Steps

Those footprints were left by some of her first steps outside... Now she's a confident playground explorer, slide rider and stick and stone collector.

This winter has felt very long and cold. Her cheeks turn an alarming blue sometimes in the bitter wind and I worry. Hopeful, I keep pointing out the crocus buds on our way to the park.

The other day, for the first time in months, I wrote down a dyeing + smocking idea in a notebook. I looked at old indigo silk while she slept. Something's stirring but there's no room for it yet.

Musings

Now that it's gone I've come to realize what played an important role in my past life: solitude. It let me focus and see in the way that made tinctory what it was.

Motherhood has been a time of intense closeness. I'm never alone. If I ever pick up this thread that's hanging loose here something will have to be very different.

I also found that being a mother to a baby is something I'm unable to do part-time for various reasons. So what I thought would be months away will more realistically be a few years.

Anna is nearly a toddler now and it's a joy to watch her grow. The love has settled in its home. I used to relish the changes of seasons. Now she is my season of constant change.

These Days...

...the ring sling is my favourite piece of fabric and metal.

I'm taking Anna to my country to meet her grandparents for the first time and the trusty sling is coming with us. When she grows up I'm going to miss babywearing.

With Indigo Eyes

About a month ago... all bundled up for a winter walk.

She's unfurling like a new leaf, with the same energy that lies hidden in something tightly coiled.

She's quickly grown into the hat I knitted for her back in the summer. The yarn was one of the last things dyed in my indigo vat.

Black Springtime

It's easy to forget what naturally follows fruition: the ripe seeds need to spend time buried alive in the dark before the shoots find the light again.

The first months felt very dark. Objectively everything was well. Anna is beautiful and thriving and we are all healthy. But subjectively it's been a dark time.

If my hands were free I'd like to acknowledge the dark beginnings and would be dyeing with the deepest colours - indigo, logwood, walnut. There would be mourning necklaces and I'd call them the Black Springtime.

I am still much needed and it's likely to take many more months before I can sew or dye.

Thank you for the kind comments on the last post and for your emails. I'm sorry for not replying earlier but want you to know that I read and appreciated them.

A

The labour didn't quite go as it's meant to but my little Anna was born safe and sound by an emergency caesarean last Saturday morning. We are all well now, back home and learning something new every day. She's asleep on my arm as I type...

So I'm now officially on a maternity break. Thank you to everyone who sent me good wishes!

Walking through October

I'm taking things easy, walking, looking at October's colours... and waiting.

Nebula: Sowing Stars

In hard-to-imagine distances in the universe there are clouds where the seeds of stars are sown.

This is probably the last piece in the series and it looks at things coming to fruition in the sky rather than on the Earth. It's made from a very dark blue piece of silk I've been saving from the days when my indigo vat was at its best. There's a band of dense smocking where the glittering stars hatch. More of them are sprinkled further along the triangle of the night sky. The chain is divided irregularly by large vintage beads in faceted black glass. They are of different sizes and form a sort of constellation around the neck.

This nebula can be observed tonight just over the northern horizon.

In August

In August the colours of the landscape change. In August summer has reached its zenith and begins to bend towards autumn. The rowan trees stand out clearly against the blue sky with their bright, ripening berries...

As I wrote about here, this necklace is made from one of only two pieces of silk dyed with this year's harvest of my fresh indigo leaves. So it's fair to say it's one-of-a-kind. It's very densely pleated and smocked. I also made the copper leaves that are part of the clasp - sawed them out of the sheet, shaped them, patinated and partly polished the metal and gave it burnished edges that shine. The glass berry beads are quite old, I think they were in a bead box at home when I was a child. The berries swing and sway on the necklace as you move.

I'm very nearly keeping this one too. But two is too many so here it is.

The Gentle Colours of Dusk

Yesterday evening I took my favourite walk in nearby streets of big houses and their quiet, forbidden gardens. The atmosphere was changing the ordinary: lights of the traffic were a string of jewels, the wet tarmac a gold thread. A kestrel flew into the twilight. Then at night we were woken up by an owl calling from a tree just outside the window. Sometimes this city is strangely romantic and alive.