Tag: indigo

blue solstice

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detail

I was asleep at the moment of the winter solstice, 1:20 a.m. Pacific time. Yesterday was a long day. We went to Vancouver for a medical procedure for John, to the same facility where I went every few weeks for 5 months last year to have my threadbare retinas stabilized and repaired. On our way down the coast, we stopped to pick up our mail from the previous day. Finally things I ordered in early to mid November are beginning to arrive so I was happy to open a package containing a copy of Christine Desdemaines-Hugon’s Stepping Stones: A Journey Though the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne, recommended to me by Clara Aussel who took John and I to Rouffignac and Font de Gaume in late October.

I was 19 when I first read about the caves in the Dordogne Valley. I wrote a poem about them, tucked away the memory of seeing photographs of animals alive on limestone cave walls, and finally we went to France this fall in order to actually visit the caves. It was wondrous. I felt I’d found my people, the ones who’d given us the gift of reindeer, bison, horses, mammoths. We were only able to visit two caves as well as the Lascaux reproductions but I knew then, and know now, that we’ll go back.

On the ferry from Langdale to Horseshoe Bay and in the medical facility waiting area, I read about the Vézère Valley where Clara took us and where I’ve actually found a little house I want to buy (but probably won’t). I was thinking of how humans make their mark. I was thinking about the night before when friends came for John’s birthday dinner. Amy and I were talking about indigo and I took her to the back of the house to show her the pieces I dyed in September. She was most taken by a 5 m. length of linen I’d twisted and tied. I remember that John held one end of the fabric on the patio while I twisted it as tightly as I could and then tied it with coarse hemp string, hoping it wouldn’t slip or loosen. I was curious to see what would happen when I immersed the length in the indigo vat, 7 or 8 dips, with long oxidation periods between. The linen was wheat-coloured so I didn’t think I’d get a clear blue. And I didn’t. It had sort of greeny underlights, or at least the parts of the fabric kept away from the dye from string were greeny. Here it is, recently removed from the last dip, rinsed, and hanging on the clothes line. (It’s the fabric on the right, with an untwisted middle section, because I didn’t want it to drag on the ground.)

hanging out

Amy loved this piece. What will you do with it, she wondered. And I wondered too. 5 m. is a lot of cloth. I don’t really want to cut it, though it would make a beautiful quilt, I think. We spread it out in the back room and looked at it closely. You could see water in its movements, shot with light. You could see the inside of an abalone shell. You’ve obviously figured out this stuff, Amy said, and I replied that I absolutely haven’t. I have no idea when I begin what the results will be. And in a way I don’t care. I am committed to the process, though. Each twist, each stone I tie into a piece of fabric (the length second from the left is the result of beach stones tied into coarse cotton), each piece of string I cut and wrap: I am interested to see where they take me. In a way it’s a cave of my own making. Surrounded by blank linen and cotton, remnants of old damask tablecloths (the two small pieces at the far left), sheets, I begin to make a mark without knowing what it will be.

We each held the end of long length of linen across the bed in the back room and brought our ends to meet the other. Women have been doing this for centuries. Millennia. They’ve been immersing cloth in dyes made from roots and leaves, hoping for beauty, for light, smoothing out the wrinkles, folding the cloth afterwards. It’s been a dark year for a whole lot of reasons. I haven’t known how to find the light. though as of 1:20 this morning, it’s coming back. The other night, light shone through the linen we held and folded, it rippled like ocean water, the water I swam in off a little bay in Bute Inlet in April, the water I swam in almost every morning from the beginning of May until the beginning of October, entering Ruby Lake’s green depths, the linen held those moments, and others, and now folded, it waits for me to know what to do next.

“There are so many things I want to say.”

