almost home

Jimmy was sort of half sprung from the hospital today. The medical doctor cleared him to leave pending the surgeon's approval but the surgeon was too busy running through the halls with a chain saw. He finally popped by after I had gone home promising to spring my man in the morning. I nipped out in the middle of the afternoon to come home and see what had become of a batch of damasks that I had pushed into a stew of soda ash the day before Jim's surgery just about a week ago. What was I thinking? When I opened up the container I half expected 20 gallons of mush but the cloth seemed OK so I went ahead and sugar dyed it all. I have a "what if" in mind for some of this fabric. Nothing fully formed, just a notion. I was busy elsewhere so daily life has taken a back seat. My pool has been sadly neglected this past week and all manner of strange things just came out of the skimmer and dip net. I just hope I can get back in the water to do the real cleaning. The water has cooled down a lot and hurricane Fay will be drenching us in a day or so.

caesura

Thanks to everyone who has sent prayers and expressed concern for my husband's recovery. Jim is on the mend. He took his first solid food in a week last night and seemed to be tolerating it when I came home from the hospital last evening. My mock nursing was getting on his last nerve. While I was gone this weekend, Raquel cleaned my house and it was such a pleasure to come home to peace and order when I had expected the chaos and clutter that I had left behind. The only room she wisely didn't go into was my studio. I peeked in, looked around cracked the windows and closed the blinds. A storm is coming soon. The mess in there is dispiriting in a small and laughable way at the moment. I had no photos for this post and found this one in a file on the computer. I know the piece is in the studio somewhere, unfinished, but I'll be dipped if I can find it.

Thanks for asking

No pictures, just the facts. I have been sitting by Jim's bedside in the hospital. He is recovering from surgery to remove a section of his colon where cancerous lesions were found during his first routine colonoscopy. I won't preach. Can't preach because I have not yet had my own first checkup - it will be scheduled shortly - just know that his doctor said that another very few months would have made the difference between a good and a poor outcome. Bumping up against mortality in this way has us both rattled to the core. And that business about sitting by his bedside? That's a lie! They have huge, high tech lounge chair that I spent the first night sleeping in but the next day Jim found he was more comfortable in the chair than in the hospital bed so at any point in the last 72 hours nurses and doctors have found me sleeping, sprawled out and generally lounging in the bed. I'm just home for a moment to count cat heads, change, shower, brew myself a decent cup of coffee and head back to duty. A duty I am so grateful to be performing. More when I can.

Bundles

Pursuant to the discussion I had with myself on the previous post I've started hacking up some of the larger pieces of fabric I have in my stash and putting together little sampler bundles. This from a girl who thought nothing of wearing striped socks with a plaid skirt. The individual pieces are roughly fat quarter or dinner napkin sized and total up to more than a square yard. Plenty to mess about with. I'll be listing them on Like Hotcakes adding more bundles as I keep grouping, ironing, folding ....it sounds like work but it's kinda fun. I just have to remind myself that these little beauties are headed for someone else's studio or sewing basket.

cutting up the cloth

I've been thinking about Elizabeth and Rayna's posts about the reluctance to cut into art cloth once you created it. Looking around my studio, I have to say I'm guilty as charged. Could be partly why I have so many humongous pieces of fabric that are not selling like Hotcakes. If I can't bear to cut them up, what makes me think someone else could be so bold? Time to break things down into imaginable hunks so later today I plan on dragging out the scissors, slashing away and putting together the yard+ bundles that I used to offer. There are also about twenty-five pieces of damask stewing in soda ash solution out on the dye deck that must be seen to quite pronto. Got to mix some colors later today. It' gray and raining and color would help lift the mood.

