I just walked down to the mail box. It is about four hundred steps one way. The daylillies caught my eye. These must be some kind of double ruffly kind. There are several along one side of the drive. And on the other side are leaf shadows on the pavement.
They look like a visual poetry to me and I think I will take more pictures of them as the shapes change along with the light. Something good for later when words will come easier.
For three days I worked on adding more to the Specimen Journal. Dick in the Art Group said I should go a bit wilder, more strange in color and subject. It occurred to me that any discoverer trying to understand what he was seeing might just do a bit of dissecting. He might also watch his subjects over a period of time to try understand how they got there. So here are the next few pages with only four more to go and the second signature is finished.
And before I went into the paint box to do these, I spent several days sorting through the fabrics and getting the sewing done.
First thing pants from Dairiings in Australia with an top made from two shirts and some Japanese scraps of cloth from a long time ago.
Two more tops, one altered from a bad Flax pattern and one from scratch using my favorite shirt pattern and more fabric from Dairings.
Two more pants, the black one’s from some nice twill cotton found in storage and batik patches on another favorite old pair of linen pants.
Now it is getting on in the week and I will work more on the Specimen Journal, maybe the Lethe Map. But mainly I am going through the silks and cottons that are just white and have been purchased to do some contact Nature printing.
My friend has collected leaves to see how to do it. I have the equipment and a tiny bit of experience, not to mention India Flints books. So if we have time before and/or during the paper making class we are taking this next week, we will give it a go. We are doing some indigo dyeing and using pigments (hopefully earth pigments) to color papers to then stitch into and alter in some way. It sounds like I can do that and still slip out to check on things at home. And it will be so much fun doing this with friends in the new paper studio at the folk school.
Hopefully next week I will have lovely pictures and something more interesting to say than this week. So far this Spring and Summer have made me feel a bit like a BB in a boxcar. I just need some crevices to drop into to think a bit before being jarred out and rolling on to whatever is happening next that demands attention.
I will say things are getting done and that’s good. But I am looking forward to some cooler, dreary days to put words to those leaf shadows. Even though today has been lovely.
