Time to turn inwards

The wind has bought the cold and I am feeling the draw of the inside rather than the lure of the outdoors. Quick trips to do chores and hastily harvest planned dye bath materials have become the pattern, rushing back inside before the next sheets of rain drive across the garden and onto the decks. Always, inside the fire is constant and the pots are happily holding their magic ingredients. Such a lucky place to be. 

I will be leading botanical dying workshops next autumn that will focus on our particular native plants around Ōpunakē some of which I have never used before. So I rushed to harvest the seed pods from the Harekeke plants that line many parts of my daily dog walks. these pods ripen quite quickly and caste their enormous abundance of seeds far and wide from the long wind tossed shafts of the flower heads. They are magnificent as photographic studies and of course 100% iconic of NZ. The trick for this project was to capture the pods before they did this dispersal. 

close up of the flowers finishing and forming the seed pods

Two different types of Harekeke around my walk. 

I am totally obsessed and in love with these forms and colours. The pods are oily and reflective and the weather here distorts things into curious alignments. If the dogs would allow I would spend hours photographing them. 

Anyway with a back pack stuffed full of these pods before they spilled their seeds I was a happy walker. 

Then came the job of emptying the pods of their goodies. A couple of hours later I had this: 

A big roasting dish full of these luminescent magical seeds. 

Several hours of slow cooking on top of our trusty wood stove yielded a lovely dye colour once the seeds had been strained.

Into this deliciousness went some wool and of course some silk, back onto the wood-stove for an afternoon of gentle slow cooking. 

And was it worth it????

OH YES.

Finishing up loose ends. February 2023.

 The hardest part of being an active creative person for me is finishing things I have started. 

My mind is a little like the proverbial grasshopper. I see material and immediately have ideas. I think with having such a large and glorious upstairs creating space I have spread out all my bibs and bobs and as I walk through the space for one reason or another I am triggered to pause and do a little on something that captures my eye and then something else calls for my attention and off I go. 

So the pile of nearly done works is getting a little high even for me. It is time to take the matter in hand......This is in no-way connected with the upcoming start of 2023 as I did resolve this after my hip surgery. However in the meantime life has kept rolling over my intentions which get increasingly unfocused. 

It is a very simple target..... finish one thing each day. 

How complicated can that be? 

Apparently >>>>>> quite. 

As I pick this up to finish it and make it go live I realise that more than 45 days into 2023 I am slowly doing this - some days more than others. So a new direction is to finish the things my mind has hopped to - last week it was elderberry dying as the berries were being consumed by the birds. Collected the berries and straight away put in the pot to come to nearly boiling then turned it off. While that was happening I managed to skein some small quantities of silks and wools to put into the dye bath after dinner. that gave me time to bring the pot up to temp for 1 hour and then to leave the yarn in the dye to cool overnight. 

Of course then there is the delay while things dry, are washed to ensure any extra dye is off the surface and then drying again. However I am proud to announce these first round of dyed threads is now carefully wound and labelled ready for use. 

As well as this I have done some more work to use the willow branches that I had soaked before they were past using, so some play with willow has happened. This then reminded me that I love the handmade cordage as the finishing wrap around the baskets/vessels that I form so I spent three nights making some gorgeous cordage.

So how easy is it to get distracted from finishing already started projects.....

I did however manage to decide on and frame up all ready to send to the exhibition a very small triptych that is for a Predator Free exhibition in March. I called it The Colonising Biome. It is made of cast weed and grass paper - evoking the replacement of our former natural biome of coastal native vegetation with the stuff to make the fabulous white gold that dominates our economy in Taranaki.