Tuesday, October 09, 2007

baby blanket time

Some fun being had.... One of my best friends is soon to become a grandma for the first time and these 8" sqaures will go into making a Wild Baby blanket for the pending star. Just picking out the fabrics for this one was fun. I stayed with the commercial fabrics for durability but the backside will be one of my favorite pieces of hand-dye that I've been saving since I started dyeing my own fabrics. If this side could be called "Sunny Day" the other will be called "A Sky full of Stars".

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Two days, two finished

I'm running out of space on the design wall. Right now, it's seven pieces deep if you only count the ones big enough to overlap. I've gotta get sleeves on all these and take proper digital shots or I'll wind up calling them table cloths and tea cozys and bring them to the Bostwick GA Cotton Gin Festival. Jan Thompson & I are going to be splitting a booth down there on Nov.3 . All I have ready are a bunch of postcards and a half dozen velvet scarves. This is the latest of the whole cloth,dye-painted group. 45"x45" as yet untitled but it's one of the Mob series.

hear the trees and plants and critters sigh

The woods behind my house look lush - there's a creek down there somewhere - but we have been in a serious drought for a long time. We need a month or more of this kind of rain, all day, everyday, ending at sunset each day to let the earth take up the water and distribute it to all the parched life. And I wish people would stop needing LAWNS of all the useless man-made conceits. When we first moved into this house in 1998 the lawns looked like a golf green. I swear they were tweezed! Then I looked inside the garage to see an entire wall of boxes and cans of various chemical and toxic lawn stuff. I told the broker that they would have to take all that crap with them. Since then our lawn lives on whatever falls from the sky and dog piss.If I had my way, we'd have sheep but we are still inside town limits here. There's been a watering ban in effect for most of the state and people have been turning in their neighbors and going to jail over Watering The Lawn. Insanity. Plant something that will survive without artificial assistance! Grow Food in the Front Yard! Have a meadow! Grow rocks like they've figured out in Florida and Arizona. People in Georgia are going to have to come to the realization that climate change is going to impact the status quo but then again there are still folks down here that don't get that the Civil War is over and their side lost.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

affirmation

Getting the acceptance letter is one thing. A big thing. Then getting an email with a list of the other artists chosen to be in this exhibit gave me pause. The works of several of these people represent, to me, the pinnacle of accomplishment in this media. Not being known for BS, I won't say "what am I doing here?" but I will say "holy shit!"

Fall

Two days in a row I stepped over this leaf on the front stairs coming into the house.I think it wanted to be immortalized. Once I remember to take it out of the scanner, I'll tuck it deep into the pages of an old favorite book that's gathering dust on the shelf. While looking through old files for inspiration for this rug hooking adventure I came across a picture of this fabric and was diverted to digging it out of the closet and readying it for some stitching. Looks like Halloween somehow. It's about 30"x40" and some ongoing cyber discussion regarding line in art (and stitching on quilts in particular) has me thinking hard about making a new approach to the stitched line.