Planet Textile Threads

breaking in my walkies. getting ready for the go on sunday. i'm doing whatever we can with along time friend whom i haven't seen since sept 11-that sept 11th. she had just flown in and was sitting in my living room  catching up with the tv on mute when the first plane went through  the building. we became blood sisters then.

neki desu

...than sulking technology.  In my case, it's a card reader which point blank refuses to read the card with my images on (or any other card, for that matter...).  Grf.  So the images I meant to use for this post are not available until I go get another one.  So I'll talk about the rest of the printing another time.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch...I'm dyeing.  My hands are blue, cobalt blue, but my cloth is a variety of hues, from pale green to rich brown.  I haven't dyed in a long time, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy it.  I'd also forgotten what it means to lug two gallons of water down to the shed...but that's another complaint entirely.  I'm dyeing cottons and silks, as well as some tshirts and a few onesies, just because they're there, and I can... I think the lilac one will be cute... The image above is of a previous session (that sulking technology strikes again...).

And when I'm done with low immersion dyeing, I'll thicken the leftover dye, and paint with it, though probably not today; there's a fridge in the shed, and the thickened dye will keep in there for up to a week.  I like dye painting; it's more relaxed than formal painting.  That said, I have a painting in my head that needs to be put onto canvas, or at least board... so I may sit in the shed this afternoon and see if we can come to some sort of agreement about what it needs to look like.  I love painting on a large scale, but these seem to want to be small... it's a completely different discipline.


My paintings are usually full of movement and energy.  At the moment, I'm personally low on both...so I think I'll try to reflect that, as in this painting, 'Tranquil'.  It's not as small as I'm planning to work, but it is small by my standards lol.  The problem with painting large, of course is what to do with it when you're done... my house is too small to actually hang these works, and nobody seems to want to buy them.  I'm contemplating lending them to a local hospital or public space of some kind, as they are currently in the shed, and in the way.  Large painting, anyone?

And the card reader isn't the only technology that's sulking.  Our broadband is dipping in and out, more out than in (as it were), so, having written this, I can't publish the damn thing... oh well.  Back to the shed.

The work of the three artists mentioned in my last post took up most of my thinking at the Summer exhibition, but some other pieces do still remain in my mind.  This year I was pleased that there seems to be more space generally, and there seem to be fewer clashes of colour or mood.  Work has also been organised so that the architecture room is no longer so full that it is offputting, and the photographs are mostly in one room.  And there is a room devoted to portraits.
I was delighted to see one of Sadie Brockbank's (whose open studio I visited a couple of weeks ago) sculptures, Red Bridge chosen and placed beautifully
next to a painting entitled Close by Christopher le Brun - of a horse, rather like the one below.
It was pleasing to see Ian McKeever's paintings given some space, so that they could shine.  They can be seen at the top of the far wall in the photo below (from this blog where you can read another view of the exhibition) - they are entitled Three I, II, and III.
On the whole the other pieces which attracted me were small.  I cannot find images of the tiny piantings I liked by Robert E. Wells (totally unlike his usual work) and Jock McFadyen.  Both were simple in composition, the former entitled Two Boys Sunbathing, and the latter Red Sofa.

Anne Desmet, who had the job this year of choosing the prints, makes work which intrigues rather than attracts me.  Fragile Hope, above, is a wood engraving printed onto paper then collaged onto razor shells.  She also has a wood engraving collaged onto roofing slate.

Collage is also very much part of Charlotte Hodes' work.  Form drew my eye to her two pieces: Walking amongst Vessels I and II.  They look in the same sort of style as Bathers: Floral below:

I found in looking up her website for this post that I had bookmarked her some years ago.  Again her technique intrigues me rather than the impact of her content - there is visual memory, but I was not really curious about meaning.  I found it interesting that collage was noticeably about as part of paintings (such as in the work of Anselm Kiefer) as well as of prints - particularly interesting because my thoughts have been engaged in a kind of assemblage of materials and techniques.  I am at present working on a group of works which use this assemblage.  As ever with my work, it will take a few months before there is anything to show. 

What I will say is that my project involves paper cutting - and that seems very much part of the making Zeitgeist along with collage.  I'm never sure whether I am irritated or pleased when this kind of thing happens - of course I don't like to think of myself as following a trend, on the other hand it means that there are books and workshops around.  I am indeed planning to spend a day at a paper cutting workshop next week.

