what are you doing ?
who ?
you !
oh me ?! I'm just waiting . . 
what are you waiting for ?
Divine Inspiration . . . 
oh for god's sake ! Whatever you do, don't hold you breath ! you've got a deadline ! just get on with it !

ok

April has been a good month & I don't usually do this but today I went looking for autumn.

Things are definitely changing in an autumnal way.
The signs are the usual ones.

​The sunset tonight was almost directly west, we’ve harvested feijoa & pumpkins, the leeks are ready & the tomatoes are ending, the days are noticeably shorter, the sun rises later, the late afternoon & nights are cooler, the angle of the sun is now low enough that the light reaches right to the back of the room & we’ve had the 1st snowfall on the mountain.

In autumn, the harakeke seed pods are empty of seed & almost threadbare, the rengarenga still hold seed but that may be only because of the cobwebs, the corokia has beautiful little yellow berries, the seed heads on the hebe are chaff & the Tawa has new growth.

In our native forest, which is evergreen, the changes are less obvious - in fact some of them, like the new growth on the Tawa seem incongruous & I’ve realised I have been overlooking many.

Every morning the grass is quite wet underfoot but the sun is consistently shining & the winds are minimal.

January weather was amazing & we spent time most of our days just hanging out & going to the beach to swim which was superb & is really all I ever want to do in summer anyway.

By the time February arrived I was well rested & ready to do some explorations into using NZ native plants for dyeing fabric & fibre.

The harakeke seed pods were at their best for harvesting for making a dye bath too & I was lucky enough to have my friend, Isla, walk me thru the process, which is very easy but it is a process which takes a few days.
Here's a link to a post on Isla's website which outlines the process we used; natural-dyeing-with-harakeke-seed-pods

In the dye bath I made from the pods I had harvested I dyed a few lengths of muka, 3xDMC cotton embroidery threads of various thickness, a 60cm square of calico, a 30cm square of cotton drill & various sized rectangles of cotton drill fabric I had cut out with a view to sewing a purl soho boxy tee.

It seems the harakeke pods are high in tannins so no surprise with the colours the cottons & cotton fabrics came out but it was lovely to see the variation in the colours of the muka fibres.

Rather than dyeing a single large piece of fabric which would have been awkward to fit in my dye pot, I pre-cut the pieces of fabric for my sewing.

What I hadn't considered was the extra shrinkage of the fabric courtesy of simmering for an hour in hot water.
I had already washed & dried the fabric BUT I do cold washes & line dry ! What a bastard trap for rookies !

I sewed up my top anyway & fortunately the pattern makes a generous size garment so the only problem area is the armhole depth which is a little too tight to be comfortable.
But I have a plan !
I think I'll open that seam, on each side, & insert a gusset just to give me a bit more space.

And now, finally, we get to the point of why I wanted to sew this particular top.
It's all about the bottom panel. Which is a separate piece.
A beautifully proportioned rectangle of fabric which lends itself to embellishment.
I was watching Sashiko Stitching taught by Lisa Solomon on Creativebug & in one part of the class she is wearing a top she has made with a sashiko embroidered bottom.

I had the fabric : I had the threads : I had the pattern I wanted to embroider & now I have a top which is the memory piece of my very 1st foray into dyeing with harakeke seed pods.