Luna's Baublebilities

So - Here are some photos of some of my new scarves. I'm still working on getting these done and loaded up into my shop but I thought that I would at least show off the Iced Poppies accidental colorway. I hated it at first but it has grown on me. It really is beautiful. I wish I felt like I could reproduce it.

The next scarf is in the Helmsman colorway. The final scarf photo is a terrible shot of the scarf but a lovely one of my girl.














































Thursday was a good day for Maxx. I don't know why he wants to make such silly faces for the camera but it sure is cute! I did slick down that shock of hair before he hopped on the bus.

Getting on the bus was no problem the first day and he was all smiles and happiness when he got home. He broke down and cried when I put him on the bus today. He looked sooooo sad. I wanted to take him off again and bring him inside but I resisted. He really needs the time with other children and I need the help and advice of his teacher. Not to mention the 4 hours of "free time" this gives me. I got 20 new items loaded up at GoblinsMarket on Thursday!

On Friday, His teacher called to tell me she had noticed some difficulties on Thursday -Maxx wouldn't hold her hand, used "NO!" a lot and engaged in a lot of sensory stuff that indicated some potential problems (flapping hands when he ran or walked, etc...) nothing surprising and I'm really glad that she is tuned into what she sees from him. We used to see the hand flapping a lot when he first came to us but it had mostly disappeared by the first 6 months. He was doing it when he got off the bus Thursday so I knew that he was a little stressed. I feel that he is going to need a lot of support as he enters the big world and it is reassuring that he has a teacher who wants to communicate about his needs with us so much. I also feel that I need to be very sensitive to this transition period and help him feel secure. How does one do that with a 4 year old who communicates so poorly?

I've got 3 challenge themes I'm working on right now. The first one being the August Take It Further challenge, which was about balance. I've dreamed up a barn swallow mobile idea that I want to develop so I've been fighting with a home made pattern. I think I'm making progress but I'm NOT going to show it to all of you because the early stages are so embarrassing!

The next theme is from the EtsyBloggers street team blog carnival. We are to choose a favorite color and make something in that color. I'm half done with that challenge. I'm working with some beautiful gold/plum matte metallic seed beads and a volcano rivoli. Photos may be ready in a few days.

The final challenge is the September Take It Further challenge which is lists. Boy do I have lists. Itend to embellish my lists a lot. Perhaps I'll dig up some old embellished lists to share with you!

Oh - and here are some beautiful, tasty pink potatoes I took put of the garden Thursday. These are all from just one plant! How amazing - an entire meals' worth of 'taters grew from just a little chunk of potato stuck into the dirt and horse poop back in May! How cool is that?

So it's 10:30 on a Sunday morning and I should be in Church, coaching my son on how to be be reverent and avoid the "naughty room" during Sacrament meeting, but I'm simply not up to it. Bryan and Molly are off with Jonathan on a canoe/hiking trip up to Big Eddy and the Seward range. They left on Friday and I'm already exhausted. Turns out, both the dog and Maxx are more anxious than I am about their absence so Ziggy keeps waking me up during the night with his anxious prowling and Maxx clambers out of bed fairly early, full of his special brand of tense energy. Not a good prescription for beginning the Sabbath Marathon, so I've elected to stay home and maybe visit my brother later today. He has lots of crab apples he wants me to take away from his tree.

Since I'm sitting around the house with a really good Sabbath excuse to avoid "Luna" work, I took some time to browse around Sharon B's In a Minute Ago blog. I've really missed having the time to read her blog and explore the amazing links she provides. I've also missed participating in the Take It Further challenge. June and July were a total wash for me, which is too bad. I really liked the color scheme in June. The color scheme this month is here. It is quite nice.














Her blog took me to some interesting places, this morning. The latest edition of CQ Magazine (online) is really interesting. It has a short but well illustrated article about painting a quilt block prior to adding embroidery embellishment. It is a very nice effect. Maybe someday I'll have time to try it.

Then there was a reprint of an article from the World Ark Magazine published by Heifer International about sericulture, the raising of silkworms and production of silk. I have been feeling really unhappy about working with silk because virtually all of the silk I use comes from China and I have been wondering how my support of the textile industry in China affects the many human rights abuses and vast environmental degradation sponsored by the Chinese government. This article made me feel much better about working in silk. Turns out that real human beings with families benefit from the production of silk and that there are cooperatives and NGOs that are using sericulture as a means of eliminating poverty in China. So I can lay aside my guilt and just continue to purchase my supplies from companies who buy from and support cooperatives and businesses that treat their workers fairly.

