As the weather cools...

...it's time to break out the magic invisibility cloak 


It needs a lot of TLC. I may even excise the most interesting elements and relocate them onto a newer, more substantial garment.

Starting out with a very worn chambray shirt was a romantic notion that has proven to be the proverbial garden path...

I'll look it over in the morning light before I do anything crazy.

The perfect bliss....

....of being easily delighted is my core treasure. Marigolds, sugar, cats purring, my Goodmans hearty laugh. I am rich.

This came in the mail yesterday. Thanks Judy.    If you have not been following this miracle of creation, the Manitoulin Circle Project ,  you can catch up here

Summer slips gently into fall with cooler nights and low humidity making good sleeping weather. After a long week of anxiety, Jim's blood work was good enough today for his second round of chemo to be a Go this morning. I told the doctor "Light him up!"

back stories

"The Stars out of Place" was finished in the spring of 2010.  It was inspired by a nightmare, the kind that is so real that you wake up in a cold sweat gasping for air.

I was almost nine when Sputnik was launched and we had a neighbor who let us lie on the roof of their screen porch at night and watch that tin star crawl across the night sky while we bounced back and forth between AM radio bands listening to Murry the K or Scott Muni.

It all seemed pretty benign to me and I didn't understand how some adults perceived this to be some kind of threat from the Russians. That all became clear to me after I read "Hiroshima" later that year. That damn book sure took all the fun out of Godzilla.

Still I became a night sky watcher for the beauty of it and became intimately familiar with the locations of the heavenly bodies and the names of all the constellations. Total immersion in the Zodiac soon followed.

In my nightmare, I went outside on a crisp winter evening and looked up to find the stars all jumbled and the moon full and leering, too close, in the wrong quarter of the sky  and shedding wisps of pink poisonous looking gases.  The air was too thin and tasted metallic. I closed my eyes so hard they hurt, woke up in sudden disorientation and willed myself awake for the rest of a long night. Despite my best efforts to forget, it was a keeper.

Alien Innards

Word has come from NY that my Heart has been sold.

 Funny, I didn't even miss it.

A different reality

The deadline for Artquilt Elements 2014 is September 30. I'm thinking, since I have work completed within the last two years, I'll apply. That may be the extent of my studio practice for some time to come. It seems that these days, any passion I have goes into cooking, serving, giving meds - all the things that used to annoy me - are now my only labors of love.

Oh, and making a few bridal garters for Missy. Colin hung out with Jimmy yesterday afternoon giving me some time to nip out to HoAnns and gather up some pretties to work with and then stopped by a friends house to take advantage of the lovely pool at her apartment complex. Heavenly!.

These are a few more full sized prints I pulled back on Sunday. There are two of each, 11x17, available on the prints page.

The originals are "Winter Behind Us",  "Taken by the Night" and "Rising Waters"

Winter Behind Us

Taken by the Night

Rising Waters 

rusty siesta

What are we looking at here (besides my pool slipping back to nature)?

It's Voodoo, doing what he does best; napping in unusual containers. That is my ten inch cast iron rusting pan, usually a birdbath, but it's been dry and I've been busy. Yesterday I caught him cuddled up in my fruit bowl on the kitchen table, hatching out a couple of sorry garlic cloves and an overripe peach. My kitchen getting out of hand too.

Happy Monday!

If I took a picture of my studio right now someone would call the fire department, the board of health and probably "Hoarders".  I have other things on my mind these days and taming chaos was never high on my to-do list.

Yesterday I was making a nuisance of myself at Kinkos draping various pieces of finished artwork across their equipment to add some new selections to the print inventory. 


There may be some studio tiding later...but more likely I will return to hanging stars in the Firmament.

To-do this morning is dashing off to the post office to get all of your orders in the mail. Please email me when your packages arrive, that is always good news.

The best news is that my Goodman is now home with us and was feeling chipper enough to take in a little nice weather yesterday. Thanks for all the love and support - it means a great deal to us both.

A little piece of my art

I finally got some prints up in the store..you can see the whole inventory here.   Each one is different.

