much I love it when I get there, getting my butt out the door is something I've spent a lifetime unperfecting. Having a dog who lives for hikes has paired nicely with counteracting that.

Oh! the rain. It does not stop, and sometimes it turns to snow. The rain kept messing with the kids plans to camp in the tent, which has now come to live permanently on the back porch. When their first break in the weather came they lasted about an hour before they tapped out and came back inside. They'd spooked themselves reading scary stories.

Now that I'm warping a full-sized loom I have waste yarn, which generally makes me sad.  But, as it happens, they are the perfect length for weaving bracelets. I plan to have several woven cuffs at this Saturday's farmer's market. They'll be crafted from either a colorway called Viola or Emma the Pink, the batch I was demo spinning at the first market. If you miss the market I also have a few at The Corner Studios in Lyons.

market preview

I have a ginormous Etsy update this week. Lots of hats and cowls and some yarn, too. I fell off the schedule wagon the past few weeks and had some catching up to do. All of these things will be at the Longmont farmer's market this Saturday from 8am to 1pm.

I've created about four colorways of natural dyed reclaimed, unsweatered yarn to take to market as well. These will be exclusive to that venue for a while until I figure out if it's worth it to add them to the line permanently. I'll also have a few short / seconds skeins in indigo if anybody wants to try them. If they turn out to be a winner I might go in for buying actual base yarn to dye up.