a working weekend

Ain't she grand? She makes me want to dress up and drink champagne.  Google's tribute to Alphonse Mucha this morning was inspiring.  I'm quite sure I've lived all those lives and remember all the luscious details.

I'm also inspired by Jude's Rock Star to pull Danube out of the store and put it into my go bag. It has a large piece of that vintage, smooth handed feed sacking all sugar dyed like a Mucha and I'm taking it back for my own greedy self.

I've been hand stitching on the same two large pieces for a long time and feel my design eye shutting down.

So tonight, it's scissors and pins and hopefully the miscreants and malefactors of the world will put off calling me at the office until Monday.

I actually like being at the whine mine on the weekends. The contacts are unique, few and far between and the atmosphere relaxed. All I need are candles and incense and I am the High Priestess of  Business to Business Reporting.

With the full moon coming on strong, I'm probably kidding myself but I like a good jest as well as the next fool in line.

Two things I need for my cube - a good Mucha poster and a map of the world. 

that popular incantation

So here I am whoring the goods.

I'm not a big prayer but having this posted on the bulletin board of my studio mind would be a good idea. So many people have commented on this and continue to visit the image that  I took the Zazzle plunge and put up a few mugs with an updated version of the imprint. The chant remains the same.

The original cloth that inspired and backed up this image fell to terrible abuse and all that remains was a low res image so I picked through a few more recent hand dyes to adorn the mugs.  Oh, the links are down there on the right in the side bar.

the perfect evening

We spent the day stirring the cauldron, sprinkling secret compounds
and muttering incantations. With all the rain and heat, the pool is having it's midseason algae tantrum. I've tried to encourage it here by reminding it of the proper shade of blue.

The evening rolls on perfectly. After days of righteous salad eating, we had a pizza and fresh canolis followed by an evening of stitching as the Braves take a big wet bite out of the Padres. Thunderstorms, please wait until after the game is in the bag.

PS - that's what I get for gloating. It took 12 innings for the Braves to lose...it shoulda poured!

with his permission

It's my only day off this week and I just finished making black-out curtains for the slider to the back deck. The afternoon sun is brutal now that my tent went to the 311 concert at Lakewood and never made it home. Uninspiring at best. Here's some inspiration for you.

This illustration from the Sunday NY Times book review captivated me. The article was amazing unto itself (read here) and made me less concerned about paying my Comcast bill  on time, in full.  The image fairly sizzled for me so I wrote to the artist. Paul Sahre ,  and asked for his permission to interpret it in cloth.

He graciously agreed. I visualized it huge of course, little areas of discharge on midnight navy cotton with glowing rectangles of white satin overlaid. Somehow this fits in with the beach pieces. somehow.

after a pleasant interlude

It's back to the fiber mine!  I found a drawer full of manila envelopes each crammed with a selection of scraps - sets that I made up some time ago and forgot about! Now to get them all photographed and posted. Here's one and here are the rest.

The chunk of silk skirt waistband was a find from a thrift store in Chappaqua from my last spring trip to NY over a year ago. It was vintage 60's by the style and the cloth it self was like a bowl of cream until I got my  hands on it. A wonderful garment but maybe a size 4!
It should be extra interesting if you pick out all the stitching and deconstruct it. Surprise shibori maybe?

wayback

I was looking for a picture of someone else and opened an album that I haven't looked at in many  years.  This is my personal pirate on one of our first official dates - we took his brother and my nephew to Mystic Seaport. Do I really remember letting two 5 year olds split a  Fosters Lager so we could be alone? Probably.




This is Jim and Colin down at my folks house. That truck turned a humiliating pink with a year of being brand new. The dealer was amused.

demon alginate

"Oasis" 2006

I was telling Arlee about my failed attempt at using sodium alginate  with dyes in this printing experiment. I got the ratio of dye to goo wrong and the alginate seems to block the dye off from the fabric. What you see here is the result of hours of over painting with fabric paint and it still didn't look the way it did when it was freshly printed and wet.

I've since gone nuts and chopped it into the elements which are stiff with paint.
Poker anyone?

Link Love - updated

Since nothing much artistic is happening in my world take a look at what some others are up to.

Thank you Judy for Bloomfelt.
This marvelous piece from Terry Grant.
Hugs back for Heather.
Thanks to Phyllis for reminding me why.

This sketch has drawn me back and I remember that there is an unfinished fiber version languishing upstairs.

Now that I am once again seeing these iterations side by side, I know why I lost the thread on interest in finishing the piece. I recall that I was in a hurry to put something together so I could take it to work and stitch on it but in my haste I lost the design elements that so appealed in the sketch.  There's  nothing to keep me from taking it apart an starting over. The curve and the huddle are missing here.

Go Braves!

I love it when our Boys of Summer have fun doing their day jobs!

If you don't like feet skip this post.

I like my feet. Not everybody does.
Great whopping, hard to fit 10w's, my Dad told me I'd fall over if my feet weren't so big.

I spend most of the time going barefooted and, according to the podiatrist I saw yesterday, since I no longer swing from tree to tree, my feet are paying the price.

He said I have "flexible flat feet" and mentioned lemurs and seal flippers in the nicest way as he slipped HUGE needle into my right heel giving me an injection that is supposed to trick the muscles there into shutting up and doing their jobs without sending big time pain message to my brain. He said the bones in this kind of foot leave too much of the work to those muscles hence the pain.

The shot and a bandage/brace thingy, flexing exercises and ice foot baths are supposed cure this aggravation. Meanwhile my left hip, knee, leg and foot are pissed off having to work overtime.  He also said that my cowboy boots would be good for my feet! Going to dig them out of the closet and see if it's true.   For now I'm  taking my flippers to the pool.

And to the foot pervs who have Googled this post - Have a nice day but don't bother to leave a comment. They're just feet.

ocean homes & working art

I already have a beach well underway so I went straight to the water and the cottages but now I'm have second thought about all those red roofs, in fact this may be the only one.

I had to sit a while with the other house quilt and examine the various techniques and sequence of stitches to remember how it went. I may forget about the roofs altogether. I know they are houses.

The blue with hand painted red dots was a dye painting experiment from over a year ago that was "lost" in the studio.  And I've been waiting a long time to use the batik that Terry sent me. It has the most wonderful hand and a pattern woven into that you can see unless you are holding it in your hands.

For a while I've been thinking of fiber art in terms of functional beauty. Like most fiber artists, I started by making blankets and I always seem to find my way back to that starting point - witness the Flings and this will be another in that line, three or more layers of rescued or re-purposed cotton - mostly muslin, no batting and lots of hand simple stitching on a base that was machine constructed for stability and strength.

It's a form of self comfort for me to make "something from nothing" - something beautiful & useful from something else that was cast off and deemed no longer useful. This kind of  making soothes my frugal Yankee spirit both in the doing and the outcome.

I've always admired these and these.