Category Archives: collaborations

My perforated heart…a love letter

Posted on by

11

perforated love letter WIP

Here’s a sneak peek of a project I’m doing in collaboration with my friend Katerina Bona Vora of Zero the One…

✕✕✕ ✕✕✕ ✕✕✕ ✕✕✕  ♡  ✕✕✕ ✕✕✕ ✕✕✕ ✕✕✕

I drew the design on 2mm. graphing paper, and then used the same as a guide to perforate a sheet of 220 gsm. watercolor paper. I’m working the stitching using a single thread of DMC embroidery floss, in a shades-of-fresh-to-dried-blood variegated red…

perforated love letter WIP

perforated love letter WIP

perforated love letter WIP

Come to think of it, this piece has the same feel of this other ‘love letter’ that I made 3 years ago, using the same variegated skein of thread…

The Midnight Velada

Ambitious mum.

Posted on by

3

my awesome "somebody told me" piece from lyndzi!

She didn’t, really. Sometimes I do wish I were more ambitious, but most of the time I can’t be arsed. Eat my young? I’d have to be pregnant and have them, first, right? Gah, exhausted just contemplating it. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through for protein.

Trying to eat Willow at Hanuman's

eating Charlotte's toes...

If I wanted to eat the young, I’d go for my godchildren.

••••••••••

Funny, fierce and smart, like the crafty lady herself…this fabulous hoop arrived just before Christmas last year from my swap partner, Lyndzi49, in the Phat Quarter FFofF swap “Somebody told me.”

Lyndzi says, “It’s from one of my favorite shows 30 Rock. Adam Baldwin’s character is talking to his assistant and says the quote portion then says that he has it cross stitched on a pillow and it’s actually behind him on his couch in the scene, lol. Since seeing it, I really wanted to stitch it and it worked well for this theme by adding the mother line. :D “

I am a television and pop-culture retard, but you probably know it.

{ Still. I. Love. It. }

What mum did try to instill in me was something she liked to call “The Feminine Mystique“. Tragically, she had never read Friedan’s book, herself, and she honestly believed the term ‘feminine mystique’ was a positive and desirable one. According to mum, a woman had to maintain a feminine mystique; this involved always being vague and indirect with your partner, never telling him when you were mad or sad (nor why), and never saying things simply or openly when they could be veiled in a melodrama of tears, cryptic iciness, exotic Oriental mystery theater, hysteria, or contempt. Yes Means Maybe, Maybe Means No, No Means Hell, No!…that sort of thing. It’s a wonder we womenfolk didn’t go the whole hog and hide behind fluttering Spanish fans all day.

Naturally I rebelled—as one must against a parent’s wisdom—so I have no one but myself to blame for being happily and peacefully married now to someone who is also my second mind, deepest friend, teacher, and favorite sparring partner. Much to my regret, eh?

Related articles

12 Days of Painting on Flagler Street

Posted on by

2

And since I’ve got painting on the brain these days, here’s some painting news that has inspired me to try and work more spontaneously, more expressively, and to create pieces that dialogue among themselves, that converse with each other:

Up and coming talents,  Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson, mounted a show of 728 paintings all based on the idea of triangular numbers.  For twelve hours a day, twelve days straight, they churned out painting after painting beginning on Day One with (78)  nine minute paintings each and ending on Day Twelve with (1) twelve hour painting a piece, each time responding to what the other had created. Read More

This thrills me…it’s not just the 728 paintings—many of which look great, fresh, uncontrived and have this irresistible “of-the-here-and-now” edge—but what obviously must have been an energizing, exciting, amazing experience for the two artists. To work at that pace (78 nine-minute paintings!) and in immediate response to the ongoing work of a partner, must have opened each artist up so much…the faster and more often you draw from that well of creativity and playfulness, the faster the well fills and overflows, or at least that’s how I sense it. What a great way to evict the ego and start the flooding of ideas and images and expression!

*sigh* Love.

via Flagler Arts Space

Related articles

The Nightmare begins…

Posted on by

0

The Nightmare

Image via Wikipedia

I spent this past weekend at a two-day Handmade Christmas craft fair. I always sell out at craft fairs because I don’t make very much to begin with, but what little I do make is well-wrought, one-of-a-kind, and so special that I don’t have to hawk my wares, demonstrate anything, deliver a non-stop sales spiel, or offer bargain deals on things. The sort of folks who buy my stuff know exactly what they want, don’t question the prices, and often come to the annual two-day Marara Christmas craft fair looking for me.

A handbound journal

In between meetings with these particular customers, I spend a lot of time just waiting and watching the rest of the holiday shoppers flow past me like a river. I try to bring something to work on every year (because it looks less awkward than standing at your table with your hands behind your back, smiling at every passerby, or having to converse with lonely people who pretend to be interested in your work when they really just want to tell you about themselves) and this year I took the black cover of my Sketchbook Project 2011 to work on.

I used graph paper as a guide, and pricked all the holes out beforehand with a bookbinder’s awl; then I worked an allover blackwork pattern—reminiscent of buttons now I think on it—in black embroidery floss with a tapestry needle. It was very soothing, repetitive work that made the hours fly by quickly. I wandered off in my own thoughts about Nightmare, and escaped the horror of hearing “Rocking Around The Christmas Tree” 27 times in a day.

It’s a quiet, rich, and serious start on the sketchbook, and I am loving the subtle black-on-black (yet highly tactile) effect on the back cover. No doubt I will continue to work with thread on the front cover, but the monotony of the pattern needs a focal point.

The Sketchbook Project 2011 :: A late start

Posted on by

3

The Sketchbook Project: 2011

The best way to get something done is to publicly commit to doing it. And if you had to pay a fee at the start, so much the better…nothing more motivating than the idea that US$45 will vanish into thin air if you don’t fulfill your side of the deal.

So in early November I signed up for The Sketchbook Project. The deadline for posting the sketchbook back to The Brooklyn Art Library is 15 January 2011…and of course they sent the parcel First Class, which means that it didn’t turn up on my end until 3 December.

Which is even better, because I’m less likely to be precious about it, or try to impress anyone—there isn’t time for anything but to dive deep into my creative wells and bring up dripping fistfuls of imagery on my chosen theme.

I have 5 weeks or so to turn my sketchbook into a Nightmare.

So here it is, my $20 Moleskine cahier with black cover. Moleskines are possibly the most overrated, over-hyped examples of notebook mediocrity on the market today. The paper? It’s shite. The binding? Nothing special…it looks like it was made with a sewing machine. That bit of paper “pocket” stuck in the back? Quite useless. But oh, they’re SO popular. Why? People are suckers for a bit of advertising and image styling, I guess.

There is a world of fabulous papers out there—of exceptional quality—for every medium and every kind of treatment. Find the paper that fits your work and enhances it, I say, popular brand or not! As a consumer, stop slavishly teaching yourself to use what manufacturers force upon you, and start demanding that they raise the standards of their products to suit your exacting needs.

a gutted Moleskine cahier

My first duty as a bookbinder was, of course, to gut the notebook…get rid of the offending paper pages, and rip out that flap glued to the back cover…the black cover is non-negotiable—there’s a bar code on it that needs to stay—so I’ll work with that, but I am going to get some good, heavy paper for the pages tomorrow… it won’t have as many leaves as the original cahier, but it’s about quality, not quantity.

I’ll document the work as I go, both here and on The Sketchbook Project site.