Home Again

I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t done any creative work. In fact, I needed to get away from everything for a while. Since I’m still not healthy enough to travel, I took a virtual vacation. All I needed was my bed, lots of pillows for propping, and a set of rented DVDs (and a snack now and then).

I didn’t go anywhere adventurous or, on the surface, too exciting. Instead, I went to Wisteria Lane and met some interesting women: Bree, Susan, Lynette, Gabrielle, and Edie. I got to know their families, eavesdropped on their private lives, shared their secrets. I laughed with them, cried with them, and groaned and rolled my eyes when they did stupid things. It was the perfect escape, and exactly what I needed.

In all seriousness, I had never watched Desperate Housewives because I assumed it was a silly, shallow, prime-time soap opera. Silly on occasion and definitely soapy, yes, but I love that DP is anything but shallow. Characters are complex—there are no good guys in white hats or bad guys in black hats, because almost all the characters end up being like most of us humans: good and evil, caring and hateful, selfish and generous (sometimes all at the same time). Even more intriguing, the show illustrates over and over again how even our best efforts to control and manipulate situations, or to do the thing we think is the best thing, or to behave in ways that will benefit ourselves or others, don’t always turn out the way we think they will. In other words, the consequences of our actions are often impossible to predict, but on Wisteria Lane they make for some fascinating life situations, lessons, and entertainment.

I spent 4 years on Wisteria Lane (TV time is like dog years: in this case, 4 years—or 4 seasons—equaled about 2 weeks of real life), and I didn’t want to “come home.” I miss those women and their families, the daily joys and miseries and intrigues of their lives. On a positive note, I’m now so bored that I’ve forced myself out of bed for a while every day to work on something crafty.

(Btw, I’ll be visiting Wisteria Lane again in September, when the Season 5 DVD is available, and then I’ll be dropping in on those gals weekly for an hour or so throughout the season).

And now, on to those crafty somethings:

Results of gelatin printing, from Rayna Gillman’s book, Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth (as part of the A.R.T. Yahoo group’s workshop based on the book):

The last two pieces above were made by brayering paint onto the gelatin plate, then removing it with a potato masher (and, on the last piece, adding a piece of sequin waste).

I love the colors in the pieces above, but I’m not happy with the white fabric. I may go in and add color to those areas at some point. On the following pieces, I laid silk leaves over the brayered paint; on the last piece, I removed the leaves.

I have to admit that I've been stalling on this lesson for the A.R.T. workshop, but I was motivated to finally try gelatin printing by Frances Holliday Alford’s work on the cover of the latest issue of Quilting Arts. I had seen her gelatin prints before and have wanted to try the process ever since. I have a way to go before I produce anything as beautiful as Alford’s gelatin prints, but that gives me something to work toward.

Weekly Square #12

This square catches me up through the end of this week on my weekly 6x6” squares. As I mentioned in a previous post, last week’s square depressed me so much that I had to find some way to find—or create—beauty.

I started with the iron-on transfer I made yesterday from a photo of the wilting roses. I went with this one rather than the TAP transfer, because I liked the aged/weathered look for this theme. I added some free-motion quilting. I started with the leaf on the left, then realized I didn’t want to cover the image with stitching, just enhance it. I started to tear the leaf stitching on the left side out, but decided to just leave it.

I didn’t want to detract from the image with a binding or border, so I just zigzag stitched around the edge a couple of times.

Influences for this week’s square: Mother’s Day roses from my son. Iron-on transfer technique. The need to find (or create) beauty, even in the face of decay and death.

New Toys

My hardware-store haul from yesterday:

Rubber plumber’s gasket for carving stamps (see Cynthia St. Charles’ article in the current issue of Quilting Arts for more info).

Waterseal to seal the wood for the stamp bases (I bought the wood as well, but didn’t take a picture of it):

Double-sided tape to attach the gasket to the wood, and duct tape to assemble my thermofax screens:

Foam weather stripping to attach to a backing for more stamps:

Plastic washers to sew onto the back of small art and journal quilts for hanging:

And finally, some acrylic caulk for . . . well, I don’t know yet, but I’ll let you know when I do!

How Much Can I Fit Into 36 Sq. Inches?

This week’s 6x6” square was influenced by some of the materials I’ve been using, the weather, my health, and my strange mood.

I was bitten by the dye bug earlier in the week. Other than dyeing a piece of round robin fabric a few weeks ago, I haven’t done any fabric dyeing since before I got sick. The weather was beautiful this week though, and I kept eyeing the picnic table on the back patio (which my lovely partner has given me permission to liven up with spilled paints and dyes) and thinking how nice it would be to spread some fabric out and paint some thickened dyes onto it.

I never made it quite that far, but I did mix up some dye concentrates and paint various combinations of color onto watercolor paper. Most of these are nice, neat tables of overlapping colors and neat notations.

Then I went a little wild and just slapped color onto the wc paper. I scanned these into the computer, and used part of one (above) for the background on the weekly square.

I’m feeling over-stimulated and anxious this week. It started as a sort of manic exhilaration, a feeling that I could accomplish anything. There are a lot of things I want to do—more than I’m capable of actually doing. So then, of course, I feel depression creeping in, because I start to think that I’ll never be able to accomplish everything I want to. That’s an unhealthy pattern for me, because I tend to push myself too hard and neglect myself in the process.

Maybe I’ve been exposed to too much sunlight this week; I have thoughts jumping around in my head like crazy, songs running through my mind night and day, and general disorder and chaos happening up there.

On top of that (or in relation to that? because of that?) I’ve felt some of the scary symptoms of my pancreatitis more strongly this week (pain and nausea, among others).

