the chase is on

Sometimes the horse bolts and you have to chase it down with saddle and bridle.


It's raining and cool here for the first time in ages. Contemplation time. No more false moves..the stage is set.

the following studies were done with an ancient paint program, PSP5 if you can believe it. I will be sad when it stops working.

I could do this all day but a handful gives me an idea of how I want to go with the stitching. As much as I may like or dislike any one of these, the finished piece will only refer to the digital image, not copy any one entirely.

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a good sundays work

I've been up before the sun putting little bits of cloth together until I decide I liked the way things look.


The bristle of all the pins is distracting so my next step is to baste the whole piece with great leaping jumps of a single strand of blue thread..easy to cut and pull out as I need to along the way.

It's very easy to lose sight of the whole picture during this part of the process. Strokes for the sake of taking them won't add up.


All the cloths I've chosen are loose and open - the thread and needle pass through with almost no resistance - quite probably more than one of those little red spots is my blood.

So easy to be sidetracked by the juicy splendor of the individual fabrics but it will be easy to make design revisions before settling in the stitching that ties everything together, the marks that will make it whole.





1300 posts. really? 
Should I throw a party?

making do do

I decided to start working with these (and cloth from some previous batches) as they are, which is outside of my comfort zone in hue, tone and other attributes. Having been creatively stagnant for a while now I'm going to think of these raw materials as if they washed up onto the beach of my desert island- and there's that little creepy dude in the pointy shoes serving drinks again.

humbled by the process

I guess I will never learn.

"Never crow about hand dyed cloth before it's been washed and dried" should be up in neon on my design wall.

Here's a link to a large image so you can see all the texture in the cloth. I can't decide if I want to continue working on this batch with other techniques or let them rest as is.

I also have to remind myself that nothing spectacular comes easy and that the best pieces I've made came from very humble starts.

she sheps naches

My friend Jan's son Ryan moved to Taiwan right out of high school to learn the language. I think it's been a little more than a year. Makes me think about what I've accomplished in the past year.

Here he is starring in an entertaining promotional video for Kaohsiung, the second largest city in Taiwan. Um, he's the tall guy with the guitar. I don't know what they are saying but the message comes across clearly.

October Glory

Well, if I can't have October baseball at least I'll have hatched out what may be the very best fabrics of the year - so far. Seriously, I was driving home from the grocery store with my ancient Ipod plugged into the car stereo (thank you Steve, you will be missed) and the theme from "The Natural" started playing and I started to cry.

I bought a leather purse the other day because it reminded me of my baseball mitt. You get funny looks carrying around a baseball mitt when you are not at the ballpark.

These are all shots from the first "reveal" when I open up the rolls of cloth and grains after 24 hours.

I can tell by the rinse water that the dye took pretty strongly . All the grains get shaken out onto the lawn and these entire batch is in the washing machine right now.





There won't be any time to take and post any finished pictures before I have to go to work so we will have to wait until tomorrow.

Que Sera, Sera    (my mother really did sing this to me)

It's seriously messy and labor intensive process but the results are worth all the trouble to me.





 

I have decided to name this entire set after the late, great Steve Jobs....they are the October Jobs.

wild assistants

While I was inspecting the tubs with cloth rolls, I tripped over this...I left a few pieces bagged up and in the sunshine to poach. They pulled it off the railing and checked on the contents for me, rather inelegantly.

From all appearances they did not approve of the contents.



update...the cable guy gave us a new remote as the service magically restored itself.

Here's part of what was in the bag shown above...you cant PAY for help this great!

waiting

I'm waiting. For the sun to come through the front door so I can see well enough to stitch on this piece for a while. And waiting on the Comcast guy to tell him I don't think the trouble is at our house because whatever was wrong seems to have cleared up since other Comcast trucks were shuttling up and down the block the past few days.

And waiting until it's warm enough to get those cloths out of the tubs and see the magic!

more texture! more color!

A fiber scout in the wilds of Georgia/Alabama left a bag of potential on the back deck yesterday. Boiled, bleached and soaked overnight in soda ash, I'm not entirely sure all of it is cotton but there's gambling in the air.

I'm taking advantage of a warm afternoon and letting these rolls poach in the sun for the rest of the day. We'll see who or what drops by to investigate the grains in the night. On the menu, some brown rice, very old oatmeal and a box of cornstarch that's at least five years old.

fun with technology

"Sunny Jim"

We spent the morning at the hospital yesterday, as scheduled,  getting Jimmy's heart back to beating a normal sinus rhythm..it got out of sync somehow a while back.

After a load of paperwork and the usual BS sugarcoated with smiles, they manscaped his chest, promised to wake him when it was over and then put me out of the room while they gave him the Frankenstein zap.
He "converted nicely" as the doctor put it.

All is well and I am deeply grateful..after all, his heartbeat is mine too.