Red Cedar

I took most of last week off of everything – work, working out, writing – an unplanned fallow week due to heat wave and 2nd shot effects which left me with a few days of lethargy. It was a relief to let go of my productivity goals for a few days and just putter around the studio, nap, and then host a musician playing at our local festival and some friends who came for dinner on Saturday. Though we’re all still tentative, the summer weather and second shots this week have loosened things up considerably around here.

The way the transition out of the pandemic is happening, it almost feels like a new year full of potential and promise. Last weekend we held the first house concert on our outdoor stage in almost a year and I’ve never seen an audience so giddy arrive at our gates. This upcoming weekend’s show, two weeks later, has seen an even greater flood of interest (it’s a good thing we aren’t capped at 50 people outside any longer). We’ve had visits over brunch and dinner, friends are coming to stay, and the tension that permeated every interaction is dissipating bit by bit. Sure, we’re all worried about Delta, but we’re also ready to have some fun again.

I’ve been thinking about this transition for awhile, what I miss and want to return to versus the aspects of “normal” I have no interest in reintroducing into my life. While I have missed dinner parties, I don’t miss union travel. I have longed for spontaneous visits with friends, but I haven’t wanted to return to obligatory social functions. A quieter life in the last year has meant less scheduling and more time in my studio, more depth in my explorations, more time in the woods (and still I don’t feel like I have enough time for all of this). I’m trying to figure out how to maintain that, while allowing some of the social back into my life. I expect come fall, there will be another piece to figure out when in-person work meetings start happening and people expect me to be there. I have a union-related investigation I must be present for at the end of this month, and that will be just the beginning of having to come and go from my small island again.

While I can say no to some things, I can’t forestall them all. I am expected at a wedding in New York next June, there are disciplinary hearings I must attend with people who need support. How can I retain some of this quality of depth and quiet I have cultivated in the last year while also attending to the world outside my home again? I expect the answer to that lies in a more rigorous meditation practice, setting limits on my willingness to attend things in person when it’s possible to do otherwise, and creating space for non-productive/non-screen time during the day or week.

It’s hard to imagine now, but when the Covid shut down happened in March of last year, I had two solid months of on-the-road meetings and conventions ahead of me. Brian had a similarly packed agenda and we both felt overwhelmed by our schedules and the fact we would barely see each other for the upcoming months. As I took things off my calendar one by one, I felt a lot of relief at not having to undergo the gauntlet of obligatory work and union meetings, offset by a bit of sadness at not being able to attend my friend’s swearing in as a judge and missing a trip to New York. As much as I will keep adding things onto my agenda and be “fine” I realized then that I was increasingly *not* fine with the external pressures that had me filling up my day planner year after year. Fortunately, this was also the year I had planned to announce my retirement from union life in 2022, which will take a lot of things off my plate automatically (and not soon enough). Still, I’m going to have to be careful at my propensity to fill my time up with something else.

I am staying home for most of this summer, which is typical for us as I see no reason to leave my home during the nicest months. I have a trip to another island booked with a friend in a couple of weeks, and will go to our cabin in the interior in the fall (hopefully the fires will have passed), but otherwise we are hosting friends and house concerts, and in between I am working and hanging out in my studio. I am thinking about how to get deeper into the creative work I do, not allowing this moment of transition to yank me back into a life I don’t want to return to.

I think it will be easier to break the old habits now that I’ve had a long timeout from them. The question is how much my ego tells me I “have to” dive back into all the old behaviours of before.

Week four and I’ve finally started dyeing things!

While I find the preparation process highly meditative, I was eager to get to the dye pot.
Being able to eventually make garments from ethically sourced fibre and fabric, dyed using methods that are gentler on our ecosystem is hugely motivating to my learning process and so I’m taking care with each step to be careful with water, reuse materials when possible, and ensure I’m disposing of things appropriately.

I also plan to start harvesting dyestuff from around our place this summer – dhalia and tansy are both poking up right now – and a friend brought me a huge bag of Lobaria pulmonara that she collected in the fall. I am excited to use the extracts I purchased from Maiwa as well as the whole stuff available to me. 

Having never done any dyeing except a single indigo workshop last spring, this exploration feels very potent and like it’s coming at the right time in my life of textile-making terms of time/access to materials and the fact that I’m able to approach it from a place of inquiry as opposed expectation or end result. 

Dyeing Activities

Learning

• Watched the third section of caitlin ffrench’s Natural Dyes course at the School of Sweet Georgia. 
• Read the study notes of other participants in the Natural Study group and wrote my own notes
• Started dye sample pages in my design notebook

Materials prep

• Made a tannin bucket, an alum acetate bucket, and a chalk bucket for plant-based fibre mordanting
• Scoured and mordanted cotton fabric for dye experiments – 12 napkins, a cotton shawl, and some random linens.
• Scoured and mordanted 2 yards of hemp/cotton yardage that I plan to dye with Lac to make a shirt from.

