It's done

Luckily the weather was not too warm on the day I finished the above snugglequilt, and I managed to persuade the snuggled one to pose. The backing is brushed cotton (or maybe brushed polycotton), which makes it nice and soft next to the skin. Unfortunately it makes it less useful as a picnic blanket - the brushed cotton picks up every blade of grass and it's quite a job to shake it all off.

But these bed quilts that you know will have to be able to withstand lots of washing, are really a load of work. "Work" in the sense of having to stitch everything securely, think about durability and utility aspects, as opposed to creative touches, which I wouldn't really term "work".

I read a book once, by a woman who had spent a year with a native American tribe and particularly observed their child-rearing practices. She noted that their language did not include the word "work" (as opposed to the term "leisure"). They had verbs for all the aspects of their lives, but did not distinguish between work and play, the way we do. I really liked the idea and it's a great way to look at one's life. I should do it more often!

Oak leaves

Still in progress, so I will replace this photo with one of the completed work, when it is done. What fun this is! I've been drooling over Emily Parson's quilt's recently and just *so* much want to make a floral work the way she does. I've been collecting and taking pics of flowers and plants, to try and come up with a suitable composition. This is a small test piece of the general idea.

Serviette decoupage - much better

I podged the same two serviettes onto white fabric and it works much better. Now I have chocolate and lettuce fabric and even a piece of a tomato. This tickles me so much, I can't help laughing. The idea of putting a little food into a quilt, unexpectedly, appeals to my sense of humour.

I hope the person who first invented chocolate is happy and well-cared for on a sweet pink cloud somewhere....
I *really* don't like the rubbery texture of the dried podge, though.

Boxes and drawers

I have an absolute obsession with cardboard boxes and drawers and I collect boxes and spare cardboard to make cardboard drawers for the cardboard boxes. I am starting to wonder if I should begin to worry about this. (You know that feeling? When you notice yourself doing something so much that you recognise you are obsessed and wonder if you've crossed the border from eccentric to MAD.)

Eccentric I can handle, am comfortable with, often even proud of. Eccentric is a character trait and not pathological. (As long as it doesn't bother others or oneself, I guess!) Mad is something else. I've worked with mad as a psychiatric nurse and I've seen mad many times. It often begins as eccentric and harmless, but full-blown madness is not glamorous or desirable in any way. It may feel free to abandon the responsibility of functioning in life, but the loss of freedom is ultimately far greater.

So I had snapped all these photos in my "studio"(which somehow sounds so pretentious to me, especially since my "studio" is actually the lounge/sitting room which I have taken over, pushing the couches and chairs and TV into one corner and commandeering the rest).

The first is from the doorway:

The rest are of my boxes:








There are more in the kitchen and in other rooms. I enjoy making them and there's no doubt they help us find things, but it has got to where I struggle to throw out any box and accumulate boxes for future building and begin to envisage a time when the entire room will be taken up with boxes, like a miniature city with apartment blocks.

All because I don't know how to work with wood! Maybe it is just my Inner Carpenter trying to express herself...

Serviette Decoupage

Some time ago, I collected these serviettes and bought some "Napkin Podge" to try out this technique. I was really tickled by the serviettes I bought with blocks of chocolate on them and I envisaged making fabric that looked like blocks of chocolate. I tried it out yesterday and for a change the picture looks better than the actual product! I photographed this with maximum light as well as flash, and you can actually see the patterns, but in real life they are very, very dark and you can hardly see the patterns. So I guess they are meant to be podged to white fabric and I will try this next - I really *want* chocolate-printed fabric! Just imagine - I can send a piece of chocolate fabric through the mail, or paste it to a card, or make a chocolate cushion, or... a choccie blankie.. or... create a hundred different ways to sabotage any attempt to lose a bit of weight!

The podge gives the fabric a kind of rubbery texture, which I don't much like. Not sure how it holds up to washing.

UFOs

This bed quilt is a UFO that has been going for about a year and I now have high hopes that it will soon become an FO! I'm busy on the last third of the quilting, having cleared a WHOLE table to lie the quilt on, so that I can actually manoevre it around. Amazing how much that helps!

