Home

I left NY late Friday afternoon and despite it being the starting gate of a holiday travel weekend, the whole trip went without a hitch. The flight was listed as "oversold" so I volunteered to take a bump but at the very last moment before boarding they told me there were two no-shows so all went as scheduled. Voodoo was particularly happy to see me because I cut big chunks catnip out of my potted herb garden when I noticed it trying to overwhelm the lavender and basil. Along horticultural lines, I found this four leaf clover in a neighbors yard up in NY while I was taking the cordless phone out to Rob who was cutting the grass across the street. It turned out to be lucky for him - a Sears technician gave him information over the phone that saved the cost of a house call and parts for one of his lawn tractors. Here is Rob, getting ready to ride his motorcycle to South Carolina for much needed and well deserved mini-vacation.

family fun

My whole family in New York are big American Idol fans while in Georgia I pretty much watch it by myself so it was lots of fun to be with my Dad, Rob and Kitty last night watching the season finale to see David Cook snatch the crown. We were all happily taken by surprise too. I wonder if the producers realize the folks in my Dad's age group (and mine for that matter) have fond memories of the golden age of TV which had lots of musical variety programs. On the stitching front, I've started to build a couple new 12x12s with an eye toward donating them to the SAQA auction.Much depends on how attached I get to them. And I'd like to bring your attention to a new contibutor to the blogshere, Elizabeth Barton. I had the privilege of taking a few classes with her since I've moved to Georgia (she's almost a neighbor) and count her work and attitudes about fiber art as a major influence on my own developement as an artist. When I saw her one-woman show at the Gwinnett Fine Arts Center a few years back I remember saying to myself "This is what I want to be doing."

my New York nature

The black soil of my home state is why I despair of ever being any kind of gardener in Georgia. I used to fling seeds to the ground in the springtime and yell "good luck!" and, lo and behold, flowers and vegetables with hardly a drop of sweat. My family's home is on a pond that feeds into the New York City reservoir system so there are a lot of rules and regulations about what can happen around this little pond. I have read about the disappearance of amphibians all around the world to either or both climate change and pollution so I was happy to see this whopper lurking in the weeds. Over the next few days I will pay more attention as I walk the property and see if the numbers seem down from what I remember. I wonder if the fairly recent invasion of Canadian geese affected the frog folk. The pond (which used to be a lake) used to be ringed with giant willow trees. I spent a good portion of my childhood about 40 feet up in one of those trees. One by one they are dying. My dad says for the most part, from natural causes as it's been 50 or 60 years since they were planted. Even trees have a life span.

new pocket patch

I only brought a small bag of scraps with me. Just enough to redo the patches I sewed over some tired corporate logos over the pockets of my favorite denim shirts. There are a few ink stains that will get a similar treatment when I get a minute. I'm headed up to the nursing home to spend the day with my Mom. We will commandeer the day room, put the ball game on the big screen TV, have pizza and beer and I will use the big conference table to spread out the leftover scraps and maybe lay out a couple of 12x12s. We will see what Mom is up to. We took advantage of a gorgeous spring day rolling the grounds of the home, pillaged the lilacs, ate pastries (forgoing the pizza & beer) and then spent an couple hours in the community room where I constructed a little "hand bone" for Mom's arthritic hand. A good time was had by all.

working in strange places

The folks at the TSA in Atlanta enjoyed my refurbished carry on - it earned me a wand treatment to start my trip to NY. Do they train pilots on the job? My plane needed training wheels as we waddled, wallowed and bounced into White Plains Airport...I'm queasy just typing about it.

I love YouTube

Neil Diamond has been all over the place promoting his latest album. This morning Jimmy reminded me of this performance during the Grammy awards so many years ago. I was watching it, he was trying to sleep beside me. As Neil and Barbra started to sing I nudged him "Wake up...psstt. Lookit this.This is HOT...they are way more than just friends...pssst". You Tube is getting to be my memory keeper.

