Haircut Day

This is the picture that precipitated a great need (on my part) for a hair cut.


Cynthia took the photo when we visited Julie and Jordan last Thursday. We were having quite a tickle session as we played "This Little Piggy Went To Market" with Ethan's bare toes.

With this picture in mind, Charles and I went early Monday morning to the little hair cuttery not far from the house, and as we sat waiting to be called, I saw this darling little boy walking to the door with his mother-- our daughter-in-law, Julie, with Ethan! Today was his haircut day, as well! Unplanned, and a delightful meeting it was.

Ethan loves having his hair cut. Even the buzzing of the trimmer doesn't annoy him. Have you ever seen a 2 1/2 year old run to the chair and climb right on up, delighted to be getting a cut and trim? Julie took this photo of him:


I am never that enthusiastic. To alleviate my anxiety, I let the stylists do whatever they think is best. Having a preference and being disappointed afterwards is simply more angst to manage. After all, it will eventually grow out! At the end of things, Ethan and Grandma were pretty well shorn:


And today, when I stepped out of the shower and didn't have to do anything more than towel-dry my hair, I wondered why I hadn't done this a long, long time ago!

Drawers Around And About

Aren't drawers wonderful? They can help to make life into a semi-organized journey for those afflicted with left-brain-itis, and they have the added bonus of being quite beautiful objects. Some have a Wabi-Sabi flavor. Those are the drawers with character. Others are the most spartan form of utilitarianism. Doesn't matter-- they are all interesting because they hold things for us. Some mystery always lies behind a drawer face. I am one who cleans up periodically, and because I'm not day-to-day neat, I tend to swoop things into the nearest available drawer. Then, when enough things have gone missing, I start the search through the drawers to see what I've stashed away. Sometimes there are huge surprises, not always pleasant-- particularly if I've just yesterday purchased a replacement for some newly-rediscovered item. Other times, there are happy reunions.

Not-so-large boxes of drawers can be moved from room to room and serve different purposes as needs change. The drawers above have been in kitchens, dining rooms, bedrooms, and presently reside in the living room. "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful," as William Morris has advised householders for over a hundred years. I have, fortunately, outlived many wedding gifts of dubious beauty or use, and have enough years on me to have replaced less attractive things with objects that have a comfortable and happy feel to them.

This box of drawers is very old. We found it in Clinton in the corner of a dusty place. It was calling my name before the door shut behind me! The shot shows the original finish and the dove-tail detail. It also has living room space:



This little "box" of drawers fits in my hand and was a purchase at the Piedmont Art Festival when Jordan was small, a treasure that never fails to make me smile. Each little drawer is absolutely perfect!



And passing through the kitchen I have these drawers sitting at the end of the island, on a low book shelf that houses my cook books. They are especially treasured, despite their small size, because I have only six drawers in my kitchen, so narrow they are not even useful for holding silverware! But these pine drawers are in a stepped-front cabinet, so the top ones are the short ones, and the third set, at bottom, are the longer ones:



The drawers in the studio are the real workhorses. My admiration for old things has led to collecting cabinets and drawers that I could use for storage, and the studio is the perfect place for them. My beads are stored in a jeweler's tool case. Opening the drawers is like a trip to a pirate hide-out with privileges in the store room:



And when I need a weaving shuttle or my dremel tool, elastic, miscellaneous tools or stamps, there is the apothecary chest, originally from France (complete with beautifully scripted cards recording prescriptions and patient information from the early 20th century-- all now sent to recycling). The drawers are the size of library card catalogues of yore, but not so sturdily made, since the drawers would not sustain such rough or frequent handled as library drawers. A lovely and utile cabinet of 45 drawers!



There are DMC thread cabinets for sorting threads by colorways, and the crewel and wool/silk yarns are in larger plastic drawers placed under the two side windows of the studio, stacked single drawers of miscellaneous embroidery gear, a tall, thin set of drawers that came out of an old hardware store-- the boxes are made of wooden cigar boxes, with wooden fronts attached! And tucked into little spots on the back wall of bookcases, small drawers prop up leaning lines of fiber-related books.

