2015 Highlight Reel

So I haven't updated the blog in forever. Not that it matters in the long run but I guess a bunch of things did happen between my last post and the end of the year, including trips to to Pittsburgh to see Holly, Iceland to see glaciers, and Barcelona to see the festival de la Merce. So I figured I would do a post on the highlights of the year. I'm picking my favorites and forgetting the rest. This is apparently what normal people do, so why can't I?


Fave event of 2015: Correfoc. Devils chasing people around with fire to the soundtrack of constantly beating drums. What could go wrong? One of the craziest things I've ever been to. Someone would shut this down in North America with extreme prejudice. But in Catalunya, okay.

And if you're a scared looking Anglo tourist, just know they're probably going to target you. I didn't look scared I guess, so I got to dance out with one of the devils, and burned my phone in the process. 100% worth it. 

Fave pic of 2015 is from the same event:

Everything about this was awesome.

First runner up from Iceland:

Taken with my crappy phone camera from a piece of lava I wasn't supposed to be on. Ha!


Fave picture of me to showcase my narcissism which is a necessary part of every blog post: Me on St Patrick's day when I always wear orange. This also showcases my contrariness. Proud to be a protestant! And not a republican, in any sense of the word.  I was also very excited about the Queen reaching the milestone of longest reigning female monarch EVAR.

God save the Queen!

And before an ignorant moron says anything: when Canadians refer to "the Queen" we mean the Queen of Canada. Because she is--The Queen of Canada. It's one of her titles, look it up aholes.

First runner up: me and Christina looking at my phone at midnight in Iceland after getting back from the Blue Lagoon. It was cloudy unfortunately so you couldn't actually see the sun that night. But you can see how light it was.

 

 The second runner up would be the pics of me and Holly being judgy about archetecture or the ones Holly took of me and mem. After all this time Mem still gives me a really good disapproving side eye. But mem doesn't ever post pictures of mem. Did I ever mention he refused to tell me his NAME for like a year and I just had to find it out? This is why he will always be MEM. Holly doesn't post pictures of Holly either, but at least she's always been Holly. That said getting her last name out of her took some work. Haha.

Fave performance of 2015: The Blind Boys of Alabama. Dickfaces in the crowd notwithstanding, I almost started crying when they sang

People get ready
There's a train a-coming
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board.
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don't need no ticket
You just thank the Lord.

And finished it off by declaring "I believe!" Man eyes so watery people all cutting up onions

After so many events reminding us that we're aliens here and will never belong or be truly welcome, to be reminded that one day we'll make our journey home was powerful. Although it was another "WHY HE NOT HERE YET" moment for me. Had a lot of those this year.

Anyway they were a last minute addition to the folk fest and I was definitely more excited to see them than anyone else.  First runners up were the many other good performances at Folk Fest, including Sheepdogs, Bahamas, Vance Joy and Blue Rodeo, but this one was the highlight for me. :)

I believe...but I wish it wasn't taking so long. 

Fave album from 2015: Music in Exile by Songhoy Blues.

Blues songs about exile banned by Islamic extremists seems quite fitting for the year somehow. Plus this is pure blues, but also purely African. None of the unnecessary grandstanding that goes on in American blues today, it feels closer to the spirit of the blues of the past than a lot of what is being made now. Maybe it's the hardship and the defiance that makes great blues. That's despite the fact that I have no idea what they're saying--but then again I still don't know what Bukka White was saying in half his songs. So there's that.

The entire album is so good and definitely the one I listened to most this year. It's the main reason I keep up spotify on my phone. Well and now the Beatles are on there :P

First runner up: Healer by Alex Cuba

Like any good fan, I was one of the first people to contribute to the kickstarter campaign, heh. I admit I missed the horns in this one and could have done without all the English (hah), but I think he is really going his own direction with it. I hope he wins the Grammy! :)  I'm excited to see him perform in Regina again, hopefully sans old grumpus grumpi this time. Also waiting to see what The Cuban Bus ends up like.

Best Moment of a Terrible Season: The Labour Day game, which we actually won. And got to do a cool card trick for. I'm going to miss Taylor Field. :(

Fave meal of 2015: I got to have Real Lox from the Jewish deli in Pittsburgh, courtesy of Holly. Even though I got mine with eggs. :P And yes it's totally dorky to add your favorite meal to such a list. But it's not like I was ever good at caring what other people thought.

