the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

No, I'm not dead, I haven't entered the witness protection program, and I haven't been incarcerated. I've just been in the fifth circle of hell, magazine production, followed by the sixth circle, unexpected article assignments. Ugg. I promise to write something fiber-related soon. Possibly tomorrow, after I finish cutting a gazillion lines out of one column and browbeating several recalcitrant article reviewers.

Studio sign

I want this sign (and the flashing lights) for the hallway outside the studio (aka sewing room).

Drowning in Bears

No, this isn't a picture of my daughter's bedroom, although it could be...county fair 2005

Fairy Tales with a Twist

My daughter and son (4 and 6) are attending day camp this summer. This week's focus is "Creative Dramatics," and they'll be putting on a play based on three fairy tales for us parents this Thursday night. Ethan and Ally are thoroughly enjoying the acting and craft-making. This morning, Ally decided to tell Mark and me all about one of the fairy tales: Handsome and Griddle. Gotta love kids!

Work trumps quilting

Another week and nary a thing done in the studio. Work is ramping up right now, as we're nearing production on the magazine, and articles have to be written, if not completed. So, between working and trying to keep the house under control, I've managed only to wash some of the fabric that's been lingering in my basement so that I can put it away in the studio. Please note: THIS IS THE ONLY LAUNDRY AND IRONING I WILL HAPPILY PERFORM. Don't ask me to remove a pesky stain (although I am a serious consumer of Shout) or iron your shirts, please.

I'm itching to work do some thread painting on the oil pastel heart. I've also got to get serious about the postcards for Postmark'dart! I was going to mess with the piece with painted fusible, with the intention of cutting it up for postcards, but my art quilt group buddy has suggested that I paint two more pieces and we use it as a challenge fabric. Oh well, I can always paint some more!

Because there is little opportunity to participate in fiber-related classes in this area, I've signed up for two at Quilt University. I'm so excited! I've wanted to take the Elements in Fabric class taught by Linda Schmidt for months! The other class, People in Places, is also taught by Linda. I brought the supply lists for the classes to our weekly group meeting, and one of my friends decided to sign up for the Elements class, too. Now to gather the supplies on the list, which we'll probably be sharing.

And, on a final note, our art quilt group finally has a name: The Grateful Threads!

Hot!

This is how it feels here in lovely Indiana. Fires of hell, anyone?

This is a postcard made for the first round of the Postmark'dArt postcard swap.

Rain!

It's finally raining here in sticky, hot Indiana! After three weeks of mid-90s weather, early morning attempts to revive the flowers with the hose (the hosta's a goner), and boiling drives in my rat-trap car without working AC, I am soooo happy! We should have a one-day reprieve from these nasty temperatures on Saturday, when the high should only be 83! The kids were wishing for snow yesterday...

Ginger asked to see some pictures of the samples I was playing with the other day. (Thanks for asking, Ginger!) I was in a rather feverishly productive mood for a couple of days, which unfortunately results in piles of dirty laundry, dishes overflowing from the sink, and processed food-based meals. Oh well, can't do everything all the time. Really, I get most work done in spurts, usually in conjunction with the kids' bath times, lol. (My studio is next to the bathroom, so I can keep an eye on them and stitch a little, too.) Making "art" (geez, that sounds so arrogant--I'm just getting used to calling my sewing room a studio!) seems like a good excuse for generally poor housekeeping. Unless you ask my husband...

Anyway, the top left sample is black cotton covered with painted WonderUnder. I'm not sure yet what I'd like to do with this. I'm thinking it needs stamping or foiling or more paint. The colors of the paint are actually brighter than the scan shows. The top right photo shows oil pastels on the same black fabric. I think this little heart may become a postcard. The bottom left photo is painted cotton batting (Setacolor on Warm and Natural) with needle-felted wool yarn, wool roving, cheesecloth, silk ribbon, and novelty fibers. The piece is actually bigger than the scanner bed. However, I like this portion of it most, and once finished, I'll probably crop it to this size. It needs more work, probably more needle felting and fme/fmq. Maybe I'll have more ideas about what to do with all of the samples after they've aged a bit on the design board.