Shoot

I pulled this piece out of storage so I could use the backside as a backdrop for a photo shoot of a flock of smaller pieces that I have decided to sell. It was conceived for an assignment in a typography class I took a few years back. The teacher walked around the room and drew scrabble letters from a cloth bag.We each got two letters that we would be stuck with for the whole term. Like my S&M?

On this overcast day, the backside was more interesting than the front and a good backdrop for these pieces.

raw materials finally exhausted

OK. Now I have to stop. All the latest batch of tablecloths have been committed to the colors and I'm just about out of dye stock. For a while I'll be working with whatever is at hand. What pleases me most is that I can reproduce these results anytime I want to. This knowledge makes me kind of greedy to make more. For the moment I have other things to focus on as I will be leaving for NY on Tuesday to spend some time with my parents. I have to put together some kind of handwork to take along. I suppose clean laundry is in order too. Thanks, Kitty, for booking me on Airtran instead of Delta. And don't forget to order the new washer and dryer from Sears today - I'm packing light! There will be lots of things to do and think about while I'm in NY. Many changes are afoot. I'm determined to plant a small vegetable garden down by the lake. Gardening in Georgia is way too much work. Little survives without major intervention on the gardener's part and I am too lazy. In New York I used to put seeds in the ground, wave my arms in some vague blessing and walk away. The soil was so good that things grew and prospered without so much as a second look from me. The Pilgrims didn't know how good they had it landing in New England. If they had landed in Georgia they would have starved to death. Here's an exception. After we moved here in '93, I brought down some cuttings from a peony plant growing behind my parents house that was originally cultivated by my Grandfather in Armonk, NY . I put them in the ground up by the mailbox where they survive on dog piss and benign neglect. Someone once told me that peonies needed ants to help them bloom and now I have the proof.

Mmm mmm good.

Some outstanding results of a process that involves dirty rock salt . This is going straight into the private stock. We're expecting some wicked weather shortly so I decided to hatch these out early, wash and dry them and then scuttle upstairs to the studio and get to work.

batching damasks

This is the last group of damasks bagged up to batch in the sun until the storm breaks over us later this afternoon. I let the other group go overnight and was thrilled with the results until I washed the whole gang together in the machine and got the dreaded FUSCHIA contamination. So a couple of yesterday's pieces will get some additional over dyeing and the rescue will be complete and lessons learned.

No Spring in Georgia

Anyone who's read my blog for any length of time knows that my time of year has arrived. I don't care if that water is only 60 degrees, I will be in it tomorrow afternoon. Maybe Friday. This is one of those quilted bags that have gotten so trendy and overpriced. I just don't understand how something that I bought for half price in the grocery store (because no one else wanted a bright yellow quilted mini duffle) got to be such a hot fashion accessory. This poor bag has spent most of it's life being mauled by the TSA or housing a sleeping cat. It was pretty tired looking so I broke out the scrap bowl and starting making it over bit by bit. I hope it will be fit to travel again soon.

Company's coming

I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and still Martha Stewart would stroke out! Poor thing. Colin's girlfriend, Raquel has arrived to stay with us a while until she can move into her new apartment. Her friend Lynn was kind enough to load all Raquel's worldly goods into her van and bring her to us from Gainseville, FL. So, how many of you can say you know someone who is an Aerialist, choreographer, dancer, clown, performer, producer, director, who is having fun and exploring the art of film. And in Lynn's spare time: See some of her current work here.

Visual Limbo

It seems like I wasted about two hours yesterday taking new pictures of a bunch of smaller pieces. Anyone who has taken digital photos of textile work has run into this problem. I hate it that I am beginning to doubt my Canon A95's capabilities - it's going on four years old now and gets used almost daily. The only difference in these two shots is that I turned the flash off for the second shot, with no other adjustments hoping (there's the key to my dilemma) that the morning light would be enough. I prefer natural light because any textures show up wonderfully but colors and values often suffer. So much depends on the weather, the time of day and other things all outside of my control. I guess the truth, as the human eye sees it, is somewhere in between. I'm going to try again later this overcast morning with more ambient light.

