new work space

The top six inches of the water is entirely hospitable...dip any deeper and numbness overtakes you. Still the plan is to get in on Wednesday, do the annual perimeter scrub and then enjoy the ballgame on the radio.

I'm not one for basking but I hauled this family heirloom down onto the deck with the intention of making it my outdoor office. It needs some patching and the binding replaces..not high on my list of gottas. The embroidery you can see used to be along the bottom of a pair of bell bottoms. This is vintage denim sewn over a heavy king sized blanket and backed with a tacky printed sheet. It's seen many a picnic and party.

I got some reading done out there today and put pen to paper for the first time in months and fell into the reverie almost immediately. Better than drugs.

Speaking of drugs..how did you like Madmen last night? I always knew that was how it got done.

further good intentions

I had to grow the base of this piece since the story seems to have legs. No planning here, just plucking bits from the scrap basket and working them into the parade. It's Back in the Saddle Monday. Time for some reading and maybe some writing. At least we won't be cooking anything today...too many tasty leftovers.

storm driven

"Good Intentions will bite you on the butt if you don't keep moving"

Saturday night the thunder and lightning were so fierce I was finally impressed. 

The house thrummed with sub aural vibrations and the room strobed with blue light like all of five-O was parked in the driveway. My phone kept shrieking some kind of weather alert. NO SHIT!  We did not get a lick of sleep until dawn but got up and forged ahead with a grossly complicated recipe for chicken/eggplant Parmesan. It turned out delicious and I am bone bone weary.

they come creepin'

I've been getting little mental sticky notes and postcards from the Ether about the unfinished writing. Why these come in the form of needlework is beyond me because I can't be in that very walled off place of writing while I am pulling and snipping thread in the studio. I'm not making the connection.

Writing is an all or nothing proposition for me so what is all this stuff? Have all my hands-on work been an effort to keep me out of my own head?

 I went to the library for the first time in months today and took away a stack of fiction - "The Cat's Table" by Michael Ondaatje,  "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" Kij Johnson, "Rasputin's Bastards" by David Nickle and another batch that got left in the back seat of the car because, after reading the first chapters, I know I won't finish them. I'll give any book at least that.

While I was sitting out there reading it dawned on me that my Verifiers, my Fact Checkers have checked out and  I am free to run amok.

a gift from the slideshow

My laptop is set to display a slideshow of images from the hard drive when it's left alone for a few minutes. I'm often taken by surprise by some of the images.

This piece "Shell Vapors" is the only piece of my work we have hanging in the whole house and it's not a quilt. It is stitched fiber but the cloth has been permanently mounted to a canvas with acrylic medium and glue.

The dark gray area had a thin layer of batting and no backing at all. I just stopped without getting carried away for once. I was experimenting with a mounting technique I called mummy making and this one was at hand and waiting and fit the 36 inch canvas that had been hanging around for years.

oddities abound

I somehow found my way to Don Kenn's work this morning and feel compelled to make something...odd.
So what else is new?

Behance

I just finished setting up a page for the Karma series on Behance.net



Does anyone have any experience there?
What are your impressions. All comments welcome...

more ironing

Everyone who believes in reincarnation seems to have been Joan of Arc, Cleopatra or Josephine Baker. Me, I was surely a laundress somewhere - but a Palace laundress, mind you.

Spent the morning ironing these beauties - doing my photographic best here but pictures still fall short.

I'm sure professional photographers know the trick of showing iridescence, like on a peacock's tail, but I have not figured it out yet.  Bits of these are available over at the Store.

rockin' the punk, punk, punk

To keep the retail therapy to a minimum I ducked into Mike's Crapola Emporium and bought a few hanks of plain white DMC floss, one hank of white Perle and ran out the door ignoring the 50% sale signs everywhere.

I hand painted them  with procion MX..a pesky business that would have been better with q-tips - but since DMCs variegated colors are so pricey, I'm hooked on making my own now

I love the sound that the needle makes ...punk, punk, punk, punk.

can't stay away from the dyedeck

Just a little fast fun while waiting for string to dry.

Tod reminded me that I wanted to try dyeing my own embroidery floss. I also have a large cone of mystery string about the weight of Perle cotton - it might be Tencel; and a small ball of sugar and cream cotton...they all got the treatment but   are strung out all over the deck drying. Nothing much to look at right now but next time I'll think through just how to do it without NOT getting a bunch nasty wet knot in stuff.

Interesting how inspiration blooms just when you make a committment that takes you away from the studio. Is that creative procrastination?

