home office

I'm busy hanging homemade prayer flags, evil baby faces and other choice pieces for my own entertainment. A small portion of my studio is undergoing conversion to be my day job workstation. I have two design walls in the studio and I will taking over the vertical one to hang an ever changing gallery of "things to eyeball" as I've elected to not move my beloved stitching chair away from the big, east facing window since most of my scheduled working hours will be after dark anyway.

As soon as the Comcast tech can get out here to yank some wires around I can bring the equipment home and get on with the Wild World of Telecommuting and it can't come too soon. Working in the training room has been HELL.

Right now, I'm off to Fry's to price and measure  a slide out tray for my keyboard and buy a couple of my favorite Yankee Candle stinkers - sage + citrus.  If any of my readers have experience with working (for the man) from home, any and all comments and advice would be appreciated.

I've already resolved to get properly dressed each day and even put on a spot of makeup.  I imagine a lot of people envision telecommuters as legless, hairless huge jelly bags stuck to their chairs and unable to function as normal human beings. I did until I met a few. I don't want to slip any further into sloth.  More on all this as I discover it.

Needleplay at Chandler

"Serpent of the Grove" will be going to the show in Chandler, AZ. Seems like the gallery had issues with the other two pieces I submitted which were permanently mounted on canvas. go figger. I expect that I'll be running into these problems if I enter any of the mummies in fiber only venues. Oh well, there's a wider art world out there. Now I have to put a sleeve on this one.

I don't know how 9 to 5 people do it. I've been in a training class all this week and by the time I get home it's all I can do to wash and feed my face and collapse in front of an increasingly disheartening (non) performance by the Braves. Staying awake for the whole nine innings is not a problem. My body still thinks it's "ON" until well past midnight. No dreamtime at all. I think I stitched the last two doors on Ocean Homes last night but at one point I had stitched it to my night gown and had to cut it away. Help me Moon.

link love

Nothing from me but others are basking in the glow of their lives  -

Judy, so beautifully expressed.
Arlee has been churning new waters.
Deidre never lost her way at all.
Heather pleasure in purpose.

percolating

This is the first thing I see when I come in the front door and last night it got me thinking about the Next Big Thing. The long, white lines are a sheer cotton lawn that was spattered with gold metallic fabric paint. The edges and ends were turned under and the doubling of the cloth created a kind of bright glow along all the edges. During the studio dig, I came across some silk sheers and plan to experiment with it on the "devilment" fabrics. 
I also found a perfectly good Rapidograph pen and was scribbling in the dark while watching the game last night.

studio upheaval

I'm preparing to give over a portion of my studio to the day job. 40" of wall space for 15 hours per week given back to my life? More than fair trade off.

So tubs of shreds and "somedays" are making room for a small desk and chair where I will work at a computer. A long overdue deep cleaning is underway.

I'm throwing out a lot of crap and uncovering some amazing starting places. These fabrics were bundled together for some distant notion. I have SIX finished tops, all of them bedware waiting to be batted, backed and quilted. There will be a lot of giveaways in the near future.

haunted places

There was a lot of revisiting the past while I was in NY. I spent a morning with my Dad touring my first hometown, Armonk, NY.  I didn't know there was a private family cemetery for "his people" which included Useteds, Smiths, and Wrights.  Working folk all.

Then I spent a delightful afternoon lunch & tea with my former neighbor Terry as if I hadn't been gone from Carmel since '93. There is never enough time and we never run out of things to talk about.


These four pieces of cloth (which continue to taunt me) were called to mind by this shot of the water under the bridge up the street from my family's house. Layers of light and color. Reflections, memories and reality all in one place at one time.

the Wheel turns

One phone call and everything changes. While I was still in NY, my supervisor called to say that I was being considered for the next telecommuting class and was I still interested?  Being able to do my day job from my home will mean 2+ more hours of each workday coming back to me to use however I want. Could more Art be in my future? Sure as hell won't be house cleaning! And going forward this blog will be the only input I have to FB. Having given up the time vampire Lexulous, I see no need to go there. Google reader let's me know when the people I care about have updates. likewise email notices when someone posts to me in FB.  There's been a lot of background buzz about "disconnecting" and I'm paying attention.

home

I'm home from whirlwind visit to family in NY. I was expecting fall to be well underway but when I arrived I was surprised to find Summer frozen in time - the leaves all still green and in place, the sun still strong and hot. When I mentioned it everyone shushed me strongly - they are hanging on to summer tooth and nail. Given the four gorgeous days I had there, it's all understood.