That article led me to the Heifer International website where I read an article about the Carbon Hoofprint. Please go read the article and, if you haven't already, take a look at my blog entries about agricultural environmental contamination and our attempts to clean our water. I continue to look for ways to change my Family's consumption habits so that I do support these industries as little as possible. We really need to get a cow.

But that will have to wait until I find some balance, which brings me back to the Take It Further Challenge. The theme for this month is Balance. Sharon asks us to consider the following statement, "In my chaotic and hectic life I often admire people who are able to maintain balance in their lives. What is balance to you? Do you maintain a balanced life? How do you balance aspects of your life? That is the challenge this month - balance."

I'll tell you , I have had no balance this summer. It all started at a retirement party for Bry's uncle where Maxx hit me in the back of the head with a big, heavy, green playground ball while I was siting and chatting with family. My neck and shoulders immediately seized up and a friend spent several minutes working on those tight muscles and I iced and rested for several days and thought I was going to be O.K. But I soon developed a tightly knotted rope running down the right side of my spine, headaches, insomnia and exhaustion. I finally broke down and went to see the chiropractor when I began developing intermittent dizziness and an inability to focus my eyes. (I know, I should have gone sooner.) He immediately diagnosed whiplash and spent several weeks straightening me out again.

The lack of energy and range of motion really set me back again, which seems to be a recurring theme in my life with Maxx. He is so much bigger and stronger and physically demanding than Molly was at 4 and he is sick every two or three weeks with viruses that he passes on to me. (I'm not sure where he gets these viruses, I believe he manufactures them himself. He is a walking biological weapons factory. I understand this is common with preemies.) Bry recently remarked that I am never well anymore, I am either incapacitated with feminine issues, injured as a result of Maxx tackling me or throwing something at me from behind or I'm sick with a virus that Maxx mixed up just for me. I'm gaining more weight and beginning to feel very much older than I should. The house has been a total pit all summer because Bry has been too busy and I've been too unwell to really clean. All of the wonderful inventory I was going to produce over summer vacation sits undyed, unassembled and jumbled together in my studio. The garden, with its wonderful French Intensive, double dug beds, has produced an admirable crop of pigweed and nettle. It is a very frustrating situation.

Here are the positives: We did get the beets wed at the right time, and have proven that these double dug, intensive beds will do their trick if we can maintain weed-free status until the vegetables are big enough to shade out the bad guys. Mint spreads relentlessly and now I can have all the peppermint tea I want for the rest of my life. I have discovered that summer squash will grow even in the midst of six foot high clumps of stinging nettle if they are planted at the edge of the nettle patch. And finally, I am developing a really good horse stance for when I hear Maxx running at me from across the room. He hasn't actually knocked me over yet, but the bulk of his weight (head and upper torso) is right at pelvis level for me. Did I mention the the chiropractor has to adjust my lower back, as well?

So balance is an issue for me, both literally and figuratively. How can I stay well, how can I become stronger and healthier? How can I get all my work done? How should I prioritize all of my responsibilities?

Those are the questions that nag me every day. Sometimes I think that having a full time job where I go away every day to priorities set in place by someone else and a regular paycheck to validate my efficiency would be easier. Or maybe I should just become a bee? they have pretty simple lives - collect nectar, make honey, feed the grubs, vibrate to keep the hive warm. . . . . maybe it's not so simple.























Anybody have any wisdom to share here about balance?

I have been very busy of late trying to get my new shop, Goblins' Market up and running on Etsy. What with Bryan looking at heading back to school, I am hoping that it will prove to be successful. I've been having a lot of fun putting together color palettes for hand dyed silk ribbon and cord. I'll end up spending a fortune on PFD fibers alone!




