These past weeks here in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have seen odd weather – not seasonally odd – but overall odd. Thunder and lightning seldom occur here – but they did, in abundance. Cold weather, and a week of rain. Now, up into the 70s and 80s, the east winds are blowing dust and pollen everywhere. Everyone is congested and feeling as if hayfever has descended like a plague. The winds are drying up people and plants. Tomorrow, we can expect more rain.
Despite my whining, it has been really lovely to get a week or so of rain. The problem is the sudden shift from high humidity to low, and the winds just add to the mix by drying everything up more so than just higher temperatures might. The skies have been beautifully clear and blue, and the clouds are more than usual – the usual is no clouds around here!
After work, a friend and I took our cameras and headed out to a local park in Thousand Oaks, Wildwood Park, which is part of the land dedicated to open space around the city. This park has meadows and scrub, rocky paths, vistas. In the early evening, with a week of rain behind us, the winter vegetation is beginning to green up. Underfoot, the earth gives a little, which feels strange when one is used to a dry, dusty crunch.
The cacti are rather fat and full of water. The prickly pear have ripening fruit.
Sagebrush flowers are dried, hollow shells, but the leaves erupt in an acrid spiciness when crushed. While the hills still look burnt from the dryness of the summer, a hint of green may be seen.
The sunset was bright and clear, with a majestic descent of the sun into the western mountains, turning clouds pink and the valley gold, orange, purple, and gone.
Patina: a surface appearance of something grown beautiful, especially with age or use.
Provenance: origin, source. the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art or literature.
Keshiki: . . . (Japanese) after you use [something] and make some stain, it is natural thing and we call it “keshiki” (“a scenery naturally made”) that makes the item valuable.
The Veleveteen Rabbit: a children’s novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner.
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We buy things to use, to admire, to give pleasure to our lives, to make our lives more efficient, to wear, to eat, to provide shelter, to take us from one place to another. Sometimes we hoard, from fear, necessity, greed. There are things we all have hiding in a cupboard or drawer or under the bed, saved for the rainy day that never comes, for that yet-to-be-determined special occasion.
And then we die. All that was valuable to us, as individuals, is gone. Now it is junk for others to cart away.
I have decided to ink my only un-used suzuri, using a highly prized ink stick. The experience will be mine alone.
Tonight I took a walk with Josh over to the campus where he goes to school, just a few blocks from our house. As it has been raining the past few days, it was really nice to be outside and smell all the damp night scents – earth, leaf mould, cement. The sky is foggy, with the moon appearing and disappearing. I took the Lumix ZS5 with me, and did everything on manual settings, just to see what I would get. Altogether, I was amazingly pleased with the results!
f/3.3 and 60 second exposure
f/6.4 and 25 second exposure (about)
f/6.4 with about a 6 second exposure
f/6.4 and about 15 second exposure
The above exposures are what I think I did – I could look at the EXIF if I wanted to, but it is a bit late in the evening for me! So, I’ll finish with a couple of shots I took as I walked back home.
Neighbor's Cactus Garden
Across the Street
Over My Fence!
This last one is looking over the fence into the back yard of my house. As I was setting this one up, a car drove by . . . I wonder what they thought if they saw me skulking along the fence in the dark!
Anyway, all the photos from tonight are on Flickr if you want to see them. Some I converted to black and white, and others I putzed with using Photoscape and Elements 9.
I spent all day Saturday dyeing yarn with indigo, cochineal, and quercitron (yellow oak bark). Judy came out from Ventura with three skeins of white yarn, one of which was 100% washable merino, another was merino and nylon, and another of merino and silk. Mine were all 100% wool, specifically the Crazy Eight yarn from Wool2Dye4. I gave Judy a skein of the Crazy Eight, so all told, we had 8 skeins of pure white wool for our projects. I also had two skeins of Sea Wool I had dyed using cochineal, one lighter than the other, and a skein of moorit Shetland which I had earlier dyed with quercitron.
Indigo Vat
Friday evening, I set out 15 g. of quercitron bark to soak overnight, as well as 10 g. of cochineal mixed 10 g. of tartaric acid. Saturday morning, once we got the first dye bath heating, we set up the indigo. After my earlier disaster with indigo, I decided to order a dye kit from Dharma Trading Company, in Berkeley, California. This is a very tidy little kit, well worth the small price – kind of like frozen vegetables in midwinter – a definitely good thing to have! The only thing I needed to buy was a container with a lid – this little kit produces 4 gallons of intensely blue dye, and we certainly did not make a dent in it. Putting the container – a commercial food storage unit – on a furniture dolly was a good thing to do, too, as that is a lot of weight to carry around.
Cochineal Skeins with Overdyed Skeins on Outside
We found out, very early, that the indigo in this vat is very strong. I dipped my two cochineal Sea Wool skeins in the vat once it was ready – and they turned deep blue violet after only a minute in the vat. Oops! I was aiming for lavender! You can see how dark the two cochineal skeins became, as well as the original shades of pink. We used this knowledge to good advantage later on, and diluted the strength of the indigo by taking a couple of cups and pouring it into water in another container. Much nicer! The lavender and greens Judy got were all done with a diluted indigo bath.
