Tag Archives: think globally

May 12, 2014 · 10:41 am

These are a few of my favourite trees

The ‘Beloved tree’ banners are out in the neighbourhood.  A bunch of us put up the first couple, and I pedalled around attaching the rest on Mother’s Day.  This one is on a massive ironbark.

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It stands beside the tram bridge in Goodwood.

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This one is dwarfed by a huge E Camaldulensis in a park beside Brownhill Creek.

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This trunk has survived a lot of depredations, whether human, animal or insect.

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I’ve tried to capture a sense of its canopy…

 

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But it is hard to show all there is to see when you stand beneath its curved limbs and beside that massive trunk.  Needless to say it isn’t all about what you can see, in any case.

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This is the place where lorikeets sometimes nest.  I’ve seen them wiggling their way in through the hole they have nibbled out of the pace where a branch used to be, as well as flying out at speed like small, feathered, green comets.

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This next tree is an E Sideroxylon. It stands outside the Le Cornu warehouse on Leader St.

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I used to be able to reach its lowest leaves, but the chainsaws took off the lower limbs some time back.  It is still magnificent.

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The light wasn’t great for it, but since there is at least one appreciator of industrial buildings reading, here is a shot of the background. I oriented my banner toward pedestrians.

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Next, one of the largest E Cinereas in the neighbourhood, standing outside what seems to be a disused office in Leader St.  Perhaps people work there but are not interested in the garden!

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It has suffered the chainsaw too, losing a truly huge bough.
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Still glorious.

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Still vast.

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Finally, my old friend on the corner of Laught and East Sts.  I thought this was an E Scoparia at first, but while the leaves give amazing colour, the bark produces a different result than other E Scoparias I’ve dyed with.  Name, uncertain. Beauty, obvious.

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This time I was spared conversation with the tree hater who lives opposite this tree and can only see it as a source of litter.  I was on the bike, so picked up a bagful of fallen dried leaves.  When I have more carrying capacity I take fallen twigs and whatever bark or wood is lying beneath it in hopes of mollifying the tree hater. 

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Fabulous.  I must say that visiting all these beloved trees and wrapping my arms around each one… I did feel like a tree hugger.  And proud!

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May 10, 2014 · 12:37 pm

Most ridiculous pyjamas ever?

I am planning a pair of pants for a spectacularly slender and tall 7 year old.  A person needs pants in winter!  But especially when the person is growing fast–fit needs to be right too.  So rather than start straight in with denim or corduroy or whatever might be lurking warmly in my stash, I decided to try a pair of pyjamas, because the pyjamas of the past have left a pretty interesting legacy.

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This is a New Look pattern of the 1980s by the look of the happy children on its front cover, which I clearly scored at some op shop or other. I started out with it and a pair of pyjamas that fit the intended recipient, and adjusted as I went.  Nothing complicated, just having a go at getting the basics right.  Zebra print on one leg, cats on a blue background on the other…

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Dinosaurs up the inside back leg to complete the picture!  I am sure there is a good deal of competition for the silliest PJs ever, but this pair are on my list!  So now I wait to see if they fit, and whether these just serve their function as a test garment or become part of the wardrobe for chilly nights…

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May 8, 2014 · 9:36 am

From old garments to new bag

I have been making a bag from two pairs of old pants.  One, a pair of second hand jeans, and the other, a pair of linen pants styled for the 1980s that I found in an op shop.  Before I leaf-printed them, they were pale green.  At first I didn’t like the effect, but it has grown on me.

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As much as the print, I think what made me want to turn them into a bag was the back pockets.  They are glorious pieces of construction. I love a good pocket.  The 3/4 jeans feature unusual pockets for jeans, too.  I don’t think I ever owned jeans with a welt pocket before.

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I cut feature sections for the outside of the bag which included the button-down pockets.  The jeans pockets went on the inside panels.  Then I pieced the rest of the garments together to create the straps and lining.