Today I finally had an opportunity to get photos of my May challenge work - such as it is. The theme was self-definition as an artist and I thought about that a lot. I am known for my jewelry and scarves - which is great - but it is also very one sided. Most people don't realize that I also love literature ad intend to write someday when my life is quiet enough to allow that level of contemplation. (Yes, I know - I should make that time now. . . etc, etc.. . Now is just not the time nor the season in my life for writing. It will come.) People also don't realize that I am very interested in 2 dimensional art and am quite a good archaeological illustrator. I decided to work on something unexpected that pulls together my love of literature with my interest in other art forms.

I painted a 6x6 canvas in an abstract style, using techniques pulled from Acrylic Revolution. Once I had the shapes on the canvas, I highlighted areas and drew in details using Derwent Colorsoft color pencils and applied a thick textured layer of High Gloss gel medium. I'm still contemplating what the canvas needs next as I am dissatisfied with the high gloss layer and the amount of detail. I think I may need to apply some transparent gesso and repaint and draw in some more detail. It is certainly not finished yet.



The back of the canvas has a 4x4 inch opening that I built a little oxplow book for. The book opens two ways. (I learned to make oxplow books from Alysa Golden's Unique Handmade Books) In one "half " of the book I have written H.D.'s The Helmsman, one of my favorite poems and a style of poetry that I greatly admire. The other half I have titled "What Georgia Had to Say About Flowers and Dirt and Bones." It contains three quotations from Georgia O'Keeffe about why she painted what she did and about not worrying about whether or not she was conforming to people's expectations of her work. Both sections are too long to post here today, but maybe I'll throw them in sometime in the next few weeks.








I am really excited about the June palette for the TIF challenge. I hope I get to play with it before August!

The theme for May's Challenge over at In A Minute Ago is "What do I call myself and why?" Sharon has posted some interesting thoughts about the dilemma many textile artists find themselves in - how to define themselves and their work in a way that the public can understand and appreciate. Why is defining ones' self so difficult?

I have always had a difficult time introducing myself. As a child, I was very shy and then as I grew older and less terrified of other people, I began to hate saying my name. Virginia is a terrible name to go through public school with. If you doubt that, come and take a look at my senior yearbook. The problem was compounded by the fact that my maiden name started with W. On any given day through middle school and high school I was referred to as a German automobile, a very private female body part and/or a virgin. The virgin epithet probably would have fit on everyone in my 7th grade, so why was it so nasty to say to someone and sooo funny to single me out? Maybe I was particularly lovely when blushing.

As an adult, I'm growing into my name a bit better, though I think it will always be too gentrified for me. Most days, I would much rather introduce myself as Luna an let it go at that. (Thanks for the extra name, Gesh, it's much more comfortable than my first one.) On top of all the baggage my given name carries, I often stumble over my reply when someone asks me what I do. It is a complicated answer which could include any or all the following elements: stay at home mom, home-school teacher of all subjects, textile and jewelry artist, class co-ordinator for local arts council, literature addict, writer in waiting, terrible housekeeper, good cook . . . .

Strangely, I don't usually reply that I am a wife - I think that is because my connection to Bryan goes back so far and is such an essential element of my person that I don't feel that it needs to be pointed out. It would be re-stating the obvious, like saying "I am a woman." Duh.

Sometimes when I am working in the gallery, someone will come in and touch one of my scarves and comment on how beautiful it is. When I say thank you, they want to see my other items in the store. I think they become a little perplexed as I lead them through the scarf racks and the jewelry counters pointing out all of my work. It look so diverse at first glance. I'm having the same problem trying to make my Etsy store look unified. There are hand painted silk scarves using serti resist methods, tie dye methods and silk devore methods. There are minimalist earrings and necklaces made with very simple stringing and wire wrapping techniques next to very intricate beaded items that look like they could be straight out of the Victorian era. There are silk fusion items with lots of machine embroidery and hand beading. Coming into my personal studio, you would also see watercolor painting, archaeological illustrations, sewn items and some recent collage, embroidery and acrylic work. There's no simple label you can put on my work or my style but anyone who looks closely and pays attention for long enough would notice that I have a relentless hunger for intricacy and detail. Even my "minimalist" jewelry items will include something with tiny, interesting detail - like the wood grain and speckled glaze on the pair of earrings below.

Having babbled on so about how I define myself, as a person and as an artist, I still have no idea where I will go with the challenge theme. This will require further thought.

