Link Love

Gotta thank Jen Lemen for that wonderful expression but I can't wait for Sunday. To make up for my lack of posting, here is some authentic magic from the wasteland called the web. Speakers on and an open heart are in order for Jonathan Yuen's site. Lisa Miller has good new for the New Moon in Capricorn and she very nearly has me picking up my Tarot cards again. Yes, I do readings. To joggle your creative bone (where is yours? mine is in my butt I think) this marvel from my old buddy Frank Ze. If you make something cool, email it to me.... deborah@lacativa.com <---I did this one...looks like my quilts. I am working hard on a new piece but big things take longer for sure and I can't get a break in the weather to do any decent in progress pictures. For now, it's me, John Coltrane and Miles Davis in the studio. "Some things are true whether you believe in them or not" .......City of Angels

dancing with the design wall

These fabrics started congregating while I was still sorting and folding in the big studio cleanup so they've been stewing on the back burner for awhile. Decks cleared, I'll start staring at them as a group until something moves me beyond the way the colors get along.

New Year, new work

Fini. This is "3 to 5 for Mopery" (39x47) $3100 Okay, so it still needs to be ironed good to set the last of the fabric paint and a sleeve sewn on but I'm satisfied for now. Some sleeve sewing will give me face time with my crew after dinner. Not a bad way to start the new year and there's a new piece on the design wall, most of the fabrics already chosen and one UFO rescued from the heap.

Happy New Year

It's 11:46...even thought it's pouring rain, the neighborhood across the brook is erupting with fireworks and sporadic gunfire. Earlier this evening I swear I heard a burst of semi-automatic rounds. I watch enough cop TV to know it when I hear it. Even though I seem to be living in a mock Beruit, I am at grateful peace. My sons are both home, their friends will be spending the night, all the cats are in and my GoodMan is snoring beside me. Two pieces of art got almost finished and something new and tasty got started. Here's to 2007! They are going nuts here in Georgia. It's New Year's Eve and a Sunday. That means that because of the Blue Laws, any establishment that serves liquor but not food will NOT be able to sell any alcohol until after the stroke of midnight tonight. I guess you can tell by my attitude that I'm not shedding a tear for them and I wonder about the lives that might not be destroyed because of alcohol tonight. Enough of my cynicism. Here's a gift for all my readers. Just sit in front of this for a few minutes and marvel. Happy New Year! And this just in from Val

"After serious & cautious consideration.....your contract of friendship has been renewed for the New Year 2007! It was a very hard decision to make. So try not to screw it up!!! My Wish for You in 2007- May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts. May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet of $100 bills. May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips! May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy. May the problems you had forget your home address! In simple words ............May 2007 be the best year of your life!!!"

continued WIP (Mopery)

After fooling around with Setacolor for the first time on both wet and dry fabric, I was confident it would do what I wanted here and bring that wretched (sorry Deb) RED under control . This is probably not included in the instructions but I've been painting a section, watching it for "creep" and when I'm satisfied with how it looks, hitting with a hot iron to set the paint. To fend off boredom induced sloppiness, I'll stop painting and switch to machine stitching but twice I've had to stop and pick out a mess of stitching because I wasn't happy with a too-casual color choice. Baby steps with this one - it's still a cliff-hanger. You can go to WIP and scroll down to see the most recent overall shot.

samples

As soon as the lasagna was being slurped up, I escaped to the studio to fool around with the transparent Setacolors that I snagged at Michaels the other day. Great fun to work with. I'm tickled that I won a set of 8 colors from Ebay at a great price if you don't count seven bucks for priority mail. At least I'll have them in time for the weekend. these are 6"x 4"

the Booty

As much as I have been suffering with my annual case of humbuggery, my Goodman once again came through with a small thing to delight me and lift my spirits. Love by the Beatles is that gem this Christmas.



I've been a Beatles fan since the first time I heard "She Loves You" coming from my mother's portable, leather bound Zenith radio. Something so different and compelling in those young voices working those flirty minor chord lifts captured my attention so completely I scorched a huge brown "V" in the back of one of my Dads dress shirts because I was so intent on this new sound. This is more than a new compilation or greatest hits. The way it's been produced reminds me of how albums connected one song to the next to make a whole that was more than the sum of the parts. For me it adds up to emotional time travel.

