and the green three-toed sloth whistles far and wee

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giant 3-toed sloth with hot air balloons

in Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

—[in Just-] from Chansons Innocentes by e.e. cummings

Fooling around in my journal pages recently. I couldn’t think of what to paint after I’d done the striped clouds on this journal page, and slowly, out of my not-caring and my not-thinking of very much at all, came this cahracter. My queer little balloonman is neither lame nor ominously, sexually goat-footed; he’s a harmless giant three-toed sloth, sporting the greenish fur that many sloths develop during the rainy season, as a result of algae growing in special grooves in their fur.  Sloths, like sly satyr balloonMen, communicate (far and wee) with whistle-like sounds.

Below, painting of a bunch of slightly sinister allium blooms that was really an experiment in laying down blocks of background color using a large square piece of foam, and the sort of rippled texture created when you pull the foam away from the wet, semi-translucent paint.

I find the subject of flowers—unless they are stylized into ornamental ones—very awkward to do…am not used to drawing or painting realistic ones at all. I’ve been asked to do a painting of flowers for an acquaintance’s mother, in exchange for the 6-meter roll of absolutely gorgeous Belgian linen painter’s canvas that he didn’t know what to do with and just gave to me. So I have been trying to get used to the idea of painting flowers, though I realize that these alien-looking spore-balls are not what he means. The guy is a local drunk and a grease-monkey off the oil rigs…i.e. very working class, and I’ll bet my money that his idea of a good painting of flowers is “like  a photograph”. I can hear the echoes of countless old biddies at the art stalls in airports the world over: “Oh, my, now isn’t that clever?! They look so real, just like a photograph! So clever“. (Oh, hey, now there’s an idea. I could get a flower photograph blown up and printed on canvas, then shlop on some transparent textural acrylic medium to look like dimensional brush strokes. Dear old mum probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Just kidding. I may be a cynical person, but I have a little integrity. So I am thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, because I would be happier doing a large close-up of a flower than the usual “flowers-in-a-vase on a tablecloth” arrangement. But really, I don’t have an idea, yet…it could turn out completely different from anything he, or I, anticipate!

alliums

Week 16 ✂ French Knot (TAST 2012)

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This week’s stitch for the TAST Challenge 2012 is the French Knot. I know I will never finish what I started—not in time for the round up on Sunday, anyway—so here is my sample, in all its half-assed, slacked-out glory:
DSCF2566
DSCF2567
DSCF2568

An old doyenne of the great unfinished project, I’ve actually got a few stitch samples that I never posted on here because I didn’t finish them in time.

I gave up on Satin Stitch, because I messed up the background fabric, tried to ‘fix’ it with white gesso, which made things worse. I took this shot, then destroyed it, because it pissed me off...

TAST 2012 Satin stitch

There was Herringbone Stitch, which was going along okay until the “permanent marker” I used to draw the letters ran. And I didn’t manage to get the black to slowly blend into brown the way I’d hoped. Shame because I adore this stitch, which is also known as “Witch’s Stitch” (the German word for herringbone stitch is ‘hexenstich’ – literally, ‘witches stitch’) and is used for casting spells and sealing magic into clothing. Variations of Herringbone are in the almond shapes, and the two white triangles on either side of the word ‘bone’ are (left) Crow’s Foot and (right) Sprat’s Head. I was very disappointed in myself when I didn’t finish this one in time and the paints bled. This one I kept, out of respect.
TAST 2012 herringbone (unfinished)

From way, way back, this is Cretan Stitch, which I did a lot of work on, then ran out of red thread. There wasn’t a single bit of red thread left on the boat, this pig of a stitch gobbled it all up. I tried using other, reddish threads (more like orange) and it looked awful, awful! I think I was leaving for Malaysia around this time, so I just abandoned it. Looking at it again, I decided I would never finish it, and didn’t like the way it was headed, so I threw it out.
Cretan Stitch (TAST 2012) WIP

✂—✂—✂—✂—✂—✂—✂

According to Sharon B., Week 15 marked an ending of the basic stitches, and stepping onto the threshold of stitches that become “more complex or less well known”. So it is time for me to decide whether I am going to continue the way I have been or not. Obviously I am not keeping up; that for me is a sign that I have once again ignored the huge discrepancies between what I want to do, and what I am capable of. The typography + stitch thing has not always been a great combination…some stitches, like the Whipped Wheels of week 11, while not impossible to work as letters, looked pretty damn ugly as letters. Seemed to defeat the purpose. I am defeated.

I have to also take into consideration the amount of time that these samples take up…last month saw me bitterly, bitterly broke. I should be making journals and stuff that I can take to the craft markets which are starting up in town now that the good weather of winter is moving in…I need the embroidery project to function as more than a solipsism.

