taking drastic measures, gleefully

The weather will drive you crazy if you let it. The sun is blazing down one minute and the next thunder rolls and smart people get out of the pool. 

Yesterday I tackled a mountain of hand dyes that had been heaped on the ironing table and after everything was folded and sorted I found an excess of INSIPID so  I took  a bunch of the worst offenders out to the dyedeck, doused them with vibrance and forgot about it all until this morning when I hatched these out. 

I've also been thinking about how to go about deepening the background of the Firmament now that it's scattered with stars and other heavenly bodies. Paint? Not. What I may wind up doing is treating each of the embroidered stars with hot soy wax and the submerge the entire piece in a deeper blue/violet dye bath.

That drastic step got me thinking about taking a similar approach  with one or two of my oldest pieces back when I was doing whole cloth screaming; treating a finished piece as if it was only half way there.

Bold? Blasphemous?  Time will tell...

It's not that I don't love you baby.
Let's just say you got a lot of untapped potential...

"Clubbin'"
2007

peer into the past

My scanner is back in service and I've tackled the job of scanning a small clutch of family photos from the late 30's and early 40's.

My mother left them with me on her last visit about ten years ago. The thing is, I have no clue as to who most of the people are. I suspect, by descriptions, the woman on the right is my maternal grandmother, Antonina Catalano Mercurio.  I never met her. No clue about the other two folks. I met the grandpa once when I was about 8 and do not remember his face.

Any RI or MA cousins who may have a clue (and they are legion) get in touch and I will link you to the archive of photos.

Some of the pictures are lovely










and a few will provoke nightmares!

some Saturday eyecandy

Some Saturday Eyecandy...first Clara Fialho...I love her work.

Australian painter, Tim Maguire

Joseph Bellacera

unwelcome guest

baby copperhead

After a week of daily thunderstorms the sun broke through midday and I was able to get in a swim which was mostly pool cleaning.

Just as I reached up onto  the deck for my float I noticed this little bugger hunkered down under it.

I knew him for the dangerous character he was immediately but, at only a foot long, no great threat if respected.

 With Colin's help I caught him in the pool net and we let him go over the fence into the woods where he should conduct his snakely business down by the creek.

on the fiber front

Isn't this just wonderful? It makes me want to put up Christmas lights in the crape myrtles.

Now that I have passed out of  yesterdays  aggravation, I've gone back to hanging stars on my firmament again. That Chandelier tree has me thinking some fireflies would work here too.  My Goddess complex is full blown. Writing fiction will do that for you too.

I'm not long on exotic or task-specific tools; I've rolled a perfectly good pie crust with the bottle of Canadian Club I had just poured from for the filling -why dirty up my maple rolling pin?

But a friend recently thought of me while she was at a tag sale and snagged a set of Gingher shears and snips with the guards and gifted them to me -what a treat! We are rife with deadly weapons!

 I have the same attitude with computer software. Free is good and if it does what I need it to do, why shop around or upgrade, but today I bit the bullet and downloaded Scrivener  for my writing projects. I kept reading good things about it and I don't even have a fully functional copy of Word anymore, not that there is any comparison. The best tools are the ones that get out of the way and just let you do the work.

Thanks again, Kara!