But the point of all these boxes and drawers is this: they keep things in place for me. I don't have to scramble through large, messy cardboard packing boxes to look for things. So much of what I do is small-scale, requiring things that would simply slip through the cracks of day-to-day living. And all these boxes are a wonderful way of keeping me "straight," neat (a loose use of the word) and organized (also a stretch of the meaning of the word). Most are old friends. In addition, they are a pleasant sight when I am working. Where would I be without all my boxes? Perhaps up the proverbial creek without the appropriate paddle . . . ?

Three Days of Fellowship and Fiber Fun!

Where to start?

Always Start At The Beginning, Dear (I am hearing my mother's voice, loud and perfectly clear).

Wednesday was the kick-off of a three-day marathon event in Studio 508. Sandra and Cynthia came to stay with me. Charles so very kindly offered to go to Knoxville and stay and work on the house there. He has numbers of projects there to keep him busy, he assured me, as well as cousins to have dinner with. So, this became a chick party! And this way, Sandra and Cynthia could have the twin beds and the larger bathroom. Perfect!

Sandra and Cynthia arrived late Wednesday morning, and we had a salad for lunch. We ate early so we wouldn't feel pressured to stop once we had gotten too deeply into something interesting. As things progressed, we did do deeply interesting things. Sandra brought some of her toys, and we began to play with wool-ish items.

Meet Little Otto:



With the help of Little Otto, a champion Drum Carder, I was able to create several batts of blended wool fibers. Cynthia was working on a felted ball that required a number of closely-related shades of blue and green, and I do love to card and mix colors, so I grabbed Little Otto and set up my work station at the drafting table. These are some of the batts that Little Otto and I cranked out for Cynthia:



They became part of a felted shape that she plans to cut down the center to reveal the layers of differently-colored roving. It will need a lot of serious wet-felting to get to the cutting stage.

Sandra, meanwhile, worked at the felting/wool working table. She was making landscapes for later embroidery, using felted wool and roving, and blending them with her Baby Lock Embellisher. I think the landscapes got a little tiring, because she also made this grid:



By Wednesday afternoon, there was a respectable wool collection in progress:



The flower shows better after Cynthia had worked some more on it-- the "Orange Blossom" was originally a semi-felted cord of pumpkin-colored wool I had made last year for a project that didn't turn out as expected, so the cord was tossed into the "Ponder These Pieces" bin. She sewed the cord into a closed circle-- please remember that Cynthia's least favorite of the least favorite possible colors is ORANGE, and you get some feel for how seriously she took her responsibilities for "pondering". She added two leaves that were a combination project. Jill gave the leaves to Sandra, and Sandra added some decorative detail, then ran the newly-refurbished leaves through the embellisher to give a more uniform texture to the leaf surface. And this is the semi-finished result. We may have to check out her blog in a few days to see what other "ponderings" have taken place over the Orange Blossom:



We were late in leaving the studio and walking the short distance to the house Wednesday night. There were three distinct flopping-on-the-mattress sounds heard from our house. . .

Thursday we had a nice treat. Jordan and Julie so kindly made time for us to make a mid-morning visit, and to our surprise, Julie had a lunch for us. She works with a nurse whose husband has a catering business/small restaurant called "It's About Thyme" in Norcross, and Julie drove there to bring us fresh-out-of-the-oven, marvelous quiche(s?)-- I think they may be the best I've ever had! I was envious-- the custard was so much creamier than the one I make. I am going to have to really step up the quality of my quiche before I offer it to family or guests again! Thank you, dear!

Bethy and Ethan were perfect little angels (this is the grandmother bragging, but they were loverly! Honest!):





Cynthia took photos and said she would share them with me, so I will, in turn, post them later.

