studio cleanup on hold

This will all have to wait - I have a meal to prepare! But it's a good start I guess. Lots of fabric that I will probably never use here. Stand by for bundles of goodies for sale on the Cheap! 

the Wheel finished

Another piece that's maddening to photograph but it's done. Maybe overdone.

Thanks so much Anna.
I saw her right away.

ongoing

Focusing on the details can become a distraction but here each detail has a place and meaning.  What they are remains a mystery, even to me. Besides, distraction is just another way to get there.

in writing

Thanks for all the wonderful points of view regarding the use of written dialogue stitched into art. It's good to know what other people think both about doing it and seeing it. For now I have decided against any messages or even letter forms.

 

I find that when I begin using letter forms I can't help but want to convey something snarky or entertaining. In fact, I find that when I work literally or do something representational you can pretty much bet on something weird, shocking or downright wrong going on. You'll laugh too if you don't run out of the room.

the Wheel

Just came from Gerdiary and it's fun to see someone who seems to be rolling along the same art rails with me at this point in time.  Using whatever is at hand to make some kind of sense of things with needle, thread and a stretch of quiet time.

The ground for this one is a piece of what I think is linen but I could be wrong. Maybe I'll snatch a thread off it and set it on fire, see what happens.

Here's a closer look

I have been thinking about the pros and cons of stitching words into this piece - all that white space is nagging me to do something about it but I'm resisting the urge for the same reasons that I don't like to write artist statements about a specific piece. I don't want to tell people what to think and don't think my own thoughts should be relevant to the observer's experience. I'd love to hear from other artists who use the stitched words in their work. It seems to be a very sharp two-edged sword.

the Wheel turns

I brought a new base to work with me only to discover that I forgot to bring any scraps to compose with so I started pulling raggedy chunks off my Go Bag. I've been dragging it around for a couple of years now and it's getting pretty seedy. There were fluttery little things hanging all off of it. Now they are being incorporated into a new hand stitched piece loosely based on the  Wheel of Fortune tarot card 

Thanks for all the lovely comments about the pieces in the previous post. This one was part of a short lived creature frenzy that I went through late in 2008 
back when I had more free time. All of these were done on the machine in a very fast, improvisational manner. Right now, the studio is a kind of sad place for me - I don't spend all that much time there. Just digging through piles of things as I look for materials to take with me on the go. The Wheel will turn.

Morning Light

I love the way stitched pieces look in the morning light that comes through my studio. Unfortunately, the tree shadows prevent any good photographs and at this time of the year the light is too...steep. I'll try again later out on the deck.








This one continues to entertain me while I am at work but probably not tonight. It's Friday, the 13th. You would be surprised to know how self-fulfilling superstitions can be. Years ago I was a telephone operator and felt certain that there should have been combat pay added to our checks for getting through a full moon Friday night or Friday on any 13th.

There has been no news about Jinx

newest-biggest

Maybe I should wait until it's completely dry but as I was applying the matte medium and working on it from all directions I decided I liked this orientation better than my first approach. I thought about calling it "Blessed Are the Cracked for they let in the Light" but no doubt Groucho Marx' family lawyers would be all over me in a heartbeat. A name will come in time as I live with it. The original textile construction has been permanently mounted to a 36"x36" canvas and sealed with matte acrylic medium                           

Make An Offer! UPDATED

BOTH OF THESE GOODIES HAVE BEEN CLAIMED AND MY PLEDGE TO PFAN HAS BEEN MADE - THANKS FOR THE SUPPORT.

In support of Joanie San Chirico's efforts to get the pFAn website up and running

(it has outgrown it's blogspace!) I'm offering "Rainbow Box" OR this tall stack from my stash to the highest bidder by noon tomorrow with a $10.00 minimum bid. All proceeds will go to the pFAN kickstart

   

It never ceases to amaze me how this can turn into this:

Somehow I have to keep these together. It will be hard. They are mostly table napkins, some monogrammed and embroided, ranging from a childish 12"x12" to a queenly 20"x20".

November change & suprises

Jake convinced me it would be good for me to get out in the sunshine and stomp the woods for while. We went to Suwannee Park and walked and talked and suddenly he pointed out a mile marker to me and to my amazement we had gone a mile and I was not falling down. Bless him, he did go get the car and picked me up at the end of the trail. Not bad for my first outing in ages. My feet are singing.      This time away from the usual Sunday routine gave those jars extra time to batch and Jim  took them out into the warm sunshine for me. There was little dye in the rinse water but how these will finish out always remains to be seen. For now it's all eye candy. Enjoy.

new WIPS big & little

It's been a good day for the art. There's been progress on both the new WIPs, little unamed by hand is waiting for me to settle down and sew,  the big one below has been under the machine needle all day.  