I’m marking an end of my own—not to TAST, which I will keep doing because there really are a lot of stitches I haven’t tried my hand at yet—but to the stitches + typography samples. I’ll be trying now to use the weekly stitch to both learn and embellish my bookbinding and other projects. While I love the idea of  a personal book of stitch samples, it is a luxury and a fanciful project for someone in my position. I don’t really need one (especially not of stitches that I have long been familiar with, which so far is what we’ve covered in TAST) and can’t afford the time to be making such a thing; the projects I spend time on must serve some second, more practical, purpose.

And did you sign up for TAST this year? How are you doing? I really do hope you are faring better than I!

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A quiet spell

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Solitude shows us what we should be; society shows us what we are.
—Robert Cecil

journal page

Well, I’m back…

When I said it would be quiet around here for a while, I had no idea just how quiet it would get. Not only have I not been able to use my laptop or get online because I can’t power my laptop, but during the Easter weekend my registered domain name expired, and my blog was replaced by one of those scary generic pages that are the internet equivalent of a tombstone…

“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to see if the earthly remains of smallestforest.net will be available for purchase soon… (Dies iræ! Dies illa!)”

It was a bit chilling.

But this has actually been a welcome hiatus. Like a detox for the spirit. I never really realized how much time I spent on my laptop, how much of what I do is subconsciously being auditioned as ‘material’ for this blog, nor how much of my week is spent taking and fixing up the photos, or  putting the words together for it. The biggest revelation of all, during the past weeks’ internet abstinence, is that around 90% of what I do online is expendable…in real terms, my life gains so little from all these activities, that it’s not such a big loss when the whole system drops out.

Not only did life go on—minus the internet, minus smallestforest.net, minus e-mails, minus desktop applications and my entire music collection—but it seemed to get more real. I went to a smattering of exhibition openings (I even bought a small illustrated tattoo at Emily Hearn’s Taste of Ink exhibition…Yay!), ferried a new friend over to the boat for an afternoon of art talk, took long aimless walks from Dinah Beach to the esplanade in Fannie Bay just to sit and gaze at the boats in the harbour for half an hour, did stuff in my art journal, worked on embroidery projects, did a couple of paintings, made some air-hardening clay figures on which to draft patterns for some softies I want to make, wrote an amazing 38 pages (!) in my journal, and scribbled so many creative ideas down in my seedbook that I would need to hire a small team of people to carry them all out in this lifetime.

The internet can inspire, no doubt about that; there is so much wonderful stuff on here to fuel the fires of making and doing. But it can also overwhelm me to the point where I am paralyzed, addicted to looking and bookmarking, and if I didn’t regulate it, I might spend more time looking for inspiration, and not enough time alone with my own creativity and a tool in my hand! One of the most productive periods of my life was when we were living in a shack on a remote beach in a very undeveloped part of the Philippines. We had no electricity, didn’t own a laptop, there was no internet, no mobile phone, not even a small crappy camera! Yet Kris and I could barely keep up with all the ideas we were getting for things to build, make, design, paint, or do. It seemed that the more we drew from the well, the faster it filled.

And while I enjoy my laptop, camera, the internet, and a hot shower (!) now that I have all these things, it is really comforting, and empowering, to know that I didn’t need it to have ideas or make beautiful things, didn’t need it to feel like I was among the happiest people on earth, and that everything could be taken away from me, tomorrow, and life would go on, as vivid and rich as ever.

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Bear with me…

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Apple 85W MagSafe Power Adapter for 15- and 17...

Apple 85W MagSafe Power Adapter for 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Minor home tragedy has occurred…my Macbook’s charger got its positive and negative pins crossed, yesterday (ahem, while I won’t mention any names, I’d like to point out that it was the Mr. Handy Man of the house who re-wired the plug…because he said I’d gotten them mixed up and had wired it wrong. Hah!), made an awful sizzling noise, and gave off the acrid fumes of deep fried circuit boards…all in the one second before I could run to unplug the thing.

So. No charger until I order a new one. Mine was modified to plug into a automobile’s cigarette lighter socket and charge straight from a 12-volt DC battery—without using an energy inefficient inverter—by the effing geniuses at MCT, Inc.…seriously, I owe these guys, big time, for the technology I enjoy whilst living on a boat out in the harbor…these are my real heroes, not the pikers at Apple)

That’s nearly 200 smackeroos…thank you very much, Apple, for being such a bunch of snobs and designing the oh-so-exclusive, nobody-else-is-allowed-to-manufacture, fits-with-nothing-else-on-the-planet Magsafe Adapter.

In the meantime, the Macbook battery that they said lasted 8 hours, lasts 4, if you’re lucky. If I wanted to blog or check e-mail and RSS posts, I’d have to row ashore everyday, cycle into town, and plug my laptop into the power grid at the library or something. Weh. I’d much rather stay home and go into seriously intense creative mode. Things are going to be a bit quiet around here until my new charger arrives from the U.S. Sorry ’bout that.

In the meantime, go and check out Catherine Frere-Smith’s little embroidered bird softies, which have me in a paroxysm of love and envy at the moment. She was going to be my next über embroiderer, but it can’t wait till my power struggles are resolved…you really should go and have a look at this fresh blog post now.

