busy! Busy! Busy

Busy! Busy! Busy! Running in circles. I cannot believe how much time I have spent in front of the computer in the last couple of weeks. The good news is I have been weaving and weaving  a lot.   I should finish my new or next piece by tomorrow evening.

Bedazzled -Asa's Rocks

So sought after-Small Expressions

I'll get my Bedazzled and Small Expression pieces off tomorrow to Convergeance. then all I need to do is decide if I am going to try and do another piece before my Small Things at Village Wools. The next piece is thought and drawn out. It's a simple background of mixed blacks and dark colours with hazmat symbols and a broken Nautilus shell-the future. I am working on prehistory right now. Sego Lilies and earthstars. The oldest of things.

Received the new ATB8 catalogue  today. The Catalogues seem to just keep getting better and better. Of course,  I am probably going to be the only one who notices I left off my MAIS in Craft Design, History, CTRA and economics degree. My fault not theirs.

                                

So Sought After                               So Many Chances  

Lucked out and found   an Oaxaca rug a few days ago. It's background colour is a lovely turquoise. I really like this detail of the band in over shot and floats.

Sometime in the future I want to weave a design that is poly chronic and related to Einsteins theory of relativity mixed in with  or related to the philosophy of  non  backgrounds of the truly horrific cutsey-ly designed tea towels  each with a crocheted border that both of my Grandmother's had me embroider endlessly.  Were they truly about the love for home  and of decorating ones home and making it a home  or were they really about killing time-literally?  I always wondered if that tiny dinky needle could be pegged through the art of the vampiric designer of those cutesy thingies that seemed to be so necessary to ones survival as a  "good homemaker".  Or maybe the act of creating was like having bound feet.  A show of not needing to do anything-a show of wealth and upper class ism. Even though "it" was needful to always keep ones hands busy at all times. I always wondered why since both Grandmother's encouraged me to run a muck-but always tastefully and with mindfulness.  This stuff or statements of my skill at embroidering mindless things without backgrounds were  always meant for my hope chest. In real life with 3 males in the house it was always a battle to keep them pristine and not turned in clean up rags. I keep thinking that there has to be a relationship to the non backgrounds that  my native American Grandmother was so fond of  and one sees in Native American art and tea towel art and  or fribbles.  Which in  some ways  has influenced me not to think that back grounds are terribly important to a design. AND, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have something to do with my horii vacuii that often invades my designs. Perhaps in protest of voids.  True paradoxes.

It is no wonder that I that artistic statements  are anything but a creator of confusing  and disbelief for me. I wonder about there worth unless they  are very very long-too long for the average person to wade through. They always feel like such an invasion of privacy to me. Why can't the work stand on its own.  How does one write about the lunacy and all of the elements that influence us to do a medium as slow as tapestry. I always seem to end up humming excerpts from West Side Story such as Officer Krupke. Yet, on the other hand I can spend days and weeks writing in my journal about why, how and what a tapestry is all about. It's not that I don't like to write. I think-maybe- it's about putting something so personal out there for everyone else to see and read. Perhaps giving up a piece of myself.

 

Black Hawk Lakota ledger Art-definitely not a fribble, but  the style was  influential to my Grandmother- This was on Wikipedia and for this particular piece copyright has run out.

It is amazingly warm in the top part of the studio today-around 92 degrees and barely 70 in the bottom floor of the studio and around 80 out of doors. My garden is finally starting to look like it might survive-about time. A lot of the plants are really rather battered looking. Do bad it brings out the sticky bind weed. Chene' tried to chase and attack a pit bull the length of the fence and became so entangled that by the time I tried to retrieve him he couldn't move. Served him right and me hours of picking burrs out of all that fur.

Had lunch with Kathy on Friday and attended the "drunken barbecue"   for a few hours.  Yes, it was at the Off Center one of my favourite places in Salem. On Saturday we attended the "Drunken Barbecue." Perhaps the other stuff happened after we left. It was really fun see Arjay, Scott, Star and the rest of the crowd.  I so miss not having them all closer. It was all rather mellow-not quite like the past and many more children. What is it they say nothing like reformed...So tamed now. Guess that's what happens when the children begin to out number the adults or supposed adults.

Haven't done much  actual silver work for a while. Unless one calls chasing down and purchasing tools for my upcoming classes silver work. Did clean and polish one of my garage sale finds. It was an opal and gold ring that I bought for 10 cents at a garage sale. It had these funny  dark little balls on each side of the opal. While I was cleaning the ring with a pick I discovered that the two small balls on each side were incredibly dirty. When I finished I discovered at the center of the balls two small diamonds. Talk about magical when I picked at the ball and tried to shine it. So suprising.

Couple of days ago we had a lunar eclipse I was all jazzed  to wake up and take pictures. But,  decided when the cloak bellowed while trying to wake  me up up and get at it  that I would rather sleep through it so I did.  So much for adding those photo's to my weaving.  Funny what working 12 hours a day on paper work and weaving will do ones goals and good indentations. Meant to say good intentions.

Okay it's time to weave.

Cheers,

kathe

Waiting for rain to go away!

