Assembled

Am I finished? I could do more finishing but I think they are happy the way they are. Of course they need clothes but that will have to wait till tomorrow.

The Dolls in Progress-Gail Wilson's Designs

Here they are still armless and legless, drying in their respective devices. Their heads are shaped a little different due to the stretching habits of the different fabrics. But I am not going to let that bother me. Well it did a little at first but I decided I quite like them each for their own distinctions. I do have a few finishing touches to add, highlights and some hair details-but for the most part the painting is finished.
For any one who is captivated, as am I, by these reproduction dolls, you can see more like them at Gail Wilson's website, by clicking on the title. And I do mean captivated.
I would wax loquacious but it is too hot. So hot that my camera lense fogged over and had to be cleaned and acclimated to the unaltered air of the main part of our little hut-which does not have ac except in the bedrooms. I really do not mind except on days when everything sticks-like today for instance, a scorcher if there ever was one. Ah but I do love summer, even on days when the sunflowers drop their petals and the cat sheds his hair in clumps as he slowly saunters through the house looking for one cool spot, one shaded place to plunk his fat self down to rest and dream of cooler haunts."...to sleep, perchance to dream.."

Weekend away

We had a restorative weekend in Greenport, located in the north fork of Long Island New York. We walked and swam and ate and took pictures and had a grown up good time. If we had not had cel phones it would have been perfect.
Just thought I'd share the view. I did not shop much or create. Just rested.

Bag update..

This felting stuff is too cool. I love the way this bag body turned out. Now for a lining and some embellishment and handles and who knows. I bought some tortoise shell handles and I have to dig up some stuff for lining.
Nappy bag is a gift. Pattern is by Amy Butler.I had some left over minke and a piece of denim from the bag so I made a quick little quilt to include in the gift bag.
I guess this was a very baggy day.

Finally a cool day

Although I am still headachy from the intense sinus pressure, the heat finally lifted and we can stop our excessive sweating for a while.
I went to Joannes today and bought handles and iron on interfacing for my projects, and Mike and I had some ice cream cake, from Trader Joes, to celebrate our anniversary. Belatedy. I also bought some patterns for clothes which I may attempt to get done next week. Or not. I have the fabric so it depends upon how crazy it gets around here.Tonight I continue work on the nappy bag.

Lack of lack

Self Portrait in 1980



Reading the posts in a group that I belong to called "everydaymatters". It is a wonderful group of artists, hosted by Danny Gregory, author and artist. There is a wiki page and a yahoo group also..
I mentioned in a previous post the little demons that keep me from my artstic endeavor and one more has revealed itself and its name is Lack. I am afraid to use up all of my precious materials. For most of my life I could not afford any.Or I did not allow myself to have them. Or I had too many kids-whatever...Now that I have become a lover of fine art suppies it is scary how much stuff I have and I love it all! Now I need to go and use it all up. Anyone else scared by the sound of this? Shudder.
Still sapped by this bronchitis scourge. Not feeling as bad but not really able to breathe either. Knitting is good when you are chair ridden.
Folded book made from watercolor paper, cover made with paper from Thailand. I read that the paper from Thailand is made from a plant that does not have to be killed in order to harvest the paper making pulp which is different from other methods that use the inner part of the plant.
Closed book
The idea for this book is from a book called "Making and Keeping Creative Journals" by SuzanneTourtillott. I bought the paper from ArtPaper.com
I went Yarn shopping this weekend.


The blue is the almost
ready to be felted bag mentioned
in a previous post. The green
wool and luscious
Malizia
is for my next project.
There is a wonderful place in
Greenport, New York called
Now and Zen Yarns.
If you love yarn,
you will love this store.
The owner, Christine Henson, is so nice and she
is excited about her work.
It is a blissful place to shop.
Her very nice mom was
there too.

Bailey goes to Columbia

Here she is on her first day, two weeks ago. She is having great summer, meeting people from all over the world and studyingliterature and art. I ask you, what could be better?

The Florence Griswold Museum

The Florence Griswold Museum
If you are ever in Southern Connecticut, and you are an art lover, you must stop here and see this enchanted place.
We were stuck in traffic due to accidents for hours and still it was worth the trip. I love these museums tucked away in the country side. They are treasures.

Fun change of course-felted bags

nonibags-felted bags
I am making the Felted carpet bag in the medium size in a solid blue. Need an easy hand work project with quick results.
I am allowing this summer self indulgence. I am enjoying it.
Click on links for pictures.