You can read more about the process in this post. I encourage any of you who stitch to give this a try. The results are quite amazing.

I had a little email give and take with the president of the American Reprographic Assoc. and he assured me that calling these
reprographs was correct.

Thanks for your patronage! 

take down day

 It seems like a lifetime ago that Jimmy and Colin hung these pieces for me but it's only been a month and now it's time to turn this beautiful space over to the next artist.

 I drove over to the gallery this morning and in a few minutes everything was packed and ready to come home.

It's a little sad but not a real surprise that there were no sales. Despite its pretensions at sophistication, I have always found Atlanta a pretty prosy place.  My work is pretty bold and the appreciation of textiles  takes an even bolder art collector. Just having had the chance to display the work was a great gift.


If anyone has any interest in acquiring any of the pieces from the recent show (or any other work, for that matter)  please know that any reasonable offer will not be refused.

It's no longer a secret that Jimmy is battling cancer and our financial reserves have been stretched to transparency. I'm deeply grateful for the resources we do have and the flexibility my home based job allows for. "Grateful for every golden now" is my in-breath and "survivor" our mantra. 

Email me and be surprised. They say that artists should never lower their prices.  Right now I'd like to get my hands on "they" and show them what I'm feeling about that rule.

tattered garden

My mailbox garden is looking pretty ratty these days. These sunflowers and morning glories soared twelve feet but I won't take them down until everyone has eaten or carried off all that is useful to them.

And we stitch a bit.

portal

Dear visitor from South Dakota...drop me a line.      Tell me what you think.

a good one...

It feels like a perfect late September morning, a real treat for August in Georgia. I'll take it. There will be some decompressing today, some stitching, a little pool cleaning time and later some grilling. Life does keep spinning.
 I'll save the bloody paperwork for tonight.  F*k 'em for a minute, eh?

My Goodman

Colin and Jimmy hanging my show.

 We met with Jim's oncologist today, got some concrete results and set the treatment plans in motion.

Now we rally our tribe, pound our shields with our swords and roar. 

owning up

I have to think about why my totem mark, the gator head, turned to left for the first time without bothering me.

This was composed over the last half of the Braves - Mets game yesterday while Jim napped on the couch.  Yeah, I napped through the first five and wish I has missed Jason Heyward getting hit in the face with a fastball.

 Composing in cloth (or any medium) came as a surprise to me. Apparently it doesn't take heart at all because my heart is busy elsewhere.

I brought the task basket downstairs, spent a half hour cleaning and sorting, just winding spools, putting pins back in the little tomato and trying to  let go of other cares for a few minutes.

 The lizard brain took over selecting the softest, tenderest shreds of cloth one at a time. Basting them onto a very soft vintage damask table napkin. Shapes, colors, symbols and layout appeared, just running on fumes.

Whether or not this turns out successfully (and I even question what that means now) is irrelevant. Making was what I needed in that moment.  As much as I wished it was possible to separate my daily life from my creative life, reality steps in, so a brief explanation is in order.

For family and friends. Now that Jim has let his distant family know, I will share here that we have been in the beginning steps of doing battle with cancer. There have been many tests and scans and scopes with no firm diagnosis or treatment plan as yet. We give thanks for his great doctors with  compassionate staffs and good medical facilities close to home. 

The battle is on and we are up to the fight.  I don't intend on documenting everything here, just keeping those who care about us in the loop. Any and all prayers to any and all powers are welcome.

keeping busy updated

I've turned these out almost as a nervous reflex but a reflex that soothes. Putting tails on them seemed necessary, makes them come alive. Eyes and beaks or wings will be up to you.

There's an awful lot of hand dyed cloth in the studio looking for homes so here's another way to move it out.. There are eight in the store  now with links to closeup shots.

Just added four of these - many of the black and white bits are trimmings from the Karma series so there are commercial prints and synthetic fabrics along with hand dyed damasks and other cottons..also available at Random Acts of Dyeness

overnight changes

And the world turns upside down.