The threads were pretty yucky..

alien skins

Why bother with taking pictures of the wet stuff when they look like this DRY! I can't wait to iron this batch tomorrow. Inspiration flying. I had forgotten how much I like all this faux texture. I should have noticed that there was almost none in my stash.

Mothers Day

I told the boys not to fuss about Mother's day but I'm glad they ignored me. There were gifts, flowers and a trip to get my fishing license so I can legally drown worms in the sunshine at Lake Lanier.

It's been  years since I've been there and at a mere 40 minute ride away, it will be a fine substitute for the beach.
The fishing is just an excuse.

The weather was beautiful today and I was gifted with a large bag of vintage towels and dinner napkins - dye lovers everyone one of them.  I was thinking about the lilacs I used to cut from the wild up in NY. My mother always loved them.

big blues

Even the commercial prints took the dye well. I should have cooled and warmed two of these just a little more but the summer is long and there's lots more white cloth..

I have another project that is pressing and will have to set aside this hands on stuff for a small ton of administrative work, starting with updating my main website. The biggest chore will be re-shooting all of my major pieces..sweat pours just thinking about it.

the Buggy Oatmeal brigade

Remember these from yesterday? After a rush of strong pure colors these are a complex and delicate breath of fresh air.  The blues are in the dryer and I'll get them ironed and up on the wall in a little while.

Sometimes the Blues

As I surveyed the proceeds so far I noticed a distinct lack of blue so first thing this morning I brewed up some blends, readied the cloth and made the plunge. The greens you see above are some over-dyes and a few commercial prints that needed some help.

I'm  making an attempt at replicating some of the nicer buggy oatmeal pieces from last summer..still have a large box that now sports some dead moths in it too.

There is also little pot of sunshine to balance everything out.

putting it all together

This is what I'm doing with the new cloth. Ironing damask completely changes the character of the cloth and brings out an iridescent quality that is hard to capture digitally.

This stitching is purely functional. It's a good thing that every one is a pleasure because this piece is 48x60 inches.

I'm afraid to admit to myself that I'm making up as I go, one piece of cloth at a time, as they relate to one another and not to the big picture.

The good thing about this technique is that it's pretty easy to snip a few stitches on the backside and remove or reposition an element. The cloth is very forgiving and there's lots of it.

First Fruits!

Thanks to everyone who commented and the private emails I received about these fabrics and my process. I'm taking the good advice and making up these samplers so you can try it out in your own work. I'll be working my way through the alphabet to name them - this is "Amphora".  The pale blue mottled piece, left center is linen, and everything else is vintage damask.

The ruler is up so you can see the scale and I've gone to some trouble to make sure this looks to my eye and my monitor as color correct as I can make it. That big golden triangle is a piece of the Butternuts from day before yesterday - the crew from yesterday are tumbling in the dryer right now and will be well represented.

I'll be posting these groupings for sale over at Random Acts of Dyeness and hope to get a half dozen up this morning.

To the far right, you can see a piece of a direct print of one of the Reveres -  a good example of what I do with my hand dyes -

here's a better look. Printed on card stock, 11"x17"

All this from just three colors. These are pretty wet but if the butternut results are any test, these won't be all that different when dry.

dyedeck action

I cut up more fabric than would fit in just one pan  (methinks this studio minion is planning a mutiny) so two other colors were called into action.

I will follow the rest of the rules for the processing.

The Butternuts are about to hit the dryer after a thorough thrashing with synthropol in the washer. I'll update this post with pictures in an hour or two.

Now it's stitching time....


ps...as promised...and a portion of all of these will end up in the store..

for JB

Dear JB.
    I just couldn't bring myself to take scissors to your beautiful tablecloth so different things are going to happen here.

There is no more satisfying stitchery that a new sharp threaded with a double strand of 12wt Sulky cotton biting effortless through four layers of supple vintage damask. Once the tension is applied the two pieces become one. This must be what stitching flesh is like, healing.

I'm just going to allow the colors and the cloth have their way with me for awhile.

Thanks again JB where ever you may be.

butternut break out

I'm going to let them all just hang there in the rain for today - save me the water and energy of doing it by hand. The ones with other colors going on are overdyes.

This is a pleasing method..mixing up enough of The Color of the Day in one of those deep steel hotel tubs, tumbling the fabric chunks altogether then letting them stew for a few hours until another good tumble with a  dose with soda ash sauce and then an overnight soak.

Looking for Sheep

There is nothing like a few hours of sun (we got about three)  and a win for the home team to improve my mood. A herd of sheep is in order for the front yard.

I spent the better part of the morning picking space herpes out of my son's laptop. It remains to be seen if the surgery was successful.