Hot Houses

No Jude, this one may wind up with a light batting also. What shall we call flings that have grown a pelt because fall has peeked around a bush at summer? Our weather has turned rainy and cooler and I will be spending a good part of the coming week by Jim's bedside in the hospital where they have all the AC one could need in Georgia. Fearful that the red overdye I gave the borders would bleed all into everything, I gave it a good thrash in the washing machine last night tossing it in with a bunch of Jimmy and Colin's socks and underwear to pink up for fun. Murphy's Law at work - no red run off at all. When we first met and felt the need to get to know one another better, Jim came with me to the local laundromat where we did our wash together in one machine. Very sexy. My brand new red chenille bathrobe left everything he owned a loving shade of pink. I plan on doing some of that Indian edge wrapping technique on the houses before I decide if there will be middle to this fiber sandwich.

Safe as Houses

I was thinking about Judy Martin's protection series and the expression"safe as houses" when I was searching for some floating nines for this latest fling. I've pieced the striped border from A's beloved Cherrywood cottons but the grays and browns depressed me so I tossed them into a red dye bath for a makeover. I seem to be attracted to some kind of wayback machine notion of time these days - I actually sat in rapt, if puzzled, attention the other evening and watched all of "Now Voyager" for the first time. Made in 1942 back when Bette Davis really was exotically beautiful. She had on the most amazing pair of earrings for a long stretch of the film and I found myself webslogging for an approximation of same for my own lobes. No luck so far. These are from my deck garden. The tomatoes were just snacked up for dinner and the habaneros bagged and frozen for the Chili cookoff in the fall.

Ni hao World

Who knew that 8's were so fortuitous? Certainly not me when I painted "Congregants" in 2007. I'll take good luck anyplace I can trip over it. I was glued to the screen last night to the spectacle of the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics. Chinese culture is so complex and old, it would take lifetimes of study for a deep understanding and I confess ignorance. I resigned myself to just taking in the visual aspect and kept hearing myself oo-ing and ah-ing over each new image. The general impression I got was of a people who will work together to accomplish a goal, no matter what that goal is. The results were amazing. I won't go all political on you here but I could not help but reflect on how opposite this culture is from ours and how our culture suffers from divisiveness, feelings of entitlement and the unwillingness to accept personal responsibility in the face of all the challenges we face as a nation. I had intended to stitch my way through the evening but didn't get much accomplished beyond sticking myself to bleeding a few times. When the actual torch lighting began I was charmed by the water spirals projected on the screen along Li Ning's progress around the inside of Bird's Nest stadium. My freestyle hand quilting is almost always spirals building out on one another much like these.

Last Fling (for now) - storm light

The thunder is rocking and rolling from the west and the trees are shaking out weeks of dry leaves everywhere. We haven't had serious rain in over a week of 95 degree days. It's time. I had to try to get a shot of this one before I start dragging it around everywhere blankey-style, doing the hand stitching on it. Can't exactly call it quilting if there are only two layers but there you have it. Now, if only the power doesn't go out!

weaknesses

For lack of anything current in the studio to show you , here's what I've stapled to the door outside it complete with my shopkeeper's bell so I won't jump out of my skin when someone enters without knocking - as if the door was ever closed. Titled "She Hears Voices", you would think it might keep folks out altogether. Anyone who's been around in the fiber art world on the web will recognize the strong influence of Pamela Allen. I made this piece when I attended one of her classes during my first visit to ACA in FL. I was thinking about the Wednesday doodling that a few bloggers do when I pulled this out of the UFO pile last night and tried my hand at thread painting. Now I recall that figure drawing was something I never conquered but always wanted to. Like many untrained artists I draw what I think is there as opposed to what really exists. I'll call this cartooning and promise to take up portraiture someday. My mother used to doodle women's faces complete with '40's hairstyles and this looks just like one of her girlies.

Last Fling (for now)

Sometimes you just lose focus, or maybe you never had it, and you were just going through the motions. I've recalled that going through the motions is how to keep one's head above the water.

Blueberry Picnic

I've finally finished this piece and it's time to say goodbye and send it on to it's new home. One problem - I haven't added the sleeve because I can't settle on an orientation. So, dear A., flip it around a few times and decide for me.

another start

I skipped adding the hand appliquéd elements to the second one in favor of letting the focus fall on the rusted fabric but decided I needed to come back to the hand appliqué and take more time with the design of each block. Stop hurrying. Stop time. I made a big selection of colors and loaded up the basket so they would be at my fingertips. I have another idea for the monkey teeth this time also. The Summer Lightness is catching on. Look where Margaret is taking it.

