bereft

My constant companion Jinx has been missing for two days and we fear the worst.

She started Firefly  with me just  after my birthday and she finished it with me curled in my lap on Sunday morning.  I am sad beyond words.



To all the kind hearts who have offered encouragement, hope and prayers, I thank you. My thoughts wander back and forth between imagined horrors and the hope that she is doing what animals do - find seclusion, curl up and wait for whatever may be.

Catch and Release

This piece announced that it was really and truly finished this morning and it was time to set it free. Well, not exactly free. We had our first sunny day in ages and I was able to get the photographs I wanted to launch my new online store for all the smaller scale things I have been working on for months :  Hands Music Fiber Art

October

I took my camera to work with me yesterday to get a picture of my pet mosses. Here's one wall of my cube. Some of you might recognize your gifts. I get  a lot of compliments for you, Karen and Marie.


The pomegranate was perfect.













Fall sneaks up you here in Georgia.













Here are my pet mosses growing in a crack out in the parking lot. I stopped and petted them the other day. I was going to up root the family and make an indoor desk garden but they seem to be thriving right where they are now so who am I to open up a Moss Guantanamo?

re-purposing dead sweaters

Remember this poor wool sweater that I accidentally felted? (Note the bare, cold toes who are wondering how people can wear wool socks?) It was lying on the floor in the studio by my stitching chair and I just scooted my  feet inside it just to see what all the fuss about wool footwear is. Amazing!

The sleeves from the sweater (which fell into a dyepot too) have been made into the toastiest, softest slippers and gotten a job as the photographers assistant. I couldn't wait to sew on the other eyes to show them off.

Lightning Bugs

This piece continues to amuse and entertain me. I hope I'll know when it's time to quit. There's a basket full of little things like this that I have worked to death.                       

Off to JoAnn's before my coupons expire!

Nurse Karma sez

...if you are feeling unwell, you must lie still and mend. No discussions. If you are in good health, Karma will not give you the time of day. She's too busy.

Jim if feeling symptoms of the same bug that's plagued me for a week or so. Nothing that rest and ginger ale won't fix. And cat attention.

a new scrap of time

Work continues on this scrap of time. It still pleases me. The base is one of a set of linen placemats scrounged from somewhere. I wish the other three had fallen into the same dyepot. Pale sisters, they await overdyeing.  Maybe later today, my first day off since last monday but I still have PT in a few minutes. All that stuff may have come to nothing vis a vis the underlying problem. An MRI awaits.

I finally took a few minutes to go through the box Eleanor's sewing things that the SILs sent me (thank you girls). In it I found a set of hand drawn and cut templates about leaves. What kind of coincidence is it that I have making and drawing these shapes for some time. A few of you may have received fabric leaves in the mail. More will come, I'm sure. I have idle fantasies about a blanket made completely from leaves.

getting back to normal

I guess if it's Monday I have  to leave for work shortly but I have this little scrap to take along with me. Over the weekend I actually had time to get a sleeve sewn on to a large piece and start a new little piece of hand music. Speaking of which - I accidentally gave my ipod a lobotomy the other day so I grabbed a pile of dusty old CDs and convinced my GoodMans laptop to put them onto the empty ipod.  One of the files was a radio program I favor from NY called Idiots Delight.  So on 10.19.09 I was listening  to a show from sometime in 2006 but the announcer started out saying "Vin won't be broadcasting from Studio V tonight because his phone line is down so here's a show from 07/06/02" wherein Vin played a clip from 8.01.2000 where a  puppet named Oogie was a guest on the show..(I'm still falling through the time rabbit hole here). In one ear I am listening to people giving accident reports and in the other ear the puppet is getting out of hand and I can't help chuckling while people are telling me about the damage to whatever or someone who was choking on a bone at a restaurant. My brain is split jelly.

a scrap of time

Sometimes all you have are scraps of time to gather your thoughts and get your bearings. To have a bit of cloth and thread to work with in those moments is very satisfying. I'm beginning to think that artists who prefer working with fabric are heeding the call of their lizard brain - the one that made us crazy when we couldn't find the blankie when we were two. Tactile input takes precedence over all the other senses when one is overwhelmed.

I've spent the week taking the hurdles necessary to take a chance on getting more of my work out into the public eye. It's getting deep around here. Now I sit with fingers crossed, prayers up to minor deities (who might not be busy with more pressing matters) and maybe a little roots work thrown into the mix.

THAY SAY ITS YER BIRFDAY!!!

I've always like the Beatles Happy Birthday song. Hysteria fringed with lunacy. Why not, it's only once a year, right?

True to his perfect form, my GoodMan did the Vulcan mind meld on me and came up with the perfect gift - the thing I didn't know I wanted and that I would love. The initial packaging stymied me momentarily and I wound up exploding all the discs out onto the bed so I closed my eyes, groped the pile and came up with "Abbey Road" to accompany me over to the doctors office and back. What a great time! The terrific thing about this set is that the songs are presented in the original ALBUM order, so crucial to time travel, which is just what these disks will be doing for me. Abbey Road was released about two weeks before my 20th birthday. Hearing this today felt just like it did 40 years ago. Spectacular! Strange and wonderful.  Something completely new and transformative. You could count on the Beatles for that.

I was thinking that music is one of those things that gets hooked into your past usually in association with people, or places and events. But for me, not the Beatles. From the time  I first heard them, their music was mine personally . Not to be draped around some boy or drama. In fact, looking at the big picture of the impact this music had on my culture - the amazing things that could come from acting on creative genius the way these fellows lucked into - kept me at arms length from the kinds of societal traps that a lot of young women fell into back then. I just knew that amazing things were possible if you kept that notion in mind.                        I  did and they were.