New vessel done

"Bind Me Together"
April 2008
Fabric vessel. Fabric scraps, threads, beads.

See this post for the process of making this. On top is a row of fabric beads made by wrapping and stitching scraps together into a sphere about 2-3cm in diameter and then attaching seed beads individually.
I feel as if my life is in tatters. My depression is worse than before I went into hospital last year and I'm struggling to cope with things I KNOW I have found very easy before. I feel like I want to keep excusing myself and saying "but I'm not usually like this, I'm usually more together..."

The "observer consciousness" part of me finds it very apt that this bowl has arisen from this desperate time of trying to hold everything together. Many tears fell onto this work. I followed some (very tattered) instincts and several times along the way I wanted to give up as I thought the result would be too ugly, but I can't sit and do nothing, so I just kept on - and now that it is done, I really like it, because... it speaks for me. It witnesses. It's proof. It's tatty and organic and raw and rich and chaotic and a lot like me. And I like it.

And that ought to make me feel good, so why, I wonder, do I still feel as though I am stumbling around in a very long, dark night....?

Burning Man and creativity

In a recent issue of FiberArts magazine, there was an article about the Burning Man festival held in the Nevada desert, USA every year. I just finished reading a fascinating article about the Art of Burning Man by Darryl van Rhey. Some very, very interesting thinking and quite affirming to read as someone (an 'outsider') who is unschooled in art but has a "burning"(excuse pun) desire to make art all the time...

My Inno 2008 entry

I didn't think I was going to be able to get it together this year, but I felt so sad to let the chance slip by, that I managed to make an effort after all - I've entered Innovative Threads 2008. It's a wonderful annual South African Fibre Art exhibition (when I first heard of it and saw some of the works I would never in my wildest dreams have thought I could ever be part of it) and this year Tonya has taken it back to Cape Town to Margie Garratt's gorgeous exhibition space, Nova Constantia Cellars. Here is a review from the 2006 exhibition (I wasn't in it) held there.

They have a theme this year: "The only journey worth taking is the journey within" which I feel ambivalent about, but I really would love the opportunity to be juried in again and if I don't enter, I have NO chance...
My entry is called "Viral Load". It is a free-hanging work and represents a model of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. The little dolls inside are (hopefully!) recognisable as derived from Edvard Munch's "Scream".
There is a mirror inside at the back, so you see your own reflection when you peer inside.
I am very reluctant to explain this work as I really want each person to make their own interpretation. It can be interpreted in several ways and I don't want to impose anything and risk stunting how you see it. The HIV/AIDS topic is a hot and highly relevant one in South Africa and I just want to contribute to the debate...

Marking time

... waiting for medication to work. Sorry, no pics today, but I have completed the scrap wors basket and slow progress is being made on a few other projects. I'll be back.

Scrap wors

I was looking at my bag of scrap-scraps (bits of fabric and thread that are too small to do anything with, such as the 5cm ends of threads you cut off when piecing or teeny bits of fabric cut off when squaring off etc - I keep everything) and I've figured out another way to use them.

Ingredients: Aforementioned scraps and some spools of thread (do not use your nice threads - the very cheap ones are fine.) You can use any threads.
Pick up some scraps and start winding the thread around them to make a sausage. Keep going, wrapping the thread around the scraps as much as is needed to hold them together. Do this until the sausage is about a half to one metre long (longer than that becomes really unwieldy to handle.) And you'll have a handful of sausage, or "wors" as it's called here in SA.

I thought I'd make another bowl, so I began coiling the wors and have just finished the base below and am about to start going up the sides. It's good for the state my brain is in at the moment (still not better) and goes well with mindless TV - and at the end I will (hopefully) have a fairly solid, useable bowl.

Rosalie has a website!

