Farm Fresh Textiles

It’s been searing hot here in the Pacific Northwest.  Today qualified as too hot as opposed to earlier this week when it was way, way, way, way too !@#$3?*! hot. I decided to sit out on the back deck when the sun finally dropped behind the trees but before it started to get dark this evening. And, because  I’ve had the Nellie Bly website up on the computer for the last several days, I took a couple of scopes out with me. I really need an in-person fix, but that’s not happening for a while.

For those of you who have been reading the blog for a while, you’ll remember that one of my great loves is kaleidoscopes from when I explained how to look at a kaleidoscope.  I don’t know how many I have, but it’s more than 30 and less than 50.  Just a wee collection when you compare it to that to the one owned by Mary Wills, who owns Nellie Bly.  She has well over 400, but refuses to count them - the more than 400 comes from when of the scope artists insisted on doing that about a decade ago, so I’m sure she has a few more the than that by now.  I haven’t added any in a year or two …  can it be two?  That’s not good.  I should be doing my part to support the economy! 

Tonight’s scopes were by Luc and Sally Durette.  One is Rhapsody in Blue and was given to me by my best friend Joanne for Christmas a couple of years ago.  I had seen it on a trip to Nellie Bly’s, but there were so many I liked that time that I decided I had to leave it behind.  A few weeks later I was regretting that decision because I couldn’t forget the colors and tones.  So I emailed the store and asked them to send it to me, only to be told that they had sold the very last one (and it was an NB exclusive, no more being made).  I was sad.  Then I opened me Christmas presents from Joanne and there it was.  The other scope I took outside tonight I can’t remember the name of, and it’s missing from my collector cards.  But I think of it as the Dried Flowers scope because that’s what’s in the cell.  In the picture below, these are the two left-most scopes:

The scopes I tend to fall in love with have colors like the yarns I dye - rich, deep and layered.  I want shades and tones of one color mixed with shades and tones of other colors.  I love the blues and greens and purples and raspberries and lemony yellows and citrusy yellows and … and … and … anything deep and rich.  I am not a pastel girl. Black and white, woodsy and chocolate browns, silvers and golds and pewters and coppers … nummy.  The colors have to be alive.

The texture of the items in the cell is also important.  I want things that look interesting to touch, whether they seem sensual, prickly, soft, or flinty.  Beads mixed with colored wires or bits of dichroic glass or buttons or filigree.  I even have one scope that has little plastic baguette loaves in it (the theme of that scope is, appropriately, Paris). And yes, size matters.  There should be items of different sizes in the cell - itty bitty beads mixed with larger crystals mixed with slabs of colored tin bits, multiple sizes of beads or glass or coils of colored wire. 

The scope itself needs the right texture too.  It has to feel good to touch.  It has to have the right weight and balance.  The shape has to please the eye and the hand.  It has to sit just right in your hand, or if it’s a parlor scope that sits on a table, it has to angle perfectly to be comfortable to view.  It needs to be lit in such a way that you don’t have to be a contortionist to see all the possible colors and textures.  And if it looks good in lower light, that can add an interesting dimension to viewing as well.

Rhapsody in Blue has all these things.  One of the wondrous things about a great scope is how changeable the look of the reflection is with each turn of the cell.  If the artist has mixed the textures and the colors and sizes and layered everything just so, magic happens.  Turn the cell to here and you’ll see:

with shapes and colors that are very jewel like. (You’ll notice the center here looks lopsided - I had the scope balanced incorrectly when I took the pictures, but the colors are wonderful.)

Turn the cell a half turn and a comepletely different look emerges:

Still a bit of jewel, but this is much more bubbly and almost fruity or flowery.  Turn the cell a bit again:

From the first two views, you might never imagine this last one with it’s gold bejeweled necklace and deep blue petals.  Rhapsody is a liquid cell scope, which means that the bits and pieces that are in the cell float in a liquid.  Here’s a peek at the cell, which is lit from the side:

You can see rods, beads, crystals and other shiny bits floating in the liquid.

