Saturday, November 21, 2009

i'm back

I think. Started working on the moonlight-and-birdsnests thing again today. I've been hiding in the sewing room much of the day, which bugs the family, but I think I made up for it here and there. Hopefully my spouse can forgive me for not wanting to sit on the couch and watch sci fi on TV.

Anyway, I got a little done today, which makes me hopeful.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

I haven't started anything. THREE projects on the table, TWO more ufo's hanging on the line! And yet another idea springing to mind as I was putting my kid to bed...I'm all talk, no action these days.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

more gift-giving

I ran to JoAnne with the guys this afternoon to find two more large-print motifs with broad repeats and a dark-brown background. I'm working on a baby quilt for new father Jonathan and his wife Emily, parents of baby Beck, whose nursery was featured recently on the parental blog. Once I had the color scheme, there was no turning back, and anyway baby quilts for someone you know are a piece of cake. I will try, try not to be too experimental with this one (unlike the last one, a few years ago, which just had too many competing fabrics included.)

Thursday, September 3, 2009

The moon is still round and clean tonight, and the colors concealed or revealed by moonlight make an unpredictable landscape of shadows and strange flares -- the bright pink of the geraniums is still as plain as if seen by daylight, but the faded red of the patio brick is now a mute gray. The air is cold -- September again, the smell of wood fires somewhere up the hill reminding me of late-summer camping trips. I feel the urge to change this blog's background to black, a reflection of me in the dark sewing room, typing by the full-moon light of the laptop screen. My late-night internet companion has retired early for the evening, so I'm left to my own devices here. Today was the first day of kindergarten. I feel I've crossed that line beside my child, and we stand together now on the hastening treadmill of all that comes with growing up, growing older. He's not a baby anymore. There's nothing I can create in the studio that matches the unfolding grace of my child as he changes.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

full moon tonight...

I'm on PAUSE. In the last weeks of summer, the first week of Kindergarten, the waiting and the simultaneous transitioning around big changes at work...I'm out of the groove.

But I have been sewing. Made a 24-hour marathon tote bag for the exiting pastor at church, a lovely item if I do say so (and no I didn't make time to shoot a photo). Designed it myself, no pattern, just a sense of what I wanted to accomplish. I used some lovely home dec and printed panel fabrics -- birds and flowers, and a quiet little spider on the back. A perfect tote for knitting and other light weight projects. She seems to like it, has already put it to use she says, though her note of thanks seemed mostly concerned with the pain of parting. Glass half-empty, I guess. But hopefully she will see only brightness and her own potential creativity when she's using the bag.

The other project, in the past two weeks, was to finish a scrappy pillow that my son and I started together last year. He grew tired of the project before it could become a blanket, this string-pieced cloth of greens and reds (again, no time for a photo) -- but it was the perfect size for a pillow for Auntie Dede, a gift of appreciation for her years of loving daycare. I printed a cute photo of H on cotton, and mounted it on matching fabric, embellishing with buttons and beads and yarn -- the photo is safety pinned to the center of the pillow cover, and can be removed should she wish to rest her head on the pillow itself (the pins are little colorful ones that blend nicely.)

So these transitions have been marked by some artistic action, a slightly more domesticated kind. This will have to do, until I can bring my heart around to the moon and the birds again.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

more on the laundry...

And yes, somehow this all relates to the Oriole's nests.

There is a compelling intimacy in cloth -- aprons, dishcloths, towels, shirts, sheets, etc. And the rhythm of laundry, the cycles and the meditative folding (peaceful if you don't have more of it than you have time for), all are meaningful. Domestic, that's an aspect of this, but not the whole story.

Magdalene is trembling, like the washing on the line

Trembling and gleaming...


Two lines from a Joni Mitchell song. I wrote a poem once that took some inspiration from those two lines, concerning cloth. (Read it here if you can tolerate some poetry.)

The "Ash Wednesday" piece from the 2007 series made the most direct reference to the Lenten season of that year and what a difficult time it was. (See below.) The series itself came in response to a call for work for a show I was helping to organize at the time, called Capax: The Extraordinary Within the Ordinary. And laundry, as an ordinary activity with interesting byproducts (lint, dryer sheets etc) was already on my mind. So I found some thoughts and notions within that, evoked for me and not entirely universal, and attached them to the objects in the series. It started with the Laundry List: worn out, expelled, vacant, shed, delivered, emerges. A list of words describing some of the materials I would use, and alluding abstractly to a state of mind as well. But "emerges" -- a hopeful new state of being, something from nothing. It was Lent, after all, and I work for the church so there are references here to Easter and resurrection as well. It's a distinctly Christian reference, but wasn't intended as the body of the message. Not that these references are separable, either, and I make no excuse for them.