Dollink

Spent last night and tonight stuffing my little friend. She is filling out quite nicely. This body is done in a different fabric than the fabric which came with the kit from Gail Wilson. I wanted to make sure I could do it before I used the lovely doll body fabric which came with her kit. It is also ready to be stuffed.
While I stuffed I watched a movie that we borrowed from our library called"Everything is Illuminated". Wonderful film. I want you all to go out and get it right away.
I wrote a poem today filled with pain and anger so I probably won't publish it because I don't want to hurt anybody. But I have to say that I do like it because it said exactly what it was meant to say. I will have to think a while before I release it. Words are powerful and they cannot be unspoken, especially if you publish them on the internet.hahaha
Today was a busy day filled with errands and struggles with my daughter and I am glad I had time to sit and do some work on my doll. I am always amazed at how I forget about all of the troubles and cares I carry while immersed in any creative moment. Makes life bearable and even joyous.

Two gessoed dolls drying in cups.
Had to clear away all the doll making stuff to accomodate guests for the day. Using two different fabrics the bodies really did stretch to become different shapes. One is taller and more elongated.The other is more the shape it was designed to be. I like them both. Today I will re read the instructions for sewing them together. We may be heading north to a museum in Connecticut, The Florence Griswold Museum in Mystic. We are still having coffee, we have not decided how ambitious we want to be today after our weekend of birthday parties and bridal showers...

Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Looks like a quilt!

Ethereal~

John Lennon

The Peace Fountain

Noah's Ark

Our day in the city -Saint John the Divine Cathedral and the Peace garden next door. So hard to capture all of the beauty and creative energy.

Acts of Faith

I spent yesterday afternoon enlarging Bailey picture in order to put her on my easel. I will look at her for a week or so then take her down and do a painting on either canvas or wood. I will trace the outline--it will be big 45 inches!!- and don't know yet about what else paint wise, some oil some encaustic(if i do encaustic, I have to prepare the ground with hide glue and whiting, six or seven coats of real gesso, sanded between each application, an act of devotion) some pallette knife. I will paint her while she is away for the month of July. I used to think it was somehow cheating to trace but if I continue to listen to those voices I will not get anything done.
The faith part comes in because it is hard for me to believe that I remember how to paint. This comes at the beginning of every painting that I do-a panicky feeling that I won't know how to proceed. I am reading the book that Ted Orland sent me called "Art and Fear', By Ted Orland and David Bayles. I am absorbing some of it. Am I dense or is there just so much in this book.Both! In the book, they talk about perfectionism, "To require perfection is to invite paralysis."and "To demand perfection is to deny your humanity, as though you would be better off without it. Yet this ordinary (and universal) humanity is the very source of your work..." I do battle with the disease of perfectionism.... and also the fear that if I am a painter then I am like my mother, who is lost and crazy, and a painter. These are not fears that scream at me, but they are like a small trickle in the backround. Just enough for me to consider doing other things instead. Things that make more noise than the trickle, I cook or eat or shop or read blog after blog after blog.
If I just show up in the right space, ready to do the work, the faith part will work. I play loud music, too, in my studio , to obliterate the trickle of doubt. Dar Williams, Joni Mitchell, Indigo Girls, James Taylor-I refuse to call them oldies. And I invite angels to sing along.

The Clematis is blooming in my yard. I planted it and it was three years before it had even one flower. They do not like to be moved I hear. It was defiantly barren. I nurtured, I built a wall around it, I weeded and gave it a trellis. Finally one year, one flower appeared. And every year since there have been more and more and now it is a beautiful thing to behold. And so -faith indeed.

Redbirdwatch

The nest is in the lilac bush behind the fence. We have only seen one baby cardinal. The papa on the clothesline is guarding his offspring, making loud clicking noises to warn the cat. The cat on the ground is impervious.The bird does not know that the cat is too fat and lazy to hunt. Since this photo was shot, the baby has learned to fly and has been spotted in a bush on the other side of the yard so we don't worry about him so much.
I have been so sick with this damned bronchitis/sinus infection that I have been able to accomplish nothing at all. I have drifted from sewing room to studio to visit my works in progress but have no energy to do much more than think about them.
I hate being sick.
Today is my Katy's 16th birthday. Katy is my bi polar baby.Hers has been a tortuous path, fraught with peril. I don't write about her much, to protect her privacy, but sometimes I feel that I should share my experience more. I have asked her if I could write about her in my blog and she has replied,
"Let them read the book."
Funny girl.