We went on to painting old picture frames Thursday afternoon. I have boxes and boxes of them-- a dozen, maybe more-- so we had a nice selection of sizes for playing around. Here are some results of the frame-painting:



Isn't the little edge pretty? Cynthia got that effect by rubbing the contrasting color over the painted frame, an old one so darkened with age that the little raised trim on the edge scarcely showed up. A bit of paint and some imagination go a long way, don't they! In the frame is an embroidered sampler of Fly Stitches. We used the Beaney and Littlejohn book, Stitch Magic for inspiration.

In this photo, Sandra's sampler of Herringbone Stitch is lying inside a frame she painted. There are many coats of paint on these frames!



Mine was the small frame for a dresser-top mirror whose mirror never really fit too well. In place of the ill-fated mirror, I must think of something to go in it that these cool water tones will show off well.



After dinner we went back to the studio to work with Stitch Magic, and the samplers morphed into fiber balls that we began putting together from fabric and woolen scraps. Over the surface of several balls, we added VERY freestyle stitches that we had just been sampling. I began to wrap one (the pink one) and the wrapping was so delightful I couldn't stop. It began life as a deeply red ball, but changed colors a number of times in the wrapping process. It ended as a pink ball, larger than a softball. I also began working on one I determined would eventually be blue. A Pink and a Blue Ball-- maybe for Bethany and Ethan? Here I've lined our collection up as if they were billiard balls, ready for a rather bumpy run across the table:



My two are the big ones at the back. Sandra and Cynthia created the smaller, neater ones, including the blue felted one (which has more to be done to it). Have you guessed by now that I can't turn an idea loose as easily as others, hence the lack of almost any evidence of production on my part!

We were even more tired Thursday evening than Wednesday. More flopping sounds . . .

Friday morning came slowly to all of us. We had overdosed on Creative Exchange for two days, and the batteries needed recharging. We did make the trip to the studio after breakfast, but not at a zip pace. There were still so many ideas we had discussed but not tried, yet. And Charles came in from Knoxville before lunch, so we took a break about 1:00 and had an extremely health-conscious salad. In fact, I could see that Charles was getting light-headed from all the raw, fresh veggies and sliced chicken breast. When I asked if he would be all right, his reply was that he needed a hamburger.

Back in the studio (while the Hamburger-Needy Charles did the dishes), Cynthia and I were finishing up our "Fiber Orbs" while Sandra was at the sewing machine. She was interested in the possibilities lying in the basket of vintage quilt scraps, eventually bringing up some pieces to use as coasters. A large stack of these is nice-- all different sizes, very simple zig-zagged edges, and (sometimes) a bit of stitching over the seams of the old fabrics to add style. And the stitching sometimes helps hold everything together. They are thin coasters, can be stacked double for really weepy cold glasses, and can be tossed in the wash if needed. Something useful from throw-away items! How "Green" is that?





I hated to see them leave. We had laughed and experimented with ideas and materials, and for three days nothing really seemed beyond our doing. Later, as Charles and I talked about our respective past few days, I concluded I'd had the better experience. He was busy with yard work and landscaping projects and has a mountain of housework to do next week when he returns to Knoxville. I, on the other hand, played my heart out with dear friends here in the studio. I patted him on the shoulder, but it was hard to look too sympathetic when I was smiling so widely!

Meet the Adorables

To my eternal shame, I have posted no pix of Ethan, my dear grandson, on my blog. Lest I be accused of bias, I have borrowed this photo from my son. The picture was taken when the family was in England for Julie's brother (Tony's) wedding in April. Can you read in his face what he thinks of formal dress?



These are from camping with Mum and Dad:









And Bethany, togged-out for the out-of-doors:



Can you see why we have moved to be only 3 1/2 miles away from them?

Freestyle Wednesday!