Finally,  to the task of the day, finding out just what I had by way of white goods in ever hopeful preparation for a few consecutive, warm sunny days so I can officially open the Lawrenceville Frankenstein Dyeworx. It's been propagating in the closet like bunnies or wire hangers.

There is such an amazing array of cloth, most things I don't even have a name for. A little cloth bag made of cotton so fine and delicate, I think it was a five pound flour or meal sack. Huck tea towels, thick damask dinner napkins, a 14 foot wide round tablecloth that is a blinding white with lilies all woven  through it. My arms got tired of folding.

So I put a few pieces of color up on the wall just to see what was making all that noise in the baskets.

After a little bit of rooting around I felt the need for some warmth so I took sample chunks from  many of the larger pieces and set them out in some home brewed butternut special.

I can wait.

rainy day doings

I am testing some natural remedies for the tinnitus that has been plaguing me for a while now. The list of prescription drugs that have been trialed for the purpose is frightening - evidence of how far people are willing to go to solve this issue. No doubt many of the researchers were sufferers too. At its worst,
 I have the stereo sound of jets preparing to take off inside my head. Quiet contemplation is a distant memory.


It's raining so hard here that much of the state is under a flood watch and the power keeps flickering. We are going to have to hire a flock of sheep to cut the front lawn, it's gone so lush. My Goodman is cooking chili so there was nothing to do but push cloth around for a while....

On todays menu - WORMS!

Ah there's nothing like a big fat rejection email (five pieces "not invited") to further deepen the ditch of creative inertia and frost the cake of a creative funk.

This would have been a local show so I went all out and entered five of my most recent large pieces springing for the extra entry fees reasoning there'd be no shipping costs. No kidding! No gas even. 

"But I like worms" I tell myself. I'm in the right line of work to get plenty.

What I need most is a sunny day so I drummed one up for myself this morning without even thinking much about it. (water color crayons)

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is nearly finished (is that me swatting at a severed head?) so I think I will just set the whole cloth mess  aside for a while until the spirit moves me to something other than teeth gnashing and tail lashing. 

You know it will eventually.

drear

It's chill and damp again, but I flew in the face of the elements and painted/dyed that great expanse of vanilla that has been moaning on the design wall for so many days now. I mixed the dyes with warm water and hoped for the best. The least I could do is leave it overnight so no pictures yet. But here are the cleanup cloths!

 I don't know how much is dye and how much is dirt because before I could start working I had to clean up after the deck gardening.

Grace, these are yard square chunks from one of the large tablecloths that arrived yesterday. Wait until you see my Naughty Amish Cap!

starting over

Nothing from me but the blank wall where it used to be. It was on the fast track to Aggravation by way of Boring so I've taken it all down and will put it away for a while. My head is all mushy from hitting it against the wall.

I'm going to break out the crayons for a while today and sniff around for the spark.

And speaking of fresh starts. {{SNAP}} take that WordoPressors, Arlee is up and running beautifully here.

I am wondering aloud here if her alleged TOS violations had anything to do with her vociferous complaints lodged against that den of thieves who coyly call themselves "pinners".  Could it be that WP and pinshit are in bed corporately?

still shuffling and WTF Word(OP)press!

Gonna let this one perk a few days before I consider adding any color. It will come but at the moment I am both burned up and anxious.

Arlee Barrs blog has been suspended by Wordpress for some imagined TOS violation. If you have been following this blog for any length of time, you probably follow hers too and know she's not some kind of sleazeball entrepreneur pill pushing hacker, or whatever they are trying to brand her.

Like me and many other artists, she primarily uses her blog do document her process. Imagine one morning trying to log in to your blog and finding it GONE -NADA-ZILCH..with no explanations, warnings or easily apparent appeals process.

Makes my stomach roll over just thinking about it and I will spend several hours later today downloading my entire history here, just in case blogger decides to get its knickers into a knot over some imagined shit or other. All I can  say is WTF?

I've written to WP on Arlees behalf..if you want, here's the link for you to do the same but if you are a WP user I'd worry that the bastards are casting some kind of net...

monday wipping

little by little, gnitaerc< >creating the current WIP. As much as I loved all that gold edged lavender, it just wasn't working here.

more in a bit...sleep overtakes me.

big bad voodoo daddy

I'm having a good time with this one as pesky as it's been. There is no batting because most of the elements are a very open damask which is prone to bearding when you stitch with doubled six floss.

There's no freebirding this one..it has to stay locked in the hoops or the pieces wander all over despite the basting.

I may tuck the basket into the trunk of the car tomorrow and bring it along. If there's poker game and no room at the table, I'll take myself outside for some wilderness stitching.