Holiday break

I did a few other experiments on Friday and took the rest of the warp off the loom. There was only about a yard of the cotton left, but much more of the silk and wool. I brought the whole woven strip home and put it in the front room where it is contantly in my sight so I think through what I want to do. There are 4 complete fiber sequences. I'm thinking one washed so as to preserve the shine of the silk and not felt the wool and, if cross dyeing is possible under conditions that will not affect these, then I will cross-dye this section.

One will be cross-dyed, perhaps using other dyes, and burnt-out in areas according to a screen. Or perhaps I will paint on the burn-out.

One will be treated so as to shrink the fibers to different extents, and dyed.

One will be treated so that the wool will shrink, and dyed.

I'm not sure what I will do with the experiments.

As for colors, I think the range from orange to purple by way of red. The reason? A one-sentence kid's letter to God that my sister sent me in an e-mail a few months ago. Something on the order of "I didn't think orange and purple went together until I saw last night's sunset. Good job," The shameful truth is I never thought orange and purple went together either, but now that I think about it....

Now, I've got four weeks approximately before the workshop/studios open again. Time to play with my own toys and follow up on some of the ideas I've recorded in this blog over the last three months. I reread it all last night after an e-mail from someone who read the blog.

Also time to make things for the shops. Got to make up for the part-time temp job money.

I atteneded a set of presentations yesterday of how the arts are being used with people with mental health challenges of one sort or another. It fits with my own experiences that, as I put on the "card" I printed out for the networking part of the gathering, "To make is to make merry". It gives a person who may have difficulties in employment a way to bring in some money that doesn't depend on anyone else's opinion or suspicions of your behavior. It give a person who may have had a period of time in which they found themselves always on the the receiving side of all kinds of kindnesses and services a way to spend some time on the other side, to say thanks to those who deserve thanks. And this may be obscure to some folks, but I think a lot of people wonder from time to time if there will be any trace of them left behind when they die. I remember distinctly when it occurred to me that, though the science papers I published would be not even footnotes in a fairly short time, there was a possibility that any of my creative makings might last far longer, that everything we know about any previous culture we know through the work of someone working in the arts, including writing for recent cultures, but as cultures were more an more distant in time, narrowing down to the more permanent arts. Making opens that possibility to anyone.