restarted

After I got home from the cookoff yesterday (and slept a while)  I took this one apart and started over.
I'm  a lot happier with the overall potential now. The left side looks darker because this was taken with ambient light. There's a lot of ways to take it  now and I'm in no hurry to choose a path, in fact, I'm going to take it off the wall today and set it aside for a while. I like the idea of more than one piece in the works with none of them considered to be a UFO.

Word from NY on my "orphan" sale is encouraging. This summer fling has finally found a home! I am so happy that it's out of the closet and will be loved and used that I am going to start a few more just to keep my machine chops up to speed. Kara tells me that Sunday is the big day at the Brooklyn Flea so my mission for today is ready another box of  goods for shipment. 

chili cookoff 2012

My warriors are home from the chili cookoff.  Apart from the cooking competition, there are live bands, people in strange costumes carrying on , lots of good food and camaraderie, and throngs of appreciative festival goers. A good time was had by all. Still no word about the winners at the time they packed up and came home. You are not imagining the look of love and pride on my husbands face.

 Jake is shaping up as a chef and Colin has the makings of a maitre d'. The logistics of cooking prize winning chili from scratch (and twenty gallons for the masses)  in the field are staggering but Jim has it down to a science. Now if we could only find an efficient and reliable can open for the beans!

thank you #10

Nothing run of the mill about this Friday night.

 Jim, Colin and Jake have set up camp at the site of the annual chili cook off where I'll be joining them tomorrow morning..wait. It's Saturday already, I'll be leaving for Stone Mt. in a couple of hours.  

There was a special tribute on TV for our retiring hometown hero, Chipper Jones, who played his entire illustrious  baseball career here in Atlanta. It would have been nice if the Braves had beaten those nasty NY Mets after all the gushing was over but that's baseball. Round bat, round ball...shit happens. 
I recently heard baseball described as "the game of anticipation" How perfect.

This piece is not doing anything for me so before I take it all apart and start from scratch, I took it up to Karma's grove under the almost full moon for a little change of energy.

Juicy tagged along to guard me from the dark.

My studio  from the grove.

seasons end

Photos like this that make me think about painting. (click for a very close look)

this one also made me think about reworking some of the darker cloths with paint and discharge tomorrow.

I'm waiting on a big delivery from ProChem including some new transparent paints that I'll be using for the first time.

I'll also rescue this poor teapot from the deck where it's been holding brushes all summer. The mason jars and plastic ware will be washed and boxed up with the rest of the tools of the trade as dye season draws to a close.

alien innards redux

I rounded up these Alien Innards - a 3D series I did some years back, with the intention of putting them on the next plane for NY...just checking them over to make sure that the time stuffed in a bag at the back of the closet didn't cause any wear or tear. On the contrary..they look ready to rock.  Handling them reminded me what fun the series was to make.

The "bodies" were machine stitched damask which does such very interesting things when it's stuffed with poly fiber and pulled tight. All the embellishments - layered transparent cloth, stitching and beading in some cases - was done by hand of course..when did I have all this time I wonder?