(One feels a little defensive in expressing the overtly spiritual in contemporary art, since the two worlds, art and faith, often collide rather than combining.)

In "Ash Wednesday" the bleached sheets on the line represent souls freed by death, willingly I hope, though suddenly in many cases. But clean, finally, and relieved of suffering. Death has I think that association for me, overall -- in my poem about my grandmother's death, there are references to clean white paper and a field of snow. And I've seen death over my shoulder too, though just once, and to my eye it was a field of white static, the void. Frightening then, but it was a bad time for me then and even in my suffering at the time death wasn't truly what I sought. So. On the tag at the top of "Ash Wednesday" it said "white sale," a play on words with reference to the t.s. elliot poem on the opposite side of the piece; ironically, the ink has almost completely faded from that one particular piece of cloth.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Lenten Laundry

Lenten Laundry: There is no human experience it seems that does not somehow involve the use of cloth, or weaving. In the incidental details of life lived I often locate the folds of some material always imbued with the detritus of living: the clothes on our backs and the stains and scents of where we've been, the evidence; the process of laundering that past, and the telltale byproducts of the laundering, the dryer lint, the paper accidentally wadded and washed, the spent softener sheets. Similar evidence washes up on the shores of consciousness: eggshells from a newly fledged songbird, or the bones of a songbird caught in the pellet left by the owl or the hawk. A worn out dishrag, a stained coffee filter, a tuft of cat hair -- we leave so much behind and the clues are often wrought of fibers, are organic, they continue after our use for them is exhausted, they go unnoticed in the sea of objects and ciphers. I am captivated by the intimacy of what we leave behind, by the cloth of our experiences.

Each of the seven pieces seen below are double-sided. All are roughly six by eight inches, except for Ash Wednesday, which is closer to eight by ten inches. Special materials include dryer lint, vintage aprons, an owl pellet, chickadee egg shells, a wire mesh hose filter (for the laundry tub), communion wafer, wine, fabric softener sheets and other found materials.

This series informs the piece I'm currently working on (see below). The experiment has since morphed into a series of fabric pieces (art quilts?) diverging along lines of spiritual expression, politics, death and decay, nature and the domestic. The series has been exhibited twice, installed in a church space and in the basement of a warehouse, hung by pins on clothesline, in no particular order.

Lenten Laundry Series: Through the Wringer, 2007


Please note that this is a new posting of old work. Originally I'd conceived this series of objects as pages in a book -- "Through the Wringer" would have been the cover -- but I found as I progressed that they didn't especially want to be pages. The objects are scraps really, laundry leavings.

I tend to try new techniques by jumping in with both feet, and my technical skills have continued to improve since this project began (an apology to the purists.)
7x4" -- paper, cloth, wire, lint, netting, ink.

Lenten Laundry Series: If Desired, 2007

5 1/2 x 7" -- cloth (recycled apron), lint, flannel, cotton batting, paper, ink, pins, recycled brewing bag.

Lenten Laundry Series: Hung Out to Dry, 2007

5 3/4 x 7 1/4" -- fabric, batting, recycled brewing bag, plastic, paper, ink, owl pellet.

Lenten Laundry Series: To the Cleaners (dirty laundry), 2007

6x7 1/2" -- synthetic netting, recycled brewing bag, found plastic, cloth, thread, lint, beads, thorns, batting, used dryer sheet, drycleaners tags, ink.

Lenten Laundry Series: Delicate Cycle, 2007

6x6 1/2" -- cloth, paper, button, beads, decorative yarn, plastic mint container, chickadee eggshells, recycled brewing bags, used dryer sheet.

Lenten Laundry Series: Deep Colors Bleed, 2007

4 1/2 x 6" -- cloth, lint, recycled brewing bag, batting, communion wafer, wine, beads, thread.

Lenten Laundry Series: Ash Wednesday, 2007

This piece may not have been the last one completed, though as I recall each object was progressively larger than the last. 7 x 10 3/4" -- cloth, recycled brewing bag, ink, fresh dryer sheets. Each of the eight sheets blowing from the line stands for one of the eight people who died, in my personal and professional worlds, during Lent 2007. An old friend of my husband's died suddenly from an undiagnosed cancer; my cousin Paul committed suicide; the granddaughter of church members died of aneurysm in her eighth month of pregnancy (baby Caleb was delivered safely); and then elder member Dorothy stopped eating, and passed; two other elderly women of the congregation died; a pillar of the church died suddenly after choking in a restaurant and slipping into a coma; and right after Easter the wife of a friend and Pastor died of colon cancer, after a long decline. It was one funeral per week, and then some, throughout Lent that year. We were all pretty shell-shocked in the end.