What with all the visiting around there wasn't much time for stitching but I hung a few doors on "Ocean Homes" and took a lot of pictures all over two counties. Hope to get them posted somewhere for the family to share.

Here's my Monet Moment. My family lives close to the vast NYC watershed reservoir system. Large numbers of mute swans congregate on the upper reaches of the reservoirs and winter over there and then spread out to ponds and rivers in the spring and summer. Getting closer shots of these birds involves a level of risk I am no longer interested in. These fuzzy long views will have to do.

September 11

 Later on this day of remembrance and reflection, I will pick up and finish a novel I've been reading, "Stones From the River" by Ursala Hegi.
It's about a community of regular people who allowed their government to fall into the hands of a charismatic leader and his cronies who snake charmed the people into accepting that any problems they were having, as a country and as individuals, were the fault of others in their society.

This government convinced people to  assign blame on "the others"  and while they looked the other way and abdicated responsibility, members of their community began to be arrested for no reason, their homes destroyed and their property confiscated. The country fell into wars with the rest of the world and was ultimately crushed. 

It really dismays me that there are young people today who do not understand the monstrosity of the expression "Holocaust deniers".  I grew up next door to some elderly neighbors who once had numbers forcibly tattooed onto their forearms and that was probably the highlight of that day. From Max and Ethel Rosenberg and a man I worked with, Joe Weiner,  I learned the stories behind those tattoos from the people who lived those lives and they spoke for those who did not live to tell their own tales.

History should not be a mystery. When are humans world wide going to grow up and stop being enslaved by religious and/or political dogma  and the fear and narrow-mindedness that it breeds?  There are so  many other things we could be doing with our passions, energy and resources. Wonderful things.

I had a dream that a very scary looking alien sat at a table with a big industrial sized blender and piles of scrolls, Bibles, Korans and Torahs. With a manic look on his face he began feeding them into the blender along with a few raw fish - was it Dan Acroyd doing Bass-o-matic?- all the while he's describing how these books appeared to be the source of power of the puny humans. Gleefully, he hits the LIQUEFY button for a minute and then chugs the whole mess, wipes his face with a scaly green forearm and strides away shouting "NOW TO CONQUER THE EARTH!".  Was it the burrito I ate for dinner or too much CNN?

cusspots transformed

What is it about containers that compels us so? Little places of safekeeping?  When I was a teenager I would take the train into Manhattan and head for a store called Takashimaya. It was a department store that sold everything under the sun. Looking back it was probably a Japanese version of Walmart. But I was drawn to a department that sold transparent, colored acrylic plastic container. Hard little brilliant jewel colored rectangles and squares of plastic with tight fitting lids. The magpie brain was always overwhelmed and ever covetous.

 As I got older the compulsion switched to baskets which are everywhere in my studio stuffed to the gills and woefully disorganized. When two dimensional design ideas fail me, I take up the crochet hook and some heavy cotton  string and set to my version of basket making. A memory from some former institutional life no doubt. Here we have some pseudo Boston bean pots and a few wild ones complete with tails. (for scale, those are one quart mason jars they are perched on, drying out)

lost cusspots

While I was rummaging around for things to overdye I came across another bunch of cusspots. These are getting the "Boston Bean Pot" treatment and will be left soft. That's it...no more soda ash, cloth or dye....for awhile at least. 



Now to see if  I can get in one or two more swims. It's gotten chilly at night and there's no enough sun on the pool during the day to warm it again and I'm not the hardy, North Atlantic swimmer I used to be.