Remember "Secret Message"? I spent a lot of time just looking at it and nothing was coming so I took it off the design wall and put it away. Of course, that's when notions occur in the night. I had a bit of stuff done on it and didn't like the way it was progressing so I stopped the whole process to spend an evening picking all those machine stitches out before starting on the dream path. Scales, snails, and paving stones.
Pain throws your heart to the ground
Love turns the whole thing around
No it won't all go the way it should
But i know the heart of life is good
Pain throws your heart to the ground
Love turns the whole thing around
Fear is a friend who's misunderstood
But i know the heart of life is good, i know it's good, i know it's good
Oh i know it's good
Oh i know it's good
Oh i do, i do, i do
Oh i know it's good
I re-wanked my elbow again on Sunday trying to lift an angry cat. Miss Karma has been highly pissed off at me since I treated her little flea buddies to genocide. I tried to give her a lift to the sink for drink (cat owners understand) she struggled and the elbow went "click". Not quite square one but aggravating.
But last night I felt good enough for some handwork so I rooted around in the studio for a UFO and found one of the smaller body parts and spent nine innings appliqueing this little Liver.
The Braves polished off the Nationals smartly and do we dare hold our collective breath now that they have won two consecutive games? On Sunday they stole a game from the Marlins in the 10th inning when the Marlins outfielders suffered some sort of mass hysteria and began impersonating the Three Stooges.
Braves 8, Marlins 7. I love to watch the boys have fun.
Painting was painless. Wringing out the fabric by hand was challenging but probably good for me. When I first discharged these two pieces, I left the goo on too long and almost all of the color left town which really wasn't all that interesting so I went back and painted on some dye, sprayed the pieces down with soda ash solution and just left them to dry outdoors. Improved somewhat but I have an awful compulsion to start hand stitching on one of these pieces.
Voodoo spent some time pie-ing my back before settling in with me to watch the Braves take another beating. My sympathies to those on the DL.
In New York summers end was the first day you got up and smelled Fall.
Summer's end is a little sneakier here in GA. I had the feeling that yesterday may have been my last pool day for the season - the temperature is supposed to drop and skies cloud over for the rest of this week. Indian Summer? Please.
Smells like fall today as I use up the last of the 400M from Testfabric. These sponges were packing from some electronic gadget. Makes me wonder just how much dye paste made it onto the fabric.
You can see in this next picture that a lot of the vibrancy of these pieces faded away as they dried. That reminds me, I'm going to go upstairs right now and "wet" one of them with acrylic medium to see if the color depth comes back.
This piece is machine constructed and quilted, then painted with acrylics and hand quilted.
I keep a glass fishbowl on my work table where I hoard exceptional scraps. Every once in a while I will dump the bowl out and puzzle the bits and pieces together. Both of these pieces, each about 10"x10" come from the bowl.
My hands have been killing me lately. Of course my solution to that it work 'em harder - and take OTC drugs. Most of the trouble has been brought on by crocheting that recycled silk thread and a lot more than usual keyboarding. DragonSpeak is beginning to look like a worthwhile investment.
I'm rather proud of this little departure. My son Colin makes music with the computer. That's his pseudonym, Izo - his graffiti, my computer alteration of same and the website I built for the whole thing.
Jimmy will be home tomorrow for the first time since the beginning of July (he's working in NJ) and I made all sorts of wild promises of lasagna and such. I did the shopping for it this morning but I just had to take a break and make use of this gorgeous day - the first we've had in a week of dreary, rainy weather. The alginate had gotten pretty gloppy in the fridge so I loosened it up with urea water per something I read in Ann Johnston's "Color By Design". Now to keep my mitts off of these pieces until they just dry up on their own - then I'll run a wash load of jeans, heh heh heh.
Email brought me good news "Passing Through" was juried
into Art Quilts XI: Stages, Cycles & Fits.
The snail mail produced my slides created from digital
images by G. Armour Van Horn - Stellar service!
When I first pulled this one out of the washer I thought "screwed this one up good" and I flung it in the dryer with the rest of the laundry.
I have a unique laundry system here. I'll run it through the washer and the dryer but that's were my involvement usually ends, so we have baskets and baskets of laundry all over the upstairs (at least).