The Durette dried flower scope is a dry cell scope.  Inside the cell are wee flower buds. petals, and bits of leaves that move about without any liquid suspension.  The colors in this scope are my favorite colors, all of them, but it’s really the texture that reaches up the shaft and grabs me.  You can almost smell the garden, can’t you:

I can imagine the featheriness of the leaves around the edge, the papery touch of the petals.  The flowers may be dry, but the imagery is anything but.  Like the other scope, a turn of the cell brings a completely different look:

Here you get a lot more leafiness, and the yellow-white leaves have just the tips showing through so they look almost like tiny flower buds.  Where did the orange come from?  There was none of that in the first image.

The items in the cell are very different in both size and construction - some are full flower buds, while others are single petals like the orange along the edge above.  Here you can see some of what’s in the cell:

I haven’t talked about the third scope yet.  That one I pulled off the shelf when I went to take pictures of the other two.  It is also by Luc and Sally Durette and is call Firedance.  This was one of my mom’s scopes, and I really need to remember to take it to one of my sisters to enjoy someday soon.  It has a cloudy end cap on the cell, so you can’t see what’s in it, and as you can see from the first picture in this post, it’s end-lit, so you can’t see the items through the side of the cell either.  It didn’t go outside with me - I thought about coming in for it, but decided against it because this is a scope that needs lots of light to be appreciated.  The reason behind the name is that as the cell turns and the objects in it settle, something in it sparkles and flashes as it settles.  If I had had it outside tonight, I would have seen the colors in the the pictures below, but I wouldn’t have seen the flashes.  Just like you can’t see them in this pictures.  Oh well, it’s pretty even without them. 

You can see that, true to its name, it has a lot of fiery color to it.

Above some of the points in the dark space, you can see a hint of the fire flash.  Where did all that purple come from???  There wasn’t any hint of that in the first look.

I have at least one other Durette scope, but didn’t see it when I was grabbing Firedance off the shelf.  It will have to wait for another day.  That one is side-lit like the first two, but has a dual action cell.  By that I mean that there is the cell full of objects, and attached to that is a piece that changes the color of the background of the cell if you turn it. It has a very different look, not only because of the background, but also because of the items in the cell. In the cell for that scope, the items are made from Fimo-type clay that mingle with several different colors of glass rods and clear sparkly twists.

Phew.  Did a marathon photo shoot tonight to get all the silks and bamboo blends photographed, then spent the last little while (long while, really) editing the photos and getting some yarns up on the web site.  So far, the two new spun silk colors are up on the Silk page, and all the new cotton/bamboo colors and the worsted weight silk/bamboo blends up on the Bamboo page.  There’s also a new link on the silk page that points to the bamboo page to make it easier to find the silk/bamboo blends from there.

I still have to get the sport weight silk/bamboo blend yarns up.  That’s tomorrow night’s task.  There are a lot of them.

Here are the teasers for tonight’s updates …

Spun silk:

Cotton/Bamboo:

Silk/bamboo - Worsted weight:

I finally have the first of the new items up on the web site - the adult sizes of bamboo socks. 

I don’t have very many at the moment - as I mentioned, they were the best seller at ANWG, so my stock was a bit decimated.  More are on order and I’m planning to spend next weekend dyeing more, especially in the adult sizes.  There are a bunch more in kids sizes that I still need to post.

 Tomorrow I’m going to work on getting those as well as the cotton/bamboo and silk/bamboo yarns up. 

I also need to talk with the customer how ordered the flame cotton/bamboo and see if she likes the color as is, or if I should dunk it in a yellow wash.  I like it, but think that the red is too pink when out in “real” light.   A yellow wash would redden it up without messing up the fieriness of the rest of the colors.  What do you all think - flame or not?

The Association of Northwest Weaver’s Guilds show is in the bag for 2009.  I wish I’d had the time to stay and take one of the post-conference workshops, but duty and the day job called. 

Here’s the booth as it looked at some point Friday:

 I say this was Friday, because Thursday I had the tables set up completely differently and Saturday I brought in more things for the table with the white cover. 

Saturday I pulled the soy silk - the orange skeins on the white-covered table - and added them to a bigger basket that had several more colors.  Several people had been asking for finer threads for weaving, but I hadn’t gotten the soy silk labeled in time to get it out Friday.

