The current WIP is a continuation of something that was started maybe three years ago, I haven't taken the time to dig through the archives here, but I know it was one of the pieces that I took to Kinkos and pulled color copies of on heavy weight paper. I'll have to revisit that. The prints come out beautiful in case you haven't tried it.
This stormy grey bit is actually the collar from a tuxedo shirt that I used for a table mopper in a dye session and then dismembered. It flapped around in the river basket like a broken wing for a long time, noisy, always surfacing. "Use me."
I think about the occasions or performances it must have witnessed. You just never know what clothes have been up to.
The older section keeps reminding me to loosen up and not be so literal. Then I study it and think that it needed more work too.
The new banner was just two pieces of cloth peeking out of the "save me" basket. This piece occupied my hands this morning while the light was good and cats begging for attention weighed me down. It's closing in on being done and I don't want it to be because then I'll have to start another. Starting is hard.
"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Karma VI
This has been hanging on the other, vertical design wall away from all the other chaos. I've decided that it needs more construction type work before I can call it finished. Could be that I'll stitch it right to a canvas if I can find one the right size.
It's 20x21.
Even as I am stitching with opulently colored fabric and threads my eye keeps being drawn to the vigor and violence of the black and white things in the room.
I loved saddle shoes back in the day. Would wear them again if I could find the right ones. Waiting for the sunlight to come through the front windows to get back to this one.
It got cold overnight and I brought Mr. Wilson inside. The rest will get their frog/lizard check tomorrow and join him.
It was so nice out over the weekend that on Sunday I took the overflowing river basket to the park and staked out one of the new picnic tables with the intention of working on this piece.
As I started looking for a certain color thread, I pulled more and more tools, UFOs, bags of thread and miscellaneous crap from the basket and found a trio of stinkbugs lurking. One by one they were evicted and I spent an hour sorting and reorganizing. It needs a serious offload.
The stitching didn't happen until much later during a short Downton Abbey orgy. I find I can't just stitch. There has to be something else going on. A ballgame, a movie, an audiobook. I have to disconnect the brain from the hands otherwise I get bored and quit or bad stitching things happen from overthinking.
Charlie and I hike up to the tennis courts they have where he lives. I've never seen anyone playing tennis so I'm sure they won't mind us taking advantage of clean surface and sturdy fences.
He's got language by the tail with a non-stop patois of gibberish that leaves this mere mortal clueless. He gestures, uses inflection and clearly wants to have a say. There's also a strong note of pity for his witless audience especially if I try to imitate him. The arched eyebrow glare is priceless.
While I was composing this last night, I was trying to recognize how the activity related to writing. It doesn't.
It's much more gut reaction to the materials.
Every move I make with cloth is a yes/no proposition - unless I get carried away and stitch a bunch of crap that gets ripped out when the smoke clears - it happens.
I'm not in any kind of rush here so each yes/no is going to be considered and seconded. I've set everything here in the studio/office so I can stitch between the Tales of Woe that I listen to every night. There's a story in that crap, lemme tell you, but you'd die of boredom before midnight.
The rain and then the chill and I realize I'm weeks behind getting the studio ready for winter. Now that I've moved the day job computer back in here, it won't be long before I trundle the little heater out of the closet. The studio will be cozy and it looks like there will be stitching.
I pulled the birthday chair out into the room and gave it a thorough going over with the vacuum and reinstalled the sliders under its feet. Sucked up every speck of spider crap and web in that corner of the room and put up new Festivus lights. That's two corners of the room deep cleaned and re-ordered.
To crown the process, I dug into the river basket, weeded out a lot excess and dug up a handful of UFOs that aren't beyond hope or help. I have discovered that 1.75 cheaters are not going to be sufficient. Time to bump up to 2s and shorting stitching time accordingly.
I have to go to the DMV to take an eye exam on Tuesday. I may lay off any further eye torture until then.
"Your eyes will lie to you first, but you can trust your other senses," he said. "Close 'em. Go on." He waited.
"Now hold this. Bring it up to your face. Breathe it in. You can feel the truth of it. Be still and find it in memory; what it's here for. Touch finds the truth every time."
This is where it begins. A scrap in the sunlight or fire light will catch my eye and beg me to touch it, pick it up, consider it's provenance and how far it's come. It was something else, long ago and now it's waiting.
"What's next for me?" it whispers.
"Find me a partner. Several. Let's dance. Let's become a part of a great whole, something to behold.
Something to hold. Something to cling to. Something that will serve. Let me last beyond myself.
Make me."
while it was raining. We've been lucky. No big storms or hurricanes - just days on end of damp drizzle that intensifies to need an umbrella rain and then slacks back to drizzle. Fungus weather.
