blessed hump day off

I love my day off.
The morning was given over to studio business - no art making but two Big Deals that I will write about as soon as there is more information.

I met my future daughter-in-law for lunch and handed over my contact list for the wedding. We only had a scant hour so I came prepared with a list of questions..check, check and check.
Missy is super organized which has to help minimize the stress. I've been tasked with making a set of garters in teal and black! I think I can handle it.



Home in time to enjoy the pool before the skies clouded over in preparation for the afternoon/evening weather event.

We beat it out the door for the trivia joint just ahead of a wicked thunderstorm. Pulled a few answers out of our hats (what the heck is a pollux) and came in second.



While I was looking for something else, this image popped into my brain. Dyepainted at my last session at EB's studio, I took a picture but forgot to set the colors with soda ash. When it came out of the washing machine, it was gone.  I may take a shot or two at recreating it when I have the next dyefest.

 

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!

just because you can doesn't mean you should

Out of the corner of my eye and lurking on the pile just under the main design wall is this. Sixty-five square inches of "WTF was she thinking?"

Well, she wasn't thinking anything beyond how satisfying it is to needleturn and appliqué chunks of hastily hacked out  hand dyed damask to an equally delicious vintage damage tablecloth. It's a good thing I don't take this attitude with raw cookie dough.

How many hours evaporated and what was learned? Too many and nothing.
Not only are these pieces invisibly stitched ever 3/8th inch or less but each element was revisited with a tiny hem stitch just inside the border to forestall any fraying. I must have been in some kind of mental lockdown. I don't even want to revisit the time. My task for the evening, flip it over, clip all the stitches and get back to reality...I need another personal blankie like I need my own fleas.

flood water finished

I'm going to make a few prints from this tomorrow and then put it away.

The story is still looking for legs and this piece is not helping.
Turns out that visual art (at least my visual art) is not  a great prompter of murder and mayhem. Settings and atmosphere, maybe, but not action.

new practice

7.6.13 rising waters

I think I've found a way to integrate the stitching and the writing. Like a lot of people, I used to stitch while something else was going on - TV, music, anything else that occupied the other available sensory input modes. Working this way was a good way to not think, a meditation and a comfort.

Now I've turned off the distractions and while working on these small pieces, find myself thinking my way through the writing; settings, atmosphere, history, characters, even action.

Here I was thinking about what it would be like when a community is deliberately flooded and the long time land holders and residents are forced to leave.  Some don't leave. Some can't.


I'm not going to focus on finishing (overworking?) these- they are rough drafts too. - Just stopping when the thought spins out, dating them and giving them a name appropriate to the storyline and then boarding the next train of thought.

Meanwhile life spins on through the summer. Sweetie is pissed with me cause I just dosed the back of her neck with a stinky herbal concoction  to help repel the fleas that seem to find tiger cats tastier than any other. She's also been literally under my feet due to her constant anxiety over thunder and fireworks. Is there Xanax for cats?

A sketch created with this online tool

the day at hand

The thing about writing is - there's not a whole lot that you want to blog about.
A book or short story in progress is a whole lot less interesting than a piece of visual art. Reading my own rough drafts gives me agita. Since last Saturday, I've kept my self promise of returning to my writing practice and have put in about two hours a day with most of yesterday spent transcribing my execrable handwriting into the computer .

Working longhand keeps me from all the distractions possible here on the laptop but  when I'm in the zone my handwriting deteriorates quickly from cramped script to shorthand alien hieroglyphs so it's important to get stuff typed up before the mystery really deepens. Then I found this (which probably only works with the Chrome browser)  and thoroughly enjoy using it with the "manual typewriter" sounds turned on; after a very short time the sound tricks me into thinking it's a real typewriter and email and Facebook are someplace inaccessible.

