Making Progress

final fabrics for the Blades

The Blades series is coming along. I was starting to feel panicked because I didn’t have a good handle on when the artwork for my upcoming shows was due. I’m making new work for the Phinney show in February as well as the Foster/White show in April. Plus, I’m teaching workshops at Pratt in February and April. Add in soccer games, chorus concerts, and all the other demands of motherhood, and I was really starting to freak out about how I was ever going to get it all done.

So I sat myself down in front of the calendar and planned out my schedule with all my deadlines plus a week by week work plan. For some artistic types it would be over the top, but for me it gives me a sense of calm. I now know exactly where I am with my work, and if no one gets sick, I haven’t vastly underestimated how long each step will take me, and I don’t take any vacations, I should be able to get it all done by mid-March.

And if that wasn’t enough planning, I also made a table of all the steps I still need to complete for the Blades. It’s complicated working on thirteen pieces at the same time! Plus, it’s just so satisfying to check things off. As of today I have made final fabric selections for the first group seven Blades and cut out the fabric and adhesive for Number Five. My plan is to be done with cutting, painting, and glueing up the panels for the first group by the end of this week. Next week I’ll move on to sewing while the kids are off school. Wish me luck!

look at all those check marks!

getting ready for painting

framing areas for cutting

Rainy Morning

It’s been stormy this morning, hailing, thunder, and pouring rain all before the sun came up. Now it’s getting lighter and the rain is easing off. It’s turning into one of those muted Seattle December days of grey. I remembered some photos I took a few weeks ago during the rain when my Purple Smokebush, cotinus coggygria, still had its leaves. This is a great plant in the garden. Ours is in the planting strip between the sidewalk and the street and has the most beautiful, vivid purple leaves and sprays of foamy, pink flowers in the Summer. These flowers are what gives it its common name. You can imagine them as clouds of purple smoke. In the Fall, the leaves turn from purple, to yellow-green, to brilliant orange and red with a pattern of brown spots. Gorgeous, and even more so when intensified by the rain drops. And, great inspiration for the studio on a grey, rainy day.

and now for color . . .

overdyeing the stash

I found these leaves I had collected and dried a couple of years ago at my house when I was cleaning up the other day. Perfect timing for thinking about color. I started out by digging deep into my stash, reconsidering all those pieces of fabric that haven’t been used for one reason or another. I’ve been dying and over-dyeing, applying resists and discharge. It’s been great fun. The colors are evolving, looking not only at my leaves but also at the Bark book. Every page is another inspiration.

I mixed up six dyes (chartreuse, rosewood, celery, burnt orange (my new favorite color), palomino, and mustard) and used them to dye or overdye about twenty pieces of cloth. I’ve also been using oatmeal and flour paste resist. Really soon now it’s going to be time to stop generating fabrics and start choosing them for pieces. But for right now, I’m kind of drunk on color!

dyes

contemplating the stash

oatmeal, it's not just for breakfast!

Gifts!

Our family celebrates Hannukah which started December 1st this year, incredibly early. It’s been a little bit of a struggle to get into the holiday spirit, especially since I’m so busy with my work. But I did get some fabulous gifts on the first night. My husband gave me the book Bark, by Cedric Pollet. It is so beautiful and inspiring. The author is French and traveled around the world taking pictures of trees. Every page is a work of art and a source of inspiration.

When I got to the studio the next day I found that Pam had left me a couple of gifts, too. A pomegranate and a persimmon from the Farmer’s Market in Davis, California where she had been visiting her mother. They were so beautiful with the book I just had to photograph them together before I ate them. Mmm, beautiful and delicious!

Blades–the Final Cut

IMG_1374_2

number four before and after

I’ve got all thirteen of the Blades series ready to go on to the next step now. I was able to put them up all together for the first time two weeks ago. Seeing them together made me realize that I still needed to do some adjustments on the shapes. Right around number eight the shapes shifted in a way I liked. I needed to make some changes on the first seven to have them all work together. Some of the changes were pretty subtle, like number four here that just needed to have some more organic curves added to it’s edges. Number five needed the most work, here’s a before and after shot.

before

after

Now that they are all fixed up in paper, it’s time to move on to surface and color. First stop is my stash to see what I’ve already got. I expect to spend the next couple weeks in the dye studio developing new fabric for the series. I’ve yet to really develop a color theme, I’d like to add some purples along with the reds, browns, and ochers I’ve been working with in the last year or so.

I’ve planned to work on the series in two parts in order to have some variation in what I do each day and also to get some pieces completely finished early for photography. We’ll have to see how that works, I already feel a little nervous about it. When I start feeling anxious about the work I have to remember that this happens with every project. I have to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and not get overwhelmed by the whole project. Yeah, right.

NorthWest Designer Craftsman

Yesterday my husband and I hosted a social for the Northwest Designer Craftsman organization. I’ve been a member for a couple of years but haven’t been able to give much to it. I was happy to contribute my house for the gathering and it gave me a boost to get some long overdue cleaning done, too.

