Please come follow along as I contine to pour my heart into my baby business! This new move has inspired me to share more of my knowledge, tips, and secrets in the world of quilting and growing plants.  

 Having a pets around the house has become a constant reminder of happiness in my life.  I love my little rabbits, Timmy girl has the biggest bunny personality I have ever meet.  I took these pictures of Timmy one evening after she was out playing in the backyard all day.  I carried her into the house and set her down on the floor, she hopped right up on the couch, plopped down in the middle, and stretched out.  As if she had a long hard day and needed to relax on the couch.  I grabbed my camera and told her how much I loved her.  The quilt she is laying on is an old ragged quilt I have had for years,  it's nothing special but definitely a nice burst of color.

This is a Folk Fibers  line sheet for the month of January.  The quilts are all in the final stages of being completed, so they are not for sale yet.  I am hand quilting some with Japanese sashiko thread, and machine quilting the others by using a long-arm quilting machine.  

I enjoy hand quilting so much, but it is becoming a dying art.  Mostly due to the time and labor required for completing an entire quilt.  I find it can be daunting especially if the quilt is a queen size or larger.  One of the reasons why I love making baby quilts is because it is a justifiable size quilt to hand quilt, and I love hand quilting!  The hand stitch adds so much to a quilt, with the slight irregular stitches, along with the care and attention, it creates a one-of-a-kind quality that is treasured and passed down.  I consider them heirloom quilts.  

I found a source in town that rents a long-arm machine by the hour, allowing me to have full control over the entire process of making my quilts!  I am very fortunate to have found this opportunity because it is rare. Now days the majority of folks piece the tops of their quilts and then have them "serviced" by somebody else.  It is costly and gives up the actually quilting process to a computer aided machine.  No fun, and most of the time the results appear to have a cookie-cutter look and feel.  There are a few reasons I have decided to use a machine on some of my quilts.  Some of the simple lines and patterns achieved on the machine can be tasteful in moderation.  My finished quilts will have a clean and modern feel to them.  

I don't usually use this blog to share my times of distress, but I feel like being real and talking about the hard times today.  I swear I have felt all the emotions already of trying to start my own company and basically it feels like I am starting a company with 10 people but 9 people never show up to work, so that leaves just me. There is so much to juggle and I am constantly having to edit my schedule and remain hopeful for higher productivity tomorrow.  Out of survival I have had to prioritize my life and forgive myself often for neglecting maintenance around the house.  All my sunglasses are cheep and always bent up and crooked. Our lawn hasn't been mowed in over 6 months, we are getting flyers at our door step for lawn services.  Our lawn mover is broken.  Our Christmas tree is at least out of our house but hasn't made it all the way to the curb. Grey rabbit has started to pee on my rug, a lot.  The big worry I have recently is the fact that I need about a half acre of land to farm, but not sure when or where or if that will happen this year.  I could go on but that's probably enough to relate to what I'm feeling. 

Chap is a great husband, but he has also developed into a great source of knowledge on start-up businesses. His main advise has been to keep creating and making.  He said that the biggest mistake new business make is investing all their time in the administrative details.  It's so easy to be distracted by all that stuff because it is important.  Though, the actual work produced is the backbone, and if the work is strong than people become interested, and the branding will evolve naturally.  

The truth is when I feel stuck I look to my vision of the future and think about my mortality.  I remind myself that I  believe in what I am doing, and feel passionate about growing natural dyes and nontraditional quilting. In the botanic dye field I have only heard about a handful of pioneers,  and I admire them all.  The majority of them are all 60+years, no longer living, or located in India.  This fact gives me the sense that I have a duty to fulfill, by educating and sharing the craft and folklore with my generation, and the ones to follow. 

I gathered up some "Folk Fibers" inspiration today from a great junk store here in Austin! Now back to quilting!

"Ask Mr. Smarty Plants" is a free service provided by the staff and volunteers at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, located here in Austin.  I am very impressed with the thorough answer I received!