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It has been a feature of my sewing career that as I’ve moved away from sewing with fabrics gleaned from all kinds of places free or as cheaply as possible out of sheer necessity–into sewing for pleasure and having the capacity to afford to buy lovely fabric…. I continue to love sewing recycled fabrics.  Shirts made from linen tablecloths and flourbags.  Quilts from recycled garments.  Bags from all manner of fabrics.  I especially love retaining beautiful seaming and details like pockets into a new application.

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Every time I make one of these my beloved makes the case for me/us keeping it.  It’s funny, but flattering!  I haven’t decided yet if this one stays or goes to a new home.

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April 23, 2014 · 2:50 pm

Let there be string!

Making string from scrap fabric is so simple and pleasurable (and satisfies my love of using up every last scrap so well) that I’ve found myself making more string this week. I have been thinking, since Second Skin, that it is not so much that I come from the zero waste school of sewing as that I come from the austerity school of sewing.  I do draft so as to avoid creating waste, and I watched my mother dothis as a child, often starting with less fabric than her pattern called for.  Then I take all the remnant fabric from previous projects and turn it into something else, even if this requires a lot of patchwork.  Little of what is left beside my overlocker is wide enough to make string, even. When I tried carding ovwerlocker waste into batts a while back, most of it fell out because there was so much thread cut so short!

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Anyway… I’ve been turning a pair of jeans and a pair of linen pants into a bag, and although that process will use almost all the fabric in each (since I’m piecing together even relatively small sections), there are some scraps left.  I cut them all to suitable widths for string making.  It began with this little pile.

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By later in the week, I had three lengths of… well… cord?  Light rope?  Very shaggy string?

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I’ve been creating small banners for trees in our local neighbourhood, and so string–cord–rope will come in handy.

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There’s a plan for these banners… involving other people… and brought into being by the enthusiasm of my fairy godson.  I’ve made several so far from a calico sack I scored from a local business, together with recycled eco-printed fabrics and eucalyptus-dyed embroidery threads.  On the inside, the interfacing is a set of damask napkins which saw their glory days long ago and have been rendered threadbare by long use.  My mother-out-law sent them down to Adelaide last time my sweetheart visited her.  I hope she’ll approve of this way of using them!

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April 16, 2014 · 1:06 pm

Craftivist pennants and another handspun hat

There have been some small moments of crafty completion in the recent period of day job overwork. The ‘thanks for cycling!’ bunting, which had been ripped down, was replaced after mending by a group of friends one sunny afternoon.

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Proper attention was paid to all its hanging particulars by willing fingers….

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And there has been still another Turn A Square made from the remainder of a skein of luscious handspun yarn.  Here it is, modelled by a particularly willing bowl.

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The distinctive crown shaping of this pattern is so simple, yet so effective. 

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Upcoming public holidays may prove more viable crafting time than recent weeks have done… and I am looking forward to it!  I have plans!

 

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April 14, 2014 · 12:15 pm

Unloved fibres of yesteryear and some eucalyptus dyeing

Some time ago I received a lot of fibres that even the felt group at my Guild didn’t want anymore.  I think this was because I taught a class on ‘novelty yarns’, known to online spinners as ‘art yarns’ or ‘textured spinning’.  It is true, people like Pluckyfluff have been known to spin semi-felted wool and all manner of inexplicable (yet ultimately gorgeous) things–and I’ve done some fairly inexplicable, or at least hard-to-explain, spinning,  myself.  But there are limits!  It seems some people equate artyarn with awful yarns made from awful fibres.  I wasn’t about to inflict most of this fibre on beginners.  What I felt was readily useable, I carded into batts for people to experiment on some time ago,.  Some I turned into trash batts.  Some I re-washed and turned into yarn.  But just recently I found there was still some in my stash.  Some was simply suffering from poor washing.  Sticky and unpleasant to touch.  I washed it.

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The amount of mohair the felting group handed over makes me think mohair isn’t favoured as a felting fibre.  So some was just mohair.  I carded it up and found it was neppy mohair, but still.

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Some was extremely short and rather matted. I would rate this trash batt standard, so carded it up with some longer wool to hold it together.

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Some was low quality alpaca in small quantities.  I carded that with some longer fine wool too.

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I would rate almost all the resulting yarns basically suitable for yarnbombing… or perhaps I should offer them back to the felters!