In the meantime, I have three yards of complex cloth to work on and send on to the next person in line. Mine came back to me, finished, last week. Pictures are below but they are not good. I need to set up a better place to photograph textiles. I think I've got the jewelry thing worked out, but fabric is so difficult to capture. The final result is actually quite a bit greener than these photos show.

And in closing - I must report success in the Potty Training arena. Yesterday my boy stayed dry all day and followed his own body's prompting to get to the potty on time. This peeing on Lady-bugs thing is really doing the trick! With the spring thaw,ladybugs began coming out of the woodwork and congregating anyplace warm and bright. It was like Amityville Horror meets Ladybug Picnic. One day while attempting to encourage the boy to pee into the toilet instead of willy-nilly all over the bathroom, Bry threw a few ladybugs into the potty for target practice. that was an instant hit. I don't know what we will do when the ladybugs have all moved on. Cheerios sadly lack that tragic victim quality.

Lots of changes (good and bad) in the last couple of weeks around here. We were able to enjoy lots of time this week with my nephew, D, who is a year older than my little guy. They had a great time but my nephew is sad because his maternal gramma, Mary, passed away from liver cancer last Sunday. She was a vibrant and outgoing woman who had beaten cancer two or three times before this last recurrance and it has been rough for D to see her weaken so quickly. Prayers for Mary's extended family and especially my brother, sister-in-law and nephew would be appreciated. They shared a home with gramma Mary for the last several years as her health became a bit more chancy.

But then last night I got some great news - my brother-in-law and his sweet wife had their first baby yesterday. It is a beautiful little boy and I can't wait to go down to visit and get my hands on him. However, this addition severely disrupts my balance of nieces to nephews. I have only 4 nieces and now I have 7 nephews. Someone in the family had better step up and start producing more girls!







Most of you probably want to see photos of my experiments with mono-printing. Well, here they are. I mostly followed the instructions in Quilting Arts, as mentioned in an earlier post. I used Procion chartruce, bright green, brilliant blue, teal and midnight blue on both sheer organza and white cotton muslin. I wasn't really pleased with my current results but here are 2 things I intend to try next time:

- Take time to find and/or create some interesting resists. I only had string to work with because there were no leaves here last week and I was too eager to take time to cut out paper resists. I found that if string is thick enough to act as a resist, it leaves a fuzzy impression because it is not flat enough to allow good contact with the plate. Scraping some of the dye away with my fingernail left a crisp and interesting deign but my fingertips are still purple.

- Get some different sponge rollers. I ordered some from Dick Blick that I think my 3 year old will love. They have a very open texture and would be great for tempera on paper but left a very grainy texture on the printing plate. Watering down the dye paste and adding a bit of dish soap to the recipe might help with that, but I think most of it was the roller. A recent trip to Home Depot revealed a wide array of locally available paint roller thingies - including some very smooth and small foam trim rollers. I'm going to get some of those.

I can see that this could become a valuable technique. If I had taken the time to create some interesting resists I could be working with some fun quilted, embroidered and embellished layers right now. Maybe next week.

Now I also want to try screen printing with dye paste. I've been intimidated to try screen printing because I was afraid that it would be very expensive and complicated. Technology is getting more user friendly, though so I may try that soon.

Oh, BTW, my samples are not ironed because I couldn't get to the ironing board. Which brings me to another issue. . . . We were just going to paint, right?

Well, we discovered that we couldn't easily scrape paint off the old woodwork without having serious lead issues. As we stood around looking at the room and worrying about what to do, my son ran through the front door and slammed it shut. It made an interesting noise, like plaster falling down inside the wall. Investigation of the noise led to the discovery that, indeed, plaster was falling down behind the door casing which was actually coming off the wall all on its own. All of the woodwork came off surprisingly easily. It is now all in the barn in the process of being chemically stripped.

Further contemplation determined that it would make the most sense to replace the two outer homasote walls and the ceiling now while the woodwork is already off. Removal of the ceiling revealed that we still have knob and tubing wiring in some parts of the house. From what is exposed, we cannot determine where the knob and tubing comes from nor where it goes. It is a great mystery.

