a Contest for the Whole Planet

(and nearby galaxies if you can send me a postage paid envelope!)

I was clipping and churning the Fat Baggy bucket this morning. I'm pulling cloth from the closet that dates back to when I first started experimenting with dyes.

Much of the really old stuff is good quality cotton - I used to buy cloth, can you imagine? There is a piece that's all swirls of red and yellow - it was crammed, dry, into a three-foot x 2-inch clear vinyl tubing and the dyes poured in the opposite ends while I watched the colors travel, meet and party!

Anyway, I dropped my big scissors into the tub and while rooting around for them, came up with the treasure below. No way to know how old or where it came from. The embroidery/embellishment is too perfect so it's probably manufactured. It's a hankie, a delicate cotton lawn, and it just went bananas for the color I was slinging this most recent dye season.

Send me an email with your mailing address from anywhere in the whole wide world and, at the end of the month, I'll have a drawing and will send this little treasure to the winner. I'll have the drawing on 3/31.

shreds!

Picking orders from this large tub of tasties today with my eyes closed so I won't be tempted to re-route any of this into the river basket.

Looks like an all-day rain today, dreary as hell, but I won't complain. Waiting on pictures of the spring snow headed for my friends in the northeast. Stay snug, y'all.

traveling vs wandering

I've never had a flight canceled out from under me and never lost a bag. Both in one day? I guess the two go hand in hand. This - now titled "Wanderer" was in my duffel along with all my favorite comfort clothing. It took an extra day, but everything is safe at home, hand-delivered by Delta. Who knows where this thing (and my clothes) has been? As Charlie told me, "It's a mystery."

It was an unexpectedly fast turnaround. In NY for only two days, I beat the storm out of town! Sorry for those left behind who are still without power.

just plain fun

I really need to record some of the conversations. He is so funny sometimes.

That's his Dad sneaking up behind us in the park today.

I'll be off to visit the sibs in NY for a short week. Change of scenery at this time of year? Bonus!

running

The week has been consumed by preparing to go.

I have this small clutch of scrap bundles ready to go. Three of them heavily blue as requested by another customer. If you order today, I will get them to the post office tomorrow! Then it will be a week before I'm back to shopkeeping as I'll be in NY for a short visit with the family.

a soft day

Warm and soft, windows and doors open this morning while I talk with family in NY about their half a foot of fresh snow.

I finally got a chance to use some of my own dirty thread. It does make me edgy to think that I only have one skein like this. Planning on making a big batch when I'm at FOF18 at the ACA in New Smryna Beach, FL in April.

I stitched while I waited for my lunch date. He's getting to be quite a conversationalist.

He's fond of large plastic eggs. Filling them with whatever small treasures. Hiding them, discovering and opening them as if they appeared spontaneously.

I asked him, "What's in this one?" ( the same one he's been playing with for an hour)

He replied, "It's a mystery!"

spring?

After days and days of cold and drear, the sun stopped by for tea. I opened all the doors and windows and turned off the furnace.

This was about 4pm in my living room. I hated to go.

Intention of line

Lines that define space, lead the eye, or both. Cloth and words.

it's a go for launch

blue Valentine

because someone asked, I made up a handful of fat baggies that are mostly blue.

as of this post, there are four left and one full-color campfire.

on the mend

And while I stitched, Charlie worked at catching up on the sleep he lost last night as he battled the flu.

A mild case of type A, he was fever free for this day.

Commitment

Reassing lines and transitions.

stalls, stops & starts

Somewhere on the web today someone spread around a bunch of Kandinsky and my brain lost any organization as I wallowed in the colors and shapes.

This called to me from the UFO shelf in the closet. Time for finishing. 

A lot of things need finishing - resolution. 

resolve

re-solve

salve

crass commercialism Friday

Ordered a Fat Baggy yesterday? It will be on it's way to you in a couple of hours! Good excuse to drag my ass out of the house.

I pulled four different tubs to pick this lot. Stuff I haven't laid eyes on in years.

I put on some good music (I've been on an Alan Parsons Project, Steely Dan, Grateful Dead tear lately, with a healthy dash of Motown) pick up a piece and chop it into nine pieces, not hard logistically, whether by ripping or cutting. Then I sort them out into nine piles. Eight for sale and, you guessed it, one for me. One of these days I'll just bust out my own hoard and let those go too.

(T. I made up two very different ones for your double order. There should be little to no duplication.)

bounty

Beautiful fruit from Chile has started turning up in the grocery stores.

I will have to hide this from her because she will knock it off the table, fang it a bit and leave it.

Like Jude said, Words have worn thin. So I'll have to keep my eyes open for pictures.

I love seeing what other people are doing with my Dirty Threads.

Tomorrow, I'll be making up a bunch of orders for scraps...pictures of that will happen.

rainy day mending

A good place to start when creative needlework is out of reach. Fix, repair, replace. In this case, one of my Dixie minks has a hole over the pocket. Not sure I like that purple. To be continued.

Dirty threads

I kept the best for myself, but it's time to plan for more.      April seems a long way off.

What have you done with your dirty threads?

moon set

fishing

Just seeing if the fingers remember. I have a few spools of metallic thread that I could never get the Janome to like. Not the best for handwork, but they slow me down, which is good.

I'm a bit burned out right now, writing-wise. They say that happens when you are coming up to the end and realize that you have to start from the beginning with a new set of eyes, a different mindset, and really sharp knife.

home

So amazed at his skills.

