Long weekend

I actually have the day off work today. We've come up to the farm for a long weekend. Plenty of time - I hope! - to stitch and to dream about cloth, texture, and design ideas

I want to play with these:


















A textural feast, from the native palm Attalea butyracea























Off the top of my head. Pattern doodles that sometimes grown into something more.













Thinking about the word "Coconut".

I'm just catching up on everyone's posts for the week.
I really like this, this and this.

Being koi

Following on from this...

The Gavilana dyed cloth is in off of the line and ironed on a very hot setting.















First try at capturing the color results: The camera is reading off of the wood of my work table so the cloth is looking more muted in this shot than it actually is in real life.



















Second try to capture color results: I placed all of the cloth in a stack on a piece of white notebook paper to see if I could get the camera to read the color of the cloth on balance with the white of the paper. This image is more accurate. I'm going to have to come up with a good descriptive name for this dye, because the actual color rang is somewhere between tan, seaweed, moss, and goldenrod.

SHHHhhhh....Don't tell anyone, but I quite like it now ;]















Trying to stitch a Japenese koi fish into the shashiko-style pond. This is what I've managed after three earlier attempts. Still misssing fins and tail and watery swirls. Now I have to make lunch. But after that I'm going to move onto something else!

BEHOLD! I have made SLIME... again!

This post is a follow on from Arlee Barr's recent post wittily entitled "BEHOLD! i have made mud! or snow dyeing part two, the results".

For quite a while I have been thinking to try an experiment dying cloth with the leaves of the plant locally known as "Gavilana", Neurolaena lobata (Asteraceae). This plant has several medicinal properties and is used locally to treat a range of ailments, including for "cleaning the blood" (whatever that's supposed to mean!) and as a deparisitite-er (sorry, don't remember the word for that in English). The latin name would also suggest some medical linkage, no?

Anyway, for some reason, I got it into my head that these leaves might be high in tanins and therefore good for dying with. The plant grows like the plague all over our property, as a weedy herb that reaches up to nearly 3 meters. So, wouldn't it be good if I could actually use it for something? So that's what I've been up to for part of the morning.



















"Gavilana" - Neurolaena lobata (Asteraceae)















In the pot, bringing it all to the boil. I decided to start it off with a fair amount of heat, before placing it out in the sun for a few days.















And so far, it's looking like this! YUCK!!!! It looks like cow poop! But, ok, definately works as a dye! Maybe this would be something to add to another dye to get a nicer color?... Or, maybe I should just forget the whole thing? ;}

Guatil or Jagua... and my trip cancelled!

Ha! So you weren't expecting to hear from me today, huh? I cancelled my trip to San Jose. I slept very badly, dreaming about some damned blocked toilet, of all things... only to wake up and discover that I have serious stomach issues today! So, whilst it's kind of ironic to be cancelling a doctors' appointment on the basis of being sick (ironic, or just plain wierd!), it didn't seem like a good idea to be heading off on an 8 hour road journey under these circumstances (and I know you know what I mean!). So, not feeeling that great today. My belly hurts and I feel hot(ter) and nauseous. But, HEY! I'm happy and I get to stay at home. Which means I get to carry on blogging! :))) and stitching! :))) etc.!:)))

I promised I was going to tell you about Genipa americana (Rubiaceae), locally known as "Jagua" or "Guatil".

This is one of those truly miraculous plants, the fruits of which have been used by indigenous people here in Costa Rica (and elsewhere in tropical America) for hundreds of years. And more about that in a moment. I've been hoping to get my hands on some and try it out for myself for ages. So you can imagine how delighted I was when Reinaldo came back from the field on Thursday with several fruits from this plant (which you can see in my previous post).

Here's a photo of the flower of this species, which not too many people can claim to have seen! But you now can!















Fabulous flowers, aren't they? The image was taken by Reinaldo (c). Apart from being the region's botanical expert, he is also known (and published!) for his amazing plant (taxonomical) photography, which means that I have access to a library of 60,000+ plant images. And if that lot doesn't provide me with any creative inspiration, well... let's face it, nothing will!!!















Remember that book about Pre-columbian printing stamps that I showed you in an earlier post entotled The Seals of Time? Well, inside it discusses this plant, saying,

"... Today, some indigenous groups such as the Embera of Panama and Columbia, use a blacl colored pigment that is extracted from the fruit of a Guatil or Jagua (Genipa americana), with which they make body decorations".

Ah... tattoos, then! When you look at certain ceramics of the Pre-Columbian period, you can see that the figures are often decorated. I always thought that was just a way of decorating the ceramic itself. But, no! This actually is showing us how the people would have appeared, doning these non-permanant tattoos made from natural pigments. including from G. americana.

The following are images of Pre-columbian ceramics that I snapped recently, in the Pre-columbian Gold and Jade museums in San Jose (we're in Costa Rica, incase you didn't already know).















A face vase... with human teeth!



















Seated female figure and pots.



















Her nextdoor neighbor.



















A high-ranking female, with jaguar-type tattoos.



















A shy standing figure.