It’s been an interesting 2 weeks. Filled with highs and lows-frustration, depression, happiness and accomplishment. 42 years of marriage to the same man is a pretty big accomplishment.         The weather hasn’t been very cooperative on the days I can work in the yard it rains. Plants are drowning in the ground because there isn’t enough heat to compensate for the over abundance of liquid. My laissez faire style of gardening isn’t doing well. Cuke plants are collapsing and rotting. My tomatoes and peppers are still in the nursery sleeves. The plants were yellowing so badly i took them to the nursery to see if they had some type of weird virus. Chene’s path construction has been called do to mud-Maybe tomorrow-or not. The good news is as long as it’s raining he isn’t chancing the Great Dane by the fence and I don’t have to try an capture him before he totally annoys the huge dog and ends up minus something or finally does figure out how ooze through the fence. Thank god he’s not capable of manipulating time space and atoms. He’s still in the running at the fence and bouncing off stage.

The good news!!! I finished Kona Pink. The more I weave with black or sort of blacks the more interesting it becomes. Blacks are such an interesting colour to work with. There are so many different blacks. All have the ability to change the look of the colour next to it-Warm blacks, cool blacks, blue blacks, red blacks, indigo blacks and of course shiny blacks and matte blacks. Then there is the textural difference in sewing thread, rayon, embroidery floss. Combining this all with the pink, purplish colours of the vog has been really interesting because there is a softness that easily greys out when the black colours of the foliage overlay the soft colours and in the centre of the piece without the dark. Contrast of hue and light and dark contrast extremes are not something I usually to prefer to work with. I have a tendency to use warm and cools to create my perspective in complex pieces.

    This mirrix is so great for weaving. I love it's treadles and how smooth it works whenI am weaving. I want to put another top bar at the bottomto stablize the warp in position when I travel with the loom. I am also going to but the texsolve heddles and prey that tthe are small enough  for 20epi.

The more I use soumack for lines the more I like it. It’s amazing how different the lines can look just by varying the amount of yarn in the weft bundle. It still is about half of the size of the main weft bundle that gives a flat surface and not a raised surface. I really like using just one thread to create really small lines. I think on the small sewing thread tapestries it’s really important not to create a ridge on the surface. Light creates too great a shadow if the proportion of the soumack to the base cloth is wrong.

Another thing that I became really aware of on this piece is just how much detail one can get in a small piece if you use half of the size of the normal wefts. This really allows one to pack more turns hence more hatches and hachures into a smaller space.

I still can’t figure out how to photograph the small pieces with all of the black. There is a shine or something that the black takes on that looks like lice. I am thinking it might be the flash that is causing the problem. Normally I try and photograph out of doors on a cloudy day. I think it’s time for another photography class on taking pictures of small things. I am fairly comfortable with large stuff- mountains, sky etc, but I think I get way to much detail and perhaps non-existent detail in my small stuff. I seem to miss the point of the photograph with too much detail. Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean that one should.

Marge has been ill. I miss weaving with her even though I still visit her. She’s almost finished with her desert piece. We have finished the cartoon for her Tyger and piglet piece. The loom is warped and waiting. Empty warped looms are so depressing. It’s like it’s time to out to play and no one to play with!

With the completion of Kona Pink--- Kona Pink really needs another name. Pink has so many negative connotations. I have hated pink and all of its hidden agenda’s since I was little. I was forced to wear pink because I have dark hair and my sister who is/was blonde was always dressed in turquoise-My favourite colour. I keep looking for frills to sprout out the side of the tapestry and change it into something besides a colour study.

It’s definitely time to do another piece. I think I’ll use the colour study of the Las Vegas night scape to clear my mind for my next piece(grin, disbelief, and a little LOL to boot). I have this idea for my photograph of sego lilies, feathers, earth stars, whole nautilus, and a broke nautilus shell that has been in my studio for seems a hundred years. I need to journal about it because I want it to say something about the probable circular continuum of past present and the future we seem to be destroying. Each day seems to produce a pending cataclysmic event-whether real or imagined or reinvented by those people we call reporters. I can think of better names, but probably shouldn’t. How long before the Motel of Mysteries by David Macauley becomes an actual happening? I already feel buried in paper and digital bytes.

The size  of the new piece will be about 10 inches by 10 inches, because I want to keep it in the range of 100 square inches. The other thing I know is this piece will not have a landscape in the background, but chene’s and melanges. Some of the reasoning with this is that I can weave the background faster. A greater part of it is because when I am not filling the background with as much chaos as possible I like the relationship of the images to a void. The images will then seem to float on the surface of the void. A little, like the first five verses in Genesis, this has been defined partially by the following quote.

“Creation or the act of creating is merely the exploit of bringing about the existence of that, which initially was not. It is to make something be when prior to taking form it was nothing...which in truth is a manipulation of a certain volume of void separated from the undefined void subsequently possessing a density of its own nature to be separate from void.” Borrowed, stolen and or liberated from a commentary on Genesis 1-5 by prefprefprefhori

On another level as a “between” I have always been fascinated with the lack of backgrounds in traditional and not so traditional Indian art. I have often wondered what the correlation to those backgrounds might have to do with the lack of backgrounds in the tea towels and pillow cases that I embroidered as a child for hours at the feet of both Grandmothers.

And, Yes, Wednesday mornings for silver work is working out. I am signed up for 4 silver classes at the Puget Sound Bead Festival. The four sides are laid out and mostly souldered. The Peruvian Opal is beautiful and very complex in there silver bezels. It's easy to see what is souldered and what isn't. The brightt so pretty stuff is the unsouldered pieces. The dull souldered silver before its polished.

On that note finally it’s time to go weave and with a fervent prayer for several days without rain!!!

kathe