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echoes

Yesterday we were headed down to the lake for my swim, maybe one of the last lake swims of the year because the air temperature was 8 degrees celsius and the water wasn’t much warmer, and we were talking about the big dye lot I’d done the day before. Actually, as we were on our way to the lake, one last length of fabric was waiting to be dyed–coarse linen I’d batiked salmon onto and then immersed in indigo a few years ago. It was the last of the dye and it didn’t really take. So I thought I’d overdye the linen and see if I could enhance the colour a bit. So we were talking about how the whole experience surprises me over and over again. I know one can approach indigo (and other natural dyes) in a systematic and scientific way, taking ph readings and so on, but my method (if you can call it that) is to give myself up to the process. I tie, sometimes I clamp with little squares of plywood and dollar store clamps (or clothes pegs), sometimes I use wax to make images for surface design. I wrap fabric around pvc pipe or wooden poles. I gather fabric around beach stones and tie them into place, sometimes randomly, sometimes in a grid, and then I prepare a vat of dye. The vat is a big plastic tub that’s otherwise used for garden work and I set it up on a long cedar bench by the vegetable garden. That way I can immerse the fabric into the vat and wait for 20 minutes or so, removing it to rest and oxidize on the bench before repeating the whole thing 6 or 7 times. While the fabric is immersed or while it’s resting, I can check out the cabbages (huge savoys I started from seed bought in the Mercado do Bolhão in Porto in March) or just look at the roses growing over the garden gate.

apricot roses

I never know what to expect. Or perhaps I mean that I don’t expect anything. I don’t know enough about this pursuit to have expectations. I don’t have confidence in my own grasp of technique. And I am always thrilled with what happens–the surprises of pattern, the intensity or not of blue, how string can mimic ripple or eelgrass, how the wrapped stones become snow angels or owl wings or jellyfish. If I knew enough to manipulate more decisively, would I be happier? I don’t think so.

As we went down to the lake, I wondered how the things I’d been preoccupied with all spring and summer found their way into the fabric. Those jellyfish drawn to the light of our boat anchored in Hemming Bay on East Thurlow Island, the ripples generated as a trout surfaced for insects while I swam on a September morning in Ruby Lake, the turbulence of my heart and mind echoing the waterways of the planet, and the memory of a walk on the Brem River estuary in April, watching for grizzly tracks. It’s like writing, said John. We think we are writing about one thing and we discover something else entirely. But the difference, I said, is that when I’m writing, I don’t have expectations necessarily but I do have some confidence in my ability, my knowledge of technique. I know the hoard of imagery and experience I’m trying to access. This is so different somehow. I’m reminded of Ann Hamilton’s wonderful essay, “Making Not Knowing”:

One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going. In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know. You may set out for New York but you may find yourself as I did in Ohio. You may set out to make a sculpture and find that time is your material. You may pick up a paint brush and find that your making is not on canvas or wood but in relations between people. You may set out to walk across the room but getting to what is on the other side might take ten years. You have to be open to all possibilities and to all routes — circuitous or otherwise.

I was dyeing linen and cotton with indigo dye. I was thinking about the life I am living with its beauty, its damage (to myself and others), the lost opportunities, the blessings, the disappointments. In the woods behind the garden shed, a pileated woodpecker was pecking so loudly I thought John must be hammering boards together. In my heart, both joy and bitterness. The disposable gloves kept slipping so that I have rings of blue around my wrists. There are so many things I want to say. This morning, a basket of blue fabric, washed with mild detergent, ready for the winter. I have gathered my sharp needles, my strong thread, the tiny golden scissors shaped like a crane.

basket of blue

three blue days

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10 years

A few days ago, we decided we’d do some indigo dye work. My daughter Angelica and I spent a day preparing cloth — two sheets and two pillow cases in her case; a length of coarse linen (with waxed fish in the centre (more on this another time), a sheet, and a stained vintage damask table cloth for me, as well as some things I’d tied or clamped ages ago, hoping for a good time to dye–and then the weather wasn’t reliable for a day of standing outside, dipping our cloth into a dye vat, removing it so it could oxidize, and repeating as many times as we had patience for. The Edmonton family arrived. I wondered if the kids would like to prepare a small piece of cotton for the vat, something they could use as a flag for their room at home. They wound elastic bands around beach stones and added the cloth to the basket.