This quilt is for my youngest daughter, and when this is completed, they will each have two quilts. This means there will be no more arguing about who is more loved, as evidenced by who has more quilts! (Beware the second- (third- etc) child-syndrome where the baby books, photographs, lovingly stitched clothes etc diminish with each child (well yeah, less free time!) leading the youngest to declare, one day, that it is obvious that you love them less, since you didn't make them nearly as many things!) I love you both, sweethearts!

(The school principal had collected anecdotes about "What is love?" for her school prizegiving speech and we all laughed at this one: "I know my sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and then has to go out and buy new ones!")

This quilt was fun to piece - a very basic Sunshine & Shadow. I enjoy the way the very warm colours show up so well next to the black. The backing is soft flannel, so it is designed to be a soft warm cuddlequilt. Murphy ensured that it lay abandoned throughout the winter and is now being finished in the spring, just in time for those hot summer nights when you can't bear to have a thread on you ...

I have one more UFO/bedquilt that has to be quilted, the top of which was pieced about 3 years ago. After that, I think it will be some time before I piece a bed-size utility quilt again - there seems to be a short creative phase and a very long slog-to-get-it-all-done phase with these, and with time so short, I definitely want to do things with a longer creative time and a shorter production time.

And now it is time to go to the salt mines (a.k.a. day job) to chip away at the rock to produce more salt to add to my already high blood pressure. Life's a b*tch, but at least sometimes, you get to quilt!

O Happy Day!!

I have a very big grin on my face as I write this. Yesterday I received a book that I had ordered some time ago, called Innovative Threads - a decade of South African Fibre Art by Liza Gillespie. As I drove home from picking it up at the Post Office, I told my daughter about the book and that I was hoping to have work included in the *next* book done about SA Fibre Art in years to come.

I took the book from the envelope and thumbed through it and then my heart did the biggest leap.... I'm IN it! My work is in there on page 129. Little ole me is in that book along with all the fibre artists I am so in awe of! I whooped and then I burst into tears and then I floated around for the rest of the afternoon (at my day job, which I will probably have to hang onto for a while yet....)

Here is a very bad pic of the page I am on. PROOF. It's really true. Pinch me, so I know it's real, please.



So does this mean I am really an artist...................???

leftovers

These are chopped-up bits and pieces of leftover scraps from projects I've been working on. They'll be sandwiched between two pieces of sheer or netting and free-machined over to hold them all in. I've referred to this before, here. My scraps jar was just looking particularly colourful, so I tipped them all out into a box to take a photo! (Can you tell I am just loving my new camera...? :) )

Even more currently

I saw this side plate at Mr Price Home and fell in love with it instantly. These rounded squares and rectangles just intrigued me - aren't they just delightful? I put the plate down and thought, " I must remember this as inspiration", but the plate was having none of it and had me pick it up again and buy it (for the princely sum of R9.99). Here is what developed:

Hand-dyed background and fused commercial black cotton. The dyeing was a fun job I did outside, managing to also ruin a good work-shirt, because of course I wasn't going to spill any dye. I can't seem to locate any of the Procion Dyes that everyone talks about, so I just used the Lady Dye Cold Water dyes that I could buy at our local pharmacy. I had a blue, a red and a yellow and mixed various other colours from these. Then, not being able to find any squeeze bottles in which to put the dyes, I turned to what was available - a box of old, expired 20 ml syringes that had been discarded from work some time back. (Of course Magpie here had carried them home at the time and stashed them - see? sometimes I even USE the stuff I stash :) ) So I filled all the syringes with dye and then just syringed it randomly. The table surface was skew and the old shower curtain I was doing it on, was buckled - but it seemed to turn out OK anyway. So when I saw the plate, I KNEW what I would do with the multi-coloured cloth.
Below are two detail shots.

And now I am stuck, so it's hanging on the design wall, waiting for inspiration to strike. I don't know if it needs something in the corners, or if I should just quilt an echo of the shapes there... I will wait and see.