My Question:  I am a fibers artist that would like to harvest the cochineal bugs from the prickly pear cactus. I would like to know what time of year should I expect to find the cochineal bugs around the Austin area?

The Answer:  Although I've often seen the fluffy white evidence of the cochineal bugs on prickly pear cactus, I guess I hadn't really paid attention to when they were most abundant so I checked with an entomologist, Valerie Bugh, and here is what she said:

"The females live inside the white fluff and squishing their bodies is what produces the red dye. The highest concentration would be when the fluff is most numerous and each piece is rather big and clean looking, indicating mature females inside. Because it is a slightly water-resistant waxy substance, the white stuff tends to last a long time, but I've seen old remains that are dried out and wouldn't be very productive because the insect inside is dead. The time of year for the best harvests will vary depending on rainfall and temperature. If we have some very hard freezes, that will delay the insects' development, as will heavy rains or scorching summer droughts. I suspect that conditions are more important than dates."

Howard Garrett's The Dirt Doctor.com page on the cochineal says that females are harvested when they are about 90 days old.  Considering that mating and egg laying would happen when the weather is warm enough, say mid-March in the Central Texas Area, it would be early to mid-summer before the females would be ready to harvest (mid-June to late July).

You might be interested in reading about how modern cochineal farmers operate currently in Oaxaca, Mexico in the article, "Red Gold—Raising Cochineal in Oaxaca."

Do not be confused by the red color here on the cactus, that is the prickly pear fruit that the cochineal is feeding off of.  The cochineal is located inside the white waxy coton substance.  The liquid/blood of the insect is what produces the color.  There are so many different ways to process the insect after harvesting, all of which produce variations of color. 

One of my goals this year it to cultivate and harvest a small batch of cochineal.  

 note: photos on this post are not mine,  I pulled them from a goggle image search. 

 

I didn't realize how many small family cemeteries there are scattered around the county.  They are all so precious and at the same time strange.  Even when I was looking at farms for sale, family cemetery were sometimes a minor detail in the descriptions, usually excluded from the acreage for sale.  After a while it got me thinking about great themes to base an American road trip around.  My top three favorite ideas are small family cemeteries,  wonderful old bowling alleys, and awesome old roller skating rinks.  So who wants to go on a road trip with me!  I truly could spend a lifetime documenting small towns in America. 

Going through photos from our trip and I came across this beauty!  This was taken somewhere around SW Wisconsin.  It's interesting to me how we evolved from the beginning of our trip to the end.  There are many introspective examples I have thought of but one outwardly noticeable examples is my documentation skills and style improved greatly after 4 months on the road.  I basically got the hang of it after-a-while.  I'm not saying that I am totally awesome now,  I just became more focused and comfortable about my vision, to the point where my instincts were strong and clear about detecting the right moments and seeking the images I wanted to capture.  In the beginning I was overly stimulated with joy and excitement, it tended to have a revese effect in some ways.  I felt like absolutely everything was worth capturing that I just rolled down the window and lived in the moment, without trying to document all the details.  It's a powerful decision sometimes to choose not to take a photo and rely on your mind to remember it.  The key is not to feel regret but to feel peace that our memory will preserve it.  Finding this photo actually surprised me because this motel sign is so good to me I am shocked we didn't stop and take one of our legendary bus photos infront of it.  Then I realized it was early on in our trip and we we're still geting the hang-of-it.  So at least I snapped a photo as we were driving by because it serves as great inspration to me now.  

I am working really hard at preparing for my launch of "Folk Fibers" on January 1st! Here are two pages from my sketchbook showing the beginning stages of branding.  It's easy to be inspired by the polished appearances of small craft business that seem to have all their kinks ironed out, but everyone has to start somewhere.  I see these beginning stages as raw, precious, and exciting.  This here is a little sneak peek!  I will gladly talk at length about Folk Fibers in the near future, but for now I have to get back to work!

Foster Huntington is a fella road tripper that has been organizing a community collection of "vanlife" photos.  Today he featured my photo of "holiday", check it out: #vanlife.  The website is open for anyone and everyone to submit photos of vans!  The motto is "life is where you park it".