I haven’t redone inventory to see what was really the best seller, but it was either the bamboo socks, the Soy Silk, or the Tencel.  I was hugely amused with how popular the socks were as the temperature was between 88F and 93F all weekend, a bit warm for socks.

I still have a really messed up kitchen, with one bucket of yarn still soaking - it should have been on it’s last rinse,  but was still losing color, so I stuck it back into soak before I left - and I tossed another bucket of yarn into the sink for a final rinse tonight.  I also left the drying rack at the farm.  Which is fine - I could use one there too - but I need one here.  Oh well.  Sort term I can dry things outside on the deck railing over towels or in the backroom on the towel racks. 

One woman was so taken with the cotton/bamboo that she came back a second day and gave me a custom order to fill.  I’ll be working on that this weekend, then I have to get my brother or sister to go out to the farm and get her contact info.  I was so sure when I packed up Monday that I didn’t need that notebook … and then remembered 150 miles later that it was needed.  I’ll be back over there in a couple of weeks, but by then I want to have the order done.

Most of the vendors were invited to come to the CNCH show in Santa Clara, CA next spring.  I’m considering it, but may have a conflict.  I’m also thinking about doing the Issaquah farmers market once or twice this summer.  I said the same thing about Issaquah last year, however, so we’ll see.  I’m not that fond of doing the shows.  It’s fun to meet people and talk about yarn, but the setup/teardown and spending the day standing is exhausting.  I spent yesterday sleeping, then driving back to Redmond in the late afternoon, only to have to sleep in today and spend just half a day at the day job because I still wasn’t feeling great.  I won’t do another show with such long hours, that’s for sure.  Between that and the heat, this one was tough.

Off to bed again so I can get up on time and earn the dogs some kibble tomorrow.

More dyeing the last few days.  More Tencel.  Some Pima cotton.  Some silk chenille in mondo skeins - 8 ounce skeins full of water or dye weigh about a ton.  Okay, maybe not a ton, but a lot.

Down on the drying racks is a little bit of the silk/bamboo blend.  This is a 990 yards per pound version of the blend, which I just had a few pounds of.  Half went to a charteuse but not too acid-y colorway; the other is a sort of sea foamy green.  It’s not quite dry, but I emptied the dehumidifier and turned it back on.  Should be dry in the morning.

Not the greatest pic, but the colors are pretty close.  The blue has a silvery tinge to it.

I have a couple dozen skeins of banana yarn soaking in a bin in the bathtub.  While I like the finished product, I hate prepping that stuff, and foget each time why.  It’s really dirty stuff.  I’ve picked out chunks of mud, bits of twig, and who knows what else.  I scoured it last night and have had three rinses on it so far and the water is still a bit dirty.  One or two more will do it.  These will probably be solidish colors, maybe three sets.  Dunno.  About one in every seven of these blows apart in the water because the quality control isn’t that great on these.  I just have to hope the three that decide to be pills are not all in the same colorway. 

Okay, gotta go take the last bunch of Pima cotton out of it’s dye bath.  It’s a pretty teal. 

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Like the Whos in Whoville, we’re here!  We’re here!

Here and dyeing.  Please note the spelling there.

I’m up to my elbows, and occasionally further, in skein dyeing for a little event at the end of this month.  I’ll be at the Association of Northwest Weavers’ Guilds bi-annual show in Spokane, Washington, May 28 through 31.  I’ll have lots of Tencel, bamboo/silk and bamboo/cotton blends, soy silk, and lots of other fun stuff.  Lots of new colors. 

Over the weekend I dyed another 100 skeins, and just started the washing out process today.  This would go a lot faster without the day job.  Of the yarns I like the best so far - green Tencel in two shades so far.  Of the yarns I like least so far - Fray Free rayon chenille.   I made those skeins too short, forgetting that rayon chenille suck itself up and has to be stretched out to dry right, so I have these heavy, unmanageable skein/ball things that are a pain in the patoot to work with.

As to what I’ve been doing since I last posted months ago, in no particular order:

• working the day job
• dyeing yarn
• getting snowed in
• playing with the puppies
• looking for the puppies in deep snow banks
• shoveling snow
• napping heavily thanks to newish meds for my back
• flying to Maryland
• flying to Philadephia
• flying to Hamburg, Germany then driving to Sweden
• researching ancestors long dead
• dyeing yarn
• working
• rinsing yarn
• drying yarn
• skeining more yarn to dye, rinse and dry
• repeat as necessary

What I haven’t been doing:

• yard work
• house work
• the non-fun stuff
• weaving

And now I need to get some sleep so I can get up early for the next rinse out and maybe dye something else.  Watch out dogs.

