red & purple

Lurgy day. So instead of doing anything of practical use, I lay about trying to rest and thinking about making a special bedspread from our heirloom purple blanket. Well, I'm defining an heirloom as something old and precious and I think this one counts. FH's Nana sent two lovely, deep purple blankets down to us, looking like they'd scarcely ever been used, when she moved out of her own home about three years ago. In an age where New Zealand practical wool items are rare, I'm particularly fond of the label:

I like the imagery on the label of the crown with the 'princess' label in the centre and the tiki on either side. When I first met FH, I was living in Onehunga (Auckland), in a done up house with a tense feel to it which had once been a gang house (pre-makeover). Not quite the scene the purple blankets conjures up to look at.

So I fancy turning this into the bedspread for our bed and I spend a good part of the day googling blanket art and wool dyeing and any other linked idea which came to me. By the middle of the afternoon I knew that the colour was not going to change and I started to think of how to decorate the purple expanse in a Sandra-possible fashion which would also somehow look fantastic.

Enter my sister's legacy. I didn't bring a lot of fabric back from our time living in the UK, but I did bring the skirt length of Welsh herringbone tweed which my sister gave to me one birthday or Christmas after her trip to Wales. It is soft and lovely and very fine and not quite enough for the style of skirt I favour and I have ummed and aghhed over how to actually wear it for years now (um seven maybe eight years).
Pre-felting above. After I had felted it twice in the washing machine and tumble drier this afternoon, it looked and felt wonderful. The felting intensified the red colour and the fabric density is now viable for my wool applique plan. Fabrics ready below.


Of course I am not allowed to actually start this until I get the purple-cardigan-of-never-endingness finished. I did do quite a lot of rows today, about ten I think, enough to feel the arthritis.
The children and I collected garden flowers for the windowsill. I decided not to be deterred from such beauty by the surrounding lack of Martha Stewart-ness. The children chose the dandelions.
The foliage in the front is sage. I cooked some up in olive oil after dinner and ate them as I recall their excellent properties for throaty-malfunction. I don't recall the specifics, but they did taste nice.

A fourth explosion at Pike River this afternoon. It's not as simple as banning mining as the Green Party have advocated, or I don't see it as being that simple. The complex desires for wealth and adventure and extraction enterprise leave me feeling not just grateful for my own relatively safe job, but also with deep questions about what powers our economy. I work for the government and without taxes from the generation of wealth, I am unable to offer my skills to the community (or not if I want to get paid for it). I don't have answers, only questions.