Making Smiles

Sometimes you just have to cave and work on making smiles. We recently found out that the girls both have to wear school uniforms next year, abandoning their cute, brilliantly colored wardrobes for khaki bottoms and navy/burgundy polo shirts. I almost cried for them-imagining the humdrum of the same dull colors day after day. So we've decided to find ways to spice it up. Their dress code says that jewelry and small accessories are allowed so off to work we went.
First thing we did was use this adorable squirrel playdough mold to make these pins. We just used sculpty clay and beads. Mine is the one with the scissors, of course. After baking we just hot glued pins to the back (the jewelry finding kind available at most craft stores).

The other thing I tackled the other day was making lots and lots of little girl smiles. I had made this little mermaid doll a couple of weeks ago for my youngest. She's only about five inches tall. I drew the pattern myself and hand stitched the details into her tail and attached hand dyed wool hair. Then while cleaning out my studio I stumbled upon this mini lunch box. I decided to turn it into a little mermaid house complete with bed, pillow and blanket and a little trinket box filled with "treasures". I just dug some beads and other little odds and ends out of my craft drawers. Then I had my daughter cover the outside of the box with stickers and a hand made label that says "Sami's Mermaid House". It now gets carried all over the house and played with more than anything else. Its hard for her now that her sister is becoming a mini-teen and not so into childish games. Hopefully having a little friend to carry around will help.

Stamping Fabric (Razor's Edge 2)

I used watered down acrylic paint to stamp on 100% cotton pre-washed fabric. Now their are pigments specifically made for stamping on fabric but I like to break all the rules, and occasionally work inexpensively. I then over dyed the fabric with, I hate to say it but Ritt dye. I don't recommend Ritt for longevity with fibers but hey, we were tie dying some shirts for my birthday and I just dumped it in there.
The pink fabric was also stamped using two sheets of plexiglass pressed together, a technique I'll get into more later. All just fabric techniques for getting unusual images.

Making Your Own Rubber Stamp (Razor's Edge 1)

I wanted fabric printed with double edged razor blades. I doubt they make it and if they do...well I can't afford it right now. So I decided to make my own.
Materials: rubber eraser, exacto knife, image, pencil
Step 1: Obtaining an image. I found my image in an image search*. But you can draw one. The important thing is finding one that fits your eraser and respecting common copyright laws.
Step 2: cover the back of the image with graphite. ie. scribble back and forth with a pencil all over the back of the image but spefically over the outline.
Step 3: lay the image over your erasure with the graphite down. Then draw over the outline of your image pressing down hard. Toodah! You just transferred your image!
Step 4: Deciding whats going to be possitive or negative. In my case I wanted the razor blades to be the possitive space-or the colored in space, and the area around it to disappear.
Step 5: carefully cut around your image removing the negative space. (if the image is going to be the possitive than remove everything outside of your image). I only cut down about 1/8" since anything below that won't register with a common stamp pad.
Step 6: Stamp away! If using a stamp long term I like to do the first couple with acrylic paint which helps to seal it. It is best applied, in my opinion, watered down and with a foam brush. The rainbow razor blade you see above was done with a rainbow stamp pad.