Ceiling removal also revealed that a weight bearing wall was removed from the middle of the living room at some point and never replaced or shored up with an alternative. Also, a joist was sawn through to allow installation of a heating duct from the furnace to the upstairs. Hot air has never come from this duct in all the years we have lived here. Removal of the duct revealed that this is because the duct had a big gap between two sections, allowing the hot air to just blow around between the walls. Removal of the duct also revealed a rotting joist and planking under what is left of the original, incredibly heavy, brick chimney.

We stared at the ceiling for many long moments. We began to wish that we had just left the room alone or given the kids some cans of spray paint. We looked at each other for many long moments.

I said "It would be a lot easier to make these decisions if we were drunk." My husband laughed like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit.











Unfortunately, we don't drink. All decisions are on hold.

This is turning out to be an exciting week in our house. For the last couple of years, we have been muttering about how cold our living room feels and about the tiles that have been peeling off the floor. It has had white walls and a cobalt blue paint on the trim - very lovely, but very cold, which is not something you need more of here in Almost Canada. To top it off, we were in a hurry when we painted the blue trim and decided that it would only be temporary (6.5 years ago) so we did not properly prime the surface of the old paint. We just wanted to cover up the hideous dusty puke-rose color and thought for sure that we would have time and money to take the trim off and completely strip it before too long, as well as replace the cruddy homasote with real wall board and insulation and restore the room to something of its original beauty.

Yes, well. We were brand new homeowners back then; innocent, optimistic, clueless. Turns out we are going to add another layer of paint - but we will scrape and prime this time. The blue has steadily been peeling off since day 2.

So. Anyone who has done a paint job on an almost 200 year old house can tell you that the work is never straight forward. We took all the furniture out of the room and decided that we would remove the fake beams across the ceiling because they looked stupid and were falling apart. We had examined the room carefully and could not conceive of a good reason why the previous home owners would have put them in, besides an obvious obsession with the whole 1980's southwestern look. (Hence the hideous dusty puke-rose color on the walls and trim and the fake arches in the doorways. Why they had paired it all with a 1970's orange and brown shag carpet, I cannot fathom.) Turns out that the ceiling is comprised of homasote, too, and that the edges of the sheets are not really connected to anything. They are screwed in hither and dither along the breadth of the sheets but the edges are just sort of hanging out, begging for some sort of faux architecture to hide them.

Sigh. There's more. The previous home owners in their fit of south west obsession, plastered the walls and ceilings with that stuccoish, pebbley stuff and wrapped the ceiling and the walls all in it together. There is a nice little curve where they meet instead of a sharp corner with a bit of space for each segment of the house to wiggle around in. Of course there has been some cracking, especially in areas where the homaoste edges have sagged inside the faux beams. If we rip the ceiling out and replace it with wall board like normal homeowners would, we would also have to replace all of the walls. Our tax return $$ is gone so we will have to do a shoddy job of it and try to patch up the places where the homasote is crumbled or where the stucco stuff has cracked with spackling. This drives my husband crazy. If he had his way, he would have ripped out the stairs and several wall yesterday.

But - when it is done, it will look different and hopefully better than before. We'll be going for a paprika color on a couple of the walls paired with a buttery cream color on the others with a deep, dark aqua on the floors. That is unless someone contacts me and says they have $50,000 they want to spend on an old fixer upper with 4 acres in Fort Jackson, NY. In that case, we'll go buy a yurt and start working on building a straw bale home near grandma's!

Time goes so swiftly! It is already April 8th and high time for me to get started with April's Take it Further challenge! This is some of what Sharon has written about the theme for this month:

"There are stages in life when it is almost unacceptable to change. For instance it is often implied that it is not acceptable to change when you are middle aged and the desire for change at this stage in life is often referred to as a mid life crisis. Yet often at the same time, in the work place expensive consultants are being hired to help corporations and institutions ‘manage change’. We are expected to adapt to different work stresses and embrace change in the work place but changes our private lives is framed as bit of issue. It amuses me when people say we have to learn to live with change as change has always been part of life. As soon as we are born we start to grow in other words we start to change.

How do you see change? That is the challenge topic this month."

The color scheme she chose is very heavy and dark to my taste for this month - she has an oriental red, mustard yellow, ivory, black and a very dark blue or green. Sharon lives in Australia so autumn colors make sense right now down under. I'm craving something brighter and lighter.

