Planning on pink

Somehow... amidst all of my weekend report writing and visiting of Nilo's virtual farm (at you know where!)... I came up with some plans for what to start on next. And guess what... I'm planning on pink!

I found that I had some Earthues natural dyes left over from Megan's visit earlier this year, and there just happened to be a little bit of powdered Lac extract and and little bit of powdered Quebracho red. And so I dyed a few little scraps of cotton, having first boiled them up with a little alum. Surprising what a difference the alum makes!


















Some pleasing results in pretty shades of rose. The bundle on the right hand side is still wet, so I'm expecting that paler shades may result once those cloths area dried and ironed.













This is one of my recent palette designs: "Plum coco". These are more or less the colors that I'm planning to use next.













This is one of my palette designs from last year: "Hot Chocolate". Similar, but it has those rich chocolate browns (which I LOVE).























More inspiration: Hot chocolate and marshmallows.


















A tree of Tabebuia rosea (Bignoniaceae) flowering like I'd never seen it do before!























An infloresence of Conostegia subcrustulata (Melastomataceae)


















A few flowers in a sweet little garland.


















Sketch 1: This idea has some way to go yet!



















A setting of buds: Probably more like the direction I'll go in.


















Sketch 2. When I simplified the pattern formed by the buds, it reminded me think of something like this...


















An elegant garnet piece from Titanium Jewelry Only

How all of this will eventually blend into a cloth piece, I still don't know. But it's something to be thinking about during the week. At 3pm we travel back to town. And tomorrow it's back to school and back work... again!

New... Summer/Autumn 2010

In the past 24 hours I've been stitching and thinking... tearing, and cutting... stitching and thinking... blah, blah, blah.

Now, you get to have a very early sneak preview of what I'm working on for the bainbridge & houseberg lines for Summer/Autumn 2010.

That's right, Summer/Autumn! Because I think they go better together. As do Winter/Spring.















You recognize this, right? The little leaf stamped cloth, but now embroidered. Same-color-on-same-color, I love that, as I've mentioned in previous posts.

So, this is the value of play. When I started playing, I wasn't planning that the soft pale cloth, of still no name, would be anything. I was just doodling with stitches, fabric paint and recycled cotton cloth. But you know how, something miraculous happens... a little shift... a faint glimmer.... and if you can capture that, it all falls into place, unforced. That's what happened! Of course... there are many hours of sweat and tears involved, before one reaches that moment. ;}



















So I took it all apart again. Lost that Wheatear stitched bit, that was becoming so problematic for me, (but don't worry, I haven't thrown it away, it always pays to stash stuff like that for a rainy day). Last night, I started working with this gorgeous scrap of chocolate and natural, printed linen, of which there is hardly any, and so I've been saving for "something special".



















I think this is it! ❥ A chikankari and dessert inspired piece! ❥ I'm being serious! You never know where inspiration can fall from.

I can't tell you how happy I'm feeling today!

I also want to share this because I enjoyed finding it and I think you will too. And, to give a warm welcome to the blogging community to a special lady called Tao, who is an amazing chef, and a neighbor of mine, here on the Osa Peninsula. Happy blogging Tao! :)

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.

A lighter shade of pale

Now that I've finished the outstanding Indie-pendant ... I will rephrase that, or else sound totally egocentric... Now that I've finished the Indie-pendant that was outstanding... sound any better???... I figure it justifies moving on to start something new... completely ignoring the existance of all of those other projects, which I still haven't finished! ;)

Yesterday, I considered starting to work on that first piece of shibori that I've recently created - Well, it's not the first piece of shibori I've created, it's just the first piece that I've created and known about it. Here is a much better shot of it...















Here, you can actually see the patterns that were created where the little pebbles were tied into the cloth and more of the tonal range.

However, lovely as it is, I have decided not to start working on it just yet. Instead, I've opted for a similar cloth - again, one that I dyed at the end of last year - but which I left too long in the dye base and it started to go moldy...















That's what the little grey specks are about, and I rather like that softly spattered effect.
















I've basted it onto a plain piece of my peachy bark-dyed cotton cloths.















In turn, I think I'm going to baste that onto a kind of damask cotton with a raised block pattern, which comes from a slightly off-white colored pillow slip that I picked up in a thrift store in San Jose on the last visit.

It reminds me of this...



















A photograph of me, taken in 1897(!) at the Las Cruces Biological Station, in San Vito, Coto Brus (Costa Rica), where, for about 3 consecutive years, I lived on site as a young explorer and artist-in-residence.

Time passes and everything becomes a lighter shade of pale! Here in the tropics, it also starts growing new life forms!

Speaking of lighter shades of pale and new life forms... just look at this by Jude Hill, and this by Arlee Barr... and this by Deb Lacativa.

Pale is where it's at!