The Dog Ate My Phone…

Yep, this morning I got to sleep in a bit, in my own bed, home safe from my great weekend with the Hudson Mohawk Guild outside of Albany NY.  I got up to make waffles, and when I returned to the bedroom to make the bed and get dressed, the dog had gone to my bedroom, hopped up on the bed, and removed my phone from the nightstand.  And the rest is history.  Oddly enough, the phone still works, but I’m annoyed, and now I have to replace my phone, because I don’t want to walk around with a phone that looks like this…

The new dog is a kleptomaniac, he steals anything that’s not nailed down, usually on the floor, which is sort of funny, a great way to make my family pick up their shoes and stuff off the floor, but I was shocked he stole my phone off the nightstand.  Needless to say I wasn’t a happy camper this morning.

But the trip to Albany was great.  The drive up the NY Thruway was gorgeous, the leaves are turning, and if I wasn’t driving I would have stopped to take all kinds of photos, and gotten up to the guild way too late!

I gave a seminar on Thursday night, in the Theo Moorman technique that I use to weave the art pieces I do, it is an unusual way to apply this technique, and there seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm and excitement for the lecture.  The meeting was certainly crowded.  On Friday I taught a workshop in color and inspiration, I gave the participants some color exercises, and we played with wrapping yarns.  At the end, the participants used a calendar or magazine photo for inspiration and did warp wraps to coordinate with the photo.  Here are some of the end results.

I wish I could see what they end up doing with the wraps.  I think they were all gorgeous.

Friday night, one of the guild members graciously directed me on a driving tour of historic Saratoga Springs, the mineral baths, the race track, the gorgeous old Victorian homes.

On Saturday I taught a one day seminar on Closures, this would be various ways to close a garment, and we start the morning learning how to do the bound buttonhole, and a triangular variation. Once the students get to try these techniques, we move onto easier more interesting closures, and now they have no more excuses for garments that don’t close!

The drive home Saturday night was easy, and I sailed down the Thruway, listening to my audio book through my iTouch, which connects through my car radio, and the sound quality is excellent.

After my debacle this morning with the dog and the phone, I got ready and headed south to Morristown, to my recorder consort rehearsal.  We are working on Elizabethan dances, the Pavana and the Gallyard.  One of the members of the consort has a degree in Early Music, and she researched the dances and we all tried them.  It really helped to get a feel for the timing and the speed of the dances.  Of course, I wasn’t dressed to dance an Elizabethan Pavana, I was in boots with 4″ heels, but I persevered!

I raced home and picked up my husband and we headed off to the Art Center of Northern NJ which is in New Milford.  I had a piece accepted to their 18th annual National Juried Show, which runs until November 2.  The judge was Clare Bell, formerly the associate curator of Prints and Drawings at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC.  I found out when I got to the show, that only 10% of the works that were submitted were accepted.  I felt privileged to have been included in the show.  There were 23 states represented, and 66 works total in the exhibit.

I was even more excited and felt even more privileged to learn I received a Merit Award for my work, and a nice check for $200. (which will pay for my new phone…) There was a little ceremony announcing the winners, and because there were works from so many states, only two of us who got awards were present, and we got the opportunity to talk about our work.

This is really an unusual thing for me, not to talk about my work, I do that all the time, but to talk about my work to an audience of painters, sculptors, photographers, and mixed media artists is unusual for me, and I enjoyed the experience, the questions were so different than those I get from handweavers.

I spoke about the metaphor of handweaving and how the process is so critical to the work I’m doing.  The idea of taking personal images and cutting them apart, weaving them back together into a whole image, especially in the case of my piece, “The Survivor”, which is a celebratory photo depicting a breast cancer survivor, printed on silk, cut apart, and woven back together.  The imagery and the process are critical components of the work.

So now I’m home, not completely unpacked, but I did manage to get the rest of the houseplants in, there are frost warnings tonight.  My daughter is off from school tomorrow, so she can work on teaching the dog not to steal our things, (only the socks and shoes that no one puts away… )  🙂