The Summer Palace is just on the Northeast edge of Beijing.  Before being opened to the public, it was the retreat of the Dowager Empress Cixi. She swiped money that was supposed be for the Imperial Navy to rebuild it in 1888.  She had to rebuild it again in 1903 after it was plundered during the Boxer Rebellion.  It is a huge garden built around a lake.  We spent 4.5 hours there one day and barely made a dent in the place.  I’d love to have had another couple of days to explore other parts of the gardens and the buildings on Longevity Hill. 

It’s hard for me to pick a favorite place, but I think this might have been it. 

Entering through the South Gate, you soon run into this guy:

Handsome fella, isn’t he?  All the girls wanted their pictures taken with this brute.  The Kylin is a mythical creature that “had the power to punish evil and repel the wicked”.  Or so the sign behind him said.

And as you can see, this was a much more quietly and simply decorated place than the Forbidden City.  Not. Not even close. 

The lake is very peaceful despite the crowds.

The temple on the right is the Tower of the Fragrance of the Buddha.  Or perhaps the Tower of Buddhist Incense.  Depends on where you go for the translation.  I like the first one.  It’s longer.  And I’m irreverent enough to be delighted by the possibility that someone was celebrating the Buddha’s B.O.   Yes, I did say irreverent.

I’d love to tell you I actually went up to the Tower, but we never made it off the lake.  Yes, we spent 4.5 hours just wandering around the edge of the lake.  Hey, it’s a pretty big lake. And everything else was uphill.  After four hours of walking along the lake, we were too tired to walk up the hill!

Two of the coolest things about the Summer Palace were the people we saw and the Long Corridor.  First, my favorite person:

The walkway was covered in the faint remainders of characters she’d drawn throughout the morning.  She’s using just water.  I have no idea what the characters she was drawing meant, but it was fascinating to watch for a while. 

And I don’t know what to say exactly about the Long Corridor.  It runs along beside the lake for about half a mile.  It seemed like a much longer distance.  There where all kinds of thing along either side to gape at or explore.  Most of my gaping was done at the interior of the Corridor itself.  This is what it looks like on the outside:

See the scenes painted on the outside and the inside of the beams between the posts? 

The whole interior of the roof of the corridor is painted and gilded and embellished.  There is a gazebo-type structure every 100 yards or so, and those area equally adorned.

Again, not a single nail was harmed in the builing of this structure.  It’s all mortise and tenon joinery.  Everything is stacked and joined just so. 

One of the most commonly talked about sights in the Summer Palace is the Marble Boat.  I’ll let you find the pictures of that by clicking on the picture below to go to the slide show of all the pictures I took there.  Instead, I’ll share with you a picture of one of my favorite bridges:

(click picture to access the slideshow)

We interrupt the China travelogue for important news:  I’m an auntie again!

Sawyer was born at 3:something a.m. today after 27 hours of labor (there’s something his mother will hold over him his whole life).  We think the newborn size clothes might fit him for another day or two - he was 9lbs. 12oz and 21.75 inches long.  He fits in the newborn crib in the birthing room.  Barely.

But he’s cute: 

He has his father’s hairline.  And his mother’s … um … sizeable … feet:

That’s my SIL holding him.  She had to check and make sure he had all the necessary fingers and toes before we left the hospital after our visit tonight.

I’d post a picture of the proud parents - I do have one - but my sister might kill me.  She’s a little on the worn out side.

Okay, one last proud auntie picture. Sawyer is one of seven.  Seven nieces and nephews for me that is.  Here’s me with Nolan, Mateo, Cydnee, and Sawyer:

Mateo seems to be especially taken with the new baby.  Cydnee wasn’t sure what to do with him.  Nolan couldn’t sit still long enough yet to notice there was a baby in the room.  Nolan doesn’t usually look this demonic either!