These two posts are not exactly a comprehensive nor a generally useful review of the RA Summer exhibition, but they summarise my response this year.  (Margaret Ramsey has a more illustrative look here in her blog.)  But we enjoy returning to the show each year, and every time we derive something different.  This year's show gave me tremendous joy because of the Caro, and also left me feeling good about my own work - which is always a good outcome!

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,
what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again
in a new way
on the earth!

Mary Oliver (b.1935) has been described as America's best-selling poet. Her poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and New England, and influenced by Whitman and Thoreau. She is an avid walker and her poetry is filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

I came across the poem - and the photograph - on Steve McCurry's blog, which so well combines words with his images. stevemccurry.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/life-breath-of-half-the-world vividly shows how torrential - and how important - the monsoon rains are to so very many people.

Where to begin? Maybe I should work backwards.

Right now, I am taking a break from packing for tomorrow's teaching trip to North Carolina. Dinner won't be for another hour so I am eating a small bowl of cold cucumber yogurt dill soup, which I made this morning. VERY low in calories and divine.

2 cups 1% yogurt (200 calories)
2 cukes (free)
2 cloves garlic (ditto)
bunch of dill
bunch of mint
1 tsp olive oil (why? -- but it's about 30 cal)
salt, pepper, lemon juice to taste


Tonight's dinner will be low fat shrimp scampi on a minimum of pasta and homemade coconut ice cream for dessert. (hey, you gotta have dessert).

It has been an interesting few weeks.
Yesterday morning, my beloved brother Jon left for home (Pittsburgh) after having been here to help me TRY and make a dent in our mother's apartment. We were there every day (almost) and it was by turns frustrating, exhausting, stressful, and hilarious.

Ma was truly a hoarder and we are dealing with the aftermath.  But she was a neat hoarder: all the STUFF was hidden away in drawers, closets, and her storage area in the building. We found an almost full case of bathroom tissue that she brought over in 1992 when she moved (and did not touch since).
Our father was in the wholesale contractors' supply business and since he also sold paper towels, kleenex, and t.p.to the contractors , we always had a carton of each (i.e. 96 rolls) in the basement.  Uh - the business closed 25 years ago.  This is the tip of the iceberg.

It isn't all bad: we found my grandparents engagement certificate, their ketubah (marriage certificate) from 1913, my great-grandparents' passports and green cards, and other wonderful papers, postcards in Polish and German from Europe in the early 20th C before they exterminated all our relatives who had sent them.

We know a lot about my mother's side of he family.  Our father's side is a mystery.  Our grandmother died when our father was five and we're not even sure what her maiden name was.  Ellis island records and other genealogy sites yield nothing because on her 4 childrens' birth certificates, her last name was spelled 4 different ways.  And there is a fifth spelling on my aunt's wedding certificate. We can find no record of her on the boat with any of those spellings.  We know when she was born and when she died -- but there is no record of anything else. We don't know whether our father's parents were married in NY or NJ, but eventually we will have to check NY's records.

On Sunday, Jon and I went to the cemetery to find our grandmother's grave.We found it, discovered her Hebrew first name, and were still clueless about anything else. Here we are, happy to be together.

This week brought a visit from another "Twelve" friend. Diane Perin Hock is touring the Northwest and stopped for a couple of days here in Portland. She and I spent a lovely day together yesterday. I started the day, as usual, with my walk with Beth and Paula. Diane was a great sport and joined us for our walk and coffee. An added bonus were giant Starbucks oatmeal cookies, which we got for free!

Fortified with coffee and oatmeal cookie, Diane and I headed into downtown Portland. Diane had expressed an interest in seeing the Portland Chinese Garden, which sounded great to me. I haven't been there for several years. We took cameras and sketchbooks.

Beautiful, peaceful, serene.

neki desu

After a week's break, the drawing session felt as scary - and passed as quickly - as ever.

 

I am enjoying life at the moment. So nice to have time to stop and smell the roses. I really tried to pace myself over the past few months, but now I realize how nice it is to have a bit more time to just be.