First runner up: Real Seafood in Barcelona for my birthday, despite the shrimps staring at me dolefully as I dismembered them. Also did you know calamari is actually tender and good? Yeah not in a landlocked province it isn't.

I have to admit birthday was was better this year, mostly because of the Brazilian acrobats that performed--twice! :D Happy Birthday to me. This is prolly why the implicit bias tests all tell me I am strongly biased in favour of black people.


Most Obnoxious Char-like Project of 2015: Learning Spanish. Stuck at "you suck" A1 level. Pheh. So bad at languages. Still reading the bible in Spanish. I think I prefer the reading and writing to the speaking and listening anyway, which kind of makes sense given that there are no Spanish people here and I'm an introvert. But if I'm going to take over Latin America I have to get this figured out. It's less hard than French for sure, I was at A1 level with that after taking it for YEARS with professional instruction. Admittedly our french teachers were kind of bad though and in some cases more interested in the students than the subject.

My fave Spanish Learning tool has been Language Transfer. Because the discussion of etymology and things is almost more interesting than the language. Maybe that's why I'm still at YouSuckA1. Then I saw this in Barcelona:

 Yeah ENGLISH.

Anyway. That's my list of highlights for the year. 

Making Extracts and Messes

 I made this post earlier, but it's been languishing in the draft file. So I might as well post it before it gets to the point where it's been too long, like most of my unposted drafts.

While Shemar hasn't been working, I've been doing other things, most especially with my Christmas present, and trying to figure out how to make the mukluks but too scared to actually cut the material. My first project with the new burner has been a bit of a comedy of errors. Like most of my dyeing experiments.

After the last disaster mama said "you are always trying so hard on these projects and they always backfire on you". Which is true and why I'd never be able to do anything creative professionally. Accidents are really the primary part of my creative process.

I've had some cochineal for years and never used it. Since I know it can produce a lot of dye by multiple extractions, I decided I wanted to make a powder extract. I looked on the Place For All Answers, the natural dye list, but couldn't find anything much on the best process to produce a powder extract. So I thought well it would just be about extracting and then dehydrating, can't be that hard. But then I forgot this was being done by me.

The process took up most of January but I did manage to produce 30g of dye extract which should dye 300g of fabric. It's also the amount of bug I started with, so I have an extract that should be ten times more potent than the whole bug. So it's not entirely unsuccessful.

Through the errors I've figured out the best way to do this is to make small batches of dye and then bake it in a pyrex plate at about 300F and scrape out with a razor. But it took a lot of not doing that to get to that point. My basement looks like I killed someone in it, and so did my hands. Red EVERYWHERE. But got to do some cool experiments anyway. And I took pictures for mem's benefit, since he is so interested in dye process (hah). I intended to post them here but I'm lazy so it's taken me the better part of a month.

The bugs secreting their lovely red. I ground them up a little, but not overly so. Once they had been reconstituted, they really did look like bugs again. 

  first extractions, so red they were opaque. I'm pretty sure I did at least 20 extractions before the bugs stopped producing enough colour to be worth it.

At this point I decided to siphon off some of it in case I ruined it and see what I could get for colour. The first attempt precipitated, and now I have some cochineal pigment after I cooked it down. Then I got some nice pinky reds on silk and alpaca. The silk surprisingly took the best colour. This is the same silk I used for Athanasius and John Owen, and it never took ANYTHING well. Except cochineal apparently. 

As I continued to extract, I put the small extractions into my giant stock pot with a light to reduce and the plan to cook that down in the pot. But I started to notice some black sludge forming at the top. Didn't know what it was or why it was there. Was it going bad? I skimmed it off with shop towels.

 

black crap. 

When I dyed the yarn, I added a little vinegar to shift the colour a bit. The black sludge turned bright orange. Turns out it was dye material and I had gotten rid of it (I had reserved about a cup of it because I wondered if there was something I could do with it and there was soo much. So I only threw away some of it, but it all had to be reconsituted). Here it is on the table where I had spilled some of the black--orange in the vinegar. 