Today I'm going to prep some muslin and organza for mono-printing and I'll do some experiments with that process as part of my challenge this month. It will be a new process for me and will represent a change in the way I work. I hope that I will discover that I like the process; my current dyeing processes require that I apply my dyes immediately, but the mono-printing method allows for storage of the dye solution as the soda ash is added to the fabric before the dye is applied. We just got a new fridge which is much bigger than our old one so if I get a small bin, I can mix small containers of dye paste and seal them in the bin to be stored in the fridge between studio sessions. That would be so amazing!

So, I am off to exercise and get that fabric prepped during "PBS prime time."

Sharon's theme for the month of March is ironically pertinent to my current living situation! Here's what she wrote for the challenge: "Do you ever notice the little things, the small moments, the details in life? This month's challenge is to do just that, pay attention to the tiny details. Sometimes the small things become emblematic for something larger."

Boy, Have I been paying attention to the tiny details! Details like, what is living in my water? And these small things really are emblematic of something larger. Our tiny neighborhood is currently suffering the consequences of American Agricultural choices. We are dealing with the fallout of an enormous industry that most people don't even pause to think about. I mean, what's so dangerous about a bunch of cows? Milk is supposed to be good for you, right? How many people actually know where their milk comes from, what conditions the cows exist under, where their waste goes and how they are fed? For most people the answers to those questions are: Milk comes from from cows raised in a CAFO. The cows are crammed in a barn all day, every day of their lives. Their waste goes onto the ground in the form of liquid manure, which can be smelled for dozens of miles in every direction when it is stirred or spread and from there it may possibly go into the local aquifer and fresh water rivers, lakes and streams. The cows are fed special dairy cow feed and lots of drugs which may include dead cows, antibiotics, Bovine Growth Hormone, genetically modified grains and/or mystery compounds from China.

Details, details, details. Did you know that the milk and eggs from CAFO raised cows and hens are higher in bad cholesterol and lower in nutrition and Omega 3-6-9 fatty acids than milk and eggs from grass fed, free ranging animals? Man. It's time to go buy a cow.

I feel that this is a good illustration of how small details, added together can become something worth a great deal of consideration.

For my challenge entry this month, I chose to make a beaded bead - a small object filled with tiny details. I anticipated making a whole series of them and even had a kit put together so that I could work on my beads anywhere my water disaster happened to take me. Needless to say, keeping the family fed and clean and entertained at other people's houses all month long really made it difficult to keep up with my project. I got one bead done. Here are the colors I used:

I used size 11 rose gold AB beads and metallic gold beads to form the main bead shape and then embellished with some Myuki size 15 taupe, gunmetal and metallic green AB beads. The pattern is a modification of Wonder Beads as taught by Sue Jackson and Wendy Hubick of Hummingbeads in the April 2001 issue of Bead and Button magazine. If you like the idea of beaded beads, Beadwork put out a teeny book of Beaded Beads in 2003. I got mine through a special offer for Beading daily subscribers, you may also be able to get it through Amazon, I know I've seen it there. The book has lots of different styles of beaded beads, many of which I wanted to try this month. Guess they will have to go on my growing to do list!

The theme and color pallette have been posted over at In a Minute Ago and I've already had lots of ideas about how to handle this challenge. The challenge this time around is a question: What are old enough to remember? Sharon's idea is that there are items, skills and general qualities that are disappearing from our world with changing technology and cultural habits and many of these things are worth commemorating. I like the concept but I'm not sure my idea will work with this months color palette.

One thing that is worth remembering to me is the sky and the weather in the 1970's here in upstate NY. We used to get these amazing sky-scapes with hundreds of huge, magnificently puffy clouds mounded together, moving gracefully across the sky in summertime. We would get several quick rainstorms a week, including some real cracking thunderstorms and a few all day soakers scattered throughout the season. Perfect cloud and lightning watching conditions. We've been in drought conditions here almost every summer since I returned from Arizona in 1991 and we just don't get that weather anymore.