I am happy with the background of this piece. Every thing is fused down but the smaller pieces on the top. I will probably do some machine quilting before I add more. I am in danger of doing too much. The small red pieces are just areas where I plan to do some red stitching.

I am excited that Diane Hock is in Portland. Steph and I are meeting her for lunch tomorrow and then I we will find something fun to do before we come back to my house where she will spend the night. Most of you probably know that Diane was a good friend when we lived in Santa Rosa. She started Twelve by Twelve and the Artful Quilters Web Ring. I owe her big time for including me in the Twelve project.

Well, you know, I keep saying I'm coming back to blogging, but then I keep underestimating how severe the depression has been over the past three years or so.  Merely putting on a happy face and continuing to work just hasn't done it, so I haven't been making, and therefore not blogging.  I am, however, hoping that I'm climbing up the other side of a very deep black hole; therefore, I'm not making any promises about blogging.  I'm here today; I might not be here tomorrow.  Regardless, though, I hope you know that I do think about my friends in the world of blogging, and thank you for persevering.

It's been a difficult week (and it's only Tuesday...sigh...).   Recognising it was going to be hard, I bought myself some gerbera, which always cheer me up (what, you didn't think I grew them, did you???).  When I'm coming out of a depression, I begin to realise how muany things I've neglected, and what I need to do to put things right.  The studios look as if bombs have gone off in them, and I've spent a bit of time in the shed today, putting things to rights.  In the kitchen too... I had left a lot of the plastic jugs and buckets I use for dyeing outside for...err... rather a long time... so they needed a good scrubbing.  I don't have plumbing in the studio, so it all got dragged up the path to the house, hosed off outside and finally scrubbed in the kitchen sink.  Mwah.  I'm now ready to dye, and the garden looks a bit better for it, too... no surprises there. Most of the improvement to the garden, though, is thanks to two lovely young chaps who are gradually working their way through much neglected borders, cutting things back, digging things up and generally being helpful.  Including unearthing a LOT of buckets...not sure whether to be grateful or not.




This afternoon, though, I felt that I really had to make something.  So, I looked out some lino blocks that I cut at one of the markets I take the work to, and decided to test print them.  No matter how careful you think you've been in cutting the pattern out, there are always places on the blocks where you haven't quite cut enough away, making odd little marks on the print.  Now I don't mind odd little marks, but I'm planning to make some greetings card type prints, and the General Public tends to have a much tidier mind than me, so I'm being Very Careful.  To my surprise, the leaf print was absolutely fine, no further cutting required.  Here it is printed on an ACEO sized board which I'd sprayed with Brusho.





But it really wasn't enough... so I added another one... different colour, same block...

Better, huh?  More interesting, anyway.  Probably not the best quality printing you've ever seen, but it's a reasonable composition, and I think I'll play with that idea on a larger, or rather, longer, scale; it would make an interesting printed border.    The flower, though, was not so well cut; look at the extraneous marks...


And as well as the unwanted marks, there are one or two places where the petals themselves haven't worked well.  They need a trim, as well as removing all the odd bits and pieces.  That's a job for this evening, in front of the tv.  I have one of those trays on pillows, which is ideal for cutting lino blocks on my knee.

And then there was the little word... Joy.  Joy, my granny.  No joy at all... lots of wee annoying bits to take out...  but it will, I hope, be worth it...

As you can see, haven't quite got it right, yet... and too much paint, too... (as a believer in Making Things Difficult For Myself I'm working with fabric paint rather than printing ink... this is probably A Mistake, but hey, I've done it now.  Besides, most of the time I'm working on fabric, anyway...).





And, when I noticed the too much paint bit, I thought I'd try a ghost print... and preferred it to the first one...




So...the manner in which I apply the paint needs to be considered...

In the spirit of change in which I'm working, I even tidied up after myself, so I can go in the shed tomorrow and dye.  Note the spelling!  If you would like to make comments on the post or the quality of the printing, please feel free.  I answer when I can, particularly if you ask me questions... which I welcome too.  More tomorrow, I hope.

