Hello everyone, I am celebrating the Winter Solstice today, Dec. 21. This is the day when the sunlight starts to return, as the days gradually lengthen, and the nights recede. This is a tree I made recently in honor of the season. I hope you enjoy a beautiful day.

Hi everyone, this is a piece of cotton I stamped with a purple Lac dye over the summer, and now I’m adding embroidery to it with a variegated floss I brought home from Oaxaca. This is how it looks today… will post more progress pics as I add more stitching to it. What do you think? Do you have some stitch experiments to post too? I’d love to see them.

Hi everyone! I hope your holiday preparations are going smoothly!! I’ll be spending quality time in my kitchen this weekend cooking up some gifts (salsa verde and my great grandmother’s rum balls) and doing some stealth gift-wrapping too. 😄 Pictured is my Christmas stocking from my childhood, made by my Great Grandmother “Munnie.” She was a crafter extraordinaire: she would crochet and knit afgans, baby booties for each new baby in the family. She made beautiful beaded bells, and glass, bead, and tin wind chimes, ornamental trees, and you name it! This stocking features hand-made felt and beaded patches made from tracing cookie-cutter shapes! What are you preparing for the holidays?

I worked with wild madder root for the first time today, which gave me such a pretty rosy pink. The green-yellow is from wisteria in my garden.

Today I did some eucalyptus dye tests. It smells so amazing when its boiling!! The color came out light brown, nothing very dramatic. So I added a few spoonfulls of alum to the dye bath and I also added a “tea bag” of honey locust seed pods to punch up the color. The 3 tests I made were the eucalyptus dye with added iron, added soda ash, and added lemon juice to see how changing the Ph shifts the color.