It's a good day when 5 out of 6 of those baskets are full of Clean things and a cat. This was in one of them and now it's up on the design wall making demands. It's going to need something special, something cohesive and for now I'm just pondering it.
Jan Thompson, my dye partner, came up with some equally exciting results.
These pieces are about 42 inches square.
A great dye in the dye-patch.
We mixed up a batch of alginate to carry the dye this time and did a bunch of experiments - painting directly onto the fabric and then laying the dye glop down on the vinyl table cover and dropping the fabric down on the paint.
Some very strange stuff that will be nagging me from the stash shortly. "Use me, use me". I need to finish a few things before I start anything new.
It's interesting that this show called for "Works that illustrate arrival at a new point in life, whether for better or worse. Pieces that fall together from a fit of passion and evolution." Evolution being inevitable, these new things represent three distinct directions for me.
Sunny Jim is a nod to my quilters roots - making blankets out of whatever is a hand, most often stuff that other quilters would turn their noses up at all the while keeping my own storytelling style. Although these quilts are intended to be used, abused, washed and whatever, I got carried away with this one and put in a lot of hours hand quilting it. THAT won't happen again anytime soon. Just the thought of handquilting the other tops in this series feels like a sentence. They will go under big J's needle soon.
Passing Through and Atavistic Inclinations both illustrate my delight and interest in finding out what comes of discharging my hand dyes. Deconstructing the color. That circular, cellular design element throws back to something deep and elemental because when I doodle, it's very often "cells".
I'm keeping the sly cartoon thing going too - I like a good grin and shudder with my art from time to time. Swooning over beautiful color and design over and over is boring.
We'll see what the jury thinks.
Thanks to everyone from around the world who responded to my hissy fit - I have a whole slew of fallback options now including a Viking darning foot and the new one from the Janome 6600.
In the meantime, I remembered that just before I retired my 30 year old Kenmore, I bought it a gadget. It took a bit of rooting around in the studio but I found it and it turns out that the high shank BigFoot fits the Janome 6500 perfectly. They are even color co-ordinated. Huzzah, the weekend is saved.
My Goodman is eternally grateful that I am so easily amused. I miss you darlin'.
That's "Pirate" for what you say when you are steaming along at a good clip quilting a piece that's turning out nicely and the darned FM foot breaks in half!!
I KNEW that effing thing wasn't long for this world! It's had a funny (bad funny) looking crack in it from day one. Here it is day 600 and something and it implodes on me.
ARRRRGHRGHRH!! I repeat. Sent an urgent email to a local shop reported to be a Janome dealer with fingers crossed that they have a spare hanging around just waiting to be sold at a scalpers price to a desperado like me.
This has to be the Karmic payoff for keeping a second presser foot (that probably belonged to the dealer ) that was in the box when I opened it.
Does anyone know of a different free motion foot - preferably with a closed ring and METAL - that works on the Janome 6500?
Thanks to DebR for a clue.
Debra said...
Ya know I really love this one, and I thought fingers instead of dildos till you wrote that. So maybe this "could" be Candy Bowl.. as it sure looks like people trying to get those last few M&Ms... 10:39 AM
"Candy Bowl Panic" is under the needle right now.
I have to write and see if they'll let me play even though I am a complete knitting failure. I can crochet like crazy. Very crazy.
Still wondering about a good name for this one. Every time I dwell on it I start to get the grins. It looks like a party to me.
Nothing else gets me out of bed faster on a Saturday morning than hand dyed fabric waiting to be washed out!
This is a piece of the 400M pfd I just got from Testfabric and I loved it before I even put the dye on it. Delicate yet strong. We had some dye leftover from over three weeks ago that I stashed in the little beer fridge out on my deck. (It is SO NASTY in there - I put a root beer in the freeze compartment by mistake and it exploded). I wanted to paint directly on the fabric with the dye so I gave it a quick dip in soda ash solution and spread it out on plastic covered picnic table. I read the directions on the alginate thickener but of course, I didn't believe them when they said "a little goes a long way". Instantly I had two pots of clumpy cream of wheat. Dumped the now room temperature dyes in and blended them in as best I could with a whisk which I bent. Gave up on getting smooth thickened dyes to use brushes with and dived right in to grab up handfuls of dye glop and finger/hand paint. It looked like a violent crime scene when I was finished. Covered it over with a sheet of light plastic that barely touched it just to keep the cats off it. It was tough to hand wash the clumps of dye/alginate out but I didn't want to put that stuff through my aging washing machine. Cool results I'm thinking.