Fireplace finds new purpose

Remember this piece from one of the first dyefests of the year? I am deeply gratified when an artist uses one of my hand dyed pieces in their work. As much as I loved it, I was at a loss for what to do with it beyond wash, iron, fold and squirrel it away for "someday". I'm lucky that "fireplace" fell into Jude Hill's magic hands. See what she's made of it at Spirit Cloth.

people will think I'm unemployed!

A basket full of handwork represents purpose, productivity and comfort to me. Lordy, next thing you know, I'll be darning socks. My grandmother had a carved ebony darning egg and I watched her darn a sock once and thought "that's nuts" but then, I was six or seven and not in charge of keeping decent socks on a hard working husband's feet. I also seem to remember getting in trouble for gently whacking my sister on the head with the sock egg. This is the second not-quilt in what is sure to become a series but none destined to languish on walls or in art galleries. In time, these will be gifts. It seems kinda like cheating as they seem to manifest out of thin air and some otherwise aimless hours. Just as I was tossing it over the railing to be photographed this little feathered jewel stopped by for lunch, gave me the hairy eyeball and went about her business freeloading at the Hummer Bar.I was about three feet away and afraid to lift the camera to my eye so I just tilted it up and clicked. My first ever decent shot of one of these little buggers.

Colors and Emotion

Here's what came out of those jars from yesterday's post. So full of joy! I left them hanging over the railing just before the rain got serious. When I went outside to retrieve them and watch Jimmy cooling off in the pool (despite the thunder and lightning) there was a tag team of hummingbirds staking out the feeder on the lower deck. It warmed my heart to witness both.

summer rolls on

Each day boils up bronze, green and wet. The cicadas riot in the trees. We have troops of golden orb spiders camped out in the ivy. I imagine I can hear them muttering to themselves, testing their lines with a hairy legged pluck. Maybe they are why we have seen so few hummingbirds this season. The deck boards are too hot to walk barefoot but by by 3 or 4 in the afternoon the clouds loom over the treeline and thunder revs up in the west. I think I'm finished stitching on Summer Garden and have started piecing a new one. This time I'm using some of the wonderful rusted fabrics hatched earlier this year.

Summer Garden

I had to piece the back together out of scraps of white and ecru muslin but Summer Garden is nearly done. Not a quilt - there's no batting - I want to spend some time doing some sort of hand stitching to hold the back and front together but it's so grisly hot and humid right now I think I'll put it aside awhile so I don't rush through this last step. The blues and greens for the border came from deep in the magic cupboard. I found a whole group of hand dyes of that soft, gauzy James Thompson Mills cottons from OHCO. I had forgotten all about them. I half contemplated inserting a handful of monkey teeth (think Prairie Points without precision) around the edges but got hasty with the heat and stickiness. This was fun to make so I'm sure there will be another time to try this again. I had forgotten how much I enjoy free form hand appliqué.

I've zeroed in on what's drawn me to those Blues in the previous post and making me quietly repeat my quilter's prayer. It's this spectacular painting by a young painter living in Halifax, Nova Scotia,Ambera Wellmann. I keep staring at it an wondering what it's making me feel. Something I can't put my finger on. Art with deep emotional content has been pulling me in lately at every turn and making me realize that I want this from my own work and have no idea how to capture it beyond obvious moodiness. I turn away from the anxieties of reality to times past both real and imagined with escape in every stitch. Instigated by Jude's wondrous Fling, I've tried to escape the heat with my own version, A Summer Garden. Dye junkie that I am, you cannot imagine what it took for me to come up with some white fabric for this. It's only 45" square and I'm fresh out.

The Blues

I've finished cherry-picking the dyefest results. These are the ones I've gravitated to over the past few days. Perhaps a reaction to the heat and humidity? There has been no real work for the new Featherweight as yet but this fabric is making me think of piecing something functional. In the meantime, the rest of the harvest has been posted over to the Hotcakes site for sale.