The old steps at the front entrance were beyond decrepit. Nerve-wracking and treacherous. While I spent the day with Charlie, Colin made this happen. I love the smell of fresh-cut wood but I guess this will have to be stained or painted.

The little extra width on each step will be home to my shade loving houseplants when the weather comes to its senses.

Now what to do with the trashed out gardens on either side of the walkway. We sawed the evil holly bushes off at the root.  One project at a time...

the habit wanes

because, this...(from last May)

It's very easy to let this habit of reporting slip away when nothing creatively shareable is going on. Writing is like that. Raw first drafts are hard enough to share with other writers in small groups. You are lucky if you can find crit partners who will be both straight with you

I've bored the cat.

and instructive. I've recently been that lucky and have been giving most of my free time over to the first draft, which is morphing into its first major revision.

Stitchers, imagine, if you will, a piece you've labored on, mostly in secret (shades of Quilt National!) - an epic piece, say 8 feet by 22 feet - that's right, I said FEET, not inches.  And so the powers that be have let you know that No Way will it ever see the light of day in that form and you have to make a triptych out of it. Somehow hacking it into hangable pieces.

At first, the rebel in me said, "Fuck you and your pony!" but after looking at this steaming pile of  222+k of words for a while, I think I've found a way to serve both the muse and the commercial masters, namely, publishers. Only time and a whole lot more writing and rewriting will tell.

Update. Nope. Can't chop it up. Last word count, 229,745.  I'm looking for beta readers.
 If you think you might be interested send an email.      deborah*at*lacativa.com

Studio

It was a happy world he made for just me.

a vanished week

That was the week that was, but it's Charlie Monday still. No going out in this crappy cold and I don't want to be too far from any facilities. He's working hard at this toilet training thing.

He's also completely fed up with having his picture taken. 

Nothing fibrous going on other than yesterday I packed some cloth up to travel. None of what I was handling spoke to me much.

The weekend was spent at a micro-retreat for a local writers group. We wrote, we ate, we kvetched. Like that.

I bumped up against the idea that the scene I've been having trouble with has only been giving me trouble because it's done and it's close enough to the end to warrant some fireworks, but they are coming up very soon.

wintered

Like most everyone I know, winter of the body and the soul continues. Part of me says, "Hey, Yankee, it's only the beginning of January. Suck it up!"  All we have had here in this part of Georgia is cold temperatures.

It's been colder and we've done it without central heat. It's the soul cold that I'm feeling today.

At night, between callers, I've been mindlessly using up the rest of the mystery string. I was thinking about a different configuration, something that hangs with a hole on the side so that birds might make nests.  There are also a half dozen new potholders at work down in the kitchen. Same fiber, same outsized gauge. For scale, that is the large spool of Sulky cotton.


And these are my rescues from Kroger.

the Mystery in the History

~

There is a mystery in the history of each piece of old cloth. What was it intended for and what actually happened to it. Who was the maker? Who was the user?

So many questions to conjure the answers for. I'll be making stuff up because that's what I do-from whole cloth and dreams. The research will be minimal, imagination to the max.

In the coming year, I'm going to be attempting to bring some of each to the page and with my hands, put some of it into something new with the old cloth.

I've brought them halfway home with the color and I'm feeling responsible for these wayward children.

the next day

Christmas was all he hoped for and more!
We gathered over brunch, exchanged small gifts and mostly just watched his delight in getting "Just what I wanted!"

I got to come home to a warm house and a productive afternoon and evening in reflective solitude. I gave me the gift of several hours of focused writing with zero distractions.

Like a lot of creatives, I kid myself that I work best with something in the background. It may be ok while roughing things out, first layouts, designing, first drafts, but when it comes to the hard work- revision- I have to be fully present to hear the errors echoing in my head. Hear them, call them out for the shitbirds they are, and kill them, even if it hurts.

So often, with old TV shows or music in the background giving me that creative white noise, I spent hours positioning and pinning bits and pieces of color until there was just nowhere else to move.

Then, with "The Sopranos" or "You've Got Mail" playing across the room, I'd move on to basting obsessively, and even hand-stitching until, hours and materials wasted, another UFO is born.

Not this time.

Glad Tidings!!

Big Best News - GRACE FOREST arrived safely with Tazmena, Tay and goats intact at Oroville California (letter dated 12.16) and she'd been there a week. She won't be on the web for a while and the phone is iffy, but she's happy and it's beautiful!!!....thanks, Michelle!

the wormhole

I can't even claim to have fallen into the wormhole of holiday preparations. We have a tree, but it's still leaning up against the wall in a corning of the living room. No lights, no wreath, no cards in the mail. There have been some self-congratulations on finding something that will delight Charlie for a long time to come. A few culinary plans for Christmas day. But beyond that, my mood has not been quite "bah humbug". More like "meh".

Like many of you, I've been pouncing on my mailman anxiously awaiting news of Grace from California. Going through the mechanics of tracking someone down with not a lot of information. 

I just finished making up nine Fat Baggies of scraps dug deep from ancient tubs on high shelves. Old cloth, pure colors, many textures. Now that you've taken care of everyone else, they won't get there for Christmas, but what's a bad day when cloth arrives in the mail?

Father & Son

I think if it wasn't for Charlie, we might not have done this.

Jimmy would approve.

The story behind this picture.

~

marking time.

seasonal shenanigans

this was the strange light that greeted me this morning. wonderland.


Not your everyday thing in Georgia!

Surprise guests arrived.   Charlie's first real snow experience.

This way to the