acetates

test strips from the maiwa course.different concentrations of ferrous acetate and aluminum acetate on cotton. the brown one is cutch, the pinkish one is old molding cochineal which i resisted to throw away. after discarding the mold it still yielded color.those poor little bugs that worked so hard to make color dererved better.there's some lac on the terrace evaporating. the resulting color lake will be useful for painting either cloth or paper with some gum arabic medium as binder.

i find quite extraordinary the awareness of natural dyes that i have gained with the course. have been  re-reading carefully some of my dye books and finding nuggets of knowledge that had escaped in the first reading. especially about mordants. to me they had been up to now  the way to fix color to cloth, but there's so much more to the mordanting process; it is a craft in itself.

i have wound and scoured some organzine silk for a warp.carefully considering the dye and the mordanting process. leaning towards benibana which i want to study in depth and adequately handle it.it is a challenging dye so the rewards are significant. it is also a cold dye, another consideration in mind with the energy prices up in the stratosphere.

neki desu 

 

food pots

lettuce already planted

 toms as well

started the eggplant seeds and this week i'm getting  a cucumber plant and more dirt.

coriander is kicking , mixed salad  and radishes already planted . fewer things in life are more satisfying than growing your own food

neki desu 

 

making space

i spent all Easter week clearing the obscene number of knitted samples i've accumulated. all  textile practices rely on sampling ,but unknitting is a lot easier than unweaving. dyeing is all together  another story . actually most of what i unknitted were  fup projects , those which fall off the machine or have unmendable runs.

i cleared a lot of mental space in the process and as a result i am thinking new possibilities.

 not so much shelf space .the cottons are quite cramped again.

neki desu