Dyeing

• Made a dye plan for yellows and browns. Plans to dye samples with Lobaria pulmonaria, Fustic, Osage, Myrobalan and Cutch. Other than the Myrobalan and Cutch, these are whole dyestuffs. I will overdye many of them with madder or indigo since I’m most interested in yellow as a base for other colours.
• Starting with Cutch extract from Maiwa I finally got my dye pot going! Dyed 1 small ball of yarn (100 yards), 1 napkin and a fat 8th of cotton fabric. Total weight 139.76 grams. Used 30% WOF – 41.91 grams of extract. Cooked for an hour at temperature and then left in the dye pot overnight. I shifted a piece of the dyed fabric with iron afterwards as well.
• Did a run of Myrobalan same as the Cutch – 2 small balls of yarn, 1 napkin and a fat 8th of cotton fabric. Shifted some of the cotton post-dye with iron (result: dark grey) and some with a soda ash rinse (result: more golden). I will likely overdye the yarn for my reds project, and some of the fabric I will overdye with a single dip of indigo to produce some teal.
• Completed a run of Osage Orange dye (derived from sawdust) this morning and articles are rinsed and drying now.
• Featured image at the head of the page shows articles dyed with Myrobalan and colour shifted with iron or soda ash.

Weaving Activities

• Finished setting up the 20+ system. It’s ready to go whenever I find time to warp that loom.
• Warp for JST Episode 2 sample (Asymmetry) threaded. It’s taking me forever to get this on the loom, but I’m beaming the warp this weekend for sure. I’m going to be working through the JST material slower than I initially planned, which means I’m going to be doing that course into the fall – which is fine with me!

Next week I start getting extra days from work for the summer so that will help me advance on the weaving. 

Apparently we are heading into some of the hottest temperatures on record over the next few days which terrifies me a little bit because I don’t like heat much, and I’ve already lost one freezer this week. On the other hand, we have wind and lots of it, coming right off the ocean so where we are is going to be much less exhausting than many other parts of the coast and interior.

I’ve become more productive at work this week, after a long slow spell of recovery from a hectic spring. I have developed a research plan, an inventory, followed up on project approvals and finally feel like I’m waking up intellectually again. I think part of my issue was a lack of B12 since I stopped taking my supplement and that pretty much gums everything up after a few months. I never used to have to worry about it, but something changed a couple of years ago and I started testing dangerously low on the B12. It makes me feel like I have some form of dementia, and that my brain has stopped working. It’s gradual so I don’t notice it until I’m deep in the fog and then it takes me some time to figure out why my brain isn’t working right. By then I’ve been losing brain productivity for some weeks or months. At least it only takes a couple weeks of supplement to start feeling more normal again. The shots work immediately, but since I can get along with the sublingual tabs, it’s just as well I do that.

Anyhow, feeling a bit sharper means I get more done, and its relieving because I hate the feeling of falling behind, even if it’s just in my writing or textile studio, the non-paid labour I feel called to. I managed to get Issue #21 of Comfort for the Apocalypse out the door this morning, with a poem instead of an essay this morning. A poem! This feels much more vulnerable than my usual offering because I haven’t written a poem in a long time and it seems much more interior to me. I had forgotten how poetry makes you reflect on language differently, and how difficult it is to get it right.

I’m going to put up a full Summer Textile School post tomorrow with pictures, so I’ll save the craft chit-chat for that except to say that I am fully into the dye stage of things and it’s exciting! Pictured at the head of this post is some Osage orange sawdust being strained after making dye with it. I am learning so much these last few weeks, and the idea of getting to weave, sew or stitch with what I’ve dyed over the summer is ridiculously compelling at the moment. More compelling than almost anything else (I am side-eyeing my untidy studio as I say this).

At Birdsong this weekend we have our first outdoor house concert since last September – and then a whole series of them coming up in July and August. We have a lot of RSVPs for the show (but not too many for the current health restrictions) and I’m looking forward to seeing many faces I haven’t seen for awhile. When we first booked this show months ago I wasn’t sure if Covid or the weather would allow it – but at the moment we seem to be good for both (unless the heat tomorrow fells people) and there is really no better place to be on a hot summer night than outdoors with a beer listening to music.

We’re also starting to book shows for the fall, with fingers crossed that we will be able to have indoor shows by then. Everything still feels so tentative even though second shots are happening and case numbers are way down. I look at the rise of the Delta variant and think – who knows what fall will bring. But for now we can meet outside and the warm weather will facilitate that nicely.

I’m sure I had something to say today, but then we discovered the outdoor chest freezer had failed last night and I had to run to rescue the thawing meat and the extra grains and flour stored in paper bags, quickly becoming wet from the dripping. I was successful at getting it organized, though I’m left with 6 pounds of bones that didn’t fit in the other freezer. I’ll be roasting and turning them into bone broth over the next two days despite the heat. Serves me right for procrastinating on that task.

All of that ate up the work break in which I would have written this post, so I am left with no time to reflect today. There has been bedlam in my house for other reasons these last few weeks (a 2 and 4 year old have been temporarily here with their mum) and there has been a lot of distraction. I am looking forward to the family moving on next week, and the return of my quiet house. I am also looking forward to the delivery of a new freezer which I ordered as soon as I cleaned up the mess from the old one.

So instead of something brilliant, I am sharing a picture of one of my favourite places to swim. It is right across from my house and down the beach about fifty feet, the only patch of sand in our little bay with a big shady maple to sit under on a hot day. When the tide is high, I love to swim to the reef and climb on top to watch the seals. I hope to get there this afternoon, but it’s not looking likely at the moment. Fortunately, early evening high tides and warm weather are predicted through the week so there will be other opportunities.