Eco Printing with color, stitch meditations and Shrekkie

I have continued to create my eco print scarves, and decided to experiment with adding just a tinge of color to the scarves with my Procion MX dyes before printing.  Love the results!  At some point I hope to get into using natural dyes, but the process is more than I can learn in a short time, so this is my solution for now:

Pale coral pink

Seafoam green

Palomino Gold

Robin's Egg blue

I am soooo in love with Botanical printing!  It really makes me happy to be able to capture nature this way... 

With the change of seasons, I am busy collecting and storing leaves for the winter months, much like a squirrel gathers acorns!  But I did let myself use one of the oak leaves for a different project:

If you follow my blog, you may remember that I was doing a lot of hand stitching back in January.  Then I got busy with other projects, and haven't done any since then.  But I have seen examples of using real leaves in collages, and decided one of my beloved Oak leaves deserved a chance to show off, so this came about recently:  Leaf hand stitched to a fringed square and a hand dyed background, with a fern leaf stamped in metallic paint.  I happened to have a frame handy that was just the right size, so it now sits on a side table in the living room, to celebrate Autumn.  I think I will be getting back to stitch meditations with the onset of cooler weather... they just go together!

 I posted last month that we had to let our sweet Bubba go, which was very sad, but his health was deteriorating and wasn't going to improve.  So now, we have just one kitty left, Shrekkie.  

Shrekkie came to live with us in 2010, after spending some time on his own.  His original owners moved away, and left him with neighbors across the road, but the household was quite unsettling to him, so he decided to be a vagabond for awhile.  Before long, he was coming around our house and yowling, which caught my attention.  I kept water on our deck for our cats, and he would come up to get a drink almost daily.  I began sitting on the deck in the morning, and gradually we made friends.  By October, I had coaxed him into the house, and he has been here ever since.  Now that he is the sole cat, he has begun to spend evenings snuggling with me on the floor while I nap in front of the TV, and he seems to be perfectly content to be the last kitty.  I still miss my Sweet Bubba, but Shrek is doing a good job consoling me, and dispensing love and affection!