Hello Oakland. CA

My fascination with the geographical data that Sitemeter provides continues. Hello fan in Oakland, California. Do you have questions about my work? Fire away. In the meantime, I decided to clear off one whole design wall and get some of these small things ready to go off into the world. Some people have had better sales success when they got to the expense and trouble of having small things professionally framed. "Dirty Pool" 16"x16" Aside from not wanting to spend the money, I think frame and matting choices should be left to the person who will displaying the artwork. Any thoughts? I can't even make the "glass/no glass decision" either. They are textiles as in feely-ness in evidence. On another track, does anyone else have time travel dreams? The kind that take you way back to an completely insignificant time fully complemented with all the sense memories of that moment. Last night I remembered what Tangee lipstick smelled/tasted like. I think my mother let me buy it because it was supposed to let the wearer's lip color show through or something all appropriate for my first makeup. Unfortunately, on me it turned a pretty garish maroon if I didn't lick it all off in ten minutes. At 13 I still had no clue about such things. I used to keep it in a tiny clear plastic coin purse that had pastel colored straw flowers laminated into the plastic. Coins, lipstick and crayons. "Blues Flower" 8"x10"

Ear Candy

No pictures but lots of music. I just finished (but I'll never be really finished) adding a music gizmo to my sidebar. Dredging memory and finding music is highly addicting. I did the right thing and it won't start playing unless you tell it to by clicking on the arrow. There's nothing worse than someone else's idea of music blaring out at you unsuspected - I have slapped my monitor in the past. My list would be even more eclectic than it is - the search engine at Playlist.com has it's limitations but so far I'm loving it.

Looking for trouble.

The gold strip along the top of the black box is gone replaced by a dark red piece that doesn't show here. I want to hand stitch this badly - needle and thread goes through it all like butter but the series calls for machine stitching and I doubled the batting so the stitches will really furrow into the damask and show. When I do start stitching, I'm not going to want to stop until it's finished so I can't really start until Saturday. Other pieces are building on the opposite design wall to keep hasty mitts off this one.

new WIP at last

I can hear that music in my head "At last...." These two pieces of fabric have been nagging me for action since I made them over a month ago. It seems like all the fiddling around I've done since then has led me back to them. This new piece has been hatching in me head since then so it was no surprise that it's fallen together on the design wall so smoothly. Now I should let it hang there a few days to ripen and tell. I should have put the camera on the tripod but I'd be tripping over it ..

This one is about 60"x42"

old things become new

This was one of my first attempts at dye printing. A little fore thought would have gone a long way but it was a messy undertaking (the way I did it) and I remember feeling an urgency as if the images I was transferring with the sponge block were evaporating before I could transfer them to the cloth. I used too much alginate and as a result the colors were so pale that I over painted almost everything with and acrylic wash and then some metallics. This morning, I cut it up into the elements with the idea that I can rearrange them. For the moment, I did this instead:

warm up continued.

"Frida Brings Home the Bacon" Any of you who are addicted to watching the barn owl cams will appreciate this one. After the mayhem and cannibalism of last season I only peek in from time to time. Still, nature's ongoing drama is compelling. I've jumped up to a 12"x12" format playing with shapes and space. Still very aware that the details and patterns of the much of the fabric that I have just made will not translate or work for much larger pieces. I might have to (gasp) make some more fabric with just big stuff in mind but the trouble is, in the past those pieces have become whole cloth pieces as I am unable to break down the dye painted design elements. Start with smaller pieces of fabric?

Warm up pitches.

Once again, Jude at Spirit Cloth leads the way with something charming and thoughtful. I sat at the machine for the first time in weeks last night and then spent nine innings hand stitching this tidbit. Through Jude's post I tracked back to the latest at the Ragged Cloth Cafe which has given us much to think about - that which appeals to us visually is an evolutionary response to what's good for us. What I want to know is,what does this say about people like myself who have never had a single qualm about critters of any stripe. Did our ancestors survive because we ate better? Did our ancestors come from another planet?