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Only the mohair really became a yarn of any quality… not too surprising given what went in to the others!

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I also had some small amounts of fibre from an exchange.  One was some kind of ruggy (coarse) wool with lots of contrasting nepps in it, and the other a quantity of a lustre longwool, something like English Leicester.  I checked my perceptions with two spinners of much experience at the Guild and we all agreed on these conclusions, which was a happy thing, suggesting I am learning about identifying wools.  I decided on eucalypt dyes.  In each case I divided the fibre in half, and dyed one half in the first dyebath and the other half in an exhaust dyebath of the same leaves, to get two different tones.  Then I spun the fibres up to retain the colours as distinct stripes.

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And now, back to spinning a large quantity of alpaca…

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April 4, 2014 · 6:23 pm

Sampling eucalypts

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As we drove home from exercise group last Saturday morning, it became clear that a big part of a tree had been cut down beside a warehouse-style business near home.  A big chunk of tree canopy was lying on the footpath.  I didn’t think I had sampled the tree in question, but there are several in that area that look like E Scoparia, but have been pruned to branch very high–out of reach.  There isn’t much hope of my identifying this one–it has no fruit, flowers or buds on it right now, though it does have red twigs and white-barked branches and leaves the right shape for E Scoparia.   I have had some success with leaves from the gutters on that street, but not right where these branches were lying.  I went back and applied my secateurs.

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To my sadness when I actually stopped I could see that a tree had been felled and that its trunk had been taken away.  The very base of it was all that was left, and it was clear that a large section of the root mass had rotted away or become diseased.  Just the same… the continuing loss of trees around our way feels relentless. This week someone else aggrieved by the felling of three massive trees on one block which I posted about recently took a spray can to the fence of the block in question.  One fence had something I can’t fully reprint here: ‘What the f*** have you done?’, and the other fence said the neighbourhood was in mourning for the loss of the trees and that planning laws should be changed.  I thought I would take a photo but this morning there was a chap with a paintbrush taking it out less than 48 hours after it went up.

But this is no reason to allow all the leaves of this felled tree to go to commercial composting if I could dye with them and then compost them.  Needless to say, after this flame orange result, I went back and cut all I could get into a chaff bag (that’s a very big sack, in my terms). As a bonus to my visit, the tree had been felled beside an E Cinerea, so I picked up every last leaf that had fallen from the E Cinerea too.  I’ll be running a workshop at my Guild in June and I’ll need to bring a goodly amount of dye material.

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This next eucalypt was standing in the parklands in North Adelaide.  I went there early one morning for an appointment so had a walk before my appointment.  I decided to sample it because India Flint suggests silver grey leaved eucalypts are promising dye plants.  The buds were so pretty!

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Clearly when it flowers there are many flowers… but not yet…

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The tree was an interesting shape…

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There was the intriguing feature of two different coloured trunks coming from one lignotuber.

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And I just can’t explain why there were so many land snails, but I love land snails.

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The result in the dyebath was a pale apricot.

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Then there was this tree, growing on the far outskirts of my workplace just outside a car park.  It seems like a box (one branch of the eucalypt family) to me.

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It was gloriously in flower, full of bees and birds.

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When I went back in the evening, I realised there were a few of these trees and there were also fallen branches.  Well worth sampling, in my view!

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I loved the colour from this plant, and I used a dyeing strategy India Flint described in Melbourne.  Far less energy use and potential for fibre damage… and clearly this may become my new normal way to dye with eucalypts!

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March 19, 2014 · 4:19 pm

Drive-by dyeing and mending

On my bike ride home from work (about a 40 minute ride), I pass just one Eucalyptus Cinerea. Well, there are two, but one is inside someone’s front garden.  A person has to have some boundaries!  The street tree had dropped a small branch.

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I decided I’d better collect it.  Usually I carry a calico bag in my bike pannier for such contingencies, but this was what I found when I scrabbled about in the bottom of my pannier on the day, so in went all the stray leaves I could find.

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This tree has had to contend with a lot.  It has had a  very strange pruning job designed to protect the electrical wires that now pass through its branches.  The pruning took out a lot of the canopy, but the tree is still standing.  For this, I am grateful.

