Cherokee Syllabary Cherry Silk Scarf

Here's an interesting new design.  I made this silk scarf using syllables from the Cherokee language.  I won a benefit auction for a used working Nacho Cheese heater, and converted it to a soy wax heater.  I keep the was there all of the time, and when I am planning to do soy wax resist batiking, I flip the switch.  Like a double-boiler the water heats the wax to a low melt, and I don't have to fiddle with the dangerous microwave in my utility room-slash-art studio.  I rarely work in reds, but was making a peppermint swirl tiedye tee for a custom order and had prepared the soy wax resist lettering in advance.  This is made using analine dyes of 3 blended shades of red, so it has shading and is not just a solid vat red.

Most of the clothes in stores is made from cloth which was vat-dyed.   The cloth goes thru a batch of dye and is highly agitated (although not mad ) in order to achieve a consistent monotone of color.  If you've a friend who tells the same joke over and over, you can appreciate how I feel about solid monotone colors.  It is just boring.  It is done because vat dyeing looks better when fabric is dyed before the clothing is constructed.  Or, only after clothing is constructed does nonvat dyeing "look right."  Basically, its easy, quick and cheap to vat dye... if you're doing millions of, ie, yards.

Much more time-consuming and thus expensive is anything ombred (ohm-burred) where the colors shift like watercolor, or tied and dyed as in tiedye and mudme.  This scarf was time-consuming because of making each syllable and its pronunciation.  (Not all Cherokee Syllables are there.  My chart shows 13 rows of 6 columns and some columns have 2 syllables as in Ga Ka and Dla Tla.).  The dyeing itself was rather simple compared to some dyes I use which are prepared with exotic stuff like inner bark, heartwood, fungus, bugs and the like.

This sweet cherry scarf is being listed at Island Retreat on etsy.  You will find a link on the right, perhaps to this very scarf if it is listed.

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Walnut-Dyed Chief's Quilt

I made this fun quilt quite a few years back, and it won an award in the Cherokee National Holiday Quilt Show.  You can see that some of the fabrics are satin.  Satin is not a dyer's cloth because it doesn't absorb and hold color without being shocked.  Um, that means "runined."  So look at the shiny strips-- those are the commercial satin.  The flat strips are hand dyed with walnut hulls.  The cool thing about walnuts, you already know if you've ever picked up big dog food sized bags of them in the fall--- they stain.  On a nice Autumn day when Kanny and Kaleb were little, our Saturday fun was to station a drum and wheelbarrow in the yard, and practice throwing walnuts into the barrel from wherever we found them in the yard.  (It soon became apparent that walnuts may go IN to a wheelbarrow, but if so they'll probably knock out at least as many or more walnuts in doing so.)  So there we were at the end of the day, with brown stained hands that nothing could clean except time.

Later in the winter a pickle barrel full of walnuts was sitting under the eave and got filled with rainwater.  THAT is a stinky mess.  I took a bunch of recycled sheets and jammed them down in the water, covering with a lid, and let them soak till Spring.  I didn't use any mordant or fixer, and I didn't precondition them with alum or anything.  In fact, they had been washed with soap on multiple occasions and were plain white sheets.

I was delighted when I pulled them out and saw the subtle shading.  Some places were foxed from being at water level.  Some places were paler or darker.  Even some sheets took the color better than others.  It is amazing to get disparate results like on these strips when using basically the same technique, right down to putting them in the same dyepot.  We can guess that there may have been a difference in the cotton content, with some sheets having more synthetic fibers... although I thought they were all cotton.  Even bleaching in a former life may have influenced the color variance.  The circle and the color "clouds" are all things that showed up in the natural dyeing process.

A cool thing about walnut dyeing is that walnuts are plentiful--- you just use the hulls and all.  And it can be done long and slow without a rigorous process.  Or it can be done quickly over a boil with stirring for more of a vat-dyed outcome (even coloration).  I suspect that temperature influences color intensity, as do the amount of water mixed with the hulls and the age of the hulls.  Green hulls would give a silvery champagne tone and oozy black hulls would give darker tones.  Basket reed dyers will attest to the fact that different natural fibers, whether it be fabric or reed, wood or wool, will take the dye differently.  Some fibers such as silk will be hard to color without using some technique to grab and bite the color.  Silk is just hard to dye sometimes.

I think this quilt was commercially quilted by Wavalene at Living Designs in Tahlequah and it is probably lo-loft batted with a pantogram design perhaps that Wavalene has created.

I was experimenting with pintucking when I worked on this quilt.  I had seen a beautiful dress of Rachel Martin in a Cherokee art book.  I think it is in a museum in Tennessee.  Rachel Martin was a distant relative and of a notable Cherokee family in history, and her spectacular dress had a lot of pintucking and pleats.  Here's a detail view showing the informal pintucking on the header and footer borders of this quilt:

Doesn't the marbling from walnut dye and the funky pintucking make for an elegant and complex visual experience?  This quilt is sort of plain but it has interesting visual and tactile textures.

Navajo Diamond Quilt Top

Navajo Diamond Quilt Top

In my collection of quilts, I have this simple quilt top that I purchased on eBay.  So often, those who sell quilt tops are descendants of the woman who made the top.  That was probably the case with this top.  I loved its bright simple lines and wanted to see how the quilter had executed the points.  It is a huge top--- Queen or King sized like a bedspread.  It is made from some bias-woven cotton in clear distinct monochrome-dyed colors of commercial fabric.  It was made probably within the last ten to fifteen years.