And of course, after that there's only t.s. elliot.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

more great nests!







nests...

It's been a long week. Late meetings, lots of angst and wrangling, lots of people feeling blue with all this rain coming down. And a tornado just a mile or so from work/church, in the midst of it all. And a few moments of completely hilarious wonder and peacefulness and guilty hope.

I went to the lake. I mentioned this on the other blog, we had three nights up at Mille Lacs, and I brought the work in progress with me, did a little hand-stitching -- not much, just filling up a ten or 20 minute gap here and there between trips to the shore and bird-watching and kid-watching.

Right outside our cabin door, hanging above the patio, was a spent Oriole nest. My husband first pointed it out to me -- it was just above the sightline, and I was so preoccupied with the big lake's long horizon line that at first I didn't see this wondrous little weaving right in front of me. Ron explained a bit of how the Oriole weaves her nest from fibers and grass and bits, makes a little basket for her eggs and self; and after the young birds have flown, the nest is abandoned. But -- each year, a mated pair will return to the same nesting area, and very often the same tree. The Oriole will tear open her old nest, throw out the dirty bits (poop, mites) and save the solid shreds for re-weaving, into a new nest that is structured from fresh materials.

I love that. I want Oriole nests in my work now, in this moon-bird-cats-hair-nest-eggs thing. I have a plan.

But, I haven't picked it up all week. Sunday and Monday were busy -- returning home, catching up -- and then Tuesday and Wednesday were both 12 hour days at work. Here it is, Thursday already, and tomorrow will be another busy one.

Fortunately I have next week off. I can and must work in some time for sewing, between Monday and Wednesday; Thursday we'll go to the Fair, and Friday...maybe I'll go to the Fair alone, I don't know. Have to check the calendar. Hopefully daycare won't be closed. But Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday for sure. Maybe even this weekend, if I'm lucky. It's hard to do this stuff at night, though I should try. It's not my most creative time.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

The middle picture, which shows much of the current composition, indicates there are troubled areas where I'll need to rearrange or break up the blocks -- particularly on the left side, where the central piece wants to break out of its frame and tumble into space. That's why I find it so useful to post pictures of work in progress -- it gives me distance. (Sorry also about the blurring, my camera doesn't deal with detail when the lighting isn't right.)









from the moon

"What we can learn from the moon is reflection," wrote Jude Hill, and because the moon is very possibly one of the inspirations or themes for my current piece (which has formed in its attributes quite influenced by Jude's own work) I am Taking Note.

The moon. My project has colors in it that are both washed out (except for the reds) and prone to sudden contrasts, and to glimmers -- like colors under bright moonlight, the yellows and greens completely absent, lots of light and dark, and occasional reds (which escape the dumbing-down powers of sunglasses too, I've noticed.)

Washed out. I'm using "laundry leavings" as materials here, dryer lint and ragged ends and soforth. Worn bits, wads of paper smooth like ocean pebbles after being left in pockets and washed and dried, etc...

and because there is a nest (a nest with three cat-hair eggs inside it, more wads from the washer), I now have two resting songbirds in the piece as well...
where are we heading, this piece and I?

The moon, and laundry, and birds. And an overall Asian motif, the results of my fabric choices.

How in the world (or above it) will this all come together?

The moon above...and birds. But laundry is a decidedly earthly process. Hmm.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Posting pictures separately from the text to see if that makes for better formatting. Seen below (earlier images posted first) -- Two days' work on a new piece, inspired by laundry leavings and...something more, as yet undetermined.

Dryer lint, cat hair in wads and other detritus picked from the lint trap; layered on wool batting and felt, beneath strips of tinted organza. Metallic threads, raveling strips of cloth. Then adding some hand-printed and vintage cotton, upholstery textiles, etc. I admit to approaching this with Jude Hill's work in mind, hoping to achieve some of the mystery of her "slow cloth" pieces. The nest-eggs in the lower left corner, the chrysanthemum/lotus on its long stem -- or something like a path, the corner of a maze -- I like where the piece seems to be going, though I couldn't describe the destination. Asian dryer lint? Chinese laundry? Something foggy and fragile...

I like walking in a place where I can't see the end of the road -- or more than a few feet in any direction. We were out at Wood Lake yesterday, and the boardwalk was surrounded by tall green cattails waving and undulating in a strong breeze, hypnotically repetitive. And I like a fog too, on the rare occasion that we see one hereabouts. I even appreciate a really bad head-cold, the kind where you walk around half-deaf for days -- all the world's sounds are muffled, senses dulled and calmed by congestion and cold meds.