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Recent events have caused me to reflect on the way I think about trees on my regular routes… like old acquaintances.  I think about them as I pass, the way I think of people when I pass near their homes without visiting.  I notice what happens to them.  I check them over when I have the chance.  I remember how they were when they were younger, or before that accident befell them.  It’s not entirely unlike the way I notice people I don’t know well, but see out and about in the neighbourhood regularly.

Further along, I saw that my “thanks for cycling” bunting had been ripped and some of it was lying on the ground.  Soon it was in my other pannier headed for the mending pile.

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A few days later, the E Cinerea made it into the dye pot and produced its usual dependable flamelike orange.  I also collected some ironbark leaves that had fallen in the parklands near where we had exercise class.  Once the E Cinerea was all but exhausted I reused that dyebath with the ironbark leaves, thinking I would save water and energy, but clearly this was not E Sideroxylon–it produced that sad, damp little pile of fawn alpaca on the right.

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I have come to regard this as a sign: The orange leaves in the picture below are the E Cinerea leaves, which have gone from silver-grey-green to orange in the dyebath.  The ironbark leaves, on the other hand, have remained a robustly green shade even after cooking.

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And, I’ve mended the bunting ready to hang it again on a suitable occasion…

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March 2, 2014 · 1:08 pm

Thanks for cycling! The bunting.

There is a new segment of cycleway near our place that has been one of the upsides of living beside a major engineering project for most of the last 2 years.  It seems only right to celebrate.  The new segment isn’t terribly long, but is one of those little pieces of path that make a big difference to a cyclist.

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I started out with some bike themed fabric.  It was originally intended as a shirt for a small bike loving friend… but he grew quickly into quite a large, keen cyclist and my sewing queue moves slowly sometimes.  Some of the fabric became a bag and the rest was sitting there ready to go.  I decided in the end that worrying about aligning the grain was beside the point for bunting, so relentlessly pieced leftovers together until there was just about nothing left.

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Then I moved over into some purple fabric.  It dates back over fifteen years to when there was a shop nearby that sold offcuts from sheet and quilt manufacturing.  I made all kinds of things from those offcuts!  This came in one of the odd shapes that I am sure could be explained by someone who had been to the factory: a square with three squared off corners and one rounded corner.  Soon it was all triangles, some constructed from two smaller triangles.  On went the lettering.

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Some more of my vintage bias binding was pressed into action, and pretty soon…

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Last night a friend was visiting and she was keen on hanging it, so we had bunting hanging before dinner.
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Hopefully it will cheer up weary cyclists (and energetic ones) as they pass.
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February 22, 2014 · 9:54 pm

Where do I find the time?

I was at a wonderful birthday picnic today, celebrating my friends turning 7 and 40, respectively.  There was all kinds of interesting chat, of course, and in the midst of it another friend who reads this blog was marvelling at the way things seem to happen at my place, to judge by the blog.  I had to break the news that I write posts at all kinds of odd times and that their sequence isn’t always entirely mapping the way things happen at my place, and that I auto scheduled posts to load every two days while I was on holidays…  I guess I think the way that things really do happen is not quite such a good story!

But just in case…   here’s the story of my Saturday.  We were up early to go to an exercise class.  I was ready in plenty of time so went outside, removed the sock yarn from its eucalypt dye bath, put it to soak in rainwater and hung the soy-soaked-indigo-dyed sock yarn up to dry.  Then there was exercise, a ‘coffee’ (I don’t drink coffee so for me it was yoghurt and hot chocolate).  I knit a few rows on my sock.

Then there was grocery shopping and visiting an upholsterer who had calico flour sacks and hessian sugar sacks on the wall that had come out of old chairs he was refurbishing (I like him already).  Then preparing food and gifts and off to the picnic.  I knit more on my sock there.  Another friend was appliqueing on a pair of jeans which were her gift.  Then home.  Cleaning up and a short pause.  So many ideas in my head! I have a couple of hours to do what I like and so… I have samples of two trees collected yesterday.

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Dealing with them requires two empty dye pots but my two are full.