New obsessions

The art quilt meeting on Friday was great, again! The take-away quote of the evening was from my friend Brenda Ramponi, who says "art is a verb," meaning that a work is not static, but derives meaning from its creator as well as those who view it. In that sense, art is also a collaboration between the artist and the viewer, the "action" of art being complete only when the viewer has reacted to it, whether positivly or negatively. Aside from talking about what art means to us, eating brownie cake, and drinking iced tea, we made plans to travel to Quilt National at the Dairy Barn. This will be my first trip to the show, and I'm prepared to be completely awed.

On to the obsessions... Edy's Dibs Bite-Sized Ice Cream Snacks are the work of the devil. I can't stop eating them! I guess I should just stop buying stuff that looks yummy under the pretense that it's for the kids. Although they do like them, too--just not as much as I do. Maybe because I've eaten them all before they could get hooked...

The other obsession is definitely more quilt-related. I'm having a great time with the Setacolor paints that have been sitting in my studio gathering dust for almost a year. I bought them on a visit to the 'rents and have been afraid to use them because "I don't know how to paint." Well, I still don't know how to paint, but I'm having a great time playing with them anyway. I finished another postcard that has painted Lutradur on the front. I like it, but the hand-dyed back is more striking than the front. I don't think the thread contrasted enough with the paint colors. I also painted some Wonderunder and fused it (after much ironing) to black cotton. It's hanging on the wall until it tells me what the next step should be. Then, yesterday I painted some cotton batting with the intention of breaking out the embellisher and felting some fibers to it. Brenda also suggested playing with oil pastels on fabric, so I made a small heart stencil with freezer paper and messed with the pastels on black fabric. This technique definitely deserves more playtime in the studio! I loved the way the colors popped off the black fabric. But, I'm wondering, is it necessary to heat set the oil pastels or treat them in some other way so that they don't rub off the fabric?

Postcards and Noodling

The second meeting of our art quilt group is tonight, and I haven't progressed further on the bird's eye challenge than sketching two bird's eyes, tearing out a picture of Pale Male from the current issue of Vanity Fair, and digging out some feather trim (rescued earlier from the jaws of the vacuum cleaner) from my stash. Knowing what I want to do with the idea doesn't necessarily equate with knowing how to do it.

Instead of figuring out this puzzle, I've been noodling with more paint and Lutradur. This is too much fun! One small piece was painted for the back of the faux suede postcard below, but I decided to back it with a funky Kaufman print instead. More stuff for the scrap box, but that's okay since I seem to find more inspiration lately in little pieces of fabric than in big hunks of the stuff. Maybe I'm too easily intimidated into creating on a larger scale, who knows.

another postcard with faux suede, painted lutradur, and beads. Hope the shell beads won't be too dimensional for the mail.

postcard made with batik scraps, variegated cotton thread, and glitter glue

Fiber art groups, and postcards, and grumpy folks, oh my!

Our small quilt art/fiber art group is having our second meeting this week! A dear friend of mine who has been a quilt artist for years and has ventured into art doll making is a member of our little group, along with another friend from the local quilt guild, to which I also belong (for how much longer, I'm not sure). We're meeting once a week and already have started planning a road trip to Quilt National at the Dairy Barn. Unfortunately, the other member of our group (in whose wonderful studio space we met) is too busy with other obligations to be involved with the group. We're also exploring the idea of challenges, with a no-pressure approach. The first one is to interpret "bird's eye view," which was spawned by the view of a nearby forest from our host's second-floor studio. I'm trying to figure out how to translate my idea into fabric--or even into a sketch, since I'm not very skilled at drawing. I'd like to construct a close-up of an owl's eye surrounded by "feathers." Trees would be reflected in the eye. I've got a pretty pathetic sketch, but nothing in fabric yet. What really has me hung up is how to do the reflection (maybe using sheers) and how to make the feathers without using feathers (which could be pretty cool). My other idea involves a view of a person from above. Having been the target of a few too many birds, I think this idea has some merit, too. :)

