New loot

Years and years ago I took pottery classes at UCSD through the Craft Center, not for grades or credit or anything. I am now taking a ceramics class through the art department. For a grade! I got my first wave of pots back:

Three of them will go to a benefit for feeding the homeless. They are an exploration of pinch pots, coiled pots, and pots made with slabs. The two jellyfish plates are experiments for the second project, which is a modified reproduction of this Minoan pot from Phaistos (Crete):

Pictures to come... but it will be fired using used vegetable oil in an outdoor kiln, heated to cone 10 (the pots above are cone 6, done in an electric kiln).

We just got assignment number 3, making a wacky teapot. It's going to be a challenge. One teacher at UCSD was always into wacky teapots and I avoided her classes like the plague.

Birthday snow

On Saturday I went by the dye garden and discovered that most things were pretty dead of frost, but a few things were still doing well. One was a bunch of pansies:

These guys were volunteers from flowers we didn't pick last year that went to seed. We didn't pick many this year either, so I hope to do better at collecting them next year. This was 0.4 oz of flowers, dyeing 0.7 oz of silk:

You usually want at least as much flowers as fiber by weight.

Anyway, that white powder on the railing is snow. It didn't last long, but it's a sign of things to come.

Same dang view

I know you're probably tired of this view, but here's the barest hint of a double rainbow:

 

Not to worry, we won't be getting daylight after work for much longer.

For a different sort of picture, here's the start of my latest crochet project, a vest pattern called Y852: 

 

Yellow leaves

In case you didn't believe me about the coming of the yellow leaves, perhaps you do in this photo:

Fall Harvest

First, a rainbow picture showing some leaves turning yellow - fall is very much here:

Still, yesterday was nice enough that I got to spin out on the porch for a bit.

Today was cooler and cloudy, raining now. Yesterday I noticed that the upper parts of the potato plants had died off. I decided that today was as good a day as any for the harvest - don't want to wait until the ground is frozen! This year's crop:



The other kind of harvest that's been absorbing me is the dye garden:


Little bits of white fleece, alum mordanted, dyed with onion, marigold, coreopsis, tansy and rudbeckia (one with both marigold and rudbeckia). I'm carding them up and I'm going to spin them together, Deb Menz style.

Hopi red amaranth on silk (left), superwash sock yarn and wool, tin mordant:

 All the lovely red stays in the dye water, so sad. Even the sock yarn became more yellow when fully dry.

 Marigold plus indigo on wool, one ply started grey, the other two white.

The most exciting dye of the year is purple basil. I followed Rita Buchanan's advice to leave it for a day or two in the dye pot, then leave it be another few days before rinsing. Same fibers as the amaranth pot, also tin mordant. For both, I dyed the wool and silk first, then the sock yarn after.

 We got this sort of color from black hollyhocks once, but haven't managed to get enough flowers any time since! I think basil is the way to go.

Happy to be home

The first time we went to pick up Lola from the pet sitters, she wasn't anywhere to be found. No word the next day either, but we finally got her on Wednesday. She's happy to be back:

Dragon dancing

We recently got back from two weeks in Orangeville, at the International Centre of Taoist Tai Chi. The first week was a workshop on Lok Hup Ba Fa, a form older than Tai Chi and the second week was a Tai Chi workshop - with a total of 601 participants! That's a lot of people to feed, more than can work together in the big practice hall. We stayed out in "tent city".

On August 9, we all went into Toronto to celebrate Awareness Day. There is a blog post on that here, but taking the dragons out meant that practice was needed beforehand. I signed up for doing the dragon dance so most of the pictures I took are of the dragons. One dragon needs 20 people to carry, while the other needs 50 - and is the largest in North America. The small dragon can do a variety of figures. Together, the two can do the "double spiral".

Getting the large dragon down from its storage location.

Practicing indoors with the small dragon.

The small dragon doing "the stairs".

Another attempt at "the stairs", just starting.

Towards the end of our stay, things got rainy and foggy. This is in front of the main temple.

I recall taking other pictures, but those are all on Rob's phone.