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They are the ones the sock yarn came out of at breakfast time. I empty, rinse and refill them. One with my friend’s street tree in case it might be E Nicholii (I live in hope, but not much!!)

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The other with leaves from a tree that has intrigued me every time I’ve driven to her house–but yesterday it was in flower and I was running early, so I stopped. Put the heat on them. While dealing with that I’ve remembered the sock yarn.  That bucket isn’t very clean, is it?  Better keep rinsing.

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Thank goodness we’ve had rain and the whole place is on rainwater at last. Must deal with the sealing fail on my dye jars.  That requires another free dye pot I don’t have.  Next.

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I decide to try to identify the eucalypt. Oh, remember to rinse the sock yarn.

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Uploading photos for this post takes a while, so I set about turning saved cardboard into tags to clean it off the desk.

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Miraculously I manage to find some of the lovely pre-used string and thread I’ve been saving… some of it with attached safety pins, and that gets reuse too.  It puits me in mind of clearing out my grandfather’s shed after he died.  String saved for re-use, straightened out nails, screws that have been saved from previous applications…

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Now these tags can join the ones that are already in the drawer made from last year’s calendar.  Out comes my favourite euc book.  If that tree is in the book it is E Stricklandii, which means I probably should have recognised it.  Mmmm.  A friend comes over.  More chat and then my beloved and said friend head off into the shed.  Rinse the sock yarn.  Put sample cards into the dye pots and turn them down.  One looks promising, the other not so much. Back to the computer, to check out my euc.  These leaves are not glossy… and so on….

Some work on another blog post.  Go to the bin to put the cardboard remains in the recycling only to find my beloved has put some greeting cards in there that surely shouldn’t be so readily disposed of… three new postcards created, one card saved for potential use as a stencil (lovely cut out design).  Check out my files for the last time I identified E Stricklandii.  Clearly I did try it out as a dye plant so there will be a comparison… Re-file craft books and fabrics. Check dye pots. Looking good.

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Empty sock yarn rinse water.  Tidy up in the laundy and see those slippers I finished ages ago but haven’t felted.  What the hey?  Put them in the washing machine and get out a timer so I won’t forget they are there (sure sign of overreach but always a good idea with felting).  Put timer in pocket.  Set up India Flint’s suggested fix for hard to seal jars (I think mine suffered from being heated too quickly despite using the lowest heat on the stove, but may as well add insurance).  Now they will be ready when the dye pot comes free.  Or tomorrow, if it comes to that!

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Timer rings.  Check slippers.  Not ready yet.  Go to find traced shape of my friend’s foot.

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Take drum carder and the vacola jars Dad picked up secondhand out to the shed.  Check dye pots. terminate the less interesting dye pot ready for the jars, pour the dyebath into a bucket.  Put the knitting nancy (french knitting kit) I found at an op shop in the box for delivery to friends who might use this, plus things from the picnic that need to go to their place.  Decide to make another dye jar with the pelargonium petals, since the pelargonium has stopped flowering. I must have been so optimistic when I started gathering them in this jar!

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Timer goes.  Slippers look about right. Take them out to cool.

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One slipper pair is perfect.  The other, back in for ten minutes.  Finish sorting out those jars of stuff, steep and store goodness.

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In they go!

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The dried avocado peels from the kitchen finally make it out into dyestuff storage land.

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Slippers come out just after our other dinner guest arrives (with dinner! bless her!)  I shape the slippers over chat with crackers and avocado and cheese.  And put a load of the really dirty dyeing stuff on to wash.  I need to keep an eye on the stuff, steep and store jars during the evening.  I am pronounced a nerd with glee…  After main course, one of our guests says she wants to ask a technical question, which is whether I could draft a pattern from a simple vest she has so that she can make one on a ‘trashed and treasured’ theme… Out comes the recycled tissue paper and we give it a go and find a vest pattern that might help with conceptualising construction.

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Well, it’s bedtime.  After heating extremely slowly (the dye burners win over the gas stove in the kitchen for slowly heating, clearly) my jars are now a little too hot… I turn them down and leave them to the dye pot timer.  Goodnight!

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