I have been dying all day, so far without success. The tea dye did not really do it for me on the calico, in this context, so I tried some raspberry leaves. Apparently oxalic acid is a useful mordant with raspberry leaves, but since I have to assume our forebears, like me, did not have a handy hardware down the road I tried some rhubarb leaves instead. Not terribly successful, though the fumes were reminiscent of my attempts to clean floor boards with oxalic acid, so I presumably did something right.

That lot was tipped somewhere I was hoping some weeds would die, and I dug out the saffron-dyed calico, and bunged it, together with today's victim, into the washing machine on a hot wash (time the machine had a hot wash through it anyway) and all I achieved was the saffron calico going more pumpkin yellow, and the intended calico becoming a vaguely greenish yellow that really did nothing positive. So while it was damp I splashed on some blobs of parisienne essence, which I am hoping is colourfast (they seem to use it a lot in quilting projects, so I assume it is OK) of varying degrees of intensity. Now it just looks blobby. Still, since it will be cut into narrowish strips, the blobs will be reduced in overall horribleness and provide some texture to the long strips of otherwise unprint-embellished calico.

We had a lovely lot of weather atmospherics today, so I also played with the camera a bit. The little lake in the left of this photo disappears completely in certain lights, and at other times glows like mercury. Unfortunately the pastel stripes of tree shades do not show up in the photo as well as they did in real life, so I will just have to remind myself they were there. The other cloud shot is on the road home from the library and shows a tiny bit of the amazing cloud display. Unfortunately all I had with me was the phone, hence, not really a quality shot ...