Nilo, studying an exhibit with his Grandma, my Mother-In-Law, the very lovely Mercedes Francisca.



















Who is definately the Cacique!... or, at least, of indigenous origin.















And here are some examples of the stamps that were used by the Pre-columbians, to decorate their bodies, as well as other surfaces.

WOW! This stuff just blows me away!!!

So... back to the dye pot...















I have started a small jar of guatil dye, with three small pieces of rolled and folded cotton. When I first put the seeds into the boiling water in the jar they and the water looked like this.















A few moments later, it looked like this.















After a while longer, it looked like this. Not what I call black. More of an indigo-purple. And OMG it really does stain skin! So, if I don't get good results from this, I'm giving up!















Half a fruit pressed onto calico.



















It reminded me of this... coming next!!!!

A little blue?

I'm feeling a little blue today, knowing that I have to leave in the (early!) morning, to make that damned long journey to the city again. Another 8 hours on a stuffy coach. I'm thinking about what stitching to take along for the ride. I never like to have to leave my little home and the boys. This is a quick one. I hope to be back on Wednesday. We have guests booked all of next week!

I've been playing with the fruits of Conostegia subcrustulata (Melastomataceae) again. The last time I tried to solar dye with these, I used too few fruits and it just turned the small scrap of cloth a slightly tan color. So yesterday Nilo and I gathered more fruits for this small experiment. We have alot of these shrubs in the garden and the great thing is - assuming that this dye is ever going to work for me - that they fruit and flower constantly throughout the year. Discover more about this plant here















Thought you might like this image of buds and immature fruits of Conostegia subcrustulata and a visiting grasshopper. The image was taken by Reinaldo.

So... on with the show!



















First I masked a small square of calico, leaving narrow spaces between each strip of tape.



















Then I started to smush the berries with a wooden pestle directly onto the cloth.



















Doesn't that look yummy! Actually, you can eat these berries, they're sweet and gritty because they have so many minute seeds (which you can see in the images).




















This is how it looked when I had done that with all of the gaps.

Next...















A random berry smushing! Pour the berries onto the cloth, place a sheet of paper on top, and roll over it all with a rolling pin.



















Hmmm... interesting! Love that vibrant blue where the light shines through. It reminds me of...

When I was a child I was fascinated by the color of the jars of Vick's Vapor Rub when held up to the light. It was the only bit of entertainment one got when sick. I have a love of Bristol Blue Glass, especially that which comes in the form of a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, which, sadly, I can no longer drink :( I went to the Bristol blue glass factory on a school trip once. It was very cool! My (other) home town is about 40 minutes drive from the city of Bristol.

Moving on...















Some very random strokes made with a paint brush, with concentrated berry smush juice,painted direct onto the cloth.















A close-up...















I especially like this section.















And here they all are, hanging out. I'm leaving them there... because, let's face it, it is never going to rain!















And here is a new solar dye experiement, this time using a much higher concentration of these fruits and a piece of rolled calico.















This morning it looks like this... I'm optimistic! I will leave it in the sun soaking for a week.















I had to put a rock on the top to hold the cloth under!

Coming soon!...















Reinaldo came back from the field with several of these yesterday... Genipa americana (Rubiaceae - that's the coffee family). But more about that later!

My posts seem to get longer and longer. Thanks for your attention span!

Calmly at it like crazy

I was planning to post this last night, but then the power went out, which meant that I had to shut down my computer and get back to the house. My workspace (i.e. the dining room) is seperate from the house. Too complicated to explain that! Anyway, luckily, a draft had been saved and I just needed to add a couple of the final images. So here it is!

I'm later than usual today. Probably nobody will see this until tomorrow. I've been happy (and hot!) all day, whizzing around on the internet, studying all kinds of truly amazing things, and my head is nearly popping off. I always get tonnes of ideas like that.

I want to share this with you. I have to say I was very impressed. I can't remember the last time I visited a gallery and liked so many of their artists. I looked at every piece (not all to my taste it's true) and was inspired by many. And I think you will be too! Especially all of you who work in cloth. Enjoy!

Before all of that, last night I did abit more on the frame of my soft pale cloth (which has no name yet). And here's what I did (see the upper line!)















This is the back-to-back buttonhole stitch, single woven.















Just weaving in and out of the buttonhole stitches as shown in the above image, with 2 strands of DCM silk thread #436 (Ha! I saved the number band this time), which is a lovely golden yellow color (Susan, that kind of came from your comment, so thank you for that!)















Here it is again, but this time double woven. Now you can see the complimentary color better. This is what's known as a composite stitch as it is made up of more than one type. It has a name... it's just that I can't remember it!


You probably haven't noticed, but I am slowly deconstructing this piece ;} Little by little, I'm taking out the stitches on the wheat. Maybe they will disappear altogether?... Or, maybe they will appear soon with a darker outline?... I haven't decided yet!















I've also now added this little rectangle of also solar dyed (with bark) cloth. It's a shade or so darker. And I did abit of mini kantha stitching over it.



















Up close it looks like this. I like it! I love the way the texture of the cloth changes when you do this. The stitching gives the cloth a very lovely weight, a kind of gentle rigidness.

