Open Mind vs Closed Mind

During a studio clean-up/purge I discovered some jars of Procion MX dyes that had been mixed up in 2012 - how embarrassing is that! We were in the midst of a really cold spell, at least for coastal Virginia, so I decided to experiment with ice dyeing scraps of leftover muslin. With night temps dipping down to 17 degrees I put some pans of fabric and dye out on the porch, with some ice cubes added for good measure.

The next day I batched the fabric, then rinsed it and washed it with Synthropol only to have most of the color disappear. The beautiful turquoise greens and yellows just went poof. Hmmmpfff!!! The yellow was either exhausted or didn't like the cold but being ever so frugal, I had mixed all the leftover dye from the containers together which made the most beautiful indigo color. So undeterred I tried again this time wrapping the fabric with string Shibori style. Another round of freezing, batching, rinsing, washing only to get light purple. Another hmmmpppfff!!! and all the fabric went in a pile on my table.

Then (light bulb!) one of the blogs I follow encouraged readers to watch a John Cleese YouTube lecture on creativity. Yes, the John Cleese from Monty Python, who has been a student of creativity for many years. The lecture is about 30 minutes with subtitles in Danish? and he talks about the concept of a closed mind (not conducive to creativity) versus an open mind (which is). Duh! We all know that, but sometimes you just need a head slap. A long-winded way to say I went back, ironed all the fabric and found some gems. So the experiment didn't turn out the way I had anticipated, and my favorite beautiful colors washed away, but there are possibilities waiting to be incorporated into something as yet undiscovered.