What a great day-- the Knoxville Freestylers met, this month at Peggy's house, on the water. These are some of my stitching buddies, minus the ones who couldn't make it this time--can you tell we're a fun group?

Teeney Weeney Wool Cottage

Remember the pink-ish weaving from Wednesday that just didn't have a stand-alone character? By re-purposing all that woven roving and rolling it into a (rough) cone shape, it has become the central construction for this small house:



You can see the heads of pins where I've temporarily placed some of the elements. The "walls" of the little house are wool felt strips that have been dyed and run under the embellisher, front and back, with lots of little chips of scrim pounded through from back to front. There are also some little "bricks" added to the surface, more of the embellishing machine at work:



The texture is so inviting-- I want to keep playing with it rather than putting it down and studying it to see how the parts are working together.



And here you can see some of the roof tiles that have been pinned in place:



I'm still thinking through how I'll assemble the roof parts. I've already made one roof (unfinished) that was a howling failure. I hesitate to start sewing things down until I've played with several arrangements of shapes-- I can't tell you how many things I've ruined by not stepping back and looking and thinking. Below are pictures of the window after I'd sewn it in place (including the green window box) and began to add french knot flowers:



This piece has a lot of work to be done before it's finished, but I think it will be a delightful journey. I especially like to work on things that are bright, happy colors with a lot of whimsey spilling out. Sometimes we need a touch of whimsey in our lives.

Starting out a little too early

What a morning! I awakened about 3 a.m. and after some tossing about finally got up, made a cup of tea, and was in the Studio before 4:00 this morning. And here it is, just after lunch, and I feel as if I should be in jammies and waiting for it to be dark enough to go to bed. I won't do this again any time soon. Next time it will be decaf tea and a snooze on the sofa.

I went into the dark back yard and began the little walk to the Studio. The night was alive with the sounds of tree frogs and rustling grasses. There was even a tiny movement of air. Above, the sky was still star-speckled. I felt quite alone in the universe, except for my cup of tea.

With all this sudden gift of time on my hands, I made a list of things to do today. At the top of the list was to assemble the four-harness loom my son built while he was still in college. The assorted pieces have been propped against walls of the studio for a long, long time, and since the wool-roving weaving experience, I have contracted the bug to make something using yarn and shuttles-- a "regular" sort of weaving. I thought the assembly of the floor loom wouldn't be too hard, that I just had to get the beams in place and everything else would line up and fall into a neat order. Was that ever a pie-in-the-sky dream! After a lot of struggling and nothing too much to show for it except that I finally began to understand which was the front and which the back, there was daylight enough to enlist Charles to help. Result: now there were two supervising personnel and no worker bees. In the end, I put everything back against a wall (the front wall, against the windows, unfortunately), and I will do this another day. Jordan and Julie are camping with the Adorables this weekend, so maybe I can persuade him to give me some guidance one evening next week and show me where the left-over parts go.

I am also working with the three wool roving pieces. The idea of weaving from roving and tossing the results into the washing machine is good in theory, but the truth is that some weavings are better suited for felting than others. I pored over the three pieces (blue/green, pinkish, and yellow/orange) and chose the pink for experimented with the embellishing machine, needle felting, and embroidery. I think I have an idea. It needs some nurturing, though. And it especially needs a clear head that has had lots of sleep before anyone starts doing drastic, non-reversible things to it. Right now I need a boring, repetitive job that will keep my hands busy while I think. Yes, I'm thinking about that bucket of bolts and screws and why the beams don't line up properly . . .

Weaving in the Studio

I've been thinking about my looms a bit, particularly as I am moving things, opening up boxes (and finding tools and parts to one loom or another), and it seemed suddenly very important to do something with the Tapestry Loom. I have so much wool yarn, roving for felting, and a cabinet full of cone threads, that coming up with a project would be no trouble at all. In fact, as I think about life past and future, if I don't use up a lot of these materials, they will end up in a landfill one day. Time to pull out all the stops and go for the big, over-the-top piece of hand-woven something-or-other.

