Emily is guest-posting today.
As someone who takes great pleasure in all things weird and wonderful, I am extraordinarily pleased with my blue right thumbnail. That’s right. It’s blue. Navy on the edge, fading to a gentle sort of sunny lakeside-ish color in the middle.
I haven’t taken a nailbrush to it because I tend to be pretty lazy when it comes to general fingernail maintenance (although they all get a good weekly biting), but also because I’m not sure I want it to go away.
I’m not sure I want to go away.
This weekend (August 9th -10th ) is the weekend that the intern house bids farewell to two of its six occupants. My counterpart in the Wardrobe Department, Lacey, is one of the young ladies departing, and the whole department is sad to see her leave.
In the past few days, Ms. Lacey, with the help of Tricia, has been making a web of numbers she should call in order to find out what becoming a textile conservator would be like. In this line of work, I am told, a certain amount of chemistry is necessary. Lacey proved her aptitude for working with potentially volatile elements during our dye workshop (See Figure 1) and was pleased and proud to see her work come to fruition. She was fascinated and frustrated by the exactitude necessary to produce both the solution for the madder (See Figure 2) and the solution for the indigo (See Figure 3). You can see the beauty produced by her meticulousness was well worth her effort.
I was just psyched to put bugs in a coffee grinder.
Lacey handed me a little container of dead insects (cochineal bugs), and I crushed ‘em up and boiled ‘em, dumped the wool in, and when I took it out, it was a dashing, daring shade of red (See Figure 4), whereupon I did a little dance of joy.
Through those two days of wool dyeing, Penny (or “Big Grasshopper”) imparted her knowledge of natural dyestuffs upon us, making sure that we had a good handle on what we were doing and surreptitiously checking over our shoulders to keep us on the right track. She was very pleased by the end of the workshop, and it was very pleasing to see her, a fiber artist I love and respect, that pleased. And she brought us chocolate croissants when we were done, too, which was pretty bomb.
Lacey’s farewell gift from Penny was a little hat made out of some of Penny’s handspun yarn, which Lacey had dyed with madder during the workshop. If I were the kind of person who could knit more than a straight line (I make a mean scarf, but anything else? Forget about it), I would be all over this yarn. Seriously. And I’m not just saying that because my second job is in retail.
I’m just thankful that Penny let us make up a second indigo dyebath, exclusively for cotton. With characteristic precision, Lacey dipped and dipped her button-down shirt until it was a stunning shade of midnight blue. I went all art school and dumped my shirt in, relishing the air bubbles that made odd striations and pockets of color all over the garment. We both went into the indigo dyebath after our clothing (and skein upon skein of yarn) with bare hands, hence the blue fingernails.
It has been more than a week since we had our dye workshop, and I am still very happy with my subtly blue fingernails. I am less than happy about the fact that I will be returning to Bennington in three weeks, with a play to costume and a fashion show to complete. It was, however, brought to my attention that I should probably get my B.A. before I’m a contestant on Project Runway. Thus, it is with a brain laden with knowledge and a heart laden with sorrow that I leave the Plimoth Plantation Wardrobe Department. I will keep in touch and will hopefully be back to work on the jacket.
And I’m just going to let the blue in my fingernails work its way out.
~Emily