Yesterday didn’t begin in a promising way. When I swam early, it was drizzling a little. But then it cleared and given that some people will leave on Thursday, we decided that we’d make it work. We set up the dye vat on the long cedar bench by the garden and filled it with ten gallons of hot water, adding the prepared dye stock and the various chemicals. Angelica, Kelly, and I began the dips of the various bundles, pushing them down into the dye, stirring gently (so as not to introduce oxygen), and Henry also came to help.

helping

I kept leaving between dips, while the fabric rested on the bench, to do things for dinner. A few people walked, there were snacks, eventually drinks on the deck as the sun really began to assert itself after days of grey. We did 5 dips before dinner and even though we were tired of standing, we went out to do 2 more after we’d eaten, the 3 of us slapping away mosquitoes, one person timing the dips and rests. We removed all the bundles to the bench overnight and today, after pancakes and sausages, we went out to untie, unclamp, and unfold our cloth.

untiedcornersclamped

All over the grass, lengths of blue cotton and linen, as lovely as fallen sky. Lovely as water. In my recent book, Blue Portugal and Other Essays, I wrote about an earlier dye session, one I did alone on a summer morning, slapping at mosquitoes:

When I did this work, I remembered another occasion, outside, taking lengths of linen out of the tray where they’d been setting overnight after a morning of frequent timed immersions. While I was doing this, I realized the sound I was hearing, agitated, loud, was a whole family of pileated woodpeckers, the young having just learned to fly. They were flapping around awkwardly and making the most comical noise while the parents scolded and encouraged. Mosquitoes kept stinging the small of my back. What the cloth remembers, I will remember too—gathering the stones, sewing the circles that became the growth rings of larch, tying cotton string as tightly as I could. And the cloth and I will also remember the raucous sound of adolescent pileated woodpeckers finding their wings, learning what a voice sounds like in open air, in the morning, before the heat begins.

Weeks later, sewing spirals that draw together three layers of cloth—the newly-dyed surface, cotton batting in-between, and a back of old sheets or muslin—I try to recall each step of the process: filling the vat and measuring indigo, additives, finding a long cedar stick to stir the bundles of tied, clamped, and bundled cloth, brushing mosquitoes from my clothing, leaving streaks of blue on my old t-shirt, allowing the cloth to drip on the grass.

Maybe we are cloth, we are the very fabric of being, the world recorded on us like blue dye, the sound of woodpeckers echoing in the trees just beyond.

What the cloth remembers, I will remember too. My granddaughter, my daughter, and I, stirring with our blue-stained gloves, talking a little, wondering about the results of our work. And then our delight as we removed string, wooden blocks, elastic bands, stones from Trail Bay, to see what the cloth remembers of its time bound and tied, remembers as it is spread out on the grass under the blue sky, and warm sun, the wonder of it, mosquitoes forgotten.

…and yes, the river is moving as I write”

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ready

Yesterday it rained. What better time to prepare fabric for indigo dye? I’ve been meaning to do this for weeks but there were enough nice days that I wanted to be outside as much as possible, working in the garden, planting tomatoes in pots on the upper deck. Getting fabric ready to be dyed is a long process. This time I’m not using any of the sewing resist methods. Mokume or woodgrain is one I’ve done in the past; you use a running stitch in parallel lines, or curving lines, and then gather the thread tightly. At least I don’t think I’m going to do this. I still have many yards of unbleached cotton waiting for me to decide what it might become. And today is rainy too.