So, with nothing to lose, I dragged the Tapestry Loom from its corner yesterday afternoon. "This will be a walk in the park," I thought as I set in on the floor beside my chair. Hmmmm . . . I couldn't remember how to warp it. Actually, I will confess to having had a hard time telling the front from the back. Then I remembered that this loom warps vertically, not horizontally. My first reaction was to glance back at the place it had come from and to think of how little trouble it would be to put it back there. But the challenge of how to warp this loom was too good to pass up.

By dinner, I had the warp on it (a narrow warp of only 20 threads, about eight or nine inches wide) and had started working out how to draw out the roving to make my weft. My intent was to create pieces that would be felted, that I would throw in the wash with jeans, so I was more concerned with color placement than good technique. It would shrink unevenly, as I am using merino wool, silk tussa and silk throwster's waste, merino/wool combinations, corriedale, goat batts . . . This made my job of re-learning how to weave a little easier. This photo shows the loom up on a work table (with attendant clutter).



Of course, you can't just cut a piece off the loom and rush to felt it, because you have all that remaining warp left that is under tension (and getting an even tension on each thread can be tedious, most particularly since I used wool for the warp, which is stretchier than cotton or linen). Best to put on yards of warp and use it for several projects, making it best to keep on weaving until you get to the end of your warp. I went from blue/green roving to spring pink/green/coral batt, to orange and yellow combinations of things. With each piece I became more adventurous. It is the last one, the orange and yellow, that is most texturally interesting.



And here is a detail of the yummy colors and texture:



Since I used curly locks here along with throwster's waste, I know I will not felt this. I have no idea now what it will be. If I had it off the loom, I could turn it upside down and see how well it speaks to me-- maybe those curly locks that are hanging down are really trees in a parched landscape?

I need to devote more thought to this one, and do some more weaving. There is an awfully lot more of roving in the yellow/orange drawer! And I will have Bethy and Ethan this afternoon, so I will ask them what it looks like. Have you ever noticed how intersting a child's view of the world can be?

Independence Day 2010

We are being quiet here. Charles has made a Vanilla Pudding (of which he is a little too proud), and I am in the studio (duuuuuh, did I really need to say that?). I've been going through boxes again. Today, I have two large empty boxes to be removed. Some of the contents were in the wrong place and needed to be put with others of a like nature. Some were destined for the landfill. But a nice little collection is going to a friend who is interested in niblets and nibs. She uses them in spinning wonderfully lumpy yarns for her knitting and felting projects. When I go to a knitting yarn store, I always wonder what people see in plain yarn. It is like plain yogurt to me-- in need of sprucing up.

Anyway, whether I have Rules Of The Studio or not, I am two boxes closer to being sorted out.

It may be that sorting is not a one-time thing. When a person moves a studio, they move their perspective and, often, their support group. Re-thinking past projects, how they were carried out, and wondering if those techniques are still interesting is well-spent time. I thought and re-thought the dyeing process until I knew I would not like to do that messy sort of thing again without a dedicated kitchen for the sole purpose of mixing chemicals and creating dye pots. Each time I open a cupboard (and there are a number of cupboards lined up against the walls) I come across another package of materials I collected to experiment with a process. Eventually, I'll be sure enough to either use them again or find a home for them.

And that is a sort of Independence Day isn't it?

Rules of the Studio

I made this silly rule. I am to take two items out of the studio every day. They can be any size, anything at all, but I must remove two items from the clutter in the studio. On the first day it was two glass jars I'd used for cleaning paint brushes. That was easy, since they were ugly and stained, and I had just found a box of about a dozen more, sparkling fresh from the dishwasher and ready for use. The following day, however, it was more difficult to see useless items lying about,so I surrendered to indecision and took out the two lids that went with the glass jars of the previous day. The third day, I skipped the rule. And by the fourth day, I needed to get rid of four objects. Fifth day, six objects. I could feel the clutter creeping closer, and I rummaged until I found a box that I thought would fit the bill. In it were assorted smaller boxes of envelopes and blank greeting cards from the time when I spent entire days making cards. Years ago I used to recycled my less successful embroidery, the pieces that just wouldn't ever work, no matter how much I might try, and these small pieces made very interesting subjects for "carding."