And now that I have finally gotten the pool pump working properly and the chemistry straightened out in My Blue Heaven, Aliens have come to roost here. I held extensive interviews with them throughout the morning and have determined that they are here on vacation with benign intentions and have welcomed them on behalf of the Earth. Somebody has to be nice. I wonder if they like chili?
I've been doodling and dreaming with this group of fabrics since I got back from NY. So much so that they talked me into re-washing, drying and ironing them today as a group. What's up with that? So far they are hanging quiet on the design wall (the pale blue of which is really starting to aggravate me) but it's not quite stone quiet. There's a low hum happening.
Yes, Debra, that is my voice muttering about keeping the skull blinking and camera rolling all at the same time. I sound like a bratty kid.
The moment I clicked on Publish Post, this cold bugger leaped under the desk onto my foot and then up into the bookcase with Voodoo in hot pursuit. Note the dust bunnys stuck to his chin. He was released unharmed, but I suspect he has a deal with the catz that they bring him in over and over again without any wear and tear.
Look what came in my favorite cereal!
When was the last time you got anything really cool out of a box of cereal?? CHECK THIS OUT.
As you may have guessed, I'm away. How brilliant of me to be following this heat wave up the Eastern seaboard. Time and circumstance. Spent a lovely weekend visiting Jimmy in Bel Air, MD where he is working. We went to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" which has made me think seriously about getting a tattoo. Then we went to a fish joint where they served large platters of crabs that you had to eat with a wooden mallet. I watched and had a nice civilized crab cake. and shrimp. and oysters. and ....there were still lots of leftovers for a kitty bag.
Next a quick rail trip into the heart of the Baked Apple to have breakfast with one of my oldest friends, Borin.We roosted over breakfast at the Stage Door Deli until the lunch crowd shooed us out. Finally, a short week with my family. That's Patty, Robb and Kitty at the restaurant where Patty is hostess part time. Mom & Dad are as ever.
Imagine - dyed, washed and ironed in one day? What's my rush? My point in doing this rather dark and murky batch was to make some pieces specifically for discharging. In most cases I got what I was after. This group started life as a huge cotton damask tablecloth I bought on Ebay.
This group includes some overdyes and some yardage Jan brought over. We used salt in the dye solution this time which I think accounts for some of the interesting figuring on this fabric.
This is the piece that had the soy wax. Live and learn. The black took more strongly on the back than the front. If I had stopped and pondered a bit before throwing dye around I would have considered a few laws of physics, like gravity.
Because I didn't want too much cracking in the wax, I laid it out flat on a piece of vinyl, spewed a few cups of soda ash solution over it and immediately attached it with brushloads of black dye solution. I should have laid it face down. Better still, suffered the cracks and immersed it.
Here's a piece of fabric slathered over with some of the soy wax I brought back from Convergence. I don't want too many cracks so it's hanging from the design wall until tomorrow's dyefest. Things are going to get fairly dark if that Cotton black works the way I want it to.
I'm still knitting my way through each nine innings of the Braves amazing comeback. This recycled silk is a bear to work with and I have to struggle to keep from knitting so tight that the wooden needles squeak.
I can always count on Colin to be as un-PC as possible at every opportunity.
Last night he stopped by to see what I was up to, took one look at the knitting and said
"What's this then? Flayed hobos? Bum skins?"
I laughed for an hour and every time I take that knitting out I will start snickering.
(28 x 23)
I lost track of the number of times I started sewing on beads, making marks with black thread, outlining the worms with beige thread, etc. With each attempt at embellishment I would recall the title "Atavistic Inclinations" and pick out the nonsense. It's finished. Now I can get back to the last thing I was doing before this sidetracked me...what was that?
