I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0)
"The road goes on forever and the party never ends …" Robert Earl Keen
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when my cloth goes wonky since I don’t measure anything except the height of each patch (1” for the black and white patches, 1.75” for the colorful patches) …
So it is what it is and this patchplay needs only two more headings for May and June up top and a strip of black and white patches along the right hand edge. Then I’ll let it rest until I decide whether to continue with the rest of the year or back the cloth as is. I’m good with it either way.
With all the back and forth between the old blog and the new blog, I neglected to properly credit Tansy Hargan’s Finding Your Color Voice online class for inspiring my recent experimentation. I thoroughly enjoyed her presentation style and, more to the point, learned an awful lot!
Because I wanted to preserve what I’ve been learning, this project was more about creating a tool than anything else; a book of swatches detailing the color combinations possible with the Derwent Inktense set of 24 dye blocks …
Each color swatch was a combination of one ink block color with each of the other 23 colors. Here are two of the blue swatches, with the key colors outlined in black for future reference …
I used Jude Hill’s paperless piecing technique to size each patch, with two pieces of cover stock as ironing guides …
Then used another Jude Hill technique to glue stitch the edges of the resulting patches, here shown back and front …
Next I ladder stitched the pair of swatches with a piece of watercolor paper in between to give the resulting “page” some body …
Then stitched the page to previous pages with DMC threads chosen to match the key colors …
with the result that the foreedge of each page is a key to the adjacent pages …
The remaining “raw” edges along the top and bottom were whip stitched with one strand each of black and white DMC …
Finally, the handstitched cover was given a light coat of Golden Fabric Painting Medium to protect the colors from any further rubbing (a problem that should be less of an issue when I move on to shibori) …
One last note: the “24 x 22” refers to the fact that I decided not to create swatches for two of the three black dyes as the results were too similar to be worth including.
I had to look up “Dog Days” to be sure I was using the phrase correctly. I was. And although this next batch of patches is a bit “dark,” I feel it’s important to have this cloth reflect the reality that life has its ups and downs.
After everyone headed home, we spent a very quiet Fourth of July, noteworthy for spending quiet time reading Fair Play by new-to-me author Tove Jannson, who wrote …
empty spaces that must be respected —those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.”
and happily eating an abundance of homegrown tomatoes …
As I tried to appliqué a bit of rapidly fraying red linen to a scrap of black linen, I realized the back looked better than the front, so I went with that …
The next day Don tackled the lawn, which was thriving after an unusual amount of rain. Unfortunately, fire ants tend to show up after heavy rains, so no pictures but this is a graphic representation of one of Don’s ankles post-mowing …
Having liked Fair Play, the next day I moved on to Tove Jannson’s Summer Book, which is supposedly a novel, but which reads like memoir …
It felt very believable and took me back to a piece of my own writing, Shelter Island, 1969, that I’ve linked to before.
The following day included yet another book and a related doctor visit, about which the less said the better. The book, What Fresh Hell is This, was on my radar as a possible suggested read for my daughters, who are closer to 40 than 30. Although I am now well past menopause myself, in hindsight I wish I had been given more warning about what to expect in the lead up to it.
The title also dovetailed with the drumbeat of summer wildfires, our very real fresh hell …
Lastly (and I will say, the next batch of patches will be lighter, visually and metaphorically), there was yet another doctor visit. The previous week’s trip to the eye doctor had resulted in a referral to my retina doctor (trust me, you don’t want to ever need a retina doctor).
So Don drove me to Austin where, through the wonders of modern laser surgery, the small hole in my retina was welded shut …
Nuff said.
I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0) 