On Sunday we went to the Royal Academy to the Summer exhibition.  This annual outing is the same, and yet different every year.  This time I wanted to spend less time seeking out, and more time taking in - I wanted the work to speak for itself.
Our first encounter was before we even entered the courtyard, let alone the building.  An absolutely enormous crane was being dismantled - performance art!  Then, once we were allowed to squeeze our way round the outside of the courtyard we were faced with what is being described as the Courtyard Sculpture: another enormous, real piece of art this time.  El Anatsui's TSIATSIA - searching for connection which is draped over the top half of the face of the Royal Academy, and has won this year's Wollaston prize.
It's certainly impressive - the very hugeness of it and the effort involved - but I must admit that it did not have nearly as much of an emotional effect on me as those very first pieces of his like this that I saw at the Djanogly gallery in Nottingham several years ago.
On the other had my slight disappointment at this was blown away when we stepped into the exhibition proper.  I am a longstanding huge admirer of the work of Anthony Caro, and it was - still is - with such great pleasure that I was confronted with a beautiful large piece in the first room.
 


Shadows is one of his great works; one which gives so much when looking from all directions, glimpses, details, whole vistas, ... a never ending delight.  This piece alone was worth the journey, and had I known that folks were busy snapping away I might have risked trying to take photos myself.  This work is such nourishment - the rest of the exhibition was going to have to have something special to compete with this.
For this post I shall stick with the other pieces which I did think had the power to stand out well beyond their surroundings.  What I have seen of Anselm Kiefer's work has never been shy, and his individual pieces in the RA each summer have been really powerful.  No exception this year.  I cannot find a photo of it online - it's one of his Melancholia pieces, tall, monochromatic woods, collaged woodcut print and paint, with the polyhedron outline up near the top, large and balanced with the trees.  Somewhat like the tenth picture down here, but portrait shaped, and with no building in the background - the intriguing polyhedron was there instead.  That polyhedron on several of his works, explained near the foot of this article, comes from Durer's Melancholia.  Here you can see that he has returned to the device several times.  The polyhedron drawing was floating rather like these grids, but now I'm just confusing the whole thing.
 Anselm Kiefer, “Trinity,” 2010. Oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, ash, thorn bushes, resin ferns, and lead on canvas in glass and steel frames, (332 × 576 × 35 cm).
The third outstanding work is a set of six weavings designed by the brilliantly thoughtful and thought-provoking artist Grayson Perry.  The suite of six is entitled The vanity of small differences, and looks in extraordinary observant yet non-judgmental detail at the markers of taste and class in the UK.
These, like the Caro have the advantage of space to themselves, indeed the last room of the exhibition.  Just as jaded, tired, full of mind and weary of knee I was ready for a refreshment break, there they were.  Zap, I felt energised once more.  Even though I had seen these reproduced many times, there is nothing quite like the work itself.  Woven, they are appropriately tapestries of our time - and although there is a debate about whether they are pukka craft or not (lawks! machine woven! commercially! - there's a lot said in the current issue of ETN's Textile Forum magazine), there is absolutely no question in my mind that it is definitely good art.
I undoubtedly missed much that is good, and even perhaps great at the exhibition in my 'scan and pounce' (as described by this reviewer, but with somewhat different results).  But the sheer quantity and variety is overwhelming.  I did spot a few other things which I shall describe in the following post.

There is much getting-ready still to be done, both in gathering work and in hiding away excess furniture etc. Do drop by if you're in or around London NW10.

was it shakespeare who said all's well that ends well? :) must have been as he said everything.


neki desu

detail from "Dust motes dancing in sunbeams" 1900 (found torn out of a magazine - RA, Summer 2008 -  a little crumpled)

"Painters either paint towards the light or towards the night. There will be less light, for the light can but fade. ...with Hammershoi the fading light is held, idealised and transformed into a state of being. For he must at all costs suppress the closing of the day, the light must be made to linger on and he must see anew what has already been seen before, see it again and then yet again. As a painter, one gets this same sensation looking at a painting on the studio wall as dusk approaches and the light fades. First, colour is bled out of the painting, then forms become reduced to silhouettes and with each passing phase one wishes to hold the moment longer in order to see what one could not even imagine in the painting before.

