Well it's Monday, September 16 and here in Andalucía everybody is back to school.
September for me always feels like the beginning of the year so before I embark on more projects for the autumn and winter here's a photo review of the summer.
I actually had two free months this year and having moved down here to the coast there were a lot of new inspirations. July I did loads of work but I think that the heat was getting to me by August and I wasn't half as productive.
Well I'm living by the sea and at the end of the beach there are piles of nets with wonderful lines and a palette of colours which I wanted to use for dyeing. Project for the future?
Later on in the summer I photographed beach towels hanging from a hotel's balconies at the end of a day. This project I did mange to use.
One photo which I didn't get was the lines, and double lines, of colourful parasols all the way along the beach. Next year.
Of course there were new paving tiles
and another antique quilt which sent me off into a whole new series of work.
As I've already written, I spent alot of time dyeing.Here's my 'Dye Studio'.
A few things side tracked me:
Sun dyeing - with procion! Fun but didn't lead anywhere.
Natural dyeing. No idea where this is leading.
I have a saucepan of pomegranates stewing at the moment and mordants coming in the post.
In the grips of the first wave of enthusiasm - I had sewn the first indigo seeds- I found these amazing and HUGE saucepans in the weekly flea market. Of course I had to buy them - they were a bargain!!!!
The end of the summer saw a whole new range of fruit come into the market: figs, dragon fruit, passion fruit and the very first mangoes. I love the way they are arranged in rows on the market stalls. I've got lots of photos and they're ready for a big, winter project.
These two are nothing to do with textiles or needles and thread but they did take over quite a bit of time. Perhaps this is why I got very little done in August? Finally our budgies mange to hatch their eggs, luckily only two of the six hatched. Suddenly one night when the chicks were about three weeeks old their mum decided to pull out their feathers and so suddenly we were hand rearing chicks. It took three of us to do it at the beginning but slowly, us and the chicks, worked out what we were supposed to do. They are now beginning to fly around and almost feeding themselves at last!!!
And finally THE STORM which landed on us one afternoon at the beginning of September.
Dramatic and swift and despite being up on the terraza taking photos of the clouds I forgot to bring in my pots of indigo seedlings. By the time I realised that they were out there I would have had to wade across to rescue them, and there was a lot of lightning and hail stones, well more like small chunks of ice. Needless to say the seedlings didn't do very well. They're still alive, just, but with burnt leaves. One little plant was under the table and is still nice and green and I'm hoping come the spring this will be the one which flowers and gives me seeds for the next attempt.
I'm now looking forward to it all being a bit cooler. One of my other projects was quilting my Pink Trip Around the World, not the best idea sitting underneath a wool filled quilt in the middle of August on the South coast of Spain. Just have to get all the quilting done before next summer!!
