“The atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” (Rebecca Solnit)

I’m getting ready to make an indigo vat to dye some lengths of linen and to try to extend the life of two duvet covers, white cotton, which have become a little stained over the years. It didn’t occur to me to over-dye them until I remembered I’d sent my daughter some photographs of a line of old sheets and some mystery fabric I’d bought at the thrift store for $2 (almost certainly a poly-cotton blend and all the dye guides tell you not to bother with polyester because its fibres won’t take dye) and then we talked about her upcoming birthday. What would you like, I asked, and she replied that she could use a duvet cover. I used the mystery fabric to make her one. (The fabric on the clothesline is still wet and this photograph shows what the blue dried to.)

So the duvet covers, some linen, 9 damask napkins, big ones (and monogrammed) , that I bought at the thrift store for a couple of dollars, and maybe an old sheet. I’m at work now, sewing the strips I pieced together earlier in the week together for a quilt top and they’ll need backing. An indigo-dyed sheet will work perfectly. Every time I have a quilt in mind, I ask myself if it might be a good idea to think about other colours, other possibilities, but nothing captures my imagination like blue. This morning as I was swimming my slow kilometre, I was watching the sky clear. It rained overnight and when we arrived at the lake, the sky was grey. But the little islands in the distance were lit by sun and as I swam the grey dissolved, transformed.

Sometimes I look up and see scribblings in the clouds. A long salmon skeleton, a few bars of music, the shapes of distant mountains. Today they were soft billows against the clear blue. And so far away. I think of Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

I think that’s what I am trying for when I dip fabric into indigo dye: the distances I never arrive at. In writing, in quilt-making, in the relationships in my life. I do my best, or at least I think I do. But I also know I’m careless. I don’t take enough time. I’m impatient. I say I’m interested in process more than results, and I think that’s true, but maybe I could take more time with the process, guide my work a little more carefully. When I tie the old cotton duvet covers with string to find the pattern I won’t know until the work is done, I could be more intentional.

Today I might finish sewing the strips for the quilt top together. I measured, cut, pieced, and as I sew the strips into their sequence, I’m having to adjust and cobble little bits here and there because I made mistakes. I tell myself the mistakes are part of the process and it doesn’t really matter if there are anomalies in the design. The atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. When I was swimming this morning, I saw that distance, the blue sky with its summits, and myself so far below.