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Nothings wrapped yet but art gets done

No title yet but it's being fun and has promise. Lots more stitching and perhaps paint.Don't know just yet. The one below got it's start last year but I jumped on the quilting yesterday and took it all the way through to sewing on the sleeve and coming up with a better name. Formerly "Turd Picnic" is now officially "Skin Keeps Us In"

Tub Thumping Time

There's nothing like a sale to pick up one's spirits. "Atavistic Inclinations" will shortly be on it's way to a new home. I'm going to miss all those little intent faces. Thank goodness for digital photography.

Self Indulgence

Now that it's too late to buy anything online and hope to get it in time for gift giving, I found a few pennies left in my PP account and decided to get myself a treat. I went grubbing about in my Shopping bookmarks and found a link to a product that I have loved for years. Long ago these little clay pots were filled with fragrant cremes from Nadina's Cremes. The scents made me dizzy and the cremes were all-purpose wonderful. I have cherished this trio of empty pots for so long - it was time to bring some new ones into the fold filled with magic potion! The paperweight is a one-of-a-kind original by Josh Simpson, glass artist extraordinaire, who I just happened to have gone to high school with back when the Ark was launched . We re-connected briefly over the web over some old photos that I scanned and passed along to him and he most graciously sent this beautiful example of his art.

Holiday Stampede

Like everyone else in blogland I've been busy trying to do all the last minute stuff required for giving a civilized nod to the Holidays. They have never been my Holy days - my Mom used to live for Christmas - thanks to her, I have fond, old-fashioned childhood memories that I perpetuated in my own now grown children so I go through the motions every year. We give and receive generously and gratefully all year so this forced hoopla once a year bugs me as much as I will let it. Is there a country/culture in the whole world that doesn't DO Christmas? I guess that says more about the power of the United States of Advertising than the power of Christendom but there you have it. If I could find this place and go there (on someone else's American Express card) from Nov.1 until Jan. 2, I would be gone. Time to say goodbye to this postcard. I'm tossing it into the tide of Christmas mail and crossing my fingers that it reaches it's destination. Now I just want to go back to the WIP which is coming along like a sweet song. Some rough patches coming up and scary decisions to commit to but, all & all, a nasty throwaway is blooming magic and it feels good.

Sewing Again

Seems like a long time but it's going well. "Mopery..." is under the needle and making me very happy even though I really don't gravitate to reds, especially the bluish reds, but there you have it. Up close, there are many other little color things going on that I plan to accentuate with stitching. Machine stitching- so you know I haven't gone totally round the bend. I've added a Work In Progress link to the sidebar and created a non-Blogger place to keep better track of work in progress so I don't have to scramble all over for information once I decide to add the piece to the main gallery. Also (whispering) I don't trust this new Beta Blogger all that much. I must publicly thank Shoshana for featuring me in the sidebar of her blog with Senator Barak Obama and Knit Tits. What an honor! She also asked aloud about what folks do when they become creatively adrift or stale. Beside cleaning, I go digging about in my old digital files. I'm a fiendish collector of bizarre miscellaneous digitalia specializing in round things. Go figger. Here's a few I dug up:

Mopery in Progress

I have been having great e-converse with the Empress of Dirt (don't I hang out with the nicest crowd?), author of Fabric Dyeing 101 a wonderful and generous resource for folks who want to take a crack at dyeing their own fabric. I was reading through her take on the whole process and occasionally giving myself the old "Palm to Old Forehead, Sharply" gesture - the way you do when you know you are screwing up even as you do it...like ironing the wrong side of the fusible crap. Damn I hate that stuff but it's the only way I can think of to close up the birthing slot left when I pillowcase a backing...(who else but another art quilter would know what the hell I was talking about.) So I took a moment to tell her about Table Moppers, but she'll elaborate on that. Anyway, to finish off the discharging session I started last night, there was this one piece of fabric left on the kitchen table, one of nastiest Table Moppers from the last dyefest.I got rather caught up in the thing and before I knew it, there were seams and batting and backing and birthing and "3 to 5 for Mopery" was hatched, another whole-cloth monster just begging for lots of paint & stitching. It's just amazing what can happen when there's a clean place to work and you (mostly) know where all your stuff is. Just a lazy eyed jump from mopper to mopery, the title refers to a family joke around here. If one of the boys was sulking about and had the nerve to utter the phrase "I'm bored" they would be convicted of Mopery, something I had a nodding acquaintance with as a teenager. Somewhere on my permanent record it must say "suspected of mopery with intent to creep", not convicted mind you, just suspected.