... where you can see some of her quilts. Exquisite. I'm very taken by her work and up close it is even more beautiful. She is teaching quite a bit in the USA these days. She has a wealth of skill, insight and experience - take a class with her if you ever get the chance! www.rosaliedace.co.za

Emmy Schoonbeek

I've blogged about her before, but she's worth another mention :) I love going over to her blog, Cramzy to see what she has been doing; I find it all very inspiring. She does a lot of embroidery and embellishing and has one of those needlepunching machines and puts it to great use.
Highly recommended! Emmy is from Holland.
-and I was very, very honoured to see that I am listed in her sidebar: thanks Emmy!

(and, yes, the timestamp is correct, I've been waking at about 2am every morning and unable to get back to sleep...)

Easy weekend

'Twas a slow weekend by us....

But some of us did find enjoyment in the fabric stashes:

Soft drink cans

I'm quite enthralled by the number of colours you can find on soft drink cans. This is a *small* selection! I could get sucked into trying to make something with the fronts instead of the backs...
(This is not fibre art. Sorry.)

(Aside: Began Cymbalta today. Black hole here, please, please a bit of respite?)

In the Meantime

I'm still churning out fabric beads, collecting tin cans and cutting them up for my second piece in the Armour series and painting some cloth to make a background for my Tri-Nations Challenge entry. I have decided on the poastcard I'm sending to Cyber Fyber so just need to get that parcelled up and taken to the post office.

Otherwise I'm not doing so great. So let's keep the focus on the fibre, shall we?

Padfolio

A couple of weeks ago, I made this padfolio, from the Free Projects on Fibre and Stitch, by Sue Bleiweiss. It has an exam pad inside, with some pockets for pens etc. The biggest compliment came from my younger daughter who asked if she could borrow it and take it to school with her! High praise indeed.
Of course I didn't follow the instructions exactly, as I always think I can see another way. All I can say is that next time I WILL be doing it just as she says, as I now understand WHY. But I always have to pick the hard path to learning.

More block printing

After printing with the last block of polystyrene from a vegetable tray, I found a larger piece of polystyrene and wanted to cut deeper so there'd be less smudging of the print. What to cut polystyrene with? I took the problem to my nightly mind-wanderings where I determined that the ideal would be a heat tool - now what did I already have that could serve this purpose. A soldering iron! It worked really nicely and I burnt (melted) out a pattern, rolled fabric paint onto it with my little craft foam roller and printed. Hey presto! Much easier than screenprinting. Now, with the next pattern I want to draw a design that matches up along the edges and try to print seamlessly
I didn't much like the result of the green flour resist I did earlier, so it proved to be the ideal cloth to overprint, and I think it looks much better now.
Fun, fun.
One of my daughter's blood test's came back very low, so we now have a further test on Friday to see if this could the problem (being deliberately vague here to protect her privacy.) Dare I hope for an answer, at last?

Flour resist - 2 takes

Two takes on the flour resist technique I mentioned earlier, after washing and ironing. The first is brown on white fabric and the one below is blue and brown on a previously dyed purple fabric. I really, really like this effect. It's batik-like without all the fuss with melting wax and then trying to get it out again.
Today we venture south-west to our closest town to see my daughter's endocrinologist - hopefully he has some explanation for why she is feeling so rotten all the time. He is going to give us the results of the gazillion blood tests he did last time. I woke up at 2am. My depression has headed south again.

Fabric printing

Bought this wonderful book a few weeks ago. It shows several techniques, and I've been trying them out. I did a screenprinting course many years ago and loved what I could do with it, but I'm too impatient now to sit and paint the screen with shellac, and I don't have the equipment and emulsion to use the photographic technique. So when I saw this, I was delighted!
You cut out the bottom of a polystyrene tray (such as veges are sometimes packed in)
(I taped some "handles" to the underside, so I could hold them.)
... and then you scribble patterns into the styrofoam with a pen or whatever. Roll on paint and print away.
It prints imperfectly, but I like the charm of it. And you get better as you do it more.