Branding

Let's get straight to the point. I think too much!
But in some ways this is good. I have a thesis show coming up this Spring and part of that is having a unified body of work. This is also important, if say, I wanted to apply for grad school, or was submitting a proposal for an exhibition.
I also read a number of art magazines, art quilt magazines, and articles by fellow crafter/artists who sell their work and they all push this idea of "branding". The main article that pops to mind shows a quilt artist who uses the repitition of small squares in EVERY SINGLE QUILT she makes! Other's always use the same combination of colors, or the same theme.
I, on the other hand, am all over the place. Chickens, flowers, rattlesnakes, anxiety, mushrooms-who knows what I'm going to address in my work. Light, dark, bright, monochromatic, it depends on the subject matter. So here I am banging my head against the wall just sure that I am a complete failure since I can't even limit myself to one media let alone one particular color scheme or repeating shape!
How will I ever decide what my show is about? On my project wall I have everything from dolls about Mother Nature, to a traditional log cabin quilt, to a nightmarish piece about sea creatures and now I can't get the image of tightrope walking over razor blades out of my head!
Leave it to my husband to sense that I need to talk. So there I sit eating my egg and ham breakfast when he says, "So how's your art stuff going? Having any inspiration?" and out poors this confession that I'll never succeed because I can't master what I've been told by an art quilt magazine. More was said but in a nutshell his response was "Please, don't become a conformist". This man is a genius! His simple phrase brings back a wave of other things I know to be true. To quote Barbara Sher in Live the Life you Love, "You can and must go after your dreams with your individuality turned up all the way or you'll wind up with somebody else's life!"
So I start thinking outside of the box. What things do I LOVE to put into my work? Layers (whether literal or implied). Silk organza. Complementary Colors. Assymetrical compositions. And most often something that is not as it first appears. Duh. I knew all this about myself all ready! I let a darn magazine psych me out. So, I got out some paper and made a list. I'm putting it up on my wall so I don't have to go thru this again.
For those of you that know me in person you know that I have a tattoo on my right upper arm that looks somewhat like a bastardized ankh/infinity/cross. If you ask me on a bad day what it means I'll tell you its how I sign my art. On a good day I'll tell you that it means We Will Be Reminded Until We No Longer Forget. This is one of those moments people. So when all else fails, write it down.

Modified

In my studio is a large stack of clothes waiting to be modified. Some are too large, some too small and others are just too cool to be thrown out but have become nearly unwearable for one reason or another. My all time favorite t-shirt was one of those because our lovely dogs stole it to use as a chew toy. Every great once in a while I would wear it out anyways but the fact that I could sew and was still wearing a holey shirt kind of bothered me.
This is the shirt. An American Apparel deep V in a perfect shade of gray, the perfect size. The find of this jewel at an outlet store inspired the purchase of several more at their full $22 price, but nothing could quite replace the original, worn to perfection.

The problem: there was a number of small to medium holes down the front, all relatively close together. The solution: another t-shirt from a thrift store with an awesome image but too small for me to wear.

In the words of Tank Girl, "Snip, Snip". Now I have a few miscellaneous holes elsewhere that are going to be patched from the inside with deep red fabric to look like the rats have had a nibble or two of me and voila! A new shirt. Okay, so I'm probably still going to get stared at but at least this way I can say it was intentional.

Happy altering!

Watching

Life is about watching. Its when we stop Watching that we lose perspective and become one of those walking zombie people (and not the cool kind). Watching is a skill that is not often talked about and usually overlooked by the masses. You will rarely see it mentioned in a sitcom or an issue of O. But it is when I stop Watching that I am overcome with stress, frustration, and feel overwhelmed by the daily activities of life.
I could say that I've been procrastinating. I could say that I've been having a mini artistic crisis (kind of true) but I've also been Watching. I've been Watching my tadpoles become frogs. Watching my kitten play and nap and hide his ungraceful mishaps and Watching snails.
During my husband and I's manual labor I found piles of what appeared to be spiral seashells that had mysteriously gathered under cinder blocks. My mind couldn't quite piece together how the shells had gotten to an AZ backyard and yet there they were by the handfull. I picked some up to give to my kids and only to see them crawling about on their own a few minutes later. Gorgeous, black, sleek snails in this long spiral shell. They were most likely going to die outside now that their insulated retreat had been removed so we brought many home to live in our frog tanks. They are happily eating up the plants and finding rot to eat in the soil.
Is this a message about bloom where you are planted? Who knows. I just know that I was delighted by these tiny black snails that I easily would have missed if I'd been paying less attention.

Feeding the Artist

Sometimes when your in the middle of a lull you just need to reorganize your books, sweep the floor and go find some art to look at. That's just what I did today. It is easy to get so caught up in what you can sell, what you can make to please others, what would impress, that you forget that this is supposed to be fun. So today I packed up the kids and headed off to the Phoenix Art Museum. This is what I saw and fell in love with, Oscar Bluemner's "Jersey Silkmills" 1911. The picture does not do it justice but I instantly thought quilt with all the geometric shapes and bright colors. This might not be something to be dove into but its definately something to pin up to the wall to think on and ponder. Happy creating everyone.

