oof!

January turned into a rather busy time - the coincidence of going back to uni, getting some part-time work and three art commitments meant that many things have been neglected.

We have however made raspberry ice cream

walked under the sunset spider

and looked at the moon.

I broke 5 needles making my entry for Brenda's Living Colours exhibition.

 and sutured another aubergine.

The Sketchbook Project

The Sketchbook Project is run by the Brooklyn Art Library in New York. The deal is you sign up, they send you a small sketchbook, you decorate it in almost any manner you choose (ie no porn or sharp elements) and then send it back to NY where it forms part of a permanent exhibition. You can opt to have the sketchbook digitised so  it can be viewed online and it will also go on one of the BAL's travelling exhibitions.

Mine was posted off to New York on Tuesday: ingredients included transparent gesso, indigo, paint, watercolour, pencil, black mica mortar paste, tracing paper, map and text fragments, digitised photos of the moon, silk, stitch, woad and glue. (pics by the lovely and talented Kind Dog)

too damned hot

43 yesterday, 41 today, 44 tomorrow.... even the toothpaste is hot :(

we're all fed up and incredulous at this sudden heatwave, especially Toby.

New Year, new post, new work

Yay we're in 2014! 2013 felt like going around in muddling circles - not a bad year or an especially good year but definitely muddling. It was quite a relief to stand on our roof last night and watch the fireworks - here's a rather blurry picture. 

It's a new year with new work planned and new habits to cultivate. My intentions this year boil down to this:

 Last year's intentions were mostly a success with the most important achievement being to minimise the presence  and impact of negative people in my life.  Although having looked at that list again I see I fell down badly on the spending money side of things and on the shoes under the desk. 

In studio news I spent the last little bit of 2013 making some tiny nests

and the first day of 2014 assembling the constituent parts of my entry for Brenda Gael Smith's Living Colours exhibition. I can't say too much about it but it's a piece that has been brewing for at least four years, waiting for the right time to be made.  And one of the joys of having a well-aged stash is that I can pull pieces out and remember who gave them to me or who or where I bought them from. This piece will have fabric I bought in Rome at the fabled Fratelli Bassetti Tessuti, a hand-dyed piece that Annabel gave me years ago and is a remnant from Jealousy, more hand-dyes from Dijanne and Deb, and silk from Fiona. It feels like this piece will have good karma - an excellent start to 2014.

Happy New Year :) xx

makings

Saturday was spent quietly in the studio - avoiding the 38 degree heat and making, preparing and planning.

 It was warm enough for me to gesso an entire notebook over the afternoon.

In between gessoing pages I made a card for a sick friend,

 finally finished my contribution to Cas Holmes' project,

 stitched some paper experiments, 

 looked at old maps,

and made an amulet.

The planning included an indigo vat, a new biggish piece, marking out the year ahead and thinking about Portugal.

reading in real life

When we came back from Europe in October I realised how much of my life has become centred on electronic devices, hooked up to Ye Olde Internette.  And perhaps this was becoming a substitute for living in the real world - reading blogs and online journals instead of books. I thought that as well as interrupting my sleeping patterns and shortening my attention span, it was distracting me from deep reading and deep thinking and maybe even dulling the sparky creative parts of my mind.

So I wrote a list. I am a great list-writer and find them a comforting thing in a chaotic world: there are few things more satisfying and convincing of achievement than ticking things off a list.  This is not as military and efficient as it sounds as my lists can be quite elastic - things I don't like doing such as making appointments and talking to real people tend to get moved from one week's list to the next.

So here is my November list of intentions:

 Apart from the usual 'drink more water', the list is really about achieving the last thing - clearing the noise jam in my head. Too much short spiky stuff is being thrust in at all angles. And an excellent cure for that is to read fiction - something I hadn't really done for ages. Between reading for uni and trawling around the internet, I wasn't getting lost in another separate world and getting caught up in lovely rolling sentences. And I used to do that a lot - I made myself sick one weekend by gorging on Jane Austen.

So, apart from uni reading, this is what I read in November and early December:

Four of the Elizabeth Jane Howards were a bit of a cheat as I had read them before but the others were new reads. I'm ambivalent about the Kate Atkinson - the writing was excellent but there was something that didn't quite captivate me. The groundhog day trope didn't quite work for me - perhaps because it seemed so purposeless?

The new Howard (All Change) was greedily devoured in one go - I read until 4.30am as I wanted to find out what happened next all the way through. A very good way of unjamming the head.

As I'm reading Gwen Raverat's account of her Victorian Cambridge childhood, Period Piece, I might have a Victorian novel phase next. And I feel the need to read the Divine Comedy again - once every decade seems about right and this time I'll make more of an effort to read Purgatory and Paradise as well as the Inferno.

And I'll finish with a gratuitous Toby Cat photo.

the lacuna begins

The lovely lacuna between Boxing Day and the New Year - that becalmed space without obligations or expectations. Last year, of course, we had our wedding blessing with our very special English family. This year is a millpond - we are both recovering from our illnesses and will be doing very little over the next week.

I do intend to spend some pottering time in the studio - I have a list of things I want to try from sun-printing to making cerecloth.  And we will both be doing much reading - here are our Christmas books.