Embossing cooldrink can metal

When I can't fall asleep (which is often) I lie in bed and think "what if" sort of things and try to let my mind free-wheel in a kind of brainstorming mode where no ideas are silly or unfeasible. Often in this frame of mind, solutions come to mind. I was lying trying to think of all the possible ways I could make impressions in the cooldrink can metal I've been working with - and it suddenly occured to me: an engraver! Of course! Luckily our local library has an engraver, that one can borrow on one's library card, so here it is and it works just fine. I do have to set it on the highest setting to get it to make a decent imprint, but it is way better than having to press hard with your hands, which I can't do at this stage anyway.

So I've been fishing cooldrink cans out of bins, especially on campus, where there are always rich pickings. If you spot me looking in a bin and reaching a hand inside, it's not that I've fallen on hard times and am looking for food, I'm just scavenging for art materials!!

18 today!

Today my firstborn turns 18. (Of course I'm not a day older.)
Happy Birthday Love!
- from your mom who clearly wasn't thinking at all when she said "yes, of course you can invite 42 people over for supper and a party..."

Like they say.. It's irresistable

The article on flour resist dyeing in the latest Quilting Arts is called "It's irresistable!" I had intended to leave the paint to cure for longer (since it's covered in flour, you can't really heat-set it, so you have to let time do the work) but yesterday my curiosity got the better of me and I couldn't resist throwing caution to the winds and washing out some of the flour, at the risk of losing the paint. (I didn't lose the paint.)
Now I wish I hadn't done it on a white background! I think I'll overpaint it with a transparent lighter colour, to colour the background, without losing the etching-like scratches. I have another piece drying at the moment, which I had previously dyed and have now overdyed.

What a lot of fun. Love it when the Quilting Arts inspires me to try something like this out.

The above makes me feel as though the old way I used to use flour resist is now quite boring!

Flour Resist

After the article in the latest Quilting Arts about Flour Resist, I just couldn't "resist" trying it again.
It is going to be hard to wait for this to cure, before I can wash off the flour - I want to see the results NOW.

Metalwork - more pics

At last I have managed to take some half-decent pictures of the metalwork hanging. (I only posted detail shots in my previous post as the full shots were blurred.) Here's the full view.
I've cut up several more cans and am planning more in this vein. Must try and find a way of doing the embossing, that isn't so hard on the hands.

Journal

I'm still making fabric beads ad infinitum, but thought I'd post these pictures of a journal that I made after I had seen the journals of Sue Bleiweiss.
I screenprinted this fabric long ago when I took a screenprinting class. The design is partly from a serviette and partly my own made-up doodles. I backed it with some batting and quilted it with some silver thread.
I used satin for the inside, but wouldn't use it again - too shiny and slippery - I would have preferred a cotton lining. But now I know. I sewed in 3 signatures of white and other coloured papers. I used old laminated posters (of which there are always plenty in an academic environment) as the stiffening, as I do not access to Peltex (which I think is what Sue uses). It worked fairly well, although it could be stiffer. But all in all, I'm pretty happy, for a first journal. Thanks to Sue Bleiweiss for inspiration!

Cats on my stuff

Silliness

Some silliness for those who have young children:

If you ever see a bunny
whose nose is very runny,
you might think it's funny
but it's (s)not!

Fabric Beads

Ahhhhh, another madness to get obsessive about. Fabric beads. These are just a few of the beads I've finished in the last few days. They are really addictive. Can't wait to begin using them in something - it will have to be nice and three-dimensional.
They're intriguing little things and I keep being drawn to pick one up and look at it closer. Ah well, there are worse things to be addicted to. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Cyber Fyber - I've joined!

I'm thrilled that I am going to be part of the Cyber Fyber Exhibition!
I am trading for Postcard No 156 and this weekend will give some thought to which postcard to post to Susan Lenz, or to perhaps making a new one especially for the occasion.
Many, many thanks to Jackie of Blissfully Imperfect who mentioned this to me and got me curious enough to go and take a look. Apparantly I am currently the only representative of the whole continent of Africa. There are many like me, I assure you, so that is not representative of fibre artists in this neck of the woods. But I am glad we are going to be in there and will attempt to keep the African flag flying high!