“Cacophony” kept coming to mind when thinking about the square, so I used Photoshop to layer the word and its dictionary definition over the dye-painted background. I upped the color saturation a little, then printed it out onto fabric, which is sort of ironic if you think about it: fabric printed with inks of watercolor paper colored with fabric dyes (!). I did some free-motion stitching (just a little) with black thread, and used some hand-dyed black/gray fabric for the backing and the fused borders.

I think of this week’s square as both a reflection of the manic anxiety I’m experiencing and a reminder to myself to slow down, take a few deep breaths, and take care of myself.

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet . . .

No, it's not Superman, it's my life whizzing by . . .

This is a journal I made from the last lesson--Lesson 5--in Sue's class. It just amazes me how quickly these classes go; it seems like they just get started, and suddenly 5 or 6 weeks have zipped by. I'm going to miss this class a lot--it was a great group of people and really fun projects.

Btw, those are fabric beads on the twine that I made a long time ago just for fun, and now I finally get to use them in a project. Hooray!

Bird Immortalized

A while back I posted about the baby birds born in our smoker. For this piece, I started with a pic I took of one of the babies learning to fly, after he had struggled all day to make his way across the yard. His moment of triumph seemed to be when he actually flew to the top of the fence. I photoshopped the pic, printed it on fabric, and hung it on the design board, where it has been ever since.

After working on some of the techniques in Vikki Pignatelli's Quilting by Improvisation, I was inspired to create this piece. I love this piece because it has real meaning for me and because I designed it from scratch (design flaws and all), with thoughts of that little bird valiently struggling to learn to fly.

Socializing

I love that textile & mixed media artists are really into swaps.

As I mentioned before, I'm participating in a fabric postcard swap.

I posted a pic of one of my postcards a few days ago, but these are better. I've finished 1/2 of mine--12 of 24. Only 12 more to go!

I'm also participating in a 3x3 collage swap in one of my Yahoo groups. I finished those yesterday and got them ready for mailing today. I've discovered that I'm not very good at collage, and I really don't like it that much. I like painting, though, so I guess it's not surprising that my mini-collages look more like little paintings than collages.

At any rate, they're done!

Triathlons

As usual, I'm overextended. I think my ADHD side does this to me on purpose to watch me run around in a panic. It seems like the busier I am at work, the more I need to work on craft projects to offset it.

And of course, when it runs, it pours. The grandbaby started school again this week, and we've all been scrambling to get everything in order and get into our routine. And my son asked me to keep his little shih-tzu, Coco, for a couple of weeks, since he's in housing transition. I'm crazy about her, but she's on my heels every second of the day and keeps me awake at night.

With the triple tasks of the job, my work, and home, I'm just feeling frazzled and overwhelmed. Here are a couple of things I've been working on this week:

I'm taking an online course at Quilt U on Landscape Quilts, so I painted these fabrics for practice:
Our instructor had an excellent tip for fabric painting: cover a board with contact paper, which I did. Typically, I try to paint on a plastic garbage bag, and the fabric ends up slipping and sliding. So then I have to iron the fabric onto freezer paper and all that mess. With this method, I covered a piece of foam core board with contact paper, and started out pinning the fabrics to the board. When I forgot to pin it and realized the fabric didn't slide, I was thrilled! After painting, I can carry the board outside and lay the fabric in the grass to dry. I used Setacolor for these (with a little Jacquard Dynaflo or Lumiere sprinkled on there and there). I was out of a couple of colors and didn't have to time to run out and buy more, so I worked here with what I had. I particularly like the salted piece (3rd from the left). The second lesson is available today, and while I'm anxious to learn how to use these fabrics to create quilted landscapes, I'm going to resist the urge to work on Lesson 2 until I've completed some other things.

The next project almost didn't happen. A couple of weeks ago, I pulled a fabric postcard out of the mailbox. It was beautiful, and I was excited because I've never received a fabric postcard before. But I was also puzzled; who sent this? Maybe it was the woman who so kindly offered to copy some polymer clay information from a book and mail it to me. In exchange, I sent her a little goodie bag with some fabric and paper snippets, a glass, copper-foiled pendant I had made, and some embellishments. I read the back of the postcard and realized that it wasn't the same woman. The message said something about looking forward to seeing my cards. I tried for a week to figure out what she was talking about; the only swap I had signed up for was a 3x3 collage swap that was due mid-September. I went through every email list I'm on, every Yahoo group, every notation on my calendar, and finally decided she was talking about the 3x3 swap.

In the meantime, I was doing some cleanup on my websites and Etsy store, and I thought I better double-check the email address I have listed with Etsy. I remembered that I had set up a new email address, which I hadn't checked in a long while (fortunately, I hadn't had any recent purchases at the Etsy store!). So I logged in, checked my email under that address, and saw pages and pages of messages about the fabric postcard group I had signed up for and completely forgotten about. DOH.

The postcards aren't due until November, but they've already started rolling in, and I figured it was best to get them done before my Quilt U class starts, which is much more intensive and time consuming. I had a small art quilt that just wasn't working, and so I had cut it up into pieces. One of the pieces became the design inspiration for my fabric postcards. Here is a completed card; 7 down, only 17 more to go!

The other project I may try to tackle this weekend is the 3x3 collage swap. Collage is not my strong suit, and I'm not sure why I signed up for this swap, unless it was to push myself (or punish myself!). The design process has been weighing on my mind. I'm not a design-in-advance person; I need to get started on the work, and the design comes out of the process. I know the pieces will take shape when I sit down to do them, but in the meantime they're nagging at me and I'd just as soon send them packing.