Happy Birthday Katy

Basil Rex

How to burn your house down

I have not painted in a couple or four months. My studio is packed with stuff for painting, wax painting, stained glass supplies, paint thinner, and my husbands tools which also have some flamable items, different spray varnishes, glues--- ach du liebe!!
Any way I am in there, music is blasting, the sun is out and all is good and in order! Did I mention saudering irons, turpentine, varnish and a grill for melting wax--
I am on my third painting and I smell something burning: faint at first, my daughter couldn't smell it at all, but then it got stronger and i started feeling the saudering irons and the paint griddle to see if they were hot. Nope. Did I misplace a saudering iron or an encaustic pen-leave something plugged in?? Of course the worktable is in front of the electric outlet and the cabinet which holds sheets of glass in in front of that and all the leftover tiles from the bathroom are in front of that so I begin to move stuff--calling for help from my dd and dh to come and move the flammable liquids and help me move the boxes of tiles and the books and the table. And be quick about it! Panic!!!
But the smell was coming from the other side of the room.
Now if you will direct your attention to the model peonies which are precariously perched on my husbands workbench, you will notice a mirror to the right of the mason jar. This mirror was reflecting enough sun through the window to ignite the wood (which is a piece of a cabinet whose shape I liked, and kept) in the window. This piece was actually on fire.
Now if the house had burned down and they did an investigation, they would undoubtedly blame the flammable materials and/or the heated tools that I use. I doubt any one would blame the mirror.
Well the verdict is that I am going to rearrange my studio and get a fire extingusher in there and secure the chemicals. And the mirrors.
So now I will clean the studio, which I have been wanting to do for quite a while. And I will paint more to make sure nothing burns down.

Chaos and Order

I have moved most of my sewing stuff from my son's old room to the table in order to allow him to clear out all of his pre college crap, take what he wants and get rid of the rest. We have a tiny house. I am ruthless. It ocurrs to me that I did not have this to deal with when I got out of school because I had already been on my own since going to boarding school and did not have any place to go back to. So when it comes to my kids I expect them to take their stuff with them when they go. I haven't got the frame of reference which allows for them leaving their unwanted stuff in my space.
I moved a dresser full of stuff out onto the front porch for him to have and now he says he does not want it. Well it isn't going back into that room now ---no it is not---I am going to put all of my sewing stuff back into the room and it will be mine forevermmmmwwwhahahaha. There is also a bed in there and I want to move that out as well but I may leave it there for the occasional overnight traveller. Or maybe not.

My yard is peaceful and pleasant in June. The recent rain has made it so lush and green! I love bulbs and annuals because I don't have to replant every year. The only seeds I will plant are for sunflowers which will bloom in August and September before it all turns brown and gray again.This view is more than half of the back yard. Small and plenty.

rain and more rain

been a week of problems and I wanted to post a nice picture but blogger will not let me! anyway it was a nice picture of my yard which has been soaking up the rain and loving it even if the people who live here feel sun deprived. maybe later I will post some pictures. Any way I have been too beleaguered to do art. to sew, but i did cut out the pieces for a diaper bag that I am making for a gift. and i hope i can get it done this weekend.

Thirteen Moons Gallery Artists

Thirteen Moons Gallery Artists
And this one!
Also from Rayna's blog.

Book Club Reading

"The View from the Studio Door" is by Ted Orland. I haven't begun it yet beause I do not have it.I am sending check today. Melanie Testa is hosting discussion group on her blog which is linked in the title of this page.
Lately my chorus of inner critics have been having a party in my head. Their names are Not Important, Too Old, Too Fat, Too Sad, Nobody Cares, Fatigue and Unworthy. Not Important and Unworthy are twins but they are not identical twins. They are especially loud when it comes to writing and painting-and really really loud when when I entertain the idea of publishing or --be still my heart--selling my work.
So here is my plan. I am exposing them. They hate the light. And I am going to try to be indifferent to their raucus and clamourous intrusion. I plan on playing music and books on tape as a first line of defense.
And daily practise and taking care of myself and most important I am going to .....what ? I don't know yet. That is why I am here, to figure that out. Writing about the chorus is a way to route them out. Sometimes they surprise me when I become aware of how constant they have become. Can I eradicate them? Silence them? Or at least minimize their influence? That is the plan.
Yesterday when I posted the poem, I felt very vulnerable and almost did not share it. Too Sad and Nobody Cares were working on me. But I put on my armor and posted away. I am ready to fight for my art.

Memorial

maybe there is no such thing as
enough time to grieve the truly grievous loss
never a time that you will not stumble into the inevitable pocket of memory that you thought (you dreamed you had buried it)
stumbled into the for last time and would never have to do it again
and again the earth opens and you remember

driving
a winding road on the east coast in 1962
in summer
in the back of a vw bug in your pajamas
the scent of beach roses hovering in the night air. you
counting street lights
on the way home from the drive in

you should be sleeping but the material in the back of the vw is
too scratchy
and it is too much fun to be out this late any way
way way past bedtime
way past

in the past I would swallow this bitter pill,
the waking up to it,the knowing of
this memory of june, carried on the scent of a fragile rose
in the early summer on the beach

bitter bitter winters to follow
still unthinkable

what stops you in your tracks is that the memory is so clear and yet so distant
you can almost be there if you close your eyes and

if the world would just stop

just for a minute
and let you go back
just to be there in that time

when you knew what it was like to know that the world was going to be like this forever
and if you wanted something with your whole heart you could have it.