Wrapping up the dyefest is this little piece that I pleated and machine stitched. Did I not recently swear that I would never do this again? How quickly we forget.

the naughty bits

Lest anyone thought I lost my tiny mind selling off all the fabrics I've been working on, here's a shot of the private stash - the stuff I'm keeping for my own work which I am itching to get on with. This one makes me laugh just to look at it. For now, I'm going to squirrel it away so nothing rash occurs. It needs to stay in one piece but that blue is so delicious looking.

Avalanche of Fabric

I've just finished shooting and posting 16 new pieces of fabric to Like Hotcakes. Making them was a whole lot more fun and there's a lot more to do. Take a look -> Of course I kept as least as much for my own stash. I'll post the pictures of that tasty stuff as they come into the palette for projects. It's wonderful to take a piece off the line, iron it and start daydreaming about how it will work with X, Y or Z who are waiting to get on with the work. I was rooting around in boxes in the ex- studio and found another damask tablecloth that had been dyed by some lunatic. It called out for soy wax and overdyeing so that's been added to the morning agenda.

Mudcats final

For the moment, this series of raw edge, hand stitched pieces has run it's course. Now I have to make myself finish them so they don't languish in UFO land. Too much fun to waste. I think I'm going to cover a large(30"x30") pillow with this one. Eeww, actually sewing? I have a ton of administrative work to get through; pieces to ship, new fabrics to post for sale, entries to finish and mail, and that power point presentation looming...all with Spring fever lulling me senseless. Yesterday afternoon I sat outside on the deck painting fabric and listening to the frogs and owls telling tales - a perfect day.

Rust Never Sleeps

Lately, neither do I for any extended period of time. You would think I would need a good night's sleep after yesterday. After I finished drying and folding all the new fabric, I decided it would be a sin to waste the beautiful weather ironing.Instead, I got busy with the annual Cleaning of the Pool, easily on a par with the Cleaning of the Aegean Stables.

This year I beat the tree frogs to their egglaying but they were not too busy to hang around on the walls of the pool kibbitzing as I worked. In the foreground, Jim's cast iron frying pans are hard at work rusting a couple of pieces of fabric that got left behind. The studio is in chaos with piles of fabric everywhere waiting to be worked on. Tomorrow.

Chag Sameach - Happy Passover !

wash day was never like this

This beats using a dryer any day but I'm real glad that I didn't throw out my old ironing board. You know, the kind you can adjust for ironing while sitting. My grandmother is spinning in her grave. The rusty business in the middle here is one of my favorites. The spotty looking things are in a preliminary state. Painting comes next. Some of these things look like skins taken from non-terrestrial beings. My "Custom Blood" recipe worked out quite nicely. I usually don't dally much with reds unless they are close to neutral. From the sublime to the ridiculous. All delicious.

Spirits in the Cloth

It was a transcendent day at the dyeworks yesterday. I found the right music (thanks Vin), surrounded myself with all the tools and materials and worked the fabric directly on the table like I was working pizza dough (but not too much kneading). Some of this fabric is top shelf 400M and batiste from Testfabric, some is mongrel cotton from OHCO, some vintage damasks from strange tables in distant times. Spirits in the cloth. Now for the fun. Finding out just what went on in all those mason jars and baggies over night. These are wet so don't get excited yet about the intensity of the colors but there was almost no dye in the rinse water. A portent of good things. These were rinsed in tubs of water that stood overnight on the deck. I feel for all the generations of women who hauled the laundry down to the river to pound the clothes on rocks and rinse in the freezing streams! I'll let these drip dry for a while before I try to haul them upstairs to the washing machine. Many of these pieces are destined for further transformation through discharging and textile paints.

Dye Day Redux

I finally got a chance to get the rest of that fabric into the dyes. It was too beautiful a day to NOT be outside working on something but now I'm pooped and will save the rinse-wash-dry-iron boogie until tomorrow. Best to batch anyway.