Now that the studio is a little more organized (meaning that one can actually walk through the door and reach the sewing machine without scaling all kinds of stuff piled on the floor), postcard construction must begin. I belong to the Postmark'd Art postcard exchange group (www.postmarkdart.com), and the deadline for mailing off this round of postcards is looming. I pulled out my batik and hand-dyed scraps the other day and started on one. I wasn't satisfied with the fancy machine stitches I had used on part of the postcard, though. So, figuring that it was probably headed for the trash can (or maybe my mom, who likes anything her baby does), I added some glitter glue swirls to it. Okay, glitter glue? I know, not terribly shi-shi surface design material, but hey, JoAnn Fabrics had this really nifty bucket of glitter glue tubes in all sorts of colors on sale the other day. I bought it with the justification that my kids can't get enough of the stuff, but I was secretly coveting all the colors myself. The glue sunk into the fabric and dried nice and flat, just leaving the glitter on the surface. I think I have to fool around a little more with this stuff before I surrender it to the kids...

I also have to finish another card that was started as a memento of our cruise in April. I took a photo of the ship, traced the outlines of the shapes onto vinyl, and used the tracing as a pattern and placement device for fusible applique. I still have to add the details with thread and possibly Pigma pens.

Okay, so is everyone just touchy this time of year, or what? I'm a confessed lurker on several fiber-related lists, and the members of one in particular seem really out of sorts lately. Meaning, like for the last several months. The delete button on my keyboard has been getting a workout. Why can't people just read the posts, maybe get peeved in private, give it a few minutes, then let the urge to lambaste the offender dissipate? And then the vocal members of the group wonder why (and complain about) people lurking. I'm not a terribly confrontational person in "real" life, so why would I want to be in my "cyber" life? And, although I may have a rather noticeable birthmark on my forehead, it isn't in the shape of a bull's-eye.

Postcard made from felted wool; needlefelted acrylic-wool yarn, wool roving, and novelty yarn; and seed beads

Back to quilting

It seems like ages since I quilted anything. Yesterday, I paid a visit to the sewing room, looking for something little to ease my way back into creating. A fabric postcard was sitting on the cutting board, started sometime in March when I finally broke out the Embellisher. The base is a Goodwill find: a grey wool skirt that felted nicely. An acrylic-wool blend chunky yarn needle felted wonderfully onto the wool. I added a novelty yarn that also felted better than I expected. I free-motion quilted around the novelty yarn, with mixed results. I used Aurifil thread in the bobbin, which I love to use in the bobbin and needle when piecing. However, I can't seem to get the tension set correctly when I use Aurifil in the bobbin with any other kind of thread in the needle.

After quilting the postcard, I added some seed beads to the design, which makes me think of a picture of new stars. I pulled out a couple of drawers of beads from the nuts-and-bolts-type of storage unit and proceeded to dump an entire drawer of seed beads all over the plush carpet. Arrrgggh. A few choice words and a lot of picking later, I had most of the beads back in the drawer. That is, until I reached for it again to dump a few more in. Result: beads all over the floor again. At that point, I went to the linen closet, grabbed the vacuum, and smilingly sucked up the blasted beads. The experience just reinforced that old lesson: Don't sweat the small stuff. Too bad I hadn't thought of that before I started picking up the beads...

Back from vacation

We're back from vacation, tanned (them) and slightly sunburned (me), and ready for a few days to get back into the groove of things. Why is it that at the end of a vacation, you're so tired that you need another one to recuperate? We went on a week-long Disney cruise with our four- and six-year-old that we had planned a year ago (the result of a company award that my husband received--no way would I have been convinced to spend that much money out of pocket). Well, after 12 months of obsessive planning on my husband's part, the vacation came off without a hitch. Of course, the kids came down with bronchitis the week before we left, causing panic and fears of quarantine, but the antibiotic came through! We sprang the vacation news on the kids the morning we left, after a week of surreptitious packing and errands.

