This summer I decided to wood-shed in the tiny (wool) house, which is a little walk into the woods (beyond Juno), and spend the days in the company of some primitive hand tools like drop spindle, hand carders, and a dye pot. I have been dyeing up a lot of wool in the tiny dye kitchen, experimenting with colors to call my own, re-inventing the wheel in so many ways. Most of all I think that I love this space for what I can achieve with short light photography.
At times I am exhausted of my obsessions, and I worry that I am just a dilettante. But heading into the dog days of summer I dive deeper into refining my creative pursuits, as I try to convince myself that textiles are not just a hobby, but a way of life. I am relishing the isolation, the hours of silence, the palpable feel of time, as I keep walking down to the tiny wool house, two or three times a day, sometimes just to think.
June is almost over and even if I haven’t made any significant finishes to show for the last couple of months, at least I’ve put together a hodgepodge post about some of the tweed tests I’ve been working on.
Looks like a lovely work place! <3
Sarah, it started out because I wanted a dye kitchen for the natural dyes that I ended up sending to you. Now I’m using commercial dyes, but I hope to at least figure out a simple 1-2-3 indigo vat one of these days. Since Jeff is recuperating from surgery, I go down there to spend long stretches of time, and now I just have gotten use to it being a sort of “summer fort”. 🙂
Actually, now that I think back two years, I was going to use it as a wool processing place as I was given a fleece,
https://jenjoycedesign.com/2023/08/06/tiny-wool-house/ I ended up not using the fleece, as I couldn’t get the stink out of it, so I gave up and decided to stick with buying prewashed fleece only. I’ve become so lazy, there was a day I would have relished all that work!