Metalwork

These are going to be "teaser" pics, not intentionally, but because the rest of the pics I took are tooooo blurry. I will re-try, but here are the close-ups, so long.
It feels like armour to me, and since much of it was done with the hulking big bandage on my hand, and with me feeling like I needed some armour against life's assaults, that's what I am sticking with.. no title yet, but I'm also not 100% sure that it's finished yet, even though it's up and hanging

Carpal tunnel repair

This is such a clever little operation and it has really, really helped. Above is my left hand, which was done about two years ago - you can faintly see a scar running from the wrist crease to about halfway up m y palm. I call it my "wealth line".

Below is the "Can hold needle - will sew" shot. I have to spend just TWO more days in this bandage, which has been a monumental pain in the {insert own body part here}. It's bulky, hot in this sticky summer weather and by now, much grubbier than the picture (thank goodness I took that shot some time back!)
But I have to say the orthopaedic surgeon has done a fine job - and of course I have a design worked out for a new work based on this experience. Making lemonade and all that...

Edit 4 March 2008
... and here it is just after the bandage came off. Still very red, but that will fade.

Is this Angelina?

I've read so much about Angelina fibres, but have never found a really good picture/description, and have never found it locally, so when I found this lilac fuzz at our local stationery/arts/crafts shop (Albany Business Machines, in case any locals were wondering) I thought it looked like what I imagine Angelina fibres to be. I bought some and took them home to play with. I tried to iron some together, between two sheets of fusible release paper and it worked like a charm! So even if it isn't Angelina, I can use it as if it was :)

It's called Angel's Hair according to the lady who orders it and the label says Sparkle Shred. Next I am going to ask if she can order it in different colours (the lilac is not my first choice of colour!) Can any of you knowledgable people out there in blogland tell me if it looks like Angelina?

I'm listed in a sidebar :)

Belonging to webrings has been a great move - I've been getting a bit more traffic on my blog. It's not the traffic I am after as much as the contact and exchanges with other similar folks - so thanks to anyone who has stopped by and left a comment, so I can follow you to your own site and get inspired :)

I've now even made it to a sidebar of another fibre art blog! - go have a look at Jackie K's Blissfully Imperfect (love the name!)

Mickey

Metal

I've wanted to explore using metal with fibre for some time. Apparently you can buy craft metal (not sure if it's pewter or what) but I have not seen any here in Grahamstown, which is the usual downside to living in a small place.

The upside to living in a small place is that you then get inventive about finding substitutes. So here is a very plentiful substitute: the ubiquitous cooldrink can (or "soda can" as the Americans call it). I wash them out, cut off the top and bottom and down the middle and voila.

I used an old dry ballpoint pen to scribble patterns on them. This isn't the best tool as I found I had to press very hard. It was VERY hard on the hands - I did these before my hand operation, and will not be able to do any more until my hand has healed. I would imagine the craft metal that is sold, is softer. One buys a ball tool for this, but really, how is a ball point pen different? You also have to cut smoothly as any jagged or pointy edges are really sharp. I bought a cheap (as in R5.99) pair of kitchen shears from Pep to cut the cans with as I was not going to risk my nice scissors and they have proved perfect (Now I'm wondering if cutting metal does not actually *sharpen* the scissors? Anyone know?)
To disguise the origin of the metal I backed them with fabric wrapped around the front and hemmed with mitred corners. I also want to try doing something that does not disguise the other side, but I did not want the distraction of the multi-coloured side for this project.

I would also still like to try and find another way to make the marks on the metal, that doesn't wreck the hands quite so much. The metal/fibre combination has SOOO many possibilities I really want to do more.

Pics of finished project soon...

My Blog of the Week!