Mostly what I did yesterday was wrap fabric around pvc pipe, using coarse hemp string to bind it. This results in the resist dye pattern arashi or storm. The last time I made a vat of indigo and spent a few days outside dipping and resting the prepared lengths, I think I loved the arashi cloth the most. See what happens with the areas bound by hemp string? I think of this as eel grass or rivers seen from a great height.

rivers

What I love best is taking the cloth into a 3rd dimension with stones or string or pvc pipe. I love to see it become a sculptural object. In the bottom of the basket on the left you can see a lumpy form created by pebbles fixed into place (with elastic bands) on a diagonal grid across 2/3s of the cloth (an old damask tablecloth, with stains, given me by a friend “to do something with”) and then the ends twisted and wrapped with string. What will it look like when dyed and unwrapped? I have no idea. Angels or birds or splashes of white.

stones

I realize as I do this that I am more interested in the process than the result. I wrap and think and wonder. I know enough to understand how amateur my work is with indigo dye. I have no illusions about its importance as art or even skillful craft. But to be immersed (literally) in a long process of preparing and standing with a stick to push cloth into dye, to turn plain cloth into something else, something more, is about as thrilling as anything for a woman to do on the edge of the continent while the world is crazy with virus and death and grief (and I am crazy with those things too). To walk through the days after with stained wrists, a basket of deep blue cloth scribbled with memory, waiting to be taken to its next life as a quilt or curtains or simply to be folded in a basket.

In her book Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada wrote about this process:

When the cloth is returned to its two-dimensional form, the design that emerges is the result of the three-dimensional shape, the type of resist, and the amount of pressure exerted by the thread or clamp that secured the piece during the cloth’s exposure to the dye. The cloth sensitively records both the shape and the pressure; it is the “memory” of the shape that remains imprinted in the cloth. This is the essence of shibori.

I won’t mix my vat today. I need a run of nice days. But yesterday’s work with the string and cloth and my reluctance to do the complicated mokume or even to fold cloth in  accordion pleats and clamp wood along the length to make itajime or window resists seemed to be the right thing to do. And when I woke in the night, I realized why. I am working on a long essay about my grandmother’s early life on the Red Deer River. She lived on the south side and then, later, the north. I am trying to figure out the details of each period, how and why she moved, and yes, the river is moving as I write, is the source for so much of her daily life. Water came from the river, brought up in tubs on a sleigh in winter and maybe a wagon in summer. A neighbour who washed her clothes in the river and drank the water died of typhoid fever on the dirt floor of her shack. And I have wrapped fabric—old damask tablecloths, rough cotton, some scraps of coarse linen—onto pipe to make rivers, the “‘memory’ of the shape that remains imprinted in the cloth.” How to make the language of this essay do that too? To spread itself across the page, first one bank of the river, then the other, a bridge in the distance, the far hills. Language to carry the dimensions of her life, of mine, her time, mine.

redux: blue days

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Today, three years after this post, I’m clearing the (figurative) decks to prepare for another indigo dye session out on the big cedar bench by my garden. Sometimes I read back to see how I did things and to remember how much I loved the process, even the days of blue hands afterwards…

__________________

windows.jpg

In early June, I wrote of my delight in finding Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada’s marvellous exploration of shibori, or shaped-resist dyeing. I’ve done a little of this in the past, in a very amateur and careless way, and I’ve had some jars of indigo waiting for the right moment to try it again. I prepared some cloth (old sheets, some scraps of rough white linen left over from curtains, a worn damask table-cloth), trying as many techniques as I could, and then waited for the right time. Some were bound with string and elastic bands (kanoko); some were stitched (karamatsu or larch); one was wrapped and then ruckled on a piece of pipe for arashi, or storm; and one had pebbles from Trail Bay in Sechelt tied into it for kumo. Preparing cloth and dyeing it is a meditative process, like quilting — or at least it is for me. In a way, it’s thinking with my hands. So the time has to be right. And in Memory on Cloth, Wada writes:

Shibori recognizes and explores the pliancy of the textile and its potential for creating a multitude of shaped-and-resisted designs. When the cloth is returned to its two-dimensional form, the design that emerges is the result of the three-dimensional shape, the type of resist, and the amount of pressure exerted by the thread or clamp that secured the shape during the cloth’s exposure to the dye. The cloth sensitively records both the shape and the pressure; it is the “memory” of the shape that remains imprinted on the cloth. This is the essence of shibori.