Damn it I threw away dye. I pulled out the shop towels and soaked them in vinegar to pull the dye back out. I'm not sure what kind of chemical thing was going on here, only vinegar would return it to a coloured dye material from a pure black.

   reconstituting the sludge.

 Making a mess. I looked like I slapped someone silly after this. Prolly what Nicholas of Myra looked like after the council of Nicea.

This is the sludge that was sitting at the bottom of the big stock pot when I strained it. I decided to pull that out and start drying it out on its own. 

I put the sludge on some foil and stuck it in my pyrex plate. I cooked it on broil and it worked nicely. The second time I put it on broil without foil, the plate broke when I pulled it out. So I need a new plate. Then I broke another one! Mama told me to put it on bake instead of broil and the rest of the extractions went nicely. But more dye wasted. :( 

Originally I attempted a dehydration set up with a light and aluminum foil. This actually worked pretty well, except the plastic melted and the containers were too small so it took longer for the stuff to dry out and turned out to be difficult to scrape out. I eventually started just pouring each extraction into the pyrex plate and cooked for like half an hour then scraped it out. I'd get about a gram of dye with each extraction. 

Altering the colour of the saved bit. Ammonia added to vinegar. 

After I realized that the black sludge was in fact dye and pulled out what I could from the shop towels soaked in vinegar as well as the cup I reserved, I played with the ph a little. 

This is how you get orange and scarlet with cochineal, it's an indicator dye. That is, the colour can be shifted by changing the ph and by adding different auxiliaries.  The ph on the left is about 4 with vinegar and 8 on the left with ammonia.

The final result. 30g of carmine (I got some more after this). And probably another 30g all over my basement. Some of it did wash out of my housecoat. Some of it.

I'd like to try this with my wood dyes, but they're way more temperature sensitive in my experience, especially logwood. My first logwood experiments became a very ugly brown that actually seemed to discharge the purple colour before it ever even got to the boiling point. That was an interesting, if less than cool experiment. So I guess I'd have to cook at much much lower temps. And probably dehydrate in an actual dehydrator because baking would probably destroy it.

So I have pure forms of two of the dyes for project. Murex next, right?

Finished (kind of) Projects!

A few months ago I mentioned my plan to add to the double wedding ring quilt I had made years ago. It didn't really turn out quite as well as I had hoped as a lot has changed in those years including my sewing machine and the neutral fabric I used. Also I didn't have Fergus to ruinate everything. Overall I guess it could have been worse, and I can put the new part to the bottom edge of the bed. :)

I did take pics of it's progress; this is one of the quilts in my original quilt journal, which years later I'm actually finding helpful in a few cases because I documented my process so well and it HAS been almost 20 years in some cases. So this is pretty pic heavy. Mostly phone pics, but I used my camera at the end.

Shemar crapped out in mid-December, and I finally got the time to get him out and to the repair shop, hopefully to have his hook race replaced. I pulled out the old QC to finish the edging of this quilt, as well as other projects awaiting completion since Shemar was sent on vacation while still insisting he prefers Versace. Anyway the quilt is still awaiting a binding. I fricking hate binding in case someone out there didn't know. Given my record I'll do it eventually in 10-13 years or so.

Crappy phone pic of the arc blocks with the various neutral fabrics I bought behind them.  They ended up not exactly the same colours, but I was still okay with the way the new matched the old colour wise. I did also find more of the original fabrics, and hardly had to use the jelly roll. So I still have most of a jelly roll for other things.

Unfortunately once I got the melons done, I learned why the quilt was smaller than expected all those years ago: the blocks that were meant to be 15" were all actually 14". I had to cut all the new blocks down to make them match the old ones. 

When I cut down the new blocks, it caused the four-patches to go pretty wonky. Above is an old four patch and the worst of the new ones for comparison. The patches, having been cut so much, were just not all the same size. This was really disappointing because at the time I was proud of how well the original four-patches matched up. 

Part of a completed new unit.

All units sewn together, ready to add to the quilt. Despite mangling the four patches, I was glad to see that they did in fact match up with the old piece. Alas, that was a temporary reality.

It also took some work to get Fergus the hell off of it so I could take a picture. Not the last time with this quilt, as you'll see. I threw him off, turned around to take a picture, and got this. He got kicked out and the door closed after this.

