as yet untitled

All that picking and sorting. I auditioned dozens of pieces of cloth, but nothing grabbed me.

I hadn't quite finished putting everything in the basket when I got a call that Charlie needed to be picked up from school. He was having a Bad Day. I abandoned the basket of wishful thinking. Probably a good thing.

Nana to the rescue and glad to do it. The weather emergency fizzled and I was home by dinner time.


The next morning I set the basket aside and rummaged in the closet where the UFOs lurk. Came up with this as-yet-unnamed piece. Not having named it makes it hard for me to search for it in the archives. Probably from 2012 or early '13.

I'll try to get a decent overall shot of it tomorrow. It reminds me of cave paintings.

 It's kind of a big, sprawly, unfocused panorama. I'm counting on these lines to make some sense of it in the long run.

storm prep

They say we may get some winterish weather on Tuesday. Chances are, school will be canceled which means I'll be spending a day or two with Charlie so I'm prepping the river basket.

 I have something in mind so I pulled a bunch of cloth this morning and actually ironed it just to see what I really had. My grandma would have had a fit - I ironed sitting down!

I don't know how to capture the iridescence of damask that's been ironed. This picture almost gets it.

Now, for the patience to take my time composing - not threading a needle until the design works.

Lately, the rush to stitch has only lead to misery.


Right now stitch needs to take me to the place where the words grow.

Bomenrij  by  Jan Mankes   1915

The Stars Out of Place

The eclipse the other night reminded me of this piece. The sky was so clear - a rare break here in Georgia - I was sorry it was so cold and I was supposed to be working, so I was running up and down the stairs to monitor the progress.

19x17     250.00

"The Stars out of Place" was finished in the spring of 2010.  It was inspired by a nightmare, the kind that is so real that you wake up in a cold sweat gasping for air.

I was almost nine when Sputnik was launched and we had a neighbor who let us lie on the roof of their screen porch at night and watch that tin star crawl across the night sky while we bounced back and forth between AM radio bands listening to Murry the K or Scott Muni.

It all seemed pretty benign to me and I didn't understand how some adults perceived this to be some kind of threat from the Russians. That all became clear to me after I read "Hiroshima" later that year. That damn book sure took all the fun out of Godzilla.

Still I became a night sky watcher for the beauty of it and became intimately familiar with the locations of the heavenly bodies and the names of all the constellations. Total immersion in the Zodiac soon followed.

In my nightmare, I went outside on a crisp winter evening and looked up to find the stars all jumbled and the moon full and leering, too close, in the wrong quarter of the sky  and shedding wisps of pink poisonous looking gases.  The air was too thin and tasted metallic. I closed my eyes so hard they hurt, woke up in sudden disorientation and willed myself awake for the rest of a long night. Despite my best efforts to forget, it was a keeper.

detail 1

detail 3

angels

           
   Found while looking for something else. I can't remember taking it or seeing this picture. Warms me. Jimmy & Karma were an item.

mending this day

It got so dreary today, temps in the mid-thirties before sunrise and not much more after, then it started to rain. All my bones are suddenly on the warpath. There was nothing for it but tea, drugs, and mending.

The damasks I used in this quilt were old when I found and dyed them. It's interesting how this some of this cloth seems to evaporate with time and use. Sometimes, the look works - shabby chic - some call it.


Not in the case of this quilt. It has some personal provenance and  I'd like it to stay around awhile, not be perceived as something tattered or disposable.

When I'm satisfied it's whole and strong enough, it will be a gift signed "Nana".