When that was done. I went surfing... the net, that is! I started out by Googling for images of Ancient Cloth. Well, that was fun! I found this and looking at it at first, I couldn't be sure if it was cloth, or if it was stone carving. I went to the site's homepage, and here I found quite a selection of images of Ancient Iran: Sasanian dynasty. More stone sculptures?... or are those really cloth too, do you think?

That all got the old grey stuff quivering. Thinking about stone... and cloth. Cloth... and stone, (probably you know the game, when I played it as a child, it was hammer, rock, cloth/paper.) Then I started thinking about how one might go about working from images of stone carvings, converting them to cloth. And that made me think of Deb Lacativa and her amazing work and her technique of brushing on acrylic medium. I bet she would do a great job on the stone-carvings-to-cloth idea! I might even have a go at it myself!

My bloke ;} arrived home from San Jose at lunchtime this morning. He's been away since Friday. Nice to have him back of course, but the best news is that he's bought me a Dongle! Don't worry ladies... and possibly gents I suppose... nothing saucey about it. For those of you who don't already know, it's a device that fits into the USB slot of a computer and works like a phone to connect to the internet from wherever you are... WOW. (3rd generation technology in Costa Rica?... I must be dreaming!). This means that, for just 17,000 colones/month I can stay online all month if I want to. YEAH! To give you some idea, we have been paying around 50,000 colones/month for my connection (that's $100/per month folks!). So, Dongle - think I'll call him Dougal the Dongle - arrives in the nick of time, as we don't have jobs right now.















I'm A Very Happy Camper! :)

Also, remember the [s]lime green cloth from the other day?... well, the story has a happy ending. Don't ask me how, but once rinsed in the machine and hung out to dry...




















... there was hardly very much green on it. Overall, it's a pretty nice rosey biege.... again (seems that's the color all of my stuff turns out!) I've also tried to show how it's changed (in the image below). It's abit subtle, but I'm comparing it to a piece of cloth that is the same color my dyed cloth when it started out (the piece with my crazy new stitching attempts on it).















And here are some things I was doodling today without realizing. Think I can use those somewhere.

Thinking out loud & Shifting perspective

Life is about constantly needing to shift perspective. That's how we change and grow. This can involve a mental shift. For example, changing an opinion, or discovering something new, which , as a matter of course, changes the way we "see" something. Or... it can be literal. For example, turning an object around, or standing on one's head. Thus, we understand the thing from a different angle, or, we "see" it in a totally new light.

And I'm thinking, this weekend (clunk, clunk, clunk... The Machine Stops...) about how shifting perspective is really the essence of Art. And of Life too for that matter! And possibley everything else? Since Science seems to work that way as well.

Therefore, does it follow that a "good" artist, is he/she who is successful in making that happen through their art? Which would basically equal human dialogue. And maybe then, a "good" person, is he/she who is succesful in making that happen through their Life (Living)? Which would basically equal human dialogue. The art of living... Living art.... Maybe that's why so many of us blog? Which, basically, equals human dialogue. And maybe that's what we're all looking in the end? Human dialogue! or at least to have communicated something to someone, and to have been understood, while we were here. Which is kind of an odd concept to be coming from a person who is rather a hermit :}

Hmmm.... Interesting!

Shifting perspectives can happen on a grand scale, changing our thoughts on huge, often controversial, human topics, such as sex, religion, or war (and yes, probably in that order!) Or, it can be in a small - but nevertheless totally significant - way, leading us to the point of, "Oh!... I never thought of it [saw it] that way before ". Personally, I like that kind best. In either case... Behold... the doors of perception begin to open! And no, I've never read Huxley, and I don't use non-perscription drugs! :}

What-If?...

What if... I lie on my back... and take pictures of what I see? Yes! I like the simplicity of that!



















Me, on my back (again) ;}

Another great feature of Photoshop is Filters. Try playing with the "cut-out" option. A useful tool to artists and especially cloth makers, as it helps us to "see" the different planes of a subject. for example, with this new image above, I could easily come up with a self-portrait in cloth or stitches. The question being... would I want to? :}















OMG.... The trees are about to fall over!















I stared at this scene through the view finder of my camera for quite a while, and managed to convince my brain that I was really looking down into water, then seeing leaves floating on the surface, and branches below it. That was wild!















The trunk of a Ceropia tree. Amazing textures and could form the basis for an interesting abstract image.















The belly of a miniature hummingbird perched on a twig above me. Nature from below! It looks very neat! Imagine that you were going to paint, sketch, make an image on cloth on that theme. Actually, that would be a fabulous challenge to put out there! So I'll do that this week!

Do you have any idea what a bird looks like from underneath?... What is it's shape from that angle?... What about a butterfly drifting above you?... Do it's legs dangle down, or does it pull them up, like an aircraft's wheels?

I found that while I was concentrating my vision on the big blue beyond, my range of vision suddenly became like a fish-eye lens, and I was seeing everything as within a circle, with branches and leaves entering from all around. That was very cool! I think I might work on that idea some more! And when I'm done with that, I should probably visit my opthomologist!