Beginning the process of ripping out the old quilt. Probably the easiest part of the whole process. I chose to hand sew a strip to the back so I wouldn't have to cut as much quilting out. I trimmed the batting to match inside. 

New and old pinned together, with the old backing and batting pinned away. Another problem is that these kind of blocks are meant to be sewn together in an "S" pattern. Because I was adding new rows, I had to add them in "C" patterns. This meant I had to hand sew the four-patch units while laying the pieces on the floor. So that was annoying.

Here it is after hand sewing, all in one piece. At this point I decided to add some paint to the four-patches to at least give the worst of them the illusion of matching better than they really did.

I didn't have my beloved spray adhesive, so I pin basted. It was challenging to lay out because of course there was a completed quilt on the end of it, so I taped the backing down and weighted the quilt so that it was still taut. I ended up with a tuck on the edge where the strip to add the two pieces was, but meh.

Pin basting in the hoop.

So once it was together I started quilting. I used the original quilting pattern as I had it in the quilt journal. As mentioned, this was the only quilt I ever completed on my hoop. Now that it is no longer in storage I pulled the hoop back out; it was far easier to use than I remember. Partly because I think I learned more about keeping tension right, and partly because I sat on my bed which is really really high. The hoop practically sat in my lap.  Here it is in the hoop, started on the rings then added the central motif.

I used a thicker thread which made me crazy and I had to use a needle slightly larger than a between, but over all it was fun to do. I tried to match but the stitches were slightly smaller than the original. And with less tension in the hoop, it was much less painful to do than the original. Helps not having an arthritic flare up too.

Fergus thought this was a "box" and tried to sit in it whenever I readjusted the quilt. He also tried to chew the thread and jump on top of the quilt while in the frame. He got kicked out and the door closed...again.

New ring above, old ring below. I had been considering getting a smaller hoop for the frame (you can get different sizes) but now I find that while the large hoop has it's challenges, it's just not that difficult to use anymore. 

Ready to cut down, and...oh look it's Fergus the king of the aholes.

....yeah. He wanted in the kitchen as soon as I had covered the doorway.

The last pic was taken after I had quilted and edged, but before washing. Glad I did it, because after washing, the new rings all shrunk considerably. They are now significantly SMALLER than the old ones. I think it's because I used kona cotton for the centres instead of broadcloth, as originally. So I didn't need to cut them down anyway, they would have shrunk down. That said, they wouldn't have matched. Still, I did a lot of extra work on them because they weren't the right size, then they SHRUNK. PHEH.

There's now a ripple in the middle of the quilt though it's more noticeable on the back, as can be seen here (note the hand-sewn strip too--been awhile since I hand sewed like that, and it wasn't the straightest, heh).  It also shrank more to one side than the other.

This is how much smaller the three new rows are. :( Mama and I did tug-of-war with it for awhile to stretch it but mostly only succeeded in almost knocking each other over a few times and lawling at each other. It really didn't stretch too much and mama once again reminded me of how often I fail at my bad ideas. Sigh.

Anyway here's some more pictures of the finished quilt. It really has turned out to be quite large and it was hard to find a wall big enough for it. The darkest rings all ended up in the last row and colourwise I think that's the only thing that looks a little weird (more noticeable in the pic with Ferghole the douchecopter). 

 The entire quilt, new part on the top so there's some rippling to the larger bottom. I had to actually Hammer push pins into this wall! This apartment has some kind of rock hard particle board that nothing sticks to or in for walls.

Look at that shrinkage. One thing I will say is that it makes the quilting look pretty nice...I mean for part of it. Really the quilting is where a difference is most apparent. 

 Quilting in the sunlight. We had a very sunny day today so I decided it'd be good for the colouring.

This picture or the one above probably show its colours best. 

I figure if I put the new part on the bottom of the bed with the smallest side against the wall, as it is here, its hardly noticeable that it's smaller. 

The DWR plus another quilt I just finished.

So though it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, they never really do. I know that it's not the best idea to pull the fork out again once you've declared something done, but I don't think it's a habit I'll ever be able to break. I do have a large and useable quilt now. And I want to hand quilt the New York Beauty even more now. Still working on the sashing!

