Exquisite cloth!

There is nothing like coming home to a package that was an impulse buy that you had forgotten was coming! I won this incredible embroidered Irish linen tablecloth on Ebay for little more than a song and some postage. It's so sumptuous. I know I'm going to be hacking it apart and dyeing it all manner of colors but for the moment the snowy acres ( 82"x80") has me completely intimidated. Look, Dijanne, it's Banksia! The embroidery runs all the way around the four sides. How to color this stuff? What a problem to have. Can you imagine what the lady of the house would think about my plans for her finery? {{{boo.boo.boo.boo.boo}}}

Ancient Beings & New Fabric

Between coughing fits and lie-downs I'm finally cleaning up the guest room and I came across this old photo. When Colin was about 7 we lucked into an old Super-8 movie camera and I made this monster from clay with the intention of making stop motion films. There was once a complete cast of characters but Jake decided that they were more fun to play with than look at. So much for our film venture. I did manage to fool with the soy wax and some dye a bit yesterday. Again a strictly experimental process, no surprise that the turquoise is so pale - the mix was cold and it was chilly outside. The white shapes came from pouring soywax over a set of glass cubes and discs. The metallic gold dots were painted on an heat-set with the iron. 23"x37".

the daily shout out

Good Morning! Melbourne, Westcourt, Tallin, Vilnius, Zebbug, Eyguieres, Dewsbury,Illescas, Rio Branco, Hallifax and everyone in the US from Honolulu to Portland! As a person who hasn't had the privilege of traveling outside of the United States (or inside it much, for that matter) I am fascinated by the placenames and imagined lives of the people who visit my blog. I'm quite likely to wind up paying to continue using the NeoEarth widget that appears in my sidebar. Imagine, someone from Malta has dropped by recently. I have become a computer chair traveler. Someday, I may just get a passport. Many years ago I was telephone operator and I always loved the opportunity of getting someone an international, person to person phone call. How many of you even remember having an operator handle a call for you? Many of the women I worked with had a great deal of stress from that job. I faced the fact early on that nobody calls the operator to tell her to "Have a nice day!" so I rarely took the daily quota of abuse personally. When I was moved into the customer service and sales arena it got a lot worse. For a long time after I left that position I missed conversations that started out with "BITCH!". I'm one of those lucky persons who was blessed with a good phone voice so I took each confrontational caller as an opportunity at lion taming sans chair and whip. I usually won the toss. Yep, the board I worked in 1971 looked just like this one. Hello World!

Green Light

Well, that was gratifying! Sharon of Granny's Hands & Quiltgranny's Shoe has liked Golden Spirals so much she's already got it into a piece in her head. I can't wait to see what she makes of it given what I've come to find out about her and her art through her two blogs. Thank you Sharon. It's enough to make one want to get out of bed in the morning provided she wasn't up coughing all night long, again. I have to keep reminding myself that I only cough when I'm lying down. I had to fold this one up quickly when it was sold because I kept finding little interesting things in it. The good part is that I know it's just the first of a series. This type of gesture is one of my natural moves - something I can do with my eyes closed I've done it on paper so many times. I used to draw spirals with my fingertip on the babies foreheads to help them go to sleep. Lots and lots of practice. And the Golden Monkey Brown was the only color recipe I ever committed to notebook. If Georgia grants me a warm enough day soon I will have a big dye day before I ever get down to Focus on Fiber 08 and I then will have to come up with a whole new game plan for that week.

Soy wax update

No surprise that I ran out of personal steam before I could take these pieces any further. In fact this is the only one I even bothered ironing and photographing. Looks like that nifty soy wax in the oven trick is a loser..you heard it here first. After 30 minutes at 300 degrees I unrolled the yardage expecting gooey pattering - what I go was a snowstorm of unmelted soy wax flakes to sweep up and comb out of my hair. I am happy that I didn't lose my recipe for Monkey Blonde! This piece is 50" long and 30 to 32 inches on the short side...a sloppy tearing job too. I shoulda stayed in bed but will post this one for sale on the Hotcakes site tomorrow. I MUST NOT ADD TO MY STASH!

art anyone

With two consecutive non-art related posts I am ready to move on. Never mind that I have a 5 star cold with sore throat & fever that cost me a dental appointment yesterday (but NOT my vote - apologies in advance to all other voters who I may have infected- mission accomplished). And never mind that we are under a tornado watch here for the same set of storms that caused such terrible loss of life in the states due east of us. It's muggy, the sky is heavy and dark and thunder mutters in the distance. I am laying out fabric for some soy wax experiments and if the roof is still on later, some kitchen dye magic. This is two yards of fabric with soy wax crumbs sprinkled between the layers. The bundle is bound for the oven for a few minutes. Fever makes me crazier than usual.