maybe it doesn’t matter if you are fifteen or fifty
if the earth opens up that way
you fall
and you are in that place at the same time as you are actually walking along
and it is always a surprise
because you had long since forgotten that you had ever been that way

that innocent
and there it is
almost reachable and always irretrievable

it was just a rose, just
a reminder
memento mori

Beach Rose

This is a Beach Rose. I don't know the real name. They grow wild along the mid Atlantic and north Atlantic coast. Their perfume is divine.You can make tea from the rose hips.
When I was a kid growing up in Rhode Island we use to take drives along the shore where the great mansions stood and these roses grew in hedges along the side of the road. The aroma wafted in through the car window as we meandered along the roads.
This particular rose is an uninvited guest in our little garden. It has been trying to grow for a couple of years and this year I just left it to see what would happen and lo and behold there were blooms and this wonderful rose emerged and more will follow-and they are red! How wonderful. And the smell transports me right back to the back seat of a nineteen fifty six volkswagon in 1960 something.

Triangles for the wedding gift

Here is my Name and Claim project for the next couple of days-to tame this pile of fabric and paper and make it into a pile of squares. It has taken me a while to engage in this project, but I have the time and energy to work on it, so now is the time!
Today my plan is to trim and remove the paper from the pile on the right and attach them to the pile on the left to make blocks like the pile on the top. Well maybe not all today. I have about seventy one blocks to assemble before I can put the top together. If I use the quilt as you go method, I can assemble the blocks in sets nine sets of nine then use a single row as a border and it will be eleven blocks by eleven. This could work! The wedding is August 11.

Another small thing

Love this little Kimono from Kumiko Sudo's book, "Kokoro no Te". It has given me some peaceful stitching time, driving back and forth to hospital where my daughter is being treated for her bi polar disorder.
We have made the drive several times since Friday when we took here there. So many things going on. I have not written or thought about it deeply, just putting one foot in front of the other. I do not have to understand everything. That is the hardest part for me, always needing to understand the whys and wherefores.
Sometimes I just have to trust the process. I still ask though. Maybe the problem is I am just too adept at recognizing when I am being led around in circles, when paradigms collide and no one really has the answers but it seems important to believe that they do.
So that is where I dwell these days in that world of chimera and mirage. Which drug will work? Which part is behavioral and which part is neurobiological? Who knows what and is there really any one who knows anything? And what is it fair to expect? from her from me from them?

A few small blocks

A few blocks to add to my pile. Demands on my time and energy have made these little sweet blocks the only ones I do. For now I am only doing what I want to do. I will get back to my bigger commitments as soon as I feel like it will be fun and not a drain or obligation. How is that for being selfish! Ha! I worked very hard to reach this level of selfishness!

Rugby

Perect day for a Rugby Tournament! The girl is my Jen. She was spectating only! Fun to take pictures as they roll by!

Round Robin

I have been diligently working on my Round Robin this week in spite of one crisis after another. Nothing earth shattering, just a crushed fender-so my fault -and the usual torment of teen agers testing and testing. You can see that I cannot get far enough back to get a decent picture, but it will have to do for now, until I stitch the border on and I can move it to a bigger spot!

Spring has sprung

Flowering bushes in my yard. Altho we have a tiny plot, we do love to fill it up with flowers. It is a perfect spring day. I have been for a walk and done lots of Things that Need to Be Done. The rest of the afternoon is mine with which to do whatever.

A Few Little Things

Here are the things I finished today.
And a poem which I wrote in my car this morning.

God traces a path through
the sightless dark, through
the pitiless cold
and timeless configurations

God brushes away doubt and
impassable obstacles and says
"Let there be love."

The title of the book I have used for machine embroidery is " Vanishing Act, Machine Embroidery on Soluble Fabrics" by Jan Beaney. It is a very good resource if you are interested in this kind of stuff. It was a gift from My Secret Pal. I have visited their web site(click on her name) and they have alot of really cool books there to look at.

The messenger

I finished a new tote today. It is called a messenger bag and it is an Amy Butler design to which I have added a loop and a side pocket for scissors.It is a great size to haul all my applique stuff and maybe a book or journal and some pens... The fabric is an older Ralph Lauren pattern, which I used to make valances for my cottage. I loved that I made it using the material that I had, and the history it has for me. The lining is a Waverly plaid which I used to make slipcovers for a friend, who has since dissapeared in the swift currents of time.
The tulip is a volunteer that grows in my Lilac bush every spring, in the shade, in between the branches. If you don't know to look for it, you will miss it. I have no idea who planted it there. One year it just appeared.