Is it Dying or Dyeing?

You can't believe how easy it is for a Dutch person, like me, to scramble these words, especially as I am so familiar with the meaning of both of them.
Next year I will be living 20 years in England and I still seem to encounter problems with the language. Although I must admit that writing and speaking in Dutch is more difficult for me now then using English. Not that I believe I will completely loose my native tongue, but as I think, dream, read and talk in English I have to turn a switch in my head when 'going Dutch' again. And I can't always remember where that switch is....
Back to the Double D words of  'Dying and Dyeing', which reminds me of a piece of work I did, called 'Double Dutch - a Strangers cloak', which was for an exhibition in Norwich, but I will talk  about that another time.

So here we are, let's start with  the 'darker' side so we can end with some colour

Dying, Death and Death Café's
This coming Sunday it will be the first Death Café I am facilitating.
Apart from advertising it on the Death Café website I also advertised it in the newsletter of the Rudolf Steiner School, which my daughters attended and where we celebrated Kiama's life, almost a year ago now. I have been overwhelmed with the response of people who want to attend and had to put people on a waiting list, as we only had place for 12 people and now we got 14 coming.
I am already thinking of doing another Death Café here in Hertfordshire next month.
Possibly during the Dying Matters Awareness Week, which runs from 13-19 May, starting just 2 days after the first anniversary of Kiama's death.

Apart from my recent passion to inspire people to talk about life, death and funerals I have been curious and fascinated all my life with the BIG QUESTIONS of Life, Death, Consciousness and Identity. This fascination lead to a conscious decision, in my late teens, to leave religion behind in search for the Truth. I am a great believer in no-believing and have dedicated my life to discovering the knowledge and wisdom inside myself through meditation, contemplation and philosophy. So far it has been the most amazing life-changing and life-affirming 'journey' I could have ever dreamt off. More importantly all of the Big Questions, I had, got resolved which is the main reason why I also can deal with my daughters' death the way I do.

Many people find comfort and strength in their faith, traditions and believes but many also experience being challenged in this when confronted with death and bereavement. For most people questions are still left unanswered, as religion nor science provide the answers.

I just had a look at what Wikepedia had to say about Death and I have copied something to ponder on:

"One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. As a point in time, death would seem to refer to the moment at which life ends. However, determining when death has occurred requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This is problematic because there is little consensus over how to define life.
It is possible to define life in terms of consciousness. When consciousness ceases, a living organism can be said to have died. One of the notable flaws in this approach, however, is that there are many organisms which are alive but probably not conscious.

Another problem is in defining consciousness, which has many different definitions given by modern scientists, psychologists and philosophers. Additionally, many religious traditions, hold that death does not (or may not) entail the end of consciousness."
 
Of course no personal account of life, death, consciousness or any unmeasurable, unscientific personal experiences are taken into any serious consideration to come closer to the answers on the big questions. So we are left finding our own ways, our own answers........but that might me a good thing and maybe this explains the increasing popularity of the Death Café movement!

Now over to some Dyeing.
I am working on a commission of 22 ribbons, each containing text inspired by the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot Deck. It's quite a big project, which has been delayed by a year now, so I really have to pick it up and run with it.
As I couldn't and didn't want to use commercially fabricated ribbons, I had bought some nice cotton sateen fabric at Art van Go to dye in all the colours of the rainbow. (3 ribbons in each of the seven colours plus 1 in 'gold' for 'The Fool')
I don't have a dedicated studio for dyeing, so the whole mess has to happen in our kitchen and to be honest I was not looking forward to it. Partly also because it was several years ago that I dyed fabric.
So I kept putting it off until Jenny, one of my textile friends, offered so kindly to come for a day to start me off. Although Jenny's expertise lays in Natural plant dyeing and I am using Procian Dyes, the principle is the same. In fact it is all very straight forward with the help of Ruth Issett's books Colour on Paper and Fabric and Colour on Fabric.

I decided to use the method of  tray dyeing, where you lay the fabric in natural folds in a tray and mix your dye powder with a soda solution and a earlier made up chemical recipe containing urea and Calgon. It creates a more organic textured appearance rather then the plain flat colour which you get with Bucket Dyeing.

Not to waist any dye I gathered lots of snippets of different fabrics, which I pushed in plastic beakers to soak up any leftover dyes, like the turquoise and blue's here, waiting for any future projects.

 Indigo and Violet drying here.

The whole dyeing project took about 5 days, which included a trip to Art Van Go for more urea and missing colours of dye and.... all the other necessary household tasks, like cooking for loved ones.

All the colours posing here.

The only one I am not totally happy with is the 'Antique Gold' in the front. So I have to see what to do about that. The other seven colours have all gone through 2 different dye processes to make them a bit more interesting.

The side view gives a bit more of an idea of how they would look as strips of fabric. The finished ribbons will be 140cm long and about 4 cm wide, but they need to be double, to hide the back of the stitched lettering, plus seam allowance.

So now I need to tear strips of 10 cm, iron them all and try out some lettering.

By the way, I think I finally cracked it, the use of the words Dying and Dyeing,  language is so colourful, I keep you posted.

Catching birds and 'letting go'

I haven't done any 'meaningful' textile work since Kiama passed away, my head was just not in the right place for it. I did however felt the need to do some creative therapy. Something 'textily' which doesn't involve much of my brain. So over the summer I started to do some crochet. I love doing crochet. Well you would do, wouldn't you, if you like me managed to crochet about 10 metres of café curtains during night shifts as a nurse in the 70's? 

