Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too

“Your hair seems blue,” a friend noted over dinner.
It really is. I’ve joined the blue-rinse gang — emphasis on the blue. Denim blue is an unnatural hair hue that seems only natural now that I'm surrounded by heaps of old jeans and altering all those tones of denim. As usual, I’m not questioning why, but how: how to add some pleasing form to a traditional working fabric; how to infuse some lacy aspect into that utilitarian cloth.

What I do see is that after four months exposed to the bright colours of urban Mexico and the glare of the garish new Trump era, I am thirsty for cool, serene tones and patterns of rain-soaked skies and coastal stones rolled smooth by the sea. I returned to discover that I am, in fact, attached to the world of hot-water bottles, mugs of tea and toasty quilts, the coziness against the cold.
 
Blue is my touchstone: something real and eternal to cling to in these uncertain, unfathomable times. I may be seduced by sun-baked yellow, spicy red, lethal lime green and sunset pink but my deep, serene dreams are all denim blue.

(For a sample of my blue-jean fabrications, check out my other site, Workwraps.weebly.com)

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Below: Recent experiments with denim include dousing doilies in bleach and imprinting them on on jeans before cutting for quilts.

Impression of two overlapping doilies on a pair of jeans.

Detail of the lacy traces through the bleaching process.

Samples of experiments with different dilutions of bleach, duration and fabrics.

A roll of quilt binding made from three denim shirts.