a day away from the chair

The mailbox garden is at its peak.
The peonies burst open and disintegrate within days in the Georgia heat. This year I'll be digging cuttings and sharing them around. The fringy paler mutant below will be cut to come inside..the rains made them top heavy.

Meanwhile, out on the burning dyedeck, many cloths came under the spell while I listened to a day game on the radio and gave m'self some minor heat stroke. The pool is still too cold to be a remedy or relief.

Some errands, a nap and then out for dinner at the trivia joint which has become a regular, fun thing.

a rondo of consequences

....and an overflowing cast of characters.

This story is unfolding but the other one is broken, boxed in, and has no anchor. I'll have to dwell on that from a cave I think.

While I was out on the deck trying to read a lady cardinal flew down and tried to pull a shiny one off my ankle beads  and the blue tailed lizards were looking at me making those naughty moves with their heads. Lizard lust.

new work space

The top six inches of the water is entirely hospitable...dip any deeper and numbness overtakes you. Still the plan is to get in on Wednesday, do the annual perimeter scrub and then enjoy the ballgame on the radio.

I'm not one for basking but I hauled this family heirloom down onto the deck with the intention of making it my outdoor office. It needs some patching and the binding replaces..not high on my list of gottas. The embroidery you can see used to be along the bottom of a pair of bell bottoms. This is vintage denim sewn over a heavy king sized blanket and backed with a tacky printed sheet. It's seen many a picnic and party.

I got some reading done out there today and put pen to paper for the first time in months and fell into the reverie almost immediately. Better than drugs.

Speaking of drugs..how did you like Madmen last night? I always knew that was how it got done.

further good intentions

I had to grow the base of this piece since the story seems to have legs. No planning here, just plucking bits from the scrap basket and working them into the parade. It's Back in the Saddle Monday. Time for some reading and maybe some writing. At least we won't be cooking anything today...too many tasty leftovers.

storm driven

"Good Intentions will bite you on the butt if you don't keep moving"

Saturday night the thunder and lightning were so fierce I was finally impressed. 

The house thrummed with sub aural vibrations and the room strobed with blue light like all of five-O was parked in the driveway. My phone kept shrieking some kind of weather alert. NO SHIT!  We did not get a lick of sleep until dawn but got up and forged ahead with a grossly complicated recipe for chicken/eggplant Parmesan. It turned out delicious and I am bone bone weary.

they come creepin'

I've been getting little mental sticky notes and postcards from the Ether about the unfinished writing. Why these come in the form of needlework is beyond me because I can't be in that very walled off place of writing while I am pulling and snipping thread in the studio. I'm not making the connection.

Writing is an all or nothing proposition for me so what is all this stuff? Have all my hands-on work been an effort to keep me out of my own head?

 I went to the library for the first time in months today and took away a stack of fiction - "The Cat's Table" by Michael Ondaatje,  "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" Kij Johnson, "Rasputin's Bastards" by David Nickle and another batch that got left in the back seat of the car because, after reading the first chapters, I know I won't finish them. I'll give any book at least that.

While I was sitting out there reading it dawned on me that my Verifiers, my Fact Checkers have checked out and  I am free to run amok.

a gift from the slideshow

My laptop is set to display a slideshow of images from the hard drive when it's left alone for a few minutes. I'm often taken by surprise by some of the images.

This piece "Shell Vapors" is the only piece of my work we have hanging in the whole house and it's not a quilt. It is stitched fiber but the cloth has been permanently mounted to a canvas with acrylic medium and glue.

The dark gray area had a thin layer of batting and no backing at all. I just stopped without getting carried away for once. I was experimenting with a mounting technique I called mummy making and this one was at hand and waiting and fit the 36 inch canvas that had been hanging around for years.

oddities abound

I somehow found my way to Don Kenn's work this morning and feel compelled to make something...odd.
So what else is new?

Behance

I just finished setting up a page for the Karma series on Behance.net



Does anyone have any experience there?
What are your impressions. All comments welcome...

more ironing

Everyone who believes in reincarnation seems to have been Joan of Arc, Cleopatra or Josephine Baker. Me, I was surely a laundress somewhere - but a Palace laundress, mind you.

Spent the morning ironing these beauties - doing my photographic best here but pictures still fall short.

I'm sure professional photographers know the trick of showing iridescence, like on a peacock's tail, but I have not figured it out yet.  Bits of these are available over at the Store.

rockin' the punk, punk, punk

To keep the retail therapy to a minimum I ducked into Mike's Crapola Emporium and bought a few hanks of plain white DMC floss, one hank of white Perle and ran out the door ignoring the 50% sale signs everywhere.

I hand painted them  with procion MX..a pesky business that would have been better with q-tips - but since DMCs variegated colors are so pricey, I'm hooked on making my own now

I love the sound that the needle makes ...punk, punk, punk, punk.

can't stay away from the dyedeck

Just a little fast fun while waiting for string to dry.

Tod reminded me that I wanted to try dyeing my own embroidery floss. I also have a large cone of mystery string about the weight of Perle cotton - it might be Tencel; and a small ball of sugar and cream cotton...they all got the treatment but   are strung out all over the deck drying. Nothing much to look at right now but next time I'll think through just how to do it without NOT getting a bunch nasty wet knot in stuff.

Interesting how inspiration blooms just when you make a committment that takes you away from the studio. Is that creative procrastination?

The threads were pretty yucky..

alien skins

Why bother with taking pictures of the wet stuff when they look like this DRY! I can't wait to iron this batch tomorrow. Inspiration flying. I had forgotten how much I like all this faux texture. I should have noticed that there was almost none in my stash.