Odds and Ends (last one)

So I personally think an art project based on the colours and white would be just about the coolest thing EVAR. Plus I could write a major best selling book documenting the process, which would also be my dissertation in being a not-pastor.  Then I could stop battleaxing and just retire to a life of self-agrandizement, which is basically what artists have to do to get noticed these days. Unfortunately the thing keeping me from it is that a murex vat would cost about 60 grand to make. Major sad.

Anyway I asked mem if I should put historic references into the post because the arguments rely on history a lot. I hate putting references into a text because they distract from the thought flow, but I did write it so that most of it could be referenced pretty easily if I had to. So these are some of the sources I used (referencing process is harder since I don't know how I know things I learned 15-17 years ago anymore). Rey asked for the references so I'm finally getting this post out.

The cool thing about the subject is that it intersects with many nerdly pursuits: theology, biblical studies, chemistry, ancient history, textiles, archaeology, zoology and so on. Which in my opinion makes it super cool and awesome, but I know from the way most people's eyes glaze over that they don't always agree. If you're not one of the normal people, here is a bit of a list to make it easier for my fellow nerdlings to research. Consider this my bibliography :).

PS I don't even know which citation style to use because there are a lot of different disciplines. And I hate that crap, having gotten a 37% in apa (mla was better). So I'm adding by author, year, article, book or journal, (publisher) for the most part. Or if Rey complains, I'll just edit and make them links.

Barber, E.W. 1995. Women's work: The first 20,000 years. Women, cloth, and society in early times (W W Norton).

This book is easy to read and discusses the development of textile processes from the most ancient times to about 500 bc.

Cardon, D. 2007. Natural dyes (Archetype books). 

This is THE BIBLE of natural dyes. Waaaannnttt 

Guckelsberger, M. 2013. Purple murex dye in antiquity. I can't understand the citation cause it's all something not English and I'm a barbarian :( It's on academia.edu. This one has a lot of the ancient sources mentioning dyes, Including Pliny the Elder. 

Whiston, W (translator). 2009.  The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem of Flavius Josephus (Project Gutenberg). 
He discusses the colours as symbolic of the universe in Book V chapter 5, section 4.

Koren, Z.C. 2005. The First Optimal All-Murex All-Natural Purple Dyeing in the Eastern Mediterranean in a Millennium and a Half, Dyes in History and Archaeology 20, pp. 136– 149 (Archetype Publications).
 A lot of Koren's research can be found at https://edelsteincenter.wordpress.com. Definitely some cool stuff there. He seems to have done a lot of work advancing Isaac Herzog's contention that tekhelet is molluscan. Also he properly reduced the freakin murex vat unlike some others. That makes him WAY more credible.

Additionally on tekhelet there is the P'til Tekhelet foundation at http://tekhelet.com (This where I got the picture of the blue murex dyed fragment and references to the Babylonian Talmud).

Orna, M. V. 2013 Chemical history of colour (Springer). 

This book discusses all the early pigments and dyes, as well as how we see colour and produce dyes. Also a discussion on the rise of the modern dye industry and its relation to medicine and industry. 

Ruscillo, D. 2002. Reconstructing Murex Royal Purple and Biblical Blue in the Aegean, Archaeomalacology: Molluscs in former environments of human behaviour pp 99-106 (Oxbow Books).
More on producing purple and blue. The repeated discussion of the stank made me lawl. Mem would probably relate this to whenever he is talking about Rey.

Also, besides the murex blue, I got the picture of the murex robe from this site.

I've had the picture of the kermes-dyed mantle for a long time because Alexander McQueen used it in one of his designs as part of his final show, and as you all know I'm waiting for God to miraculously make me that good at sewing so I can copy it. So I'm not sure where I got that particular picture from but it is a pretty famous textile.

I also used bible gateway and the blue letter bible for the references, concordance and words. Usually for things like this I look at the NASB. Heavy on the end of Exodus, also Isaiah 1 and 4 and Ezekiel 44.

One of the things I left out entirely was the contrast between clothing and nakedness in scripture. There is a link, especially in Hosea and Ezekiel, but it just didn't fit and probably would have been another thousand words long. But it is a fun study of its own.