slowly she turned
Living the Slow life in North Carolina
Category: fiber art
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“This is Day Four,” India pronounced ominously at the beginning of our class. Then she passed out chocolate frogs that she brought all the way from Australia as a preventative for any Day Four woes. Day Four is when patience grows thin, things go awry, bodies get weary, minds get overwhelmed. We stretch and do…
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Daisies, mullein, and lupines were everywhere on the island. After finding out that the raspberry tea bags made beautiful pink marks that magically turned blue on the cotton paper, raspberry tea suddenly became the most popular beverage in our class! Hmmph. India shows us what we are to do with our cloth/papers. They will become…
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My bundles, freshly removed from a dyepot made with goldenrod plants (yes, you can use the leaves and stalks!) I was a wee bit disappointed, especially in my wool samples overall, but I would soon learn that the secret of getting good plant prints included getting the tightest possible contact between the cloth and the…
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The meadows around MISA were gorgeous; full of wildflowers and wildlife. Unfortunately that wildlife included many ticks. If you go, do take bug repellent of some kind. I think that I may have been one of the only people in my class that did not find a tick on me at some point during my…
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Preparing the rhododendron leaves while our fabrics and yarn skeins soaked in a mordant bath with alum. We only used the older leaves, not the new, sticky shoots and new leaves. The breeze felt great but it kept blowing out the gas stoves. The rhododendron leaf dyepot: We simmered the leaves for about an hour…
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Dede ponders the answer to a question. I couldn’t wait for the India Flint workshop so I signed up for a workshop with Dede Styles at Cloth Fiber Workshop on Saturday. I’m so glad that I did. She gave us a great lesson in identifying local wild dye plants, with information about when to harvest…
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Yesterday was a day of experimentation with natural dyes with just the tannin-laced water of Lake Waccamaw as a mordant. The onion skin dye was very successful, although it is very hard to mess up yellow onion skins for a dye. What I did notice was that the color yielded more reddish tones, which I…
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I am back in one of my happy places – my cousin’s house at Lake Waccamaw. This time we are here alone for a couple’s art retreat. Sandy brought canvases and paint, and I brought dyepots, fabrics, yarns, hot plate, Procion dyes, and acrylic paints, paper, brayers, collage materials, and my Gelli plate. Also a…
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Last week I had the privilege of taking a small workshop with Lyric Kinard at her house in Cary, North Carolina. “Abstract-a-licious” was a inner-child embracing, extremely helpful class about designing for abstract art quilts, but the exercises that she introduced us to could be easily adapted to any kind of abstract art. Lyric went…
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I managed to weave this six foot long overshot scarf during the month of February. The warp is thin cotton and the weft is silk, with lots of colors from different dyepots I’ve played with over the years, as well as some commercially dyed yarns from Treenway Silks. Some of the silk is from an…
slowly she turned 