Over the past two nights, it's become cold. Drear. My old cat Voodoo insists on spending his days outside on the dyedeck. Willful. Worrisome. They take charge of themselves no matter what we want.
I've been overwhelmed by too many obligations and a shortage of personal resources. The day before I was to be cleared to return to work full-time, a nasty little virus took hold and has further sapped my energy. I would rather sleep than just about anything else. So I do.
Any day now I am going to have to bring all my houseplants inside and find places for them to survive the winter.
the best days of the week, I spend with Charlie who is a full fledged toddler now. He wants me to put his shoes on him even before he's out of his Pjs.
Here is a brief moment where we both throw back to "baby" times. He's adept at the sippy cup and any day I suspect all those "bobbies" will disappear.
I'm more excited about these than the cloth this time. There were some accidents in the color process due the insistence of my feline apprentice, but from those came some serendipitously gorgeous, thirteen yard hanks of thread magic.
Due to the lack of sunshine/warmth this is the only way I can dry these after soaking and double rinsing them. Incredibly tedious. I had BETTER take up stitching again. There are maybe a dozen more waiting. I lost count and ran out of washcloths. A few will be up for adoption.
The weather went from wonderful to rotten almost overnight. I still haven't cleaned up out there - the board of health will be calling anytime now.
After a thorough rain rinse, these six and eight-foot strips were machine washed and tumbled to just damp and then let hang to dry. What started out as an enormous, fringed tablecloth - linen - I'm pretty sure, was ripped into nine or ten "scarves" although they won't be offered up for that purpose.
The cloth is coarse, not at all skin friendly. I plan on cutting these up in two or three-foot lengths as ground cloths, or bases. Each piece will be photographed and priced individually which is going to take some time. Bear with me.
So this turned out to be the day that Summer turned her back on my neck of the woods. It even rained on an off late yesterday. All unexpected by a bout of intense wishful thinking on my part.
It's okay. Rain rinse is very good thing. As I expected there was some weakness in some dyes, but that's okay too. What was left behind is subtle and deep. I may decide to overdye some of these and even have thoughts of hand painting with dye. I found a beautiful calligraphy brush in the chaos.
I cut two large tablecloths into long strips about a foot wide and may make some scarves out of them if the rough hand of the cloth can be tamed by the dryer. Everything is in a raw state now so what you are seeing here is as ephemeral as the weather.
Not nearly sunny, but still warm enough. The mosquitos found me quickly so this fest cost blood as well as dye.
These threads are DMC six strand cotton and a handful of DMC Baroque which is kind of like Perle cotton on steriods. We'll see how well it likes the dye.
Half of these dyes have been exposed to less than optimum storage practices this summer so I expect the colors to be not nearly this strong come the wash out. I'll get back to all this tomorrow afternoon.
This is a repost from back in May only because I had the exact same dream last night. Although this is the last day of summer, the week ahead promises 80s in the daytime all week. I haven't worked on the dyedeck since then. There is still time and plenty of thread and cloth waiting.
I was in the studio the other day, looking for something as always, and a certain configuration of cloth - a small pile of rags, actually - spoke to me. Not a word so much as a gesture. I couldn't quite make it out, but it was gentle, insistent. The pieces below are somewhere in there too.
early returns
I was just standing in front of the washing machine with my forehead on the lid making prayers to the Overlords of Particulate Physics that this litter of rags should TURN OUT RIGHT.
And, although my eye says "YES" my heart is still a clenched fist until they dry and maybe get ironed.
All this angst over a dream, which may have been a nightmare.
I could blame it (the dream, not a possible dye fail) on wallowing in the Madmen finale and trying to match everyone drink for drink, but those of you who know me also know that that would be nonsense. Still, I was pretty smashed after watching both the show and the encore.
I want to write more about Madmen, but I don't want to be assassinated by some random fan for spoiling it for them.
Besides, I won't write a lick until I find an image of Don stepping out of what I think was a '69 Chevelle SS 454. I didn't know where to look first as he took off the helmet.
It was always about the car.
Back to the nightmare.
Heisenberg, his mask perched over his glasses, sweat running off his face and fumes coming from his hazmat suit like vapors from hell, leaning across the teacher's desk and intoning.
"If you warm that bile with blood, better make damn sure it's royal blood and not that damned monkey juice you are so fond of!"
I knew exactly what he was talking about!
(note to self. don't forget what H said about the soywax and soul windows)
I won't whine about not having taken any pictures myself because I was having too good a time enjoying the festivities. Colin did a great job.