Last of the Mystery cottons dyed

This china platter hasn't seen a turkey's backside in years mostly because it weighs at least five pounds all by itself. These are the last of the mystery cottons and a few new colors that I cooked up from the original concentrates. You can always count on a critic or two at the Lawrenceville Frankenstein Dyeworx. Now it's time to "clean" the pool.

more hand dyes

Awright....I'm going upstairs to iron. It's only 99 degrees, sure, why not. Hey! Gunga Din! over here with that water skin if you please! I want to thank everyone who anted up their two, twenty and 99 cents regarding my photography quandary. Combing through the wisdom I think I've distilled an answer. It's going to involve my Goodman building me a portable hard wall and some cooperation on the part of the weather but the job will get done and the results will be what I have been looking for.

photo frustration

I've just spent the best part of two days shooting and reshooting four of my most recent pieces and I don't know if I'm losing my mind or my overworked and aging little digital camera is losing more than just a step. I hate that I'm feeling animosity towards the pieces as if they cared. This was taken on the design wall in my studio Getting good digital images of textiles is a struggle on a good day but throw anything shiny like metallic thread or paint or damask fabric into the mix and be prepared for hair pulling, crude cursing and lots of sweat.
This one was taken out on the deck with the sun overhead. Part of my problem is not being able to decide if I want the digital image of the work to highlight the basic elements of the design - the shapes, colors, lines and energy of each piece, to speak first and loudest, or do I want the textures of the fabric and the textures created by the stitching to have an equal voice. These decisions come with little or no thought during the design and creation of each piece but conveying these decisions through the digital image is maddening. As if I could afford one, I spent a lot of time rooting about on the web looking for local professional photographers in the metro ATL area and found a disappointing clutch of wedding shooters hell bent on selling that fuzzy dream image which is probably all that most folks remember of their weddings without expensive pictures to remind them. What do other fiber artists do with this problem?

Fruits

Yesterday was an emotional contrast to the day before. I was in a hurry, on fire as usual, to get results. It was hotter & more humid than yesterday, a horsefly was chasing me around the deck and I was hellbent on murdering it. I couldn't even consider picking up the brush and painting so all of these came out of the serendipity of "bagging" each piece with color added as I went along. There was not one disappointment in the entire batch of mystery fabrics. Each piece took and held the dye as if it was born and bred PFD! So the method of one machine washing with HOT water and Dawn plus a 24 hour soak in soda ash solution seems more than adequate. I left this image large so that, if you click on it, you can see the variety of textures from a heavy broadcloth through smooth muslin even to a piece of cheesecloth. Even the table mopper on the top of the heap has promise. I can't feature ironing anything even this early in the day but if I decide to part with any of these they will be ironed and posted over at Hotcakes as the week goes by.

Standing on the Burning Dyedeck..

The mood is light, the sun is hot, the music cool and the pace is much slower and more pensive than my usual frenzy-with-color. I only bagged up three small pieces over the course of the afternoon. Must be the moon. I find myself painting in slow motion without thinking about anything at all. I think I am going to be returning to meditation to even my keel. This is a juicy piece of flannel. Remember, these are all "mystery" cottons from the remnant rack. I scrubbed them as proscribed by the collective wisdom of the QA list but I still won't know anything for sure until later tomorrow.

Hitchhiker

Colin picked up up a hitchhiker in the grocery store parking lot this morning. After much research this beast (that's a nearly 3 inch wingspread!) turns out to be a Royal Walnut Moth...the Royal Walnuts of Georgia to be sure. He/She? is free now somewhere in my backyard. Click on the photo for a closeup!

Road Kill

These are detail shots from the piece in the previous post which is done and about to be sleeved and photographed. The slightly smaller scale of this piece, roughly 30 inches squarish, called out for more stitching to pull the design together so I spent most of two days smoking away with Big J.

