Of easels and dyes and other things

Giving away the easel, weighed a ton, reminded me of the brief period as a teenager when I tried oil painting and, being broke, needed to invent a cheap easel.  

I found three bamboo canes, used a rubber band to hitch them together at one end,  then splayed them to stand in a triangle, one pointing forward at the top to hang a canvas or whatever I found to paint on.  Weighed a few ounces.

It worked fine until I moved on from oils, partly because of allergies, partly because it's such a dull, plodding old artform. I got much more into drawing and when I could get the paper for watercolors, did them. The spontaneity appealed to me.

And many years later I had an interesting experience with dyeing yarn. The indigo picture reminded me. I'd used beets, notoriously fugitive color, to dye yarn I'd spun, to see what would happen. I'd used a mordant, forget what, maybe alum, and the red color seemed to be, surprisingly, holding up.

Then I hung the skein to dripdry over a container. As the dye dripped out, the color went with it until I had a container of reddish liquid and -- a beautiful hank of green yarn! Natural dyeing is full of surprises. 

This saori weaving detail has some of that green yarn, faded from being in strong light. The yellow is probably onionskin, and the blue possibly Kool aid, good dye material. I wouldn't drink it.

Rainy Sunday came with a discovery of Ustinov playing Poirot on Freevee 

Look at that cast. 

And there's the Funeral Ladies book, a Foyle series 

And there's stick weaving and knitting also in progress. Plenty to do.

Here's the progress of the stick weaving, embroidery floss on darning needles. Reading left to right, you can see it's improving 

Getting the hang of sliding it off the needles, the hardest part, a bit tricky for my fingers. The trailing ends would be threaded back into the weaving but I left them out, to show the stages of learning.

9/11 is coming up and I registered for an online evening meditation session. That seems an appropriate way to observe it and the current state of the US.

And lunch notes: I roasted the rest of the carrots and potatoes with olive oil and the last spicy sausage fritter. Good discovery, long red pepper ground over carrots is very good. It's a fruity sort of grind, and is really interesting with the sweetness of the carrot. Noted for future reference.

Happy day everyone, resist and cope is the goal. And make things.

Billie agrees 

Sunday, mindfulness and dragonflies

I got a walk Sunday morning, before the day got too hot. The dewpoint was high but there was shade and a wind. 

The people I met were largely absorbed in their thoughts and I wondered if their early morning walk is a meditation. 

I did see a biplane type of dragonfly 

We have many species of dragonflies, darners and demoiselles in this region. Sometimes in the early morning sun I see them everywhere lit up by sunrays, clouds of them. Since they tackle clouds of mosquitoes, I like them. 

The other day while I was reading on the deck, a tiny green metallic one landed on my shirt and rested a while. Maybe half an inch long, wings buzzing continually, until he lifted off and was gone. We also get tiny green metallic sweat bees but usually on sedums, not on people. 

Then, once home I did a yes2next exercise, this one ten minutes of mindfulness, a great change from doing things all the time.

About aging and friends and losing friends, as Barbara Rogers mentioned on her blog -- do you follow Boardwalk Barb? You should, it's full of thought and art and family, definitely worth the price of admission.

Anyway the subject of outliving people came up there. I've outlived all my sibs, and my agemate friends, including two (!) recorder playing quartets.

Since I've been active in various arts, I have friends in many age groups including twenty somethings. No hierarchy of age in art. And I'm often the oldest person in any group these days. Some of my friends are helping care for parents, younger than I, but whose health is poor.  

It does pay to be willing to find new friends, though lifelong ones are good, I wouldn't know. Emigration tends to make childhood friends fall away eventually,  despite all your efforts.  

Particularly when you've emigrated from the UK to the US rather than the colonies -- mostly the approved destinations are Canada, Australia and NZ. My own relatives never got over my going to the US. 

But the world is full of nice people to meet. So there's that. And there's innocent merriment to be had in the obituaries, which I read to check I'm not in there. 

One thing I love is the kind of doh expression such as William, known to his friends as Bill. Or Thomas,  whose family called him Tom! Like, what the heck else, this isn't exactly groundbreaking. But then obits may be written by family without much writing experience so I will refrain from criticizing further. But I won't refrain from being amused.

Happy day everyone, meet nice, play nice, don't tease your friends!