Yesterday I dipped my prepared pieces into the dye vat. The process is magic. The dye itself is a kind of swampy green. The fabric turns pale yellowy-green and only becomes blue when it’s exposed to air. So you dip and then let the pieces oxidize; then you dip them again. The more times you do this, the darker the finished dye. I did 4 dips of about 20 minutes each, letting the pieces rest for half an hour on a long bench of rough cedar in-between their visits to the vat. One of the pieces, the damask table cloth, was wrapped around a piece of pvc pipe with cotton string, too long for the dye vat, so it had its own basin of dye and had to be turned regularly to allow it to take the colour evenly.

in the dye.jpg

There was time to do some watering in the nearby vegetable garden while the various pieces were soaking or else resting.

all tied up.jpg

I picked kale and made a green pie for guests who were coming to dinner. I made sourdough bread. And for each step of the dyeing process, I tried to lose myself in the fabric. If the cloth records the shape and pressure of thread and clamps, what does it remember of its worker? That she is flighty? That she was thinking of a sad member of her family too far away to truly comfort? That she wondered if she’d added salt to the bread dough? Never mind. I did my best, I think.

There are differing opinions as to what you should do when you’ve finished the last submersion. Some people advise you to rinse your pieces immediately and let them dry on a line. Others suggest letting the pieces oxidize for 12 or 24 hours to set the dye completely before you rinse them and then wash them in a mild soap. Because we had friends coming for a swim and dinner, I chose to let mine sit overnight on the cedar bench. And this morning I went out at 7 to snip the threads, the elastic bands, the string, and to remove the beach stones from the square of linen. There was very loud noise on the other side of the vegetable garden and I eventually realized it was a whole family of pileated woodpeckers, the young having just learned to fly. They were flapping around awkwardly and making the most comical noise while the parents scolded and encouraged. And mosquitoes kept stinging the small of my back.

But what pleasure to lay each finished piece out on the grass! Each a surprise! I’d wondered when I was awake in the night if I’d bound pieces tightly enough, if the dye would somehow penetrate the thin pieces of wood I’d used for the itajimi pieces (you pleat the cloth, then fold it and clamp it or use elastic bands to keep it place between two pieces of wood). A more careful person would have more interesting results, perhaps, but I have to say I love what shape and pressure created, how the cloth remembers its time as a three-dimensional object. You can see the itajimi in the photograph opening this post. Here’s the damask tablecloth remembering the storm:

arashi

And my favourite might be this, the rough linen shaped by beach stones from Trail Bay:

kumo.jpg

I expected a darker blue, given the number of times I dipped each piece. (The intensity of colour comes from the number of short dips rather than a long sustained soak — or at least this was what I gathered from the numerous things I read about indigo dye.) But maybe my indigo was old or weak. Anyway, it’s a ravishing blue.

And what the cloth remembers, I will remember too — gathering the stones, sewing the circles that became the growth rings of larch, tying cotton string as tightly as I could. And the cloth and I will also remember the raucous sound of adolescent pileated woodpeckers finding their wings, learning what a voice sounds like in open air, in the morning, before the heat begins.

“I remember the silver light…”

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arashi2

Yesterday I was outside by the bench where I do my indigo dyeing in better weather. I was thinking about the long essay I’m current writing on blue, its various incarnations, and visual disturbances. The research has led me into the most amazing areas of scholarship, unknown to me before I fell on ice in Edmonton in November and tore the retina in my right eye. My son Forrest mentioned Oliver Sacks and his experience with indigo and so I read his collection of essays, Hallucinations.

I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo — now!”

And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture. It was the colour of heaven…

                          (Oliver Sacks, “Altered States”)

After that I was interested in the idea that the entoptic phenonoma I’d experienced before the retinal tear was diagnosed might be something one could induce. I’m not sure I want to induce them but I found myself thinking about the intense beauty I’d been reluctant to admit was the result of damage to my eye. The blue in particular, the blue of the sky billowing with white clouds: if I was a believer, I might have thought I was seeing heaven.