"For we see the painting anew each time we look. ... It is as if, in looking, we recognise that we should not be there. However, since we are there, we look in silence, waiting - perhaps now not even thinking - looking and waiting, not knowing when to leave."

words by Ian McKeever, who "shar[es] with Hammershoi an artistic sensibility in which light and colour evoke a profound stillness"

more works by Hammershoi (click image to enlarge)

McKeever and some of his work (click image to enlarge)

 

I gave up on the painted batting that just didn’t work. I used gray felt for the batting which was perfect. The gray felt is covered with gray organza squares. I started tearing my organza pieces to collage, but the plain gray areas were not working for me so I took a deep breath and painted some marks with black paint.

 

It is drying and hopefully, this will work. At any rate, I am having fun, again.

I also did a test swatch of cotton stitched to pre-felt and then shrunk in the washer and dryer.  Not thrilled with this. I think that silk works better.

 

We had a nice father’s day family time yesterday. I made oven fried chicken, roasted potatoes, asparagus and a couple of salads. Stephanie made the annual strawberry shortcake for Mr. C. She bakes the best biscuits.

I am finally feeling rested and able to get caught up on every thing that I have been neglecting. My mojo has returned!!

Looking southwest, beyond Clodgy Point - so many wild flowers, spring and summer happening at once

Looking back towards town and  The Island

Low tide at Porthmeor Beach

Porthminster Beach

Looking from The Island towards Hayle; the speck of white on the horizon at left is "The Lighthouse" from Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse"

Looking towards Hayle again, and down the estuary - lots of blue sea, blue sky (for a change)

Porthgwidden Beach - colourful cabins and windbreaks

Bamaluz, just behind the harbour

Artists  capturing the view

Here endeth my holiday snaps!

St Ives has many quaint cobbled streets (and some wide enough for one-way traffic) and interesting old cottages

i wasn't counting  the anticipation and planning of the trip and it's almost exhilarating.
going to decathlon this morning to get my walkies and socks. learning about how not to get blisters. such science!


neki desu

I am slowly fading away here...

I'm sorry but you are really going to have to send me an e-mail.  So far that has been the easiest way to reconnect with me.  With only your name I really can't get in touch with you and give you details... (Lois Jean, B. in the US, Susan, Ida, Marquetta, Sharon, Diah, Martine, Diana, Jo, Jewel, Pat, Quit for fun, Golden isis, Shirley E.)

My gmail address is tamiwa07@gmail.com

Allen Ruppersberg's "Never Ending Book" (2007) is part of Tate St Ives' current display. The installation gets reformatted slightly according to where it's shown -
but the components are the same - "furniture" (theatrical maquettes from the 1940s), boxes, and photocopied pages from books in his personal collection. The work on the wall is an index of what's available in the boxes. Viewers may sift through the boxes and take 5 coloured photocopies and 5 black and white photocopies, to make themselves a personal book.

The Tate website says: "Much of Ruppersberg’s production is based on ideas of multiplicity and the creation of multiples arising from the existence of an original design or idea. ... The work is emblematic of his entire practice which often situates the book, and more generally, narrative, as something capable of spatial composition and aesthetic abstraction." Ruppersberg is one of the first generation of conceptual artists - indeed, a foundational artist of West Coast conceptualism. His philosophy was to use language as a means of expression in its own right, drawing on different sections of the mass media and consumer society, engaging with language's slippage between mediums, and its situation amidst the familiarities of pop culture. His work often reanimates material from preceding generations and his own personal history.

We took a long time to choose our pages, whittling down the possibilities and/or changing our perceived themes several times.

Many of the books in his collection were published by small American presses in the 1930s and 40s, and I found many "About the Author" pages - the authors were often female, high school English teachers, poets, who grew up in small towns on the American frontier. Yet the enlarged words from some covers - so vintage! - also held appeal....

We put together the pages with a modified version of Drum Leaf Binding - ie, without the spine backing, and with a folded soft cover in a plain colour, into which the endpapers slotted.

 

It is taking me some time to get my mojo back. Things are still in a mess around here, but I have made some progress. I managed to unpack the supplies that I took to San Antonio and sort of straightened up my studio. I started working on a piece for the High Fiber Diet red show. I have had a piece in my head that is a collage of grey, black and red organza. I started to work on it, but needed more of the gray background. I went to the store where I bought it and they didn’t have just the right color. I am trying to make what I have work. I didn’t like the gray organza on white batting so I painted the batting black. I will have to see how that looks tomorrow, if I have time since it is father’s day, and I am cooking for the family.