"Great," I thought. "A whole box of boxes! I'm good for the next month." And to add to my relief, the big box under this big box had more card-making supplies. These, however, were smaller things, labels, bits of old puzzles, game pieces, hand-made paper scraps-- all unsorted and unboxed. Hmmm . . . .

I decided to save them for Bethy. We'd cut and paste and make wonderful, messy things. Then I could throw away both boxes. Voile!

But, Bethy wasn't interested. After a while, I realized that it was I who was interested, and I made that incredibly fatal mistake of too much touching and thinking.

Which is why, this morning, when I meant to clean up from our day in the studio I, instead, spread the contents of the boxes on the drafting table, and when I finally looked up it was because Charles had come into the studio to announce that he was ready for lunch.

Lunch?

By then I had made a small selection of greeting cards, which I share with you.











If there is a moral to this tale, it must be that we should not make rules. Certainly not left-brained rules for right-brained operations.

Friday with Bethany

Yes, this is Bethany, now four. She is holding a little critter I made her that we call a "Ticklebug." I made it from scraps of felted wool and yarn while she played with wooden beads in the studio this afternoon. It is the sort of little stuffed toy whose charm is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

A better look at Ticklebug:



She arrived shortly after breakfast this morning, and we spent some time pasting and drawing in the Big Sketch Book she has had for about a year. After a half-hour of this she was ready to try something new. I showed her some embroidery thread and she fell immediately in love with the pink variegated cotton and wanted to stitch! Oh, heart be still! I put a threaded needle in her dad's hand before his second birthday, so I've been ready for this moment for quite a while. I found a hoop, linen, and a needle with a large eye, and we began.



I was surprised that she understood easily that the piece of fabric was two-sided and that she needed to go into the fabric on the same side that the thread just came out. Only once did she wrap the thread around the side of the hoop. The beads made the stitching even more fun, and the small scissors fascinated her. Showing her how to pick them up, remove the leather sheath and open them slowly and carefully-- this was easier than I'd thought it might be because she knew immediately that this was a grown-up action in which she was being allowed to participate.

How neat it was to watch her horizon widen just the smallest bit . . .

Recycling a Recycled object

Hey, is this green, or what! I have been using part of an old sock as a cloth to clean my paint brushes, so there was an accumulation of watercolors, gouache, and a little acrylic paint on it. I was cleaning up today and half-way through throwing it in the trash when the lovely colors began screaming, "Save me, Save me!" And so I did. I've always wondered what it would be like to embroider on a sock. This one was terry-lined, which gave me a double challenge: the knit surface and the looped underside.

After thread and vintage buttons were applied, this is my result:



Not bad, when you consider that the embroidery is the third life of the sock. However, I don't think I'll be doing this on a regular basis. The knit stretches, and the point of the needle pulls loops of the terry that make a little "mark" on the smooth front of the scrap. It is often very rewarding to embroider on a cloth that has some outstanding tactile characteristic that requires extra attention to detail, but I'm just not sure an athletic sock is that sort of rewarding experience.

After the little sock embroidery, I started thinking about making fabric books again. The only way I know to do it is to lay out a lot of linen and see what starts to take shape. Pieces of linen have to "talk to me" before I can begin the creative process. I started with my basket of small, rolled linen pieces.



They look like ancient scrolls, don't they?



Then the real fun-- unrolling and laying out the bits and pieces, fingering them, thinking of how they will hold stitches and buttons and beads . . .



I started stitching on one of the pages, and hopefully will have it ready to post tomorrow or the next day!