Lousy weather=good day in the studio

I started the day early doing my webwork. Sussing out the nitpicking details of transferring a domain and building a splash page for a new client. Because I have become a bit jaded to the Usual Suspects when it comes to deciding on shows to enter, I wavered just a little with a Google search on "call for entries" and came up with one of the comprehensive list of art opportunities I have ever found on the web. If you are at a place in your fiber art career where you no longer get any jazz out of entering quilt shows or maybe, like me, you never belonged there in the first place, here's your chance. Get on over to Artshow and be prepared to lose a few hours if you are the least bit serious about your work. I hate to admit it but I was ready to spend the better part of the day playing manatee out in the pool but one moment the sun was blazing over the rooftop and then next - cloud city complete with thunder, lightning and hours of rain. Oh Damn Well, there's always tomorrow for lolling about and reading a wet Sunday NY Times. So, I hiked up the sarong and let the muted daylight of the studio take me to a slightly different place in my work with the salt dyed damasks. Add to that, some of Joan McGee's silk scraps and a new piece rose up from the flames of an idle day.

Welcome Little Feather

A new Tool has come to join the crew here in my studio. Big J seems skeptical but it won't be long before Feather will be working alongside him. I have craved a Singer Featherweight for many years. My Grandma owned and treasured hers enough to never allow me to touch it - I was a well know "tinker" belle, inclined to de-construct anything mechanical - but she promised it would be mine, someday. After she died, her machine found another home somewhere and I never had the nerve to press the matter. At a recent lunch, a friend and I were talking about our respective sewing machines. (Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the gentlemen at the table leaning back and a glazed expression came over their faces) I mentioned my quest for a reasonably priced Featherweight and dear A. simply said "I will send you mine". Done and done. It arrived yesterday in a flurry of pink packing peanuts and I am smitten and so grateful.

after the crowds go home

We had a BBQ yesterday. Thank goodness one of our guests considers himself a Grillmaster. My idea of barbecuing is when enough smoke comes out from under the lid, it's time to turn things burnt side up, raw side down. Nice folks, too much food, water volley ball and a little thunder and showers. All and all a pleasant change of weekend pace. Company is always a great excuse for a little overdue housekeeping, pre and post party. A Braves game got underway a bit late due to the thunderstorm but once it got started it rolled on to a Turner field record - 17 innings and a badly needed Braves win. Although I missed the first half to hostessing, the cats and I watched the last half of the game right through to the last amazing frame.

Happy 4th of July

My deck garden is starting to make food. These are grape tomatoes which will probably be good for a salad a day for two weeks. The other shot is a green pepper, bell, I think, and a jalapeño which freeze well but may wind up in homemade salsa. I've been thinking about what it takes to "put food up" as my grandmother used to. I used to get to pour the hot wax over the top of the jam and relishes she made. She also put things in Mason jars and boiled them...stewed tomatoes, yucky. Liberty next year would be plowing under my whole front lawn and growing food instead of grass. And now that I think about it, I want a pair of mules and some goats and chickens. Folks are coming by today to grill and eat and swim. It will be nice to have a little company. Tonight I will watch the fireworks from my bed and listen to mariachi music. I can look out across the woods to the next street where, each year, they compete to burn down their houses with illegal fireworks displays.

back to the Studio

I finally feel like I'm waking up from the sludge of a long working trip. Thankfully, it's been deliciously cool overnight (for a change here in Georgia) as our AC has been on the fritz. Throwing the house open wide at night has made for good sleeping weather and renewed energy for the studio. I'm picking up this piece where I left off before I went to Tampa. Finished my one foot squares last night and will shoot and submit them to SAQA later today. Hmm, maybe I should pay my dues first... With an order in the pipe to Dharma and several juicy auctions in progress on Ebay, there's a big dye day coming up at the L'Ville Frankenstein Dyeworx in the not too distant future. Raquel wants to try her hand at color magic and having an assistant would be interesting. There are several handmusic projects in my magik basket and much contemplation afoot regarding a possible career change. Corresponding with AnneP has reminded me of keeping my eyes, hands and feet on my own artistic path. Lots to do, lots to think about.