 I was supposed to be writing an outline but I kept getting sidetracked with actual writing. I tell myself that this in not procrastination since (hopefully) and I'll be able to use these bits and pieces along the way. The outline is more like a very vague map. There is a gang of characters waiting for meat to be put on their bones and  their marching orders, and a timeline, sort of.

Anyway, the habit of writing daily is re-established and I'm good with it. I keep telling myself it's a writer's job to lie convincingly. Consider this scene from one of my all time favorites, "Tootsie"

I needed a break from the keyboard late yesterday and neither of the current UFO rescues was moving me, so I started scouting pieces from the scrap basket and basted up this this small summer cloth.

The  little bundle in the foreground is a handful of sheers that I want to incorporate, maybe. There have been some very inspiring uses of sheer fabric around lately.

Up top is one of the prints, a detail from Karma I. I need to find some frames for a few of these before I put them into the shop.

We are under the weather gun again today here in the metro ATL area. Many Fourth of July festivities have been postponed - I'll be working the whine line this  afternoon and evening anyway if the power holds. Happy Fourth of July!

staycation

Today feels like an extension of the really busy day I had yesterday.These new threads got washed, sun-dried and re-wound during the game.

For no other reason than my arm got tired at thirteen, each one has thirteen+ yards of hand dyed Red Heart #10 crochet thread, mercerized cotton. I think it's the "mercerized" part that makes the dye take so easily. I learned not to poke or move these around too much one the dye was applied or colors got muddy but even the muddy ones are beauties.

I also pulled two UFOs from the hand basket and started in on them. My gator head symbol is starting to look distinctly wolfish.

I jumped off the cliff with getting my main website reorganized for a major project coming up. There's nothing more annoying than a website that is under construction, but this will have to do for a minute.


I also joined a local writing group. Push has come to shove so I had better get busy. Part of the agenda is getting up in front of a group of total strangers (with knives) and reading four pages of your work. My heart is in my throat just writing those words.

the Month of Festivities

1981

It all happens in the month of June; Jake & Jim's birthdays and our wedding anniversary and, although he did his damnedest to NOT be on time, today is Colin's birthday.

He taught me how to do four things at once, badly. I learned the fine art of self-defense napping and seeing through baby eyes at the ripe old age of 30. We thank you son, for the love and the never ending challenges.

hand dyed threads

These colors were dashed off in a little haste last night but after a thorough rinse and a day drying in the sun, I just did a little stitching with this thread and I love the way it handles. I've tried Perle and didn't like it. This stuff is fun. Now to custom dye some colors for the things I am working on right now.

glory days

I only got about a third of the new hand dyes ironed. It was just so hot at that task, but the results were making me dizzy.

The older damasks can look pretty frowsy fresh out of the dryer or off the line. Line dried, they are stiff and scratchy and you have to be careful with the iron lest you catch a fold in the point of your iron and rip it. The ones from the dryer remind me of a bad hair day- limp and fuzzy.  Once ironed, they become smooth, shiny and with some color combos, iridescent.

Yesterday I took The Creatives and two of the Karmas to Kinkys and made a series of new reprographs.

They are quite startling in person. An elderly Asian gentleman was standing by waiting on a woman who was busy feeding a pile of documents into the printer next to the one I was working.

 He stepped in to observe as the machine spit out the one I am holding in this picture and broke into a broad smile. He could see the edges of the back of the cloth lapping out from under the machines cover but he couldn't get what he was looking at until I took it out and turned it over to show him the original.

He was holding the print and said "You sell?"

I nodded "Yes."

He said "You keep cloth?"

I said "Yes" and smiled.

He threw back his head and cackled and said something in a foreign language to the scowling woman hard at work over her copies. She scowled harder  and I imagine his remark was something along my Goodman's joke about prostitution. "You got it, you sell it, you still got it!"


Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the mailbox garden sprung me a surprise. The morning glory seeds I planted showed WHITE flowers on the package.

We get by with a little help from our friends....

If you are a regular reader here, you may also be familiar with my friend Arlee Barr and her amazing work.