This last summer was as close to a 1970's summer as we've been in a looong time. Several times we would be outside or in the car or I would look out of a window and shout, "Look, it's a 1970's sky!" My daughter eventually started to roll her eyes at me whenever I got excited about the sky. She did not grow up spending days laying on the lawn, looking at the sky - there hasn't been much to look at up there in the last 13 summers. Hardly any dragons or turtles or charging horses in the sky. I had forgotten how magical cloud watching can be. We started out with a 1970's winter here, too, with lots of snow (before thanksgiving, even!), reasonably cold temperatures and actual snowbanks in a few places. I've never considered myself a sentimental person, but the weather in '07 has really tugged at my heart. If you are wondering what I mean by these amazing cloudscapes, you just need to look at some of the nostalgic commercial art of the 1930's-50's. Eric Sloane, a highly talented illustrator of barns and early American material culture, published a book back then about how to draw these sky-scapes. Dover has just re-issued it and you can get it for 6 bucks right now. So there's one more thing to work on.

I'm also interested in playing with mono-printing. The new issue of Quilting Arts has some amazing articles about the process, including a story on monopriniting on sheer fabric as an overlay for collaged images on a base fabric. I immediately went to the Pro-chem website and ordered some print base so I can try this at home. I've never tried this stuff before because I have never been set up to do screen printing, but the Quilting Arts article shows how to use thickened dyes for mono-printing. I do have a piece of plexiglass and a brayer and my pro-chem stuff arrived Thursday - I hope I get time to experiment today. The issue also has an excellent article about preparing textile arts for display and another fun article about mono-printing using textile paints.

Well, my boy is awake. I'll bet he will want breakfast before we go to the studio to learn about mono-printing.

Here are photos of my progress in the January Take it Further challenge. Earlier I posted my design sketch and info about my source materials and yesterday my camera came home so... Here's where I am so far - now that it is no longer January!

I've had a bit of frustration with the colors here - obviously, I need to take the time to re-calibrate my color balance on the camera. The actual embroidery is not quite as yellow as the first picture nor quite as blue as the second picture. The detail photo is close but not quite right, either.









I have been using satin stitch for the foundations of the ruins here and french knots and some modified satin stitch for the ground/foliage around them. I'm loving the textural detail but am feeling a bit daunted about the remaining amount of empty space in the composition. I'm leaning toward leaving a lot of it as is and formulating some elegant border and corner motifs.
I do like that the texture in this work looks like organic growth super-imposed on a man made structure - much like a forest overgrown into the ruins of an ancient fortress - which was the whole point! Another part of my bewilderment over what to do with the open areas right now is how to fill in the empty spaces without using too much satin stitch - which would look like more ruins instead of grass or foliage as seen from the air. Maybe I sketch some color on with colored pencils or something? I don't dare use textile paint or dye at this point because I don't want anything to get on the embroidery. Any suggestions?

Look for Round Robin photos in the next day or so - those are finally done and just await a good pressing .

Well, here we are halfway and more through January and when I look around myself, I feel that I've not accomplished a single thing. If you were to come to my house you would probably think that we had some sort of minor disaster this month. Dirty dishes are piled high in the kitchen, clean laundry is escaping from the Pack-n-Play in the study because the main closet is messy and the laundry baskets are full, general chaos reigns in the Living Room, the stairway really needs to be swept . . . Unless you fail to keep house the way that I fail to keep house, you probably can't begin to imagine the mess.

But my studio is still clean! And I taught a beading class this week; a feat that included 15 hours of writing instructions and illustrations. And I've completed my initial sketch for my take it Further Challenge project. And my toddler is finally getting ready to potty train (maybe). And we are catching up with our home school schedule.

All of this in a week where I suffered from lack of sleep, associated headaches and the major disappointment of breaking my camera.

I am posting here and on Flickr my plans for the Take it Further Challenge. I borrowed a book a few months ago from our Arts Council "Library" titled Embroidery and Architecture by Jan Messent. The book was published in 1985, before color printing became affordable for arts and crafts books but the book is by no means boring for lack of color. Jan Messent includes historical information about how architecture has been used as design fodder for embroiderers and textile artists for centuries and then goes on to explore specific architectural elements from ground plans to doors and windows and how they can be incorporated in embroidered art work. She includes many many amazing and beautiful drawings and photos of both architectural elements and embroidered textile works using these themes. On page 38 of the book is an aerial view of a ruined castle that caught my attention the first time I picked the book up. I scanned this illustration, enlarged it and played around with adding some colored pencil in the colors from January's challenge. My plan is to embroider the wall sections with satin stitch and then use some dimensional stitches, like French knots for the ground areas. Since this is one of the first embroidery projects I've taken on in a planned out way, I'm going in with very low expectations and a willingness to experiment and have fun with the design. Who knows if the finished piece will look anything like I'm imagining it will? Who cares?