Currently

This piece of cloth, from my dyeing the other day, seemed just beautiful as it was, so I decided not to cut it at all, but just embellish it. I've beaded and embroidered and, as so often with textile work rich in texture, it looks better in real life that in a photo. But that is just too bad. It's been fun and much TV was watched while beading it.
Below is a detail shot, where you can see some of the embroidery. I'd like to add lots more (as I'm always tempted to do), but my youngest said "don't do anymore, Mom, it's enough." Should I listen to this? Does she have a point? Argh, I just dont' know.
I've now cut the backing (I was beading through the top and the batting only, without backing) and will quilt it some more - when I work out whether or not to embroider more!

For some reason, a snippet of the Leonard Cohen song, Suzanne, keeps going through my head whenever I look at it:
"...and the sun pours down like honey, on our lady of the harbour,
and she shows you where to look, among the garbage and the flowers,
there are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning,
they are leaning out for love, and they will lean that way forever...."

I may just try to incorporate this somehow.

Kuhleke Moya Wam

Xhosa for "It is well with my soul". From a hymn my daughter's school choir sings in Xhosa and English; hauntingly beautiful. I added the writing and it works well. I want to add some more text from another song they sing about Africa: "Guard her children, guide her leaders."

Fusing rocks! New work.

I'm a fan! I won't give up on piecing and applique just yet, but fusing is going to expand the possibilities and speed the process FANTASTICALLY! :)

Explosion in a confetti factory

Fractal seaweed - auditioning backgrounds (in the end, neither of these)

Pebble Path. I like it so far, but am totally stuck. Hugely intimidating white places!

Today is a good day to dye - Klingon saying

Past works 6

My very own camera

I just re-read what I wrote a couple of posts back about NEEDING a camera of my own.... and have that weird, almost creeped-out, prickly feeling. I just got one! I had emailed my brother (knowing he had one, and would have done all the research regarding specs) asking him what he thought was a good buy and ... to cut the story shorter... he said, "Oh, I got one as a gift when I subscribed to cable TV, here, you can have it!"

Whew, does it work, or what?????

Um , "Universe, I would like a new job, please, with the same pay but half the hours.Thank you"

Oh, let's just throw caution to the winds, and as an ex-girlfriend used to say "Go Big or Go Home":

"Universe, I would like a Personal Patron of the Arts, please, who will provide me with a salary every month, just to produce my art, so that I don't have to spend time at a job that I'm not really enjoying anymore. Thank you."

I need my own camera!

The camera (which actually belongs to my daughter, who got it for her birthday!) has gone with said daughter on a school trip to Cape Town. I really, really need my own. How am I going to go about getting one of these nifty little instruments into my life.......? Now *there* is something to toss into the subconscious think-tank and let brew.

"UNIVERSE, I would like a camera, please. Thank you" :)

Darn headaches

Not much has been done lately as the headaches have got me again. Moreover I'm a little worried that the tablets I've been taking for the headaches might be causing headaches themselves, in a rebound sort of way. So trying to take less, I'm having to just live with it to an extent; I wait until they are really bad before I take something. Hopefully it will lessen, even if gradually. Just today left to work this week, then I am off for 3 days. Sleeping doesn't help, but at least I am "unconscious" for that time!

I'll blog again when I have the camera back and have something to show.

Rain, rain and more rain

I don't mind the rain too much and although it has been cold, I'm lucky enough to be able to sleep in a warm bed and not have it rain on me. (It still appalls me every time I put my rubbish bags out on the pavement on a Monday and see the people going through my rotting garbage that we STILL have such vast economic disparity; that just a few kms further some people live in shacks made of twigs, mud, sheets of plastic and corrugated iron. Rain and wind wreak havoc on these dwellings. )

Several parts of the country are flooded, roads are breaking up, houses are swimming away, people are living in community halls... a friend sent these photos from other parts of the country.

The first 4 are from Port Elizabeth (East Cape) at the intersection of Kragga Kamma Rd & Circular Dr.



The next 3 are from the Kaaiman's River Bridge (Western Cape) near Wilderness.

Avoiding work

You Are: 10% Dog, 90% Cat

You are are almost exactly like a cat.You're intelligent, independent, and set on getting your way.And there's no way you're going to fetch a paper for anyone!

Are You More Cat or Dog?