It hadn’t occurred to me that a person could summon indigo. My own recipe for producing it was pretty tame. Indigo powder (which is sourced from a farm in India, not grown in my garden and fermented in a vat),thiourea dioxide, lye, synthropol soap, and soda ash. I use vinegar for rinsing the dyed fabrics. Some of these are caustic but none, as far as I know, is capable of generating hallucinations.

Would I use a cocktail of hallucinogens to see that inner sky again? Would I mix a little of my precious vial of homemade cannabis tincture (Texada Timewarp buds soaked in Silent Sam vodka) with something else more powerful if it meant I could look upon that cracked red desert beyond my irises? An inner landscape entirely my own. I don’t know. But I would be in good company. Dr. Sacks—and those who entered the caves perhaps 35,000 years ago to paint horses, bison, ibex, a gallery of lions, their own hands outlined in hematite.

—from “The Blue Etymologies”, a work-in-progress

Right now I’m reading The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, by the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams. It’s quite a provocative analysis of the origins of image-making, the evolution of symbolic activity, and how certain percepts are wired into the human nervous system. I think of the spirals, the gridwork, the zigzag lines that are part of the complex non-representational patterns we see in cave art, existing alongside the most beautiful and coherent images of animals, keenly observed and anatomically represented. The quartet of horses in Chauvet, the polychrome bison in Altamira. The finger-flutings in mud in the Cosquer Cave. The finger-drawn grids in Hornos, in Spain.

I read, and I write, and I wait for better weather in order to set up my dye vat and pursue my own indigo dream.

I remember the silver light falling beside my face, like the tails of shooting stars, in the dark cave of my bed at night, fearful and blessed, and how I will try to replicate that sensation—not just the visual beauty but the awe—in some way for the rest of my life.

—from “The Blue Etymologies”

vat

blue windows

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windows

Yesterday I had a laser procedure to mend a retinal tear in one of my eyes; the other eye is being monitored because of suspected vitreous detachment. This is probably a result of my fall on ice in Edmonton last week. I thought I had a badly bruised and possibly cracked coccyx (my doctor confirmed that either or both are likely) but then developed some visual, well, not problems exactly because the experience was very beautiful but apparently beauty is not a consideration when your retina is torn. You need to have it repaired, and as quickly as possible. I’m lucky.

Yesterday I asked my (new to me) ophthalmologist about some things I’d seen while being examined in the Royal Alexandra Hospital’s Eye Institute on Sunday evening (another lucky thing, because there just happened to be a young ophthalmologist in the Institute who was willing to examine me and who alerted me to the necessity of immediate action once we were back on the Coast) and he told me I’d experienced “entoptic phenomena”, visual effects within my eye. I won’t detail those right now because they fit so beautifully into an essay I am writing called “The Blue Etymologies”, an exploration of the colour blue, my work with indigo dye (the image at the beginning of this post is cotton dyed last year), some old blueprints associated with my grandparents in the 1940s Beverly (then a small mining community just outside Edmonton but now part of the city), some cyanotype prints by the 19th century English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, and some other elements a little too complicated to explain just now.

The world of our senses is extraordinary and profound. We see, and then we realize how that happens. We have intense lights directed into our eyes and we see images so beautiful that we weep. Maybe a little because of the discomfort of a cracked tailbone as we sit on the examining chair and the pressure of the ophthalmologist’s tools. But maybe we have been given something else. When I was trying to describe this sensation to my son Forrest on the phone the other evening, he wondered if I’d read Oliver Sacks’s essay, “Altered States”, in which he sees indigo. No, I hadn’t. But yesterday, before my medical appointment, I found a copy at our library and read the essay last night before sleep.

I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo — now!”