Friends, old and new, family, and total strangers wandered in. For the first time, I was able to enjoy exhibiting my art because of the temporal distance I have from most of it now. It was fun to engage with visitors about my techniques and talk about textile art in general.
The hour and a half flew by in a blur and afterward, I was taken out to dinner. It was a great evening.
Because this room is used for many scheduled activities such as yoga classes, meditation groups, etc, please check the calendar at Phoenix & Dragon if you decide to visit the show. This also means that a lot more people are going to be viewing the work.
I just came from last minute (almost) details for the show. "Spooky Stories", my Dad's quilt, is NFS and is a little rumpled from the time it spent in my lap this morning while I stitched on a sleeve. It's been in use since it came back to me from New York so there were little things here and there that needed attention, like a small patch of baby barf that escaped my attention.
The quilt on the right, "Hopped Up", sold before I got it hung, right from the FB announcement of the show. I'll have to dig through the archives here and print out the provenance for the new owner.
Who stays and gets to strut it's stuff and who gets rolled up to go back into the closet? I spent two full hours making those decisions yesterday and, with no one to help me pull back and see clearly, I hope I made the right choices.
It might just be a big damn mess, but the ones that got to stay are clearly my favorites. I was alone in the room with memories. Today, Colin and I will go over and actually get everything up on the walls. Here are a few who didn't make the cut even though I hauled them over there.
None of my smaller pieces are represented.
It's a big room and the littles tend to get lost.
"Limbo" 2007
I'm going to be updating my gallery over the coming weeks so each one will get a chance to shine.
"Summer banner" wasn't even finished and no time to make it happen. (minus the lettering, of course)
More like uncharted territory.
Much has gone on since the positive change in my health status. It's been strange coming "unstuck", but I'm working on it.
I have been scrambling to make ready for another solo show at Phoenix and Dragon in Roswell. It's been two years since the last one and I warned the owner that I had no new work.
She was happy to have a retrospective. There is room for 12 to 15 pieces depending on the sizes. So I decided to haul everything out of hiding/storage just to have a look and see what I was thinking.
Some stuff left me cold and will be finding new homes in strange places (a public art experiment that I'm still thinking about).
Others took my breath away.
Instead of moaning "Who was this person of exuberance?" I can now say that I had a great run at it for a while. And you can just never tell, so I'm not junking the Janome anytime soon.
The show, "Reclamation & Rebirth" opens Sunday, Sept. 13 with a small reception from 4:30 to 600pm in the gallery at the Phoenix & Dragon bookstore and will run through the end of September.
I've not been scared these past few weeks of not knowing. More like frozen halfway between panic that there is too much left to do, and relief that none of it will be my problem anymore.
The selfish anxiety has been how the potential illness and possible treatments would affect my thinking, my art. Thinking beyond that to matters of mortality has not been an issue. I'm cool with all that. Packed even.
Now that there are no excuses, I find that the road is wide open. In fact, there is no road. I've always enjoyed maps. Making them up as I go.
Thanks to everyone who was concerned, said prayers, did dances and made promises on my behalf. I'll do my best.
I went to the post office yesterday and was astonished to find the entire population of Wingdale, Milledgeville and another other nuthouse you care to name seething around in the lobby as if they'd been notified that gold bars were being distributed over the counter for free. Most of them were unhappy about the scam. Before gunplay ensued, I booked, putting the business off until today.
This morning I walked into the Lilburn office and there was one lonely staff person - the greeter guy who works the lobby making sure you know what you are doing before you hit the counter. I thanked him for my very own personal post office and two ladies came to the counter at my announcement.
"She's got another bundle of rags." One of them said. They always want to look so I never seal up the packages until they are done. Transaction and conversations underway simultaneously and, from the recesses of my bag, my phone goes off, LOUD (otherwise I can't hear it.)
My ringtone for everyone is "Some Kind of Wonderful" by Grand Funk Railroad. I don't answer because I'm face to face with other humans and I like the music so I let it play and they all like it too. Spontaneous hoe down ensues, everyone bopping and stepping for thirty seconds. I'll get back to whoever.
Business concluded, I stepped outside to call back the mystery number. It was the neurologists office. The news was all good. Aliens in my brain had decamped, packing out their trash and leaving no traces. It must have been too hot and chaotic in there for them. Absent any new or recurring symptoms, I am no longer a candidate for skull drilling, experimental brain rays or a pine box.
I went back inside, about a dozen folk all milling about now, doing the post office boogie on simmer. I raised my arm to get everyone's attention.
"Ladies and Gentlemen! That phone call that we all danced to a minute ago? That was my doctor. I do NOT have a brain tumor, brain cooties, cancer or aliens." It's been a long time since I was on any kind of stage. Applause is some kinda wonderful.