If not, you should know that she recently lost most of her raw materials and UFOs in the flooding that overwhelmed the city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

If you can help get her art studio back on its "hoofies" in the smallest way, there is a link in the sidebar of her blog to donate...

Surprise! the LIMIT is the cost of one of those mocha-choke-a, latte, with a double dash of extra calorie coffees that y'all swear you should live without anyway!

One 5$ brick at a time, we'll lift her up.

color blizzard

There's been an orgy of color going on here. The Lawrenceville Frankenstein Dyedeck has been burning up with heat and awash with jewel tones, my favorite indulgence.

This is the time of year when I say "Cram it" to the misty, pastel, and delicate colors. Take a vacation, we are rocking the loud and lively. These are the colors that will sustain me through the drabness of winter.

I get the sense that the term jewel tones have fallen out of favor in some sets. There's a reason these colors are named after the precious..it never fails that if something is offered in different colorways, the jewels sell out first.

There's enough here to keep me busy for some time.

From the dramatic to the sublime. All I need is a rainy day for ironing 

my super moon

We live on the downside of a ridge and the moon didn't clear the trees until after 11pm just as a bank of light clouds drifted in.

I must have taken twenty or thirty shots with all the settings the little Coolpix had and this was among the best. More interesting, but un-photographical, were the thousands of fireflies doing their best moon imitations.

The pinpoints of light through the trees reminded me of the need for paying attention to the sizes of the stars in the Firmament to give the illusion of depth.

I took Karma's cast iron lantern down to the pool deck and armed it with what turned out to be a highly effective citronella candle. I was over an hour at the edge of the woods and next to the water and not one bite. Usually, anything that bites will take a piece of me before anyone else but not last night.





All these black and white patterns have me thinking about what to do with these.

an electronic hiatus

Solstice Gifts

The first fruits of yesterday's dyefest were uninspiring. I put part of that down to my own frazzled lack of focus and some to the tired out dye stock that I was being flagrant with.

The offenders have been sent back into the sauce but I did get some new combinations mixed up today.

This gem is a section of one of Martha Stewarts finest which I used for wiping up the spills while making the new dyestock.

And while I was looking for something else, look who popped out of one of the cloth bins!

Soltice dyefest

I felt the need for a little textural excitement from the dye jars yesterday. The pantry yielded a very old box of pastina.  I didn't see any bugs in the box but they did the job nicely. Later this morning the experiment will continue.

I also plan on mixing some fresh dyestock this morning blending some of the new colors. Green has proven to be elusive this season and the bottles for the purples and curry have been rolling around the caddy empty  for a while now.

Might there be something special about colors born on the Solstice?

pool water magic trick

We are coming off a spell of what feels like tropical weather; heat and humidity every day, capped off by violent thunderstorms with torrential rains.

The guy at the pool supply place said all the rain unbalanced the pH so some other chemical thing we do (which is not much) fails.
You can see my alter ego lurking in the algae laden water shown here.

He tested the water and gave me a recipe for adding soda ash and baking soda in the right proportions.

 In a matter of hours, the water was back to Caribbean blue, even bluer that you see here..magic.

not your regular workday

Wednesday is change up day around here.

I spent most of the afternoon with a friend at her neighbors fabulous swimming pool. She house sits for the mansion's owners when they travel, which is a lot. And boy, are we grateful! Sadly, the for sale sign went up yesterday.

I brought these two flowers home with me and by the time I got home I was dizzy with the combined fragrances of magnolia and gardenia. If I had gotten pulled over I would have been jailed for driving while stupefied by scent.

Jake, Colin and my nephew Jimmy

Based, in part, on this photo, my son Colin was called late last night to play a "russian mafia thug" for a few days in a movie being shot here in Atlanta.

So what does a RMT wear? Turns out he dresses like one most of the time so wardrobe (extras have to bring their own) was not a big problem.