And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture. It was the colour of heaven…

His methodology sounds a little more interesting than mine (a hard fall on the butt and a torn retina) but yes, that was it. The colour of heaven. Right before, or rather inside, my eye. He never found it again.

the outlier

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pigmenti

I’m writing about indigo right now, about that blue that is sort of the outlier in the colour spectrum, a between colour (and I have my own theory about why but will let this wait until I’ve finished the essay). In the meantime, I am looking at blue, at the dictionary definitions (using my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, sixth edition), at fabrics dyed on the cedar log near my vegetable garden on summer mornings while pileated woodpeckers taught their young to feed nearby, at beautiful examples of Japanese textiles, at the hands of Tuareg people who wear indigo-dyed clothing and have stained skins as a result, and more. I am living in blue (“taken as the colour of constancy, taken as the colour of sorrow and anguish”).

quotidian

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This is a celebration of the quotidian, the daily. This is for when I think everything is happening in other places. That real writers are those out in the world, on stages, represented by high-powered agents, writing, writing, in castle retreats or on Greek islands or in the mountains in their own snowy studio, returning only for meals at a table of other writers. This is a day when the wood box was filled, two loads of laundry done, a table cleared and laid for dinner tonight, when sourdough bread and a pie was baked (well, it was one frozen, unbaked, in September when the Merton Beauties sat on the counter),

apple pie

when biscuits were baked (Stilton and walnut) after the pie, in a cooler oven, to have with glasses of wine this evening,

stilton and walnut

when I folded laundry and thought about the book I’m writing, a collection of essays called Blue Portugal, and how when I was swimming my slow kilometer yesterday I realized how I could structure the book, mostly long essays about family history, fish libraries, and the nature of memory but what about using smaller “blueprints” based on some actual blueprints I’ve been studying and parsing, what about investigations into the process of modrotisk, the Czech blueprint I’m using as a back for a small quilted piece using a forgotten piece of indigo fabric tied with beach stones, what about tracing the evolution of blue cloth, what about including some of the Assyrian cuneiform tablet stuff detailing the agency of women weavers and merchants in the 19th century BC when their husbands carried their textiles to Anatolia by donkey caravan, what about, what about…You can see how the daily might add up to be something worth writing, and maybe reading.

in progress

“in a way remembering”

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Years ago, in Yellowknife, I saw an exhibit of Gwich’in caribou skin clothing at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre. I was enthralled by the gorgeous handwork, the unity of practical and beautiful, and this morning, looking for something else on my shelves, I found the book I bought at the time, Long Ago Sewing We Will Remember, by Judy Thompson and Ingrid Kritsch. It tells the story of Gwich’in women brought together to sew traditional summer clothing using some 19th century examples from the Canadian Museum of Civilization (later renamed the Canadian Museum of History). It’s worth looking for, 143 in the Mercury Series. Women carefully examine the quillwork and beadwork used as embellishment and realize that many of them are things they’ve adapted over the years. They know how to do this work even though perhaps they haven’t worked with skins for some time.

I see great possibilities with this technique [porcupine quillwork]. I think what I’d start off with is just putting it in tiny places, like the collar or the pocket, before I start anything extravagant. I’d like to just keep things simple. Even in my fabric art, I think I see possibilities. It would make a pretty good rainbow or Northern Lights. (Margaret Donovan, Tsiigehtchic, 2001)

I’ve been working on my indigo quilt this weekend, having replenished my shell button supply at the wonderful Button Button.

buttons

I use akoya buttons but if I had unlimited funds for such things, I’d choose abalone for their green-y splendor. And I know what Margaret Donovan means. I’ve been concluding my quilted spirals with a single button, using varying sizes depending on what feels right.

recent spiral

But what I’d really love to do, and maybe work up to trying, is trying to gather firelight into the stitching, trying for the kind of light I see looking into water. The Gwich’in women had each other to work with and I sew alone, in my quiet kitchen. This work is so meditative. I stitch and release what I can do nothing about, I gather all my hopes and my love for the world into each spiral. Some days I come into the kitchen and see the quilt waiting in a wicker chair by the door and I’m filled with pleasure at the thought of time spent sewing, thinking, and yes, in a way remembering.

waiting blossoms