It was a loud, convivial, and crowded event with many of the local luminaries of craft. They are a graying group, but very welcoming to those of us new members whose hair hasn’t completely changed color. It was an honor to host people who I admire for their depth of work in craft.

I would love to see some kind of mentoring program within the organization, or even just an informal way to share information with those who have so much more experience. I had great, but short, conversations with some women whose work I really admire in basketry, Jan Hopkins, Danielle Bodine, and Jill Nordfors-Clark, and Dona Anderson. I still feel a little nervous around people who have shown more and have had more success than I have. And yet, each of them were so friendly and approachable, and many said how much they admired my work. What do you know? Part of the reason I joined NWDC was to get these conversations across media, especially since I’m still trying to figure out where I fit, or even if it really matters.

The organization is coming to a turning point. Many of the members are elders, and there is a need for new energy to reinvigorate it. There are a few people who have taken on leadership roles with the idea of change. After yesterday’s event, I feel there is something there, something worth investing time and energy into to help it survive. I’d like to help, but I have to take baby steps otherwise it’s so easy to over commit. To be continued . . .

Persimmons!

Last weekend my husband and I had a quick getaway to San Francisco. We had a great time, we ate, we drank, we walked, and walked some more. And what did I take pictures of? Fruit at the Farmer’s Market, of course! There were six kinds of persimmons and these gorgeous pomegranates at one of the booths. I wanted to buy one of everything but getting it back on the airplane posed a problem. We did have a big, beautiful, delicious, ripe persimmon with breakfast, though. Not something readily available in Seattle.

Testing One, Two, Three

I’ve been doing some testing for my dye book. I realized that the longer I work with dyes, the more sophisticated my testing has become. Some of the work I did five years ago is incomplete. So along with the tap tests I did earlier this month, I decided to update my dye book with discharge effects. I went back through my samples and found the original test fabrics I did (because I don’t throw away anything!) and was able to use them to do the samples. I got a new discharge agent from ProChem called DeColourant. It’s citrus based and is supposed to be less toxic than bleach or thiourea dioxide. It comes in both a spray and paste so of course I ordered both.

So my discharge tests became very involved, five different discharge agents: bleach, soft scrub with bleach, thiourea dioxide, paste DeColourant, and spray DeColourant. I tried all five on cotton and rayon, and the three without chlorine on habotai and raw silk as well. And all of this with 43 different dye colors. Can you say obsessive?

So now I have lots and lots of little piles of little 1.5 inch squares of fabric with different discharge effects. I haven’t had a chance to compare them all because I don’t want to get them mixed up. In general, my observations are that soft scrub takes away more color than plain bleach and that the DeColourant doesn’t work that well. Now I just have to find time to paste the samples in my book so I can really see them. Oh the glamorous life of the fiber artiste!

13 Blades

I’ve never worked on such a big series at one time before. I now have 13 of the blades worked out in paper. When I got to ten, I realized I needed to get a better sense of their sizes, especially because I don’t have a space in my studio I can put them all up together. I made a list of all the approximate dimensions, divided them into small, medium, and large sizes and decided to make one more of each. It feels like an odd way to make art, but right now I’m not really visualizing these completely as individual pieces but as part of an installation. I’m excited by these crazy shapes.

Pam, my studio-mate, is out of town this week and offered to let me use her studio which has a nice big wall. I put them all up on Tuesday and learned what I really already knew, that I needed to rework the first seven pieces. Also, this is a big body of work! I’ve been reworking the pieces with the goal of having them all worked out in paper by the end of this week. Luckily, it’s taking a lot less time to rework the pieces than to come up with them from scratch. I want to finish the last two today, then put them all up on the wall again. Hopefully, they won’t need anything beyond some fine tweaking.

Next week is Thanksgiving and my youngest daughter doesn’t have school all week. I’m planning to use that time to get started on to the next step: cutting out the patterns in peltex and hand-stitching them together to make sure they work before I move into fabric. I started thinking about that yesterday, just how am I going to sew these together? Ah, but that’s next week’s challenge. This week is paper!

In the Garden, part II

Sometimes it seems trite to say that my work is inspired by nature. And yet, what an amazing show is on display every time I step outside. I took a walk the other day and photographed some of the changes there have been in a few short weeks. The ripening and bursting of seedpods and the changing color and decomposition of the leaves are signposts of the Fall. Here in Seattle, I can feel the omens of a cold winter in my bones and in the chill at the back of my neck. Today is grey, with precipitation that is a cross between heavy mist and light rain and will most likely last all day. These are times for reflection, for deepening ideas and developing concepts. To look at those blue sky pictures, remember the vivid colors, and try to catch a glimpse of their essence in the work.

opened lily seed pod

hosta leaves

detail of smokebush leaf