On the Saturday morning, early early, we all hopped onto a bus for a tour sponsored by our hosts at the National Library of China (National Archives).  Our first stop was the Forbidden City.  This was just a few blocks from our hotel, but delegates from several other countries joined us at it was a lot farther for them to come. 

We started the tour the most popular way, by entering through the south gate, called the Meridian Gate.  To get a better idea of the layout of the Forbidden City, you can do a search for a map.  Here’s one map that’s sort of easy to read - a map that sticks to just the main points.

As you can see, we were just one of several tour groups ready to go through.  We got there right when they opened so it wasn’t as crowded as it would get later in the day.  It’s one of the most popular destinations in China on the weekends, so it gets really packed.  When you go to China, I highly recommend getting there early, going on a week day, and ideally taking two days to really explore all the nooks and crannies.  If you are interested in textures or shapes or details, this is a little bit of heaven.  I could have shown you pictures of the crowds, but mostly I was too busy taking pictures of all the carvings and the paintings and the roof lines.

There are two things remarkable about the picture above. First, all of the Forbidden City buidlings are wood, built using mortise and tenon joinery.  There’s not a nail anywhere in the structures.  In the window frames and some of the detail work, yes.  In the building structures, no.  (Models in the Ancient Architecture Museum, which I visited a few days later, showed the intricate detail of the joinery.) Second, all this painting has been recently restored, specifically for the Olympic crowds.  They have refurbished the buildings from the south gate to the Hall of Central Harmony.  From there to the north, the buildings are being restored at a rate of about one per year.  They will be busy for a while.

Here’s what the posts and beams look like before restauration:

I almost like the unrestored painting better.  I’m not a huge fan of gold or gilding.  And there’s something more sculptural about detail on the unrestored beams. 

There are few surfaces in the Forbidden City that are not embellished in some way.  The approaches to all of the halls are sculpted, the window sills and frames painted and adorned with brass fittings, beams painted.

I think the stone work was my favorite throughout the complex.  Almost every stair, almost every ramp was carved.  The drainage spouts were carved. 

Leading up to the Gate of Supreme Harmony is a stone with stairs on either side of it.   The detail picture above captures just some of the carving.  These motifs repeat throughout the City, as do dragons, serpents, mermaid-like creatures and many others.  On the north side of the Hall of Preserving Harmony is one stone that is the largest single carved stone in China.  I don’t know how big it is exactly, but massive might be an understatement.  According to the storyboard next to it, it was moved to Beijing in during the coldest part of one winter by spraying water over the roads to freeze them and having 10,000 people push the stone along the road.  Very clever.

In case you think I’m exaggerating that almost everything is embellished, here’s one stairway:

Yup, just a little carving work there.  Couldn’t have taken more than a few months, ya think?

I loved the brass fittings around the windows.  Every inch decorated with dragons and phoenixes and STUFF. 

About the time I took this, I realized one of the Brits from our group was equally fascinated by all the architectural detail.  The two of us spent some time gawking over the dragons and the precisely carved (?)detailing and the spacing of the repeats and the symmetry or purposeful asymmetry.  Ferocious looking beasty, isn’t he?

Our group mostly stormed straight up the middle of the City, no time for the side buildings on this trip. I did get to see the side buildings before the Hall of Supreme Harmony because I was tagging along with a colleague and his wife. Dennis was pushing Sue in her wheelchair, and the ramps were a lot easier on my back than the stairs were later.  Yikes there were a lot of stairs.  I switched over to the center buildings at the Hall of Supreme Harmony, missing most of the stairs and the growning crowds by taking the side route. 

The decoration didn’t stop at the gardens either.  I could have spent a lot of time in the Imperial Garden never looking up because the walkways were decorated with pebble mosaics.

These are just a few of the 200 or so pictures I took.  If you want to get a general view of the Forbidden City, do an internet search for pictures.  If you want to see details that grabbed my attention, click the picture below to go to a slide show of the pics I took that Saturday.

Looks uncrowded, doesn’t it.  It was, right up until we collided with all the other tour groups coming in,  just up at the top of those stairs.  It was much easier and crowd-free to take the ramp on the right and then go up just a couple flights of stairs. Go ahead, click, enjoy the pics.  Let me know which are your favorites.