Well, here are the photos and the Flickr challenge pool site so interested parties may take a look at what everyone else is doing for this challenge. Unfortunately, the threads I have chosen do not show well in the scan. I really miss my camera and anxiously await its return from the repair center.

December was a short and difficult month - there simply wasn't enough time to get all of the things done that I needed to do and none left over for blogging. Today life is almost back to normal after another week of sickies in the house and two days of 30 below temperatures in Almost Canada, NY. This has been a true old fashioned winter around here. When it isn't 30 below zero, it is snowing. We have more snow here than we have had in the last 5 winters combined. I took ashes out to the garden this morning and sunk up to my thighs in the show! many people are complaining but I am really enjoying it - it feel like a return to my childhood in the '70's when we went sledding and built snow forts in the huge heaps of snow left by the plows. If it is going to be cold, there might as well be snow! I'm not sure I would want a return to the winters of the '40's and '50's that my Dad experienced, though. He tells stories of digging a tunnel from the house to the barn and being able to step over the telephone wires on his way to school, the snow was so high in Colton some winters.

I've been cleaning out my studio/the dog's lair and coming across many old projects that need to be ditched, lots of forgotten supplies and a serious organization challenge. I took some "before" photos which I will probably be too ashamed to post and plan to take some "after" photos when I'm finally done ... maybe today?? I definitely need lots of new bins, big and small and I need to let some stuff go. Recently I read a quote by Suze Ormond on an artist's blog site that said; "If you are not making the money in your life that you think you should be making, if you have debt, if you cannot save a penny, I am willing to bet that clutter is standing smack in the middle of what you have today and what you could have tomorrow." Well, that's me. I'm just not productive enough because I am too busy trying to get through the clutter in my house and my life. So this year, I am trying to be more purposeful and organized about the things I keep, the activities I choose and the work I do.

Here's a list of the things I plan to work on in the next few days and weeks:

- - Two pieces of Round Robin fabric. As noted in one of my first posts, I'm participating in a complex cloth round robin and I'm behind. I now have two wildly different pieces of fabric waiting for my attention in my studio. One of them will get a layer of dye. One of them will probably have some dye discharged. Photos to come when I get the studio clean.

- - Sharon Boggon's Take It Further Challenge which starts this month. Each month Sharon will post a theme and a color scheme for stitchers and other artists to work with. Participants post their progress on their blogs and/or on the Flickr site for the group. The challenge theme and color scheme have only been up for a few days and already there is a great deal of excitement and interest. It is going to be fascinating to watch all of these artists work through their various concepts and goals during this challenge. One funny thing - for our anniversary, my husband and I bought new sheets and a comforter set for our bed in a color scheme that just happens to match the scheme for January perfectly. I hadn't seen the challenge page yet so it was a bit surreal to see my new bedroom colors posted up on Sharon's site yesterday!

- - Some new polymer clay beads and magnets. I've been planning to make some face beads and magnets for several months now and just haven't got to it yet. My friend, Hilary, who is also my boss at the Arts Council has been looking for some ceramic face beads for several months now with no success so I thought that it would be nice to make her some polymer beads for planning and practice. They were going to be a Christmas gift but if I hurry, she might get them in time for 3 Kings Day! Also as I was preparing for Studio Tour this year, I opened an old box of beads and came across the one remaining Transformation bead from a set I made two summers ago. I had forgotten how much I loved these beads and how much fun they are to make. I posted the one left on Etsy and want to make some more in different colors to go with it. Maybe I'll play with Sharon's green, gold and purple color scheme on some of these.

I also have several Alchemy Scarves to iron and edge as well as a beaded bracelet and brooch in progress. Beading is a good activity for 30 below weather when one is sick. I like to sit by the Fisher stove with a plate of beads in my lap and play with new techniques and projects. That way I still feel productive but I am not working on anything that I can ruin while I'm muzzy headed and slow.

It is now time to get everyone dressed and get the day moving in a purposeful way. The 3 year old is still sick and snotty in nose and attitude so it looks like a fun day around here!