Add to that a whole flock of vintage damask napkins and table scarves found their way into the dyepots today. For now, there's a dozen or more mason jars flocked around the little heater in my living room sort of poaching.  I promise not to get up in the night and start hatching them out. Dawn maybe.

Sesame Street

I've been enjoying all the media coverage given to the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street which, I happily confess, I used in loco parentis   when both my sons were little. It was so different than other children's programming and I counted on SS so heavily to entertain the boys that I religiously taped shows just in case it wasn't renewed.

We didn't go overboard in the consumerizing department but Jake had the large talking Big Bird that came with a cassette player in it's belly and books that went along with the taped stories. His mouth and eyes would move as the story was told in his voice.Jake tired of those book tapes pretty quickly and we discovered that you could feed Big Bird any cassette tape. Strauss waltzes were a favorite and one Frank Sinatra tape would cause Big Bird to open his mouth wide and roll his eyes up in his head gruesomely. One day when Jake was about three I came upon him in the living room feeding  Big Bird a bottle of Robitussin cough syrup. Jake had enough on his own face and clothes to make me call poison control. Big Bird was never quite the same.

passing time (on the left)

The internet provides endless opportunities for inspiration, solace and plain 'ole passing time. Equal measures for all.                                        Elizabeth Barton continues to kick my ass at Lexulous, (far more insidious than crack) even as she opens a solo show!

Visiting friendly old blogs and a few new places feels like being driven through interesting countryside like a recovering gork. Take a peek in on theWorstHorse,  come to from Whiskey River, and a very illuminating and thought provoking post here. Even the comments are important.        



In the studio, two new avenues of idea and action. Above, a large piece developing with the intent of mounting it to a canvas.  On the left, a new piece of hand music giving thought to an empty space in my life right now.

distracted

                         Without heart for much else, I have been cleaning and putting other things to work. I found  some unused canvases and have started mounting smaller hand stitched pieces with acrylic medium, basically mummifying the fabric in plastic.  Once dry, the textures are still there but the hand is gone. Hand? Given that we discourage people from touching the art was                                                     hand ever a consideration for this kind of piece? This is one of the Gray Grid series now up for sale at the Hand Music store                                                                 
                                             

bereft

My constant companion Jinx has been missing for two days and we fear the worst.

She started Firefly  with me just  after my birthday and she finished it with me curled in my lap on Sunday morning.  I am sad beyond words.



To all the kind hearts who have offered encouragement, hope and prayers, I thank you. My thoughts wander back and forth between imagined horrors and the hope that she is doing what animals do - find seclusion, curl up and wait for whatever may be.

Catch and Release

This piece announced that it was really and truly finished this morning and it was time to set it free. Well, not exactly free. We had our first sunny day in ages and I was able to get the photographs I wanted to launch my new online store for all the smaller scale things I have been working on for months :  Hands Music Fiber Art

October

I took my camera to work with me yesterday to get a picture of my pet mosses. Here's one wall of my cube. Some of you might recognize your gifts. I get  a lot of compliments for you, Karen and Marie.


The pomegranate was perfect.













Fall sneaks up you here in Georgia.













Here are my pet mosses growing in a crack out in the parking lot. I stopped and petted them the other day. I was going to up root the family and make an indoor desk garden but they seem to be thriving right where they are now so who am I to open up a Moss Guantanamo?

re-purposing dead sweaters

Remember this poor wool sweater that I accidentally felted? (Note the bare, cold toes who are wondering how people can wear wool socks?) It was lying on the floor in the studio by my stitching chair and I just scooted my  feet inside it just to see what all the fuss about wool footwear is. Amazing!

The sleeves from the sweater (which fell into a dyepot too) have been made into the toastiest, softest slippers and gotten a job as the photographers assistant. I couldn't wait to sew on the other eyes to show them off.

Lightning Bugs

This piece continues to amuse and entertain me. I hope I'll know when it's time to quit. There's a basket full of little things like this that I have worked to death.                       

Off to JoAnn's before my coupons expire!

Nurse Karma sez

...if you are feeling unwell, you must lie still and mend. No discussions. If you are in good health, Karma will not give you the time of day. She's too busy.

Jim if feeling symptoms of the same bug that's plagued me for a week or so. Nothing that rest and ginger ale won't fix. And cat attention.

a new scrap of time

Work continues on this scrap of time. It still pleases me. The base is one of a set of linen placemats scrounged from somewhere. I wish the other three had fallen into the same dyepot. Pale sisters, they await overdyeing.  Maybe later today, my first day off since last monday but I still have PT in a few minutes. All that stuff may have come to nothing vis a vis the underlying problem. An MRI awaits.