Bunny Blog Day or Purple Pets

I started out my Saturday by joining a dear friend for brunch. It was officially a craft date so I decided to share with her the fine art of needle felting. Without a game plan I went where my thoughts took me and that was right to my No Name bunny. I ended up with this purple felted bunny who is basically useless but darn adorable.
The real deal is my early birthday present, a two month old English Lop whose ears seem too big for his body. I had some great photos of him tripping over his ears as he ran but I thought those were rude to post to the general public. We are still figuring out how to get along with each other, he insists on kicking bedding and food all over my floor and I have to try and not rub all the fur off his ears by petting them. I'm sure we'll eventually settle on a suitable symbiotic relationship. Until then his very presence is inspiring.

When I got home from my friends I found out why I usually don't leave my husband home unsupervised! In the living room was a six foot by six foot by three foot reptile cage complete with an over weight Savannah monitor and a juvenile green iguana. Another rescue case caused by the owner losing their home. We eventually got everyone settled and could even pair up friends (you should see the two monitors we have sleeping with their heads on each other). I informed him that we really don't have any more options when it comes to rearranging our living room but what can we do when the poor things have no where else to go? AZ is short on reptile rescues and those that do operate charge large intake fees and quickly turn the animals around for resale, meaning they often end up back at a rescue. It seems like a vicious cycle spurred by countless adoption/intake fees-though how anyone could make money feeding and housing these creatures is beyond me. But I thought this was a sewing blog, right?

So I am onto my second Bitch Bag. I'm thinking this endeavor might require its own separate etsy store. Not all the bags will be stitched with Bitch. This one with the horses will be embedded with Wild instead. Though this is a commercially purchased fabric I am tweaking it out with some hand dyed cotton and a reclaimed vintage lining. Have to keep it real, and one of a kind, here folks. This one is a birthday gift for my fibers friend. We will be graduating together in May and both celebrate our special days in July (go Cancers!). As always I'll keep you informed.

Machination

It feels like every time I master a skill some one's already figured out a way to do it easily by computer or electronic device. Call me old fashioned but I refuse to become dependent on these mysterious machines for my art. The problem with this predicament is that what I painstakingly do by hand has lost its value. "That, oh yeah, my machine does that for the bargain price of $9999.95."
Unless you maneuver yourself into the gallery market there is little place for a hand maker in today's society. And even in the art world there are those who, if not mass produce, but utilize a machines capability to product their work faster and more precise.
Now I am not claiming to be 100% machine free. I do sew on a machine and often do machine quilting. But I do not program my machine to do the quilting for me. I don't program in the words for my quilted text-that is all done with how I move my hands. And it disgusts me that even during final critique in my advanced surface design where I had sat for weeks free motion quilting my Weeds piece that someone asked what other fonts my machine did.
There are machines that you can program in your text, a font, an image even and away it goes. And if you don't want to have a hand in what is embroidered or quilted into your work there is now a sewing machine foot put out by Bernina that regulates the tension of every stitch for you. So long to the learning curve, the months of practicing on scraps to get the speed of both the machine and your hands perfectly synced so as to create tight little stitches front and back. So long to those hours ripping out what I thought I was on a wicked roll to create only to see that they weren't as good as I thought from behind (tee hee, people all over often have this problem).
But this phenomenon is not limited to the fiber arts. There are those that create through a lens being pushed out by photoshoppers. Those that hand draw in competition with those that keep a projector handy. There are always short cuts for those who choose to take them and I'm not saying that their designs are any less attractive. I just want to find a way to keep a niche open for the things that I choose to do.

Squids for Kids

Okay-so I've been out of the creative loop for a few days. A missing kitten, an early birthday present, errands, and well, in a nutshell some time with my husband.
I did do some sewing on Monday. I had been in a crap mood most of the time and couldn't scrounge up any motivation to work so decided to head into the studio to make a large mouthed monster of some kind. About the time I'd dug out my tub of monster fabric in walked my seven year old. I asked if she wanted to make a monster and being who she is she did, and knew exactly what he should look like.



I didn't get back around to my monster yet but I have visions of lantern fish dancing in my head.