Somehow, amusingly, interestingly, this is somewhat the same. I'm thinking of this as a place.



laundry leavings - beginning




Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Once again, blogger seems confused about how and where to place the images when I upload multiples.
The first image is the book's cover, by owner/artist Theresa Petermann of Pulaski, WI.




















These are the latest from the Altered Book Round Robin, part of the Visual Journal Collective at Minnesota Center for the Book Arts. The second image is Out of Chaos (the second). It was produced first as a collage; a photo of the collage was downloaded to the computer, altered slightly (text added etc) and then printed onto Extravorganza. The fabric print was stamped (bird image in silver) and painted (watercolor), then glued to white tissue paper, which was in turn glued to white drawing paper. This gave the piece a somewhat translucent but bright base; the Extravorganza doesn't hold a very intense image. I sewed the resulting piece onto a page in the book, added some embellishments, and made a pocket behind it to hold some related ephemera (including a tag used in the original collage.)



The piece with the silver leaf "cloud" and the feather is Out of Chaos (the first.) This is just tissue paper and mylar on a drawing paper base, with some white acrylic paint around the edges. The feather is in mylar; the silver leaf is on the page behind the mylar. Two pages were removed from the book to make room; you see the remaining tabs to the left of the image. It's a Blue Jay feather.


Two pages in a book about "winged creatures," both titled Out of Chaos. The original volume in use is a style manual, and the title comes from the chapter heading for one of the sections in which I worked.
The lettered index tabs were added by the owner of the book.






Tuesday, July 14, 2009

a little more catch-up



"Ash Wednesday" front and back. 8x14" 2006.

a little catch-up




Here are the back and front views of a quilt I completed for my neice, in December of 2007. Not such great photos but all I had time for -- since I finished for Christmas and shipped it on the 22nd! The pattern is "garden path." I called this "Chloe's Garden."

Monday, July 6, 2009

dia de los muertos


This last altered-book project is a three-page spread that takes advantage of the unique construction of the book. This is a large-format picture book with pop-ups and flaps. Only the first few pages of the book were printed; the rest is blank white, still containing the added features. The originating artist found the unprinted book in a second-hand book store for 75 cents and rightly discerned its wealth of potential.
She chose the book's Dia de los Muertos theme. My piece incorporates a facing page (left), the back cover of the book on the inside complete with the nine inset rectangles, and a flap that folds over the back cover interior. This flap has been machine cut to create a "window" of pierced paper in the image of a dragon climbing a flowering tree. My work was simply to decorate and adapt the three-page spread.
The book is about 9 1/2" by 11" by 1 3/4" in size, closed. The left-hand page is completed using laser transfer emulsion, laser print, acrylic paint, stamping and tissue paper. The flap on the right is completed using acrylic paint and tissue paper. The central collection of insets is mixed media and includes a variety of found objects, cloth, acrylic paint, laser transfer, waxed cookie wrappers ("Ines Rosales"), beads and etc.

June/July Book Arts Round Robin
















Sunday, June 28, 2009


It's true. Until I picked up the latest round-robin book back on the 16th, I accomplished just this: one window curtain in my kid's room. Haven't even made the other one yet. But I'm cranking away at the Dia de los Muertos theme of the new book, and once I get through my second reading of the Harry Potter series, I might just (gasp!) sew another curtain. Fallow periods happen.

Monday, April 6, 2009

from the Altered Book Round Robin




March 09.
Excerpt from "On Writing An Illinois Poem" by James McGowan.
Artwork created within an old geography textbook.

Surely the People Are Grass



An oddly cropped photo of "Surely the People Are Grass" - and a detail (sort of, below).
Click on the photos for enlargements.
Size 13.5x17.5 inches.
Fabric, beads, yarn, string; and 6 pieces from my collection of paper objects that wash up in the clean laundry. (Laundry findings.)

Isaiah 40:6-8









A detail, taken before several formal problems were resolved. After adding Mr. Robin to the death image -- hope for resurrection and eventual springtime. Faith in renewal.

Monday, March 16, 2009

coming attractions

Views from the most recent Altered Book Round Robin...and a little progress on "Grass." (Tonight I saw my own altered book, the little one I started back in November, being passed from the fourth to the fifth artist on its road to immortality. It appears as though someone has made a little carrying case for it!!! I so wanted to peek, but I think that's a little like ultrasound -- legal, even wise in some cases, but taking the fun out of uncertainty.)

Saturday, February 28, 2009

work in progress


"For are not all men grass?"