We've gone from basting in subtropical heat and humidity to the damp 60's overnight.

busy hands empty the mind

Although I don't know when I will ever have the heart for something new, I shouldn't  be surprised that a little stitching is better than any number of pills for smoothing out the wrinkles on my brain and between my eyes. There are still many stars to hang in this firmament.

"Sunny Jim"

hiatus

All the time and freedom I have had to make the art that you have enjoyed here has been  made possible by my biggest fan and supporter, my husband Jim.
We have things to attend to now so it will be mostly quiet here. It's good to be needed.

we are hanging fire

Karma and Colors go to the Show

This is Ocean Homes front and center in the beautiful gallery/meditation room.
 I really wanted to just sit there and do just that but getting this show mounted was just the first part of our busy day.  The show is at Phoenix & Dragon, here in Atlanta GA and will run through the end of the month.

Of course none of this would be possible without the love and support of my husband Jim and my sons Colin and Jake. Thank you my darlings.

'rangements

It's very strange seeing two years worth of your work in one place all at once.

If the arrangement of all these pieces were up to me, I'd still be sitting on the floor chewing a pencil.

Candace stalked around the room eyeballing everything at once, moved this one here, those two there and in less than an hour, grouped pieces in ways I never would have imagined.

I won't be able to actually get stuff up on the walls until Friday morning.

doing the sleeve city slog

The peskiest part is over - fitting, pinning and test flying a sleeve. These are the last two and I'll try to get them done this evening.

I left them hanging up outside after a good spritz and happily all the storage wrinkles just evaporated. Both of these were conceived and constructed as utility quilts but never used.

Everything is marshalled, packed and ready to go tomorrow morning. There will be lots of good pictures,

It was pointed out to me that "Ocean Homes" has a strong grail feature..I thought it was a swimming pool when I was making it. But a grail shaped swimming pool? Why not.

Beaches

showtime round 2

This is a detail from "Beaches"  a piece that you've never seen a full image of  because I never put a sleeve on it - just finished it, took a few quick and dirties and put it away.
That was in 2010.

Tomorrow I'll be fitting a sleeve onto it because it will (hopefully) be included in a solo show that I'm hanging on Wednesday morning.

I have been offered the gallery for the whole month of August back at Phoenix & Dragon,  here in Atlanta.  The owner curated the show last year from nearly thirty pieces that I brought her and I was so pleased with her choices.

 I have twenty four new pieces to bring her and the room is large enough for more than three fourths of them.

Stay tuned...

dyefest july 2013

I got about half of Aunt Jo's vintage linens into the dye today. I held back a monogrammed pillowcase for myself. It's labeled Thomaston Page and the kind  of delicious cotton that is always cool a little longer when you flip your pillow.

I remixed a few colors and used them quite strong as I'm afraid the stock may have suffered since it's not been refrigerated since first mixed. For a change of pace I made a point of scrubbing the color deep into the cloth so the coverage would be as even as possible rather than my usual splotchorama serendipity. But it's hot and I'm tired so the reveal will have to wait.

I'm going to have to find a way for this Lantana to winter indoors with us this year since it's pot-mates are not winter hardy, even in Georgia.

bundles..

cotton table cloth

My cousin sent a package with a bundle of vintage linens that came from our aunt's home. Josie was my mother's oldest sister, an adult when my mother was born and her surrogate mother. That is the only provenance I have for these things, which means some of them could be as old as the turn of the century. They traveled a lot so the decorative things may have come from anywhere. At first I though this one was a holiday kind of thing but on closer inspection of the elements, it's just plain quirky. I dimly recall Aunt Jo doing some kind of needlework. This just might be from her head and hand.  I will consult the older cousins...

passing time

Nothing new or creative here from me right now, but I used to be...

from 2005, if you have some time on your hands this weekend

Here's the end result and here is what passes for instruction....

Night visitor

(photos by Colin Lacativa)

We had a late night visitor . It's remarkable how this Luna's eyes look like satin stitching. He/she hung around on the screen door and was gone this morning.