Yesterday, I went to Miles’ graduation from 5th grade to Middle School. I really enjoy being at the school. It is such a great school where they really work at making all the kids feel welcome and important.

 

You will notice that Miles does not appreciate hugging. This kind of public display of affection, except from Mia, is uncomfortable for him. Here he is in a natural Miles pose with his diploma.

 

And here he is, obliging us with a smile.

 

Despite the Aspergers/Autism, Miles has made great achievements in his ability to interact with the outside world, even though it is uncomfortable for him. One of his teachers told Stephanie that he is different, but better. That made her very happy.

After getting the new bathroom put to rights, I turned my attention to my old office, now 18" narrower than it was. The wall on the left is the new one, but it all seems comfortingly unchanged. It really doesn't seem much smaller than it was. I think those 18" have a much greater impact on the bathroom, than on the office, so I'm glad we reallocated them. I rehung the artwork today and got my desk put back together. My Journey to the Big City quilt used to completely hide the electrical panel, but the new one is a bit bigger.

This room is my gallery of old and meaningful stuff. It is really the only place in the house than I hang my own work. The gathering of prints is on the wall behind my old baby-rocking bentwood rocker.

Some of these prints are my work, the pigs (upper left) are by Linda Wolfe, who was my printmaking teacher. One is by an artist I taught with and another from another old Pocatello friend. These were all done in the '70s and '80s. Artwork lasts and I never grow tired of the old stuff.

This is a reduction lino cut print I made in 1996. It is the only one I have ever done using that technique of one block, where you print the lightest color, carve away more of the block, print the next color and finally carve away all but the few lines that are printed with black. It is a brain bender and requires very precise registration to get it all printed in the right order and place.

I like old things that remind me of other times and other people. One of my first jobs after college was in interior design and I could never understand how people could empty a room, entirely, of all its possessions and redecorate it from scratch, buying all new art and accessories in one go. To me, these are things that find you along your journey and come home with you to take their place among the older things.

These guys will go back up on the top shelf, just where they were before. These are friends. How could one replace them?

I took some "toys" to the seaside -
- a new sketchbook (A4 size)
- various pens and pencils
- the little watercolour box, long unused
- blue threads

...and had some aims in mind -
- fill the sketchbook
- try out various drawing materials
- collect small objects (on walks) and record them
- make a memory ball with these objects, and include bits of writing

We did spend a lot of time working in sketchbooks - and with a bit of large-brush "surface preparation" in the final pages, my book was completely filled.

On the train journey, I started filling a few pages, playing with the effects of various pens on wet paper -
Wetting paper in various ways was something I subsequently did every day, using seawater, streamwater, rainwater, tea/coffee, even watercolour water -

(click on image to enlarge)

The words were notes about sights and sounds - a non-visual diary.

The main task was to collect and record objects found on walks -

These memorabilia included tags, tickets and receipts, as well as natural things like twigs, pebbles, seaweed -
A visit to Tate St Ives resulted in an unexpected project - to make six drawings from a postcard not of our own choosing. Mine was Terry Frost's "Green, Black and White Movement", painted in 1951, just after he moved to St Ives -

(click on image to enlarge)

These used graphite, wax crayon, acrylic, watercolour, frottage, and collage, in various combinations. The close study of the painting and how its composition works was more rewarding than any of my results. Also it gives a new way to look at boats, in their interconnections.

One morning we set up a still-life -
The practice of looking at how one object related to another was good preparation for the life drawing session we attended that evening (eight poses in two hours, whew!).

Eventually, after seeing Judy using paint to such good effect, I got out the watercolours -
 "It doesn't have to be accurate, it's a reminder of where you were" - true; nor was it possible to get a good photo -
 The cut-outs got ever smaller, but eventually the eviscerated book did go into the recycling.
As for the memory ball -- because of its lumpiness, it's more appropriate to call it a memory pebble. I recorded what went into the ball, with a view to making a book showing the process (and the contents).

On the train back home, I wrote down more phrases, intending to cut up the page and make another ball with the remaining thread -
The "written" book/ball will be considerably lighter - there'll be no stones in it.