The kids had a blast on the ship. Simple things made their trip: getting to sleep in a pull-down bed, eating ice cream whenever they liked, playing on the beach, staying up late. I loved the sound of the ocean, the beautiful views, and the peace of sitting on the veranda and reading. I could, however, have taken a pass on the seasickness... Luckily, that didn't last long, and Mark came armed to the teeth with every motion sickness remedy available.

I brought along my sketchbook, which got no use since I forgot to pack the colored pencils in the last-minute suitcase stuffing. The digital camera and Mark's 35-mm got a workout, though. At least one picture seems worth translating into cloth. Once the laundry is done and the piles of stuff are put away.

Ahhh, the closet...very appealing to my occasional obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And the source of most of the stuff that appears all over the place in the other pictures.  

More mess. 

Room 'o doom from the doorway, which can't be entered without removing piles of stuff and another view from the door.  

Thanks to Gevalia

It must have been that large mug of Gevalia Dark Roast at 3:00 p.m. yesterday that did it. I was so wired last night that I couldn't drift off to sleep. Somewhere around midnight, I began thinking about what I had written yesterday about fear. That emotion has characterized so much of my life.

Growing up in rural western Pennsylvania and the youngest of six children by many years, I spent much of my time alone. It amazes me now to think of the things I did routinely that I would never allow my children to do now. Either my parents had blind faith in the universe, or they were just too overworked and tired to worry that much about my activities. One of my favorite things to do as a little girl of eight or nine was to walk the railroad tracks, sometimes with my elder sister and cousin (when they deemed me acceptable company) or most often by myself. One section of the tracks traveled over a bridge, if you could call it that. The water far below glimmered through the gaps between the trestles, and I don't really remember any rails along the sides. Walking the length of the bridge seemed to take an eternity, and I was always sure I could hear a train whistle somewhere in the distance. I wrestled with both the fear of loosing my footing while hurriedly stepping from one trestle to the next and the fear of moving too slowly. By the time I reached the end of the bridge, looking over my shoulder along the way, I was convinced that I had just barely escaped death by speeding locomotive, even if there wasn't a train for miles. The fear I experienced on the bridge wasn't the disabling kind I've slogged through so many times since. It was exhilerating, challenging me to do something that may have been foolhardy, but that also resulted in a bolstering of my confidence once I completed the task. There's a quilt in those train trestles...

The Room of Doom

I finally made it back into the sewing room, although only for as long as it took the kids to play in the bath water. It's been weeks, it seems, since I've done anything remotely creative, mainly because the sewing room has been a total pit and I've lacked the focus or motivation to get it together, then actually launch into a project. I know, I know, it seems like everyone with a quilting blog has caught the spring cleaning bug, but this has been brewing for me since January, when the sewing room experienced what looked like projectile vomiting. I'll post pictures taken to shame myself into at least creating a path to the sewing cabinet. After about a week's worth of dragging assorted bins, books, and do-dads out of the room, and reorganizing the fabric inside the closet, I can actually see the floor. Okay, so the perimeters of the room are still stacked with stuff, but I'm out of space in the closet...

The other challenge to getting started is my mood: angry, depressed (as in clinical), frustrated. So far, this has been a bumpy year for my marriage (okay, so what year hasn't??), and tensions are running high. Add to this stew a heaping helping of fear (of failure, change, divorce, my work not being good enough), and most of my output has been in the form of tears.

Part of the anger, I know, is disapointment with myself. I'm furious that I haven't made time for art, or any other theraputic activity that would improve my outlook. I'm frustrated that I haven't produced anything, especially since I was invited to exhibit some things at an art event at the end of April.

There's currently a discussion on the Quiltart list about this same problem. It's good to know that I'm not the only person who's caught on the anxiety hamster wheel. Now to get the damn thing to slow down a little. Wait a minute, what if I just run a little slower? Or just jump off of it altogther; that is, choose peace over anxiety. As corny as it sounds, I've been praying a little every day, asking for help with the anger and depression. Letting go is something I've never done well.

So, I have a relatively ordered sewing room. I'm working on the chaos in my head and heart. Now to dive into the work.