I can't show the curtains any more, but I still have the booklet with the pattern in it.

 

 And this gives an idea of how they looked.

Anyway I wanted to do something more modern and trailed the internet and found this lovely bird pattern  by Lucy on her colourful blog Attic24.

So I made several of these little birdies with cute dangly legs and buttons.

They are hanging now from some wrapped and decorated branches from another, earlier project, which I will tell about another time. The branches are in a vase on the diner table and give a continues happy and colourful display, especially during those dark days and when we don't have real flowers in the house.

Initially I wasn't aware of why I chose to make birds, apart from the fact that they looked cute, but then I realised that somehow they symbolised a kind of ascension. Kiama 'flying up and away', to other realms perhaps...  Interestingly Ilana, my eldest, had started to doodle birds at the same time, so we also wondered if these birds were symbolising a part of our grieving process. Another layer of 'letting go'.

This brings me to another story. Just a couple of weeks before Kiama fell ill she phoned me one day with the question: "Mum, do you have any suggestions on how to catch a bird? I want to catch a bird and then let it go." She told me that it was for a short film, she wanted to make for an art competition, in which she wanted to present the concept of 'letting go'.  Oh the irony of this, as we keep on seeing the signs.... with hind-sight!

Anyway, I never heard anything more about this project until after her death, when one of her friends posted a very short video on her Facebook wall. It showed Kiama laughing and cautiously trying to catch some pigeons at the market place in Norwich. We later also found some journal writing about it and some sketches of birds flying of bicycles.

Responding to her half-Dutch roots Kiama had a love for bicycles and cycling. Many of her art, social and uni projects had to do with bikes. So the sketch on the right is there for even more striking, with the fallen bike and the bird flying up to the sky, especially when you know that it is the last proper sketch in her latest sketchbook!

Welcome to my world

It has been several years now that I wanted to begin this blog but the indecisiveness of my Piscean nature kept me in procrastination mode. So blame it on astrology, my parents and the universe - anything else but me - for the long wait of this peep into my life.

I have always had a great need to express myself creatively, it keeps me sane. I also have the desire and will to leave some kind of inspirational mark behind. Perhaps to justify my very existence, although I know very well that that doesn't need any justification, I am just who I am.

Although writing doesn't come that quick and easy to me (too much thinking and pondering) there have been several phases in my life that I seem to be attracted to pen and paper or tapping a keyboard. From my teenage years onwards I used to keep a diary, wrote poetry and tried my hand at some short stories. I even self-published a poetry book in Dutch with the financial support of friends and family.

The truth is I love words in all its forms and not-so-secretly belief that there is a book somewhere hidden in me. Although I don't know if it will ever come out of its hidden place.

My love for textiles and stitch stems from early childhood. I still remember the reassuring sound of my mum's sewing machine until the early hours of the morning. She was a dressmaker, born between the wars, with the 'make do and mend' mindset, now so fashionable re-invented as 'upcycling'.
 

 
Being the oldest girl of a 'good' Roman Catholic family with 13 children she had to stay home, from the age of 16, to sew and repair the clothes of her family. She was very upset about that, as she wanted to study, so when she was well in her 20's she took her chance and trained as a Montessori Kindergarten teacher. She married my dad, for those days, late in life (32) and it was more out of necessity that she picked up her sewing again.

My mum bought me a second hand Singer sewing machine when I was about 14 and taught me how to make some of my own garments. Later when I started my own family, I took great pride in making clothes and toys for my two little daughters. Living in my home country, The Netherlands, I started to follow adult education classes in all kinds of textile techniques and was hooked for life.

Before I go any further I want to thank all those creative inspirational people out there and in particular my friend Gina, whose blog 'kindled my fire' for the blogging world.

Though foremost I want to pay tribute to my daughter Kiama Petit, who suddenly after a short illness, passed away on the 11th of May 2012 at the age of 22. This devastating and most shocking event in my life is slowly opening up new roads, insights and inspiration. Last but not least it was the direct push to start this Blog, as Kiama showed me clearly that life is too short to waste it with procrastination.
She was a happy, enthusiastic young woman with a passion to inspire people to live a more positive, healthy and happy life.

   

Kiama was a 3rd year art student at Norwich University College of the Arts (NUCA) and was just weeks away from finishing her course in Visual Studies.

During the preparations of her funeral and Life Celebration, which we organised  ourselves with the help of friends and family, we discovered in her journal that she had written, several months before she died, a 'Bucket list' (a list of things you want to do before you die). As far as we know Kiama was, like us, unaware that she would die so soon and suddenly.

Her sister, Ilana, read 'My Bucketlist' out during the Life Celebration. It is such a moving and inspiring piece of writing that her friends and tutors at NUCA did ask our permission to make a poster of it and print out a limited edition. Ofcourse we agreed.

 
The students and tutors wanted Kiama's work to be part of the graduation show. She had done a particpatory art project, called 'Papergirl Norwich' and it was decided to present an impression of this through film, photographs and a wooden crate full of 'My Bucketlist' posters, which people could take away when visiting the graduation show.

They went out as hot cakes and the university ended up having to do several print runs, printing 1000 posters in total, and they all went. The graphic design of the poster was done by her friend, Luke Emery, and can be viewed and printed, for free, in high resolution via his website here.