If you haven't seen it already, you MUST hop along to Sue Bleiweiss' blog.
Fantastic stuff.
She publishes an online Mixed Media 'zine called Fibre and Stitch. Just a look at the contents page of the latest issue made my mouth water. If the Free Projects are anything to go by, I think I may just NEED to get this into my life :)

Not so bad

I've taken painkillers on 6 occasions in the last 6 days and there is no more pain, so I'm pretty impressed with that. Still not a lot of grip strength in my hand (cutting with scissors is out) but the opposable thumb bit is getting better. It aches at the end of the day, but I have to admit that is when I have pushed it hard. I still have a very bulky and irritating bandage on, which is only coming off in TWO weeks(!) I have finished my black and grey piece, but pics will have to wait until I can get them uploaded.
So, not that much of interest here, today. Sorry.

I'm a terrible patient

I'm so restless and need to be doing something with my hands.

However, I CAN hold a needle (joy of joys!) and even though I don't have much strength in my right hand, (using any of the hand muscles pulls on the stitches and hurts) I can do basic things. So I have installed myself on the couch with season one of Grey's Anatomy and about 2 seasons of House MD and I am working rather mindlessly on a black and grey piece that I'll show you when I can figure out how to get pics onto a computer whose USB ports are all broken. Mickey kitten comes and climbs onto my lap and plays with my thread and is soooo cute. Every now and then I take 2 of the 20 pills I was given for pain, when it gets too sore, although I must say the pain has not been very bad.

I can't shake an oppressively heavy, depressed feeling that has settled over me like a blanket. It seems it is always lurking about, waiting to pounce on me when I'm not alert... :(

Post-op thoughts

I wish I was a glow-worm
a glow-worm's never glum,
For how can you be grumpy
when the sun shines out your bum?!

Ow.
Grump grump.
What is the use of two weeks off work, when I can't do the thing I MOST want to do whenever I'm off???

Tri-Nations Challenge

With a prod from a friend, (thanks, Mariss) I have enetered the Tri-Nations Challenge.
O help! I have NO IDEA what I am going to make. The entry form had to be in by 31 Jan, so I just sent it in, without any clue as to what I would do. It has to be 50x50cm with theme "My Place".
No doubt something will occur to me...

South Africa's National Quilt Festival, held every two years, is coming up in September this year in Johannesburg. I have to decide a) whether I am going and b) whether I am going to try and enter something. I also have to decide about my entry for Innovative Threads, which has a THEME this year, much to my dismay (it's usually open-themed). I'm dismayed because I recently finished what was going to be my Inno entry for this year (been working on it 2 years and haven't shown it here yet), but I dont think I am going to be able to squeeze it into the theme :( And I'm SO proud of it.

And to go with this dismay, I lost a filling in a tooth, that I just had done last week and I have to go for the Carpal Tunnel op on my hand next week. Lovely day. Why is the general trend just always south, I wonder. oh well, just have to get on with it, I guess...

Tatty edges rule :)

Just before making the piece I posted about a few days ago, I cut the raw edges off all the fabrics. They had a lovely frayed look to them. I sewed them all onto a piece of black fabric and don't they look great all lined up together :)
I will probably make a fabric journal cover from this. Any other suggestions?

Hand Trouble

Two years ago, I had an operation to repair the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in my left hand. At the time, I had it in both hands, but much worse in the left, so I only got the left done. Now I fear it is time to do the right hand.

I'm really anxious about this! Much more so than last time around. My right hand is so instrumental in all the things that are really important to me, that the thought of laying it under a surgeon's scalpel just doesn't appeal to me. I know it will help; it won't be so sore, tingling, numb etc. but... but... I also know I won't be able to use it for 2 weeks, during which time I will be off work and thus ACHING to make stuff and thus frustrated out of my tree!

My appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon is on Monday 4 Feb. Sigh. I also remember it was about 6 months before I could say my hand had fully recovered. I'll have to learn to use a mouse with my left hand and perhaps I should take out a DVD contract... ugh, I don't want this.