wha, where?

well october wasn't much chop on this blog, was it? it seems to have vamoosed very quickly with little to show for it - i have puddled around painting fabric and such but not actually produced anything...

and today was a washout as i had to work. so no dancing lessons for billthedog, no contemplative coffee, no musing over the fabric stash, no noodling in the sketchbook. not even any photos.

luckily i'm going to sewjourn this weekend so i should have some actual crafting content.

back soon - with photos - promise

monday night rumi

The hurt you embrace becomes joy.
Call it to your arms where it can

change. A silkworm eating leaves
makes a cocoon. Each of us weaves

a chamber of leaves and sticks.
Silkworms begin to truly exist

as they disappear inside that room.
Without legs, we fly. When I stop

speaking, this poem will close,
and open its silent wings....

gesso gesso gesso and some paint

yesterday i spent some profitable time playing with gesso and painting some more fabric.

i had a lovely time gooping gesso on some hessian and sculpting it into furrows and whirls with my fingers. unfortunately it bonded tenaciously with the old tablecloth i use to protect the kitchen table and this morning i had to tug and pull to separate them.

then i dived into my bubblewrap stash and did some silk dyeingafter a very short time the room looked like this and i was in the muse zone

wanna buy some textileseahorse?

you can now buy your own little (or big) piece of textileseahorse!

i finally jumped and have set up a page to sell textileseahorsery - if you incline your head to the right you will see a new link see on the top of the sidebar. it's all a bit new and unfamiliar so bear with me while i get used to this new part of the blog.

all my work is for sale - i will be adding pieces regularly to this page but if you see something you like on my blog just ask...

you can pay through paypal and postage is free. so in the spirit of samuel pepys, go forth and spend....

yes!!

i submitted 2 quilts to the 2010 victorian quilters' one step further exhibition and had both accepted :)

jealousy
and desert landscape triptych
will be on display at the Whitehorse Art Space, Whitehorse Road, Box Hill from 12 November until 22 December.

sunday

rather a quiet day - spent mostly in bed reading pepys and sleeping, knocked out by painkillers as my back is playing up.

i did rinse out the results of my beetroot dyed silk - here is it is with the greys of yesterday

saturday

it's still raining in bursts here, enough to discourage hopes of laundering, and i am playing with ideas for my next couple of pieces.

the next challenge quilt theme is self-portrait - i started playing with image transfer with gel medium yesterday although i'm not very happy with the results so far (that's it in the middle) the direct printing onto silk was more successful in terms of clarity but i'm not sure exactly which bits i will use as a basis for my piece. is clarity what i want or do i want a mistier feeling? more playing is called for...

and here are my first sketches for the oblivion piece that is brewing in my head
and some yarn, fine wool, hemp, silk and cotton thread and muslin that i dyed last weekend all in suitable shades of black and grey (this photo wasn't taken in black and white)

thank you all for your lovely supportive comments here and on facebook - the middle of the night is a dire time but even if joy hasn't cometh in the morning, feeling better has :)

a number of things have happened lately that have prised off old scars and had a good poke at the rawness beneath. and in the general world outwardly innocuous and worthy events such as child protection week, mental health week and remembering your lost baby day have poured a measure of lemon juice and salt into the wounds.

luckily there are people in the real and cyber world who hold my hand and there are the other life rituals that hold us together. my baby turned six this week.
and being friday and no work, there is coffee and raisin toast and an anxiously attendant billthedogit's also pouring with rain - a good day to stay snug

more murk midnight

i'm beginning to develop and hearty dislike of 4 am.

what is it about the middle of the night that attracts all those harpies of anxiety who come and perch in your mind and poke you with sharp sticks? all the things that seem copable or at least overcomable in the light of day suddenly grow fangs and become intolerably worrying in the dark.

even my familiar, toby cat, seems to have deserted me tonight and i am powerless against the demons. a few more hours and things should look better

frottage and rubbings

well that title should garner a few disappointed readers....

it's amazingly easy to get out of the blogging habit - after trying to post every day in september, october has been fallow. partly because my particular ball of dung has been a bit heavy and unwieldy for the last little while.

(image from here)

inspiration is sluggish and disconnected and the tempo uneven.

but on friday i played around a bit - inspired by the lyric kinard quilt university class i signed up for but didn't actually do at the time :( i played with paintsticks and textures
frottage in art-speak is taking a rubbing of an object - in this case fabric crayon and paintstick on cotton over a flattened out copper scourer. and cotton over flattened out kozo fibre
it also leads to gilded fingertipsthen i played with some silk ribbon and a piece of japanese linen using a fabric weaving technique i found on someone's blog - i think it was jude hill's blog but when i went back to find the post to link to i couldn't find it :( if anyone can remember who posted a 'how to' on this technique can you please let me know? not least because i'm not sure that i did it right...and finally i used a new to me product called fibre paste to coat some canvas and cotton and we shall see what happens to these.

nightmare #1 progress

next

now that doors is done i am thinking of a new project - something soft and nightmarish (btw must finish nightmare #1 now that toby is not sleeping on it).
inspired by this:

sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness,
water of dimness inscrutable,
and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy,
like a moth,
prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.

Virginia Woolf Orlando 1928
how to conceptualise oblivion and the strong pull it exerts? i am thinking of pleats, folds and some kind of vortex, perhaps? this might need to marinate for a while