I finally took a few minutes to go through the box Eleanor's sewing things that the SILs sent me (thank you girls). In it I found a set of hand drawn and cut templates about leaves. What kind of coincidence is it that I have making and drawing these shapes for some time. A few of you may have received fabric leaves in the mail. More will come, I'm sure. I have idle fantasies about a blanket made completely from leaves.

getting back to normal

I guess if it's Monday I have  to leave for work shortly but I have this little scrap to take along with me. Over the weekend I actually had time to get a sleeve sewn on to a large piece and start a new little piece of hand music. Speaking of which - I accidentally gave my ipod a lobotomy the other day so I grabbed a pile of dusty old CDs and convinced my GoodMans laptop to put them onto the empty ipod.  One of the files was a radio program I favor from NY called Idiots Delight.  So on 10.19.09 I was listening  to a show from sometime in 2006 but the announcer started out saying "Vin won't be broadcasting from Studio V tonight because his phone line is down so here's a show from 07/06/02" wherein Vin played a clip from 8.01.2000 where a  puppet named Oogie was a guest on the show..(I'm still falling through the time rabbit hole here). In one ear I am listening to people giving accident reports and in the other ear the puppet is getting out of hand and I can't help chuckling while people are telling me about the damage to whatever or someone who was choking on a bone at a restaurant. My brain is split jelly.

a scrap of time

Sometimes all you have are scraps of time to gather your thoughts and get your bearings. To have a bit of cloth and thread to work with in those moments is very satisfying. I'm beginning to think that artists who prefer working with fabric are heeding the call of their lizard brain - the one that made us crazy when we couldn't find the blankie when we were two. Tactile input takes precedence over all the other senses when one is overwhelmed.

I've spent the week taking the hurdles necessary to take a chance on getting more of my work out into the public eye. It's getting deep around here. Now I sit with fingers crossed, prayers up to minor deities (who might not be busy with more pressing matters) and maybe a little roots work thrown into the mix.

THAY SAY ITS YER BIRFDAY!!!

I've always like the Beatles Happy Birthday song. Hysteria fringed with lunacy. Why not, it's only once a year, right?

True to his perfect form, my GoodMan did the Vulcan mind meld on me and came up with the perfect gift - the thing I didn't know I wanted and that I would love. The initial packaging stymied me momentarily and I wound up exploding all the discs out onto the bed so I closed my eyes, groped the pile and came up with "Abbey Road" to accompany me over to the doctors office and back. What a great time! The terrific thing about this set is that the songs are presented in the original ALBUM order, so crucial to time travel, which is just what these disks will be doing for me. Abbey Road was released about two weeks before my 20th birthday. Hearing this today felt just like it did 40 years ago. Spectacular! Strange and wonderful.  Something completely new and transformative. You could count on the Beatles for that.

I was thinking that music is one of those things that gets hooked into your past usually in association with people, or places and events. But for me, not the Beatles. From the time  I first heard them, their music was mine personally . Not to be draped around some boy or drama. In fact, looking at the big picture of the impact this music had on my culture - the amazing things that could come from acting on creative genius the way these fellows lucked into - kept me at arms length from the kinds of societal traps that a lot of young women fell into back then. I just knew that amazing things were possible if you kept that notion in mind.                        I  did and they were.

strange days

It's Sunday and Jim had to work today leaving me to my own devices for the first time in ages. I almost forgot what those days were like but when you start the day with a hearty belt of Robitussin the rest of the day will get weird.

I spent two hours vacuuming & marveling at the cool tracks the old Hoover made in the carpets before I figured out that I was too stoned for housework. So I switched over to art and kept to the practical side of the street.

There was a great score at Goodwill yesterday - I had a need for retail therapy and almost always come away with great finds from there. It pays to live near the affluent.

The gray fellow inviting me to a dance was a large 100% wool J.Crew sweater that accidentally got felted. Now what?

This is a cotton & ramie sweater that I pitched whole into the dyepot. I love dyeing over embroideries. This one will be hacked up and repurposed in dozens of ways.

There is also a leaf green dashiki that was big enough to drive a MiniCooper into. I just haven't had the energy to iron that acreage today or photograph it.

Probably the best find (for 2$) was a pair of Queen sized flat cotton sateen bed sheets. You can never be sure that "100%" cotton does not include a healthy dose of whatever will impede the dye but I cut off a strip for a test and after a nominal soak in the soda ash and just a few hours in the dye, these impromptu shiboris came out just great.