Yes We Can

Thank you Terry Grant for posting this - now someone pass it on from here -

Superbowl Hangover

Sorry about them Patriots Poppy. Me, I watch for the commercials!

No unfinished business

I've been in New York all week sitting at my Mom's bedside in the same hospital where I was born. She is busy at the work of dying. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon. I think she is satisfied that she has no unfinished business. Then again she could fool us all and be imperiously bossing her way around the nursing home by Spring but I think not. My sisters and brother have been with her round the clock because she gets anxious and disoriented if left alone despite the best efforts of the nursing staff. I spent my shifts talking with her and doing a lot of hand stitching on this piece, more than I expected to. More slow cloth, the stitches marking out the moments as they passed. My Dad was well enough to visit with her one afternoon and she spoke to him on the phone the next day briefly.These days she always ends her conversations with "I love you." Northern Westchester is a wonderful facility and with a retired postal worker's medical insurance, she's getting the kind of treatment usually reserved for movie stars. Christopher Reeve, Superman himself, lived his last days right down the hall from her room. There is art on the walls everywhere. This installation by Kim Tamalonis is across from the main elevators on the Lobby floor. At first I thought they were glazed tiles but on closer inspection each element is a separate canvas. It's called "The One That Got Away". Much thought has been given to the needs of caretakers here. There is a center where they can go and rest, have a snack, use the internet. There's a massage chair great for having spent the night sleeping in an upright chair and a quiet room with deep leather chairs and waterfalls on the wall. There is a baby grand piano just outside the doors of these rooms and a talented man was playing something from the Standards songbook, I forget exactly what but it felt appropriate. Somehow it didn't feel right to luxuriate there but the music was enchanting.I guess I haven't been at the caretaker thing long enough. Meanwhile,upstairs, Rosalie was sleeping peacefully for the first time since I arrived. I got home to Georgia late last night and my Mom goes back to the nursing home for Hospice care today. Many thanks to all the kind folks who are thinking about us and helping first hand with this, Life's final project.

Damn Disney!

Damn him! I just got off the phone with my Dad who called early this morning to let me know that my Mom has had a heart attack and is in the hospital. She has been living in a nursing home for more than a year now and has been in failing health for a long time. She's in the hospital and responding to excellent care. Both my sisters and brother are either with her or nearby. I sat down on the couch to absorb all this information and take in a little electronic anesthesia and what do I see? The scene from Dumbo where his mother is locked up in elephant jail and can only reach through the bars to hold her baby while the choir sings "Baby Mine", a very sweet and tender lullaby that I would have loved to sing to my own babies long ago except that I would be bawling my eyes out and scaring the kid.Thanks Walt. So I did some of that and came here to talk about it to myself. Here's my Mom, Rosalie, on the left and Jim's Mom, Eleanor who passed away just a few weeks ago. This was taken at our wedding in 1977. Jim and I both have a keen appreciation for strong women and their accomplishments.

In the Middle of the Night almost

I got just enough done on the new piece yesterday to call it a good day's work. I have to look at it awhile to decide how next to proceed. Hand stitching to replace the basting? Paint to work/rework value issues? Build the sandwich using that new wool batting that I got from OHCO? It's kind of heavy but has the depth that this piece will be happy with. The damask has a love of weavy give. Throw in a dentist appointment (where I finally got my teeth into "Art & Fear") , two loads of laundry, a really good meatloaf, and updated my Work In Progress page for the first time in a year and I felt no guilt about creeping into the sack at 7:30. Of course, that gets me up at 3:45 and there's a long day ahead but that will fly by too.Registrations for HGA's Convergence 2008 are coming in and we are working hard to get everyone's class assignments into the database and paperwork mailed out. June is bearing down on us like a freight train. So here in the wee hours I did a little Follow The Links game and, thanks to a long overdue (and deeply inspiring) post by Danny Gregory, found the work of his mum, Hazel Kahan filled with some of the most exquisite images of leaves, a theme I've felt has been done to death in fiber art lately but newly inspires me find them, make them into my art. And, if you don't already know her, come by and see Anne's work. The next time y'all start whining about not having the studio space to do the things you want to do, think of Anne and get on with it! Here she is in her "wet" studio. That Green piece just knocks me out!