Ah, and there goes my Pinterest account…

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Image representing Creative Commons as depicte...

Oh, I know Pinterest is already working, and quickly, on the big problems they have been having with copyright issues…so deleting my account wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction to rumors of lawsuits or anything like that.

But I was never comfortable using Pinterest…often because I would look at someone else’s pin, trying to find the source for an image (because I want to know who made it), and there wouldn’t be any information or links back to the original. There were just too many unacknowledged images on my boards, too many re-pins that, when I looked into it, didn’t have attribution. It was such a mess (and I was so mortified that I had been doing this to other people’s images!) that I deleted my account tonight. It just seemed easier than going through all my pins, deleting the ones I couldn’t trace to source.

I’ll wait till Pinterest has sorted its shit out before starting up again. So sorry to all the Pinterest followers I’m dropping, but I’d hate to think I encouraged anyone to re-pin an unattributed image that I’d used wrongly.

To be quite honest, I wasn’t using it very much anymore; I found all those images overwhelming. Spend too much time looking at other people’s original work and you might not be able to come up with your own! It was like being raped in the eyeballs by Pantone swatches: cupcakes, quilts, wedding decorations, dresses…all higgledy-piggledy and terribly, well, preoccupied with the acquisition of consumer goods, and with self-delusion: “If I can’t own it, at least it’s mine on Pinterest!”

I found that looking for too long made me start to want things…things that I didn’t need, that I didn’t even really want, that wouldn’t make me happier than I am, and that, when I finally got my hands on them, I probably wouldn’t use after the two-week shiny-new-toy phase had passed. It just does that to you…convinces you that you want/need all this…stuff! There were some good things, of course, but most of it was just ordinary junk, but in pretty colors. Blargh, I’d kill myself if I had more  than two things together in one room that used the rainbow as a color scheme. I’m not even sure that the rainbow can be called a colour scheme*…when you’re 14, the rainbow is a color scheme. But I’m not 14. Anymore. And I’m so glad my mom refused to paint my bedroom walls with balloons arranged in rainbow stripes, when I was!

*it’s a spectrum…you’re meant to choose a few hues, and leave the rest. That is a scheme.

As for my own images, I wish I could say something cool about the Creative Commons permission I put on my online images, but  it’s all pretty straightforward and uninteresting. Share alike. Attribution would be mighty decent of you. Non-commercial, though I’ll be honest and tell you I can’t be arsed to enforce anything, legally. I did, however, tell a woman to “drop dead” in 2003, and she obliged the next morning. Also, I put on a curse on someone in highscool, and her partner recently killed himself, I was told. Just sayin’. *laughs*

Banksy was cool before anyone else, and nobody does the Copyleft magnanimity better than he does. You’ll find this gem on his website, under the ironically-titled ‘Shop’ heading:

Banksy - Online Shop

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Candles…

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candles on a dark rainy day

Nights, by the light of whatever would burn:
tallow, tinder and the silken rope
of wick that burns slow, slow
we wove the baskets from the long gold strands
of wheat that were another silk: worm soul
spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other.

—from Without Regret, by Eleanor Wilner

Our wet season is winding up, but we are getting a few days of hard, straight-down, heavy-as-lead rain, as a kind of encore before the monsoon trough relinquishes it’s hold on the weather. Soon it will be winter in Australia—cold down Sydney-way, yes, but it’s a fantastic time to be in the tropical North. Everyone in Darwin is looking forward to the change of season.

One recent morning was so dark and wet and miserable that I lit a few tapers…not so much to see by, but because I needed the emotional warmth, the flickering energy and golden color of those nibs of flame. Candles are a great comfort to me…I love the way they send shadows dancing around a dark room, and I can sit and stare at them for hours. My mom was a candle maker for many years…she didn’t make everyday taper candles, but one-of-a-kind art candles—tall, heavy pillars of translucent wax which glowed from within, revealing trapped dried flowers and fern tendrils curling inside the wax when lit. Her candles were widely exhibited, pricey, and sold to collectors…

But that didn’t stop my mother from using them as everyday candles in our home; she loved the 8-hour scheduled blackouts that the government instituted, for one year, in an attempt to cut down on national power expenses. She would come in from her workshop with armfuls of candles, and light them all. There were candles everywhere in the house on those nights—fifty of them, standing in groups of three or five, sitting on every piece of furniture, shining down from high ledges, throwing their light far up into the wooden beams of the pitched roof. The house looked like a medieval chapel, it was magical.

And there’s a teensy bit of the candlemaker passed down to me, too, because I spent many hours sitting with my mother in her workshop…it was where we had most of our mother-daughter talks. I even did some work for her, when she was swamped with orders, so I have the rudiments of candle making. Maybe someday I’ll do that for a spell.

This post was a bit random…just a bit of blather and procrastination before I get to work on some sewing projects I swore I’d finish today. :)

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