Because I have so many quilts and so little space, I would like to sell it as a quilt top ($150) or finished quilt ($450) and would work with the buyer on selection of backing, batting and machine quilting design.  I'd suggest a plain solid back matching any of these colors or an Indian print with a one-inch wrapped binding, with a low-loft or 80/20 cotton poly batting in white or black (or a wool batting if the purchaser lives some place cold for most of the year).  This image was retouched because the top was wrinkled from storage.  I can send detailed pics if requested.

Civil War Replica Quilt

Civil War Replica

Here is a fun quilt that I'm making possibly for inclusion at a Cherokee Nation facility.  Legislation passed into the Cherokee Nation Code states that when buildings are constructed, a percentage of the budget is for Cherokee art. 

I'm a Cherokee history buff.  This quilt is interesting because I've utilized replica fabrics which existed during the Civil War era.  See how the colors of red are turkey red?  See how there are two shades of blue... conrflower blue and indigo?  See how the green is more of a bronze color?  Greens back then were made in a two-stage process where indigo was overdyed with something producing a yellow.  Greens were transient colors, and if you ever look inside the seam of an old quilt, you can see what the original color more closely resembled.

The cream "blank" squares are natural unbleached muslin, but I then overdyed them with a camel color to sadden the fabric and give an aged appearance.  A quilt from the 1860s, now 150 years old, would not remain this bright.  Beth Herrington has a quilt from this time period, which was once featured in a Thompson House quilt show about 15 years ago.  It was a quilt that a soldier had carried with him in the war.

This one consists of four four-patches grouped together.  And while I have never seen a 16-patch, it is typical because it is geometric, pieced, contains squares of about four inches.  The sewing machine was invented or sold about 1824 or so--- it is a contemporary of photography and the industrial revolution in England.  But very few homes had treadle machines and almost all sewing was by hand.  This one was machine pieced (and when quilted, it will be machine quilted).  Unlike quilts from the 1860s, this one is retrospective.  The squares contain images (such as quilt block patterns) from the Civil War era, and also facts and information about the Cherokee condition in the Civil War.  Most of the facts were gleaned from Emmet Starr's History of the Cherokee Indians.  You would find the last names of some of the soldiers who fought together; some names of battles in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory; information about impacts of the war; and some quotations; treaties; casualty summaries, and the like.

When I made this quilt before I added the war data, it seemed too new to be authentic and didn't tell much of a story except via colors.  Now with the fact squares, it 'speaks' about its historical context.  I'll be posting more Cherokee art quilts of this nature in the future from time to time.

I am seeking a Cherokee hand-quilter who would like to collaborate on this project, but my time frame is short.  If you would be interested in hand-quilting it (or know of someone who does that), then I would be delighted to hear from you.

Avatar, The Movie

Saturday, Friedrick and I had a fun date to Fayetteville, where we saw Avatar in 3-D and ate at Fayetteville's most acclaimed Asian restaraunt, Taste of Thai.

Mike Pinkerton, Stilwell Pharmacist, and I were in first grade together, in the classroom of Mrs. Duvall and intern Delores Sumner at Cheorkee Elementary in Tahlequah.  He owns Stilwell Pharmacy now.  He couldn't put into words why I should see Avatar, only, "YOU JUST GOTTA."  I had been pushing that movie to the back of my list for a couple of reasons.  It is cold winter, and thus the convenient movies are the ones on Pay Per View.  Pay Per View costs less, too.  That was a fact not lost on me as a woman newly out of work.  Never before have I been a housewife or full-time artist.  I've always had a demanding, more-than-40 *real* job outside the home mostly.  Besides, I couldn't get over the fact this movie was an animation.  I'm a computer geek from back in the days when a Radio Shack TRS-80 had 16k of ram and you programmed all morning to finally play pong on a black and white TV.  And Friedrick is a gamer, so I'm weary of animation because it seems too clunky almost always.

All I can say is "WOW!"  The animators in this movie have done a credible job of creating a seamless fantasy world of beauty with lots of causation and insight about nature.  There's a long history of movies themed around travelling in and out of different realities.  Avatar does something different though.  Everything happens in just one world.  So, as in Wizards and Lord of the Rings, the action takes place with animated characters and model real warriors in one spot.  One of my fave movies from the 1990s was Ferngully, and Avatar has some commonalities with that simple, sweet storied film.

 There's another timely theme:  Wes Studi plays the (animated) Na-vi Chief.  It sort of delighted me to hear some Cherokee words in the movie.  I think they were describing the stream of exterminators coming for them as "Uktena."  That is a Cherokee cultural concept--- a simple way to talk about it would be a huge giant snake.  A cool thing about Cherokee is that there is a lot of attitude or worldview in each speaker's conversation.  To call it an Ukten when a stream of troops is marching in to kill you, is to bridge a huge culture gap in the thinking of people.  

(Here's an aside:  Cherokees, like a lot of indigeous peoples who survive at least somewhat intact (albeit, assimilated to survive) have groupthink.  Its a way of looking out for each other and valuing the good of the whole group.  Cherokees aren't too tuned-in to being the Chiefs of various things.  Cherokees are mostly about getting stuff done together.  THAT'S all I'll say about that.)

Anyway, this movie does a breathtaking job of lining up indigenous people against global capitalism-- a faceless ideological opposite which is an enemy too nebulous to take-on except vicariously thru its shock-troops.  Is it fantasy?  I'm sad to report no.  This conflict is playing out in Brasil and Venezuela, where forest tribes are facing venture capital projects about drilling for fossil fuels or clearing rain forest to plant plantations.  It isn't even a new story.  Indigenous people have been giving way to evolving social darwinism since hegemony began.

More about that, some time.  See this movie, Avatar.  See it because it is fanciful.  See it because it will make your heart ache with unkept promises.  See it to remember what heroes are like.