Judy's Lavender (Indigo Over Cochineal) and Green (Indigo Over Quercitron)
To get her lavenders and greens, Judy did two dye baths. The first was a purely yellow skein in the quercitron, and a purely pink skein in the cochineal. As her skeins had different fiber content in them, as well as had been treated to be washable, her colors were not as intense as the Crazy Eight yarn, which is a washable merino, but is made up of 4 2-ply strands plied together. Because of the silk in her yarn, all temperatures were carefully controlled not to exceed 180 F. – important to keep the luster of the silk, as well as to keep the yellow from drifting into drabber shades.
Indigo-Dyed Moorit Shetland
If you are unfamiliar with indigo dyeing, you might like to know that before you get the blue, it is green in the dye vat; the oxygen in the air creates the blue color. You can see that the large vat is green in color, with a bluish rim at the top. As a result, it is difficult to gauge how dark your indigo will become once exposed to the air. So, as I said, we diluted the indigo with more water. Then, to get the gradated yellow-into-green, and pink-into-lavender, Judy dipped only a part of her skein into the indigo, and slowly squeezed the dye into other areas of the skein once it was removed from the weaker solution. Doing this three or four times, she made some very nice space-dyed yarn.
For myself, I wanted to preserve most of my skeins as solid colors, and so chose to do one skein in pure quercitron, one in pure cochineal, and one in a medium indigo. My last white skein was tied off in the traditional flammegarn method. and dipped first in the cochineal, tied up some more, and then dipped in the indigo. The results were quite pleasing altogether. I was also quite pleased with the indigo-dyed moorit yarn – it took on a pleasantly greenish cast.
Left to Right: Tie-Dyed, Quercitron, Cochineal, Diluted Indigo Judy's Indigo Overdyed Flammegarn
Saturday flew by! By and large, Judy and I were happy with our results. Judy had done a flammegarn in quercitron, cochineal, and indigo, but it was too pastel for her tastes. Rather frustrated, she dumped it into the undiluted indigo – and lost all here cochineal. However, the yarn came out really nice, despite that. In place of the yarn she didn’t like, she got one which is mulberry and teal, two of her favorite colors. The picture here is a bit too intense – the graduation between the purple and teal was far more subtle, with the teal being darker.
Our working concept was to use the lightest colors first, and then move to the darker ones. This meant yellow, then pink, then blue. I was not really pleased with the green we got using this method. Looking around, I see some people dye with indigo first, and then with a yellow overdye. I expect that the initial indigo has to be relatively pale to achieve middle greens. This is something I plan to do at a later date, and while greens are often readily available in other dye plants, the ones done with a combination of blue and yellow seem to be more vibrant. Color mixing is an art, and not knowing how something works best is frustrating, but at the same time so much fun. Since I am not a professional dyer, I am not too concerned about creating repeatable products, but I do like having control over my results a bit more. This is where a sense of adventure is important, as well as a willingness to try something. Theories often do not work with realities!
That said, here are the skeins, all hung up to dry a bit before getting dinner ready for the men.
I am a magpie at heart – I love shiny objects. As a kid, I used to drive my mother nuts because I liked rhinestone buttons on my dresses and gaudy costume jewelry. These days, I am more conservative, or at least demonstrate better taste, than I did when I was five years old as far as clothing. But, I am still irresistibly drawn to sparkles – splashes in water – spider webs in the morning light – flickery sun in dark shadow.
Today, I returned to the local botanical gardens. Autumn is settling in. The sky has a different quality of blue, the light is cool and intense. The scent of pine needles rises up with the heat of the day. With me came my Lumix ZS5, and the Canon QL17 GIII. I took a few pictures with the Canon, and oodles with the Lumix. This is the luxury of digital – 60 pictures without the cost for processing.
The path I took this morning was one I haven’t taken before. I always head uphill for some reason, but today I deliberately went downhill. Here, the garden is more of a woodland, with large California oaks mixed in with other native plants. The colors are more brown and green in the woodland area of the garden than up the hill, but there are little bright spots here and there of sunshine and shadow, along with lingering flowers and autumnal berries.
What I looked for today, very deliberately, was the contrast of light and dark, of sun and shadow. I stopped the camera down to -1/3 EV, to keep the camera from making all the light areas washed out. In the shadows, this creates a bit of drama with contrast. Compositional elements were a bit more studiously considered as well, such as movement of a tree branch across the picture, a pathway, a stairway. Some shots I framed with foliage, others I attempted to focus on a specific part, such as a tree leaf, and open the f/stop as much as possible with this camera (which is not more than f/3.3 manual), to blur out the background.
The set on Flickr for today contains images as they came from the camera. Most of them need some help, I think, but a few of the ones of the oaks are interesting and successful as they stand, I think. The one below has been cropped.
I am always in conflict about post-processing images, yet it has been done since the early days of photography. Images have been manipulated by time and f/stop, airbrushing out of unwanted characters who have lost political importance, handpainting. Processing of film images also influences the final product.
I am a magpie at heart – I love shiny objects. As a kid, I used to drive my mother nuts because I liked rhinestone buttons on my dresses and gaudy costume jewelry. These days, I am more conservative, or at least demonstrate better taste, than I did when I was five years old as far as clothing. But, I am still irresistibly drawn to sparkles – splashes in water – spider webs in the morning light – flickery sun in dark shadow.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 