First view

Swimmers-at-dawn view

Dull-day view

Wild-weather view

Tide's-out view (with distant surfers)

Dazzling-sunlight with wild-waves view

Glorious-sunset view

Final view

Favourite view

Gillian Colyer, Bound, 2011 (from here)

Janet Kawada, A Shift in Time, 1998 (from here)

 summer's here so have a great weekend!

 I've never had any luck growing hostas.  These look fabulous and they are so large so early!

Can you see my name in this fabric? Isn’t that cool? An SDA member from Houston made this for me in a workshop. She called me a while ago and was having a problem registering for the conference via her computer. I helped her and she wanted to thank me. I think this is so sweet. Her name is Peggy Sexton. She was one of our Texas volunteers, helping in hospitality and other ways. The Texas contingent of SDA members were fantastic and so welcoming.

At the conference, SDA holds a silent auction. There were some really awesome things available – big ticket items. I bid on some of the smaller items  and won a pack of beautiful hand-dyed and printed silk art cloth.

 

I particularly like this piece.

 

I also had the winning bid for Elin Noble’s book.

 

One of the vendors was Kristy Kun of Opulent Fibers here in Portland. I bought a large piece of red pre-felt as I want to do a shrinky dink red quilt.

 

Another vendor was Stencil Girl. I have several friends who have done artwork for them. He told me that one of their most popular artists is Terri Stegmiller, one of the Twelves. I bought some small simple stencils for my friends in the STASH group. We had our monthly get-together today so I gave theme each one with some wash away pencil markers that another vendor was selling.

 

I also placed an order with Thai/Exotic silks that arrived in the mail today. I have the supplies I need to get to work. I am feeling quite exhausted, but still very happy. I need to get to work in my studio — I know that once I get busy, the creativity will come. In the morning, we are going to Miles’ 5th grade graduation ceremony, then I can come home and get to work.

Want to see something really cute? Click this link to see a video of adorable Paige enjoying her first beach vacation.

Whenever I have piles of stitching to complete, I always have the urge to draw on the computer - more combinations of interactions, more enigmas, ....
These can happily wait on the back burner meantime.

What a nice way to start the day!  Reading my morning email, sipping my cup, and there’s Quilting Daily from Quilting Arts editor Vivika DeNegre, so I click on it.  It’s about my forthcoming article on the difference a background makes!   You can see it here:

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/quilting-daily/archive/2013/06/13/choose-backgrounds-for-art-quilts.aspx

Thanks to my friend Pat D. (Waving across the US to Mill Valley, California!) who suggested I submit this article concept.  I’d been sharing with my small, wonderful, essential-to-life online sketching group, trying to decide which background to use for my Tea with Milk quiltlet,

which was included in Quilting Arts a couple of issues ago. Pat thought my decision process would make a good article, so I submitted it and …WOOT!… Quilting Arts accepted it.  I’ll share the whole little quilt once the magazine is published.  Until then, here is “Tea with Milk” and an option or two when I made it.

Love the contrast, but don’t like the vertical: looks like the items are going to slide off a table that has been tilted up!

"Nude Descending a Staircase" 
X. J. Kennedy (1961)

more dyeing-note the spelling-with brazilwood in a pot that refuses to exhaust. looking around the house for more stuff, whatever at this point, to dye.
 added about a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate to the pot. think that the color is optimal now.




neki desu

Yesterday evening we went to hear Django Bates' Beloved Trio - wondrous stuff!  So stimulating.
Here you can read a review of the music, and here you can listen for yourselves.

I just realized that this site had not exactly "gone under" even though I transfered the previous posts to my new blog site on Squarespace 6 (the old site is on the previous Squarespace 5). So if you have found this site from an old link or subscription, please visit me at http://susie-monday.squarespace.com/blog or at http://www.susiemonday.com. 

Thanks for looking and thanks for taking this journey through cyberspace with me!

entrance to The Tanks

It took place last July, and I went along on a whim, wanting to hear about the "social" dimension of art practice.

waiting for the speakers

Lin Chi-Wei starts "Tape Music," spooling out his ribbon of sound

above each chinese character is its sound, to be spoken as the ribbon passes through your fingers

design for recombination and interaction

Suzanne Lacy talking about her Crystal Quilt project

neki desu