A Breakthrough!

I'm back at work today after my first long weekend of many. What do I mean by this?

I have begun my NEW WORKWEEK! I have finally conceptualised and negotiated this after a long time (years) of feeling burnt out, not coping, always behind and dissatisfied with my life. As I've mentioned in my profile, I feel as though I am in "wage slavery" and wish I could be an artist full-time, but there's that little money/survival issue, not improved by my single-parent status. A multitude of things that have to be done add to the stressors, and I find I often have the feeling that I am just not coping, but being pulled on a rope behind a big truck going too fast.

I've also found that contrary to my expectations, my teenagers need me a lot. They don't need as much physically, but they need emotional care and a lot of *listening*, and I need to be relaxed enough to do that listening and around when they get to talking. My parenting is a big part of who I am and occupies (voluntarily) a lot of my thoughts and hours. While they are little you dream of all the time you will have free as they grow up and 'need you less'. Hahahaha. Not so. They need you less in many ways, but then need you more in other ways. (Perhaps we need that illusion while they are small!) They are very companiable at this age, I am finding that I WANT to spend time with them, since I'm aware that time is fleeting and they will soon be gone.

So a while back, I sat and did the exercise of "If I could have whatever I wanted and money was no object, what would I want?" I found that what I wanted most was TIME (to do all the things I really wanted to do). Ideally I wouldn't work and just have unlimited money etc etc. but then I did the next exercise, which is "Which of these things could I have *right now*, with just small modifications to my life?" Think compromise. And what I wanted was to reduce my working hours from full-time to a little less, but not part-time, which I cannot afford to do.

I sat and did sums for working 4 days a week, 3 days a week etc. I worked out that I could probably manage on a 4/5 salary - we will miss some things, but my quality of life will improve, to make up for it, and as I am happier, I will be more available for my girls. Happiness isn't in having more stuff anyways.

I first tested out the feelings of my boss by enquiring whether the option of a 4/5 workweek was available and he didn't think so. Then I said "So it's either fulltime of half-time?" He answered interestingly, I thought. He said "well, 4 days out of 5 would be better than half time".

I mulled it over for a few weeks until a number of things all piled together and convinced me that I HAVE to change something or I will be heading for an early grave. (I already suffer from underactive thyroid, high blood pressure and depression and landed in hospital last year with uncontrolled high blood pressure and uncontrolled headaches). And then I went to him (last week) and said "I *need* to reduce my working hours *somehow*". I put together the possible options and we discussed it and then -

-he accepted the 4/5ths!!!! I couldn't believe it!

I will take a 1/5 pay cut. We have yet to work out how it will impact on my benefits (medical aid, pension etc) but I have asked that they cut the housing subsidy first and the medical aid last. So I should be able to retain most benefits. My leave will also be cut by 1/5.

I take off fridays, which gives me a long weekend, EVERY weekend! I've only just begun, but coming in to work this morning, I just felt SO good. I got lots of backlogged stuff done on the extra day and even had time to just sit and blob a bit. We'll lose a few luxuries, but with both my mental and physical health at stake, I'm ok with that. I've noticed that both girls are getting a little overweight (we won't even talk about the body that I currently inhabit...) as I'm too tired to provide proper food, so I'll be able to give that some attention.

I think just one extra day a week is going to go a LONG way.... without landing us on the street.

I've thought for a long time that there should be more flexibility in our working lives, especially for mothers. Women should be able to job-share, where 2 people cover one job. We should be able to work 3/4 time and other permutations. This kind of thing is well recognised in Europe, but we lag behind here in South Africa. We need to set some precedents, so this kind of thinking becomes more accepted. Then both our jobs and our families can be accommodated and we can adapt to different stages, going back to full-time when less is needed at home.

I think I also realised that jobs come and go, and if I fall over dead they'll have me replaced pretty soon, but my girls will not replace me that quickly. They are what really matter to me. So I really hope this works out for us... and I am feeling a whole lot more positive about my job now (it allows me to indulge in my art AND still eat!)

Plus, I'll keep buying Lotto tickets - hey, *someone* has to win! I know that statistically it won't be me, but... dreams are free.