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