It’s holiday time! Time to decorate, time for making gifts, the annual Christmas missive (yeah, I actually write one of those…), and all festive thoughts aside, today is Day Without Art, an international program to mark AIDS Awareness Day. I logged on this morning, and my Google home page has all the blogs I follow, plus things like the MET artwork of the day, something from the vast archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today I logged on and there was nothing but a black rectangle. There was a note attached, “Today’s daily artwork will not appear. Day Without Art began on December 1, 1989, as part of a day of action and mourning in response to the AIDS crisis”. It hasn’t escaped me that this is a perfect day to reflect that we still have a lot of work to do in the arts community for AIDS awareness, as we gear up for the spending/decorating/eating frenzy that marks the last month of the year.
On a brighter note, my daughter got with the holiday spirit immediately, she disappeared into the bathroom and came out decorated for the season!
And I started to play around with something I could make for small gifts for a few friends, I resurrected a technique I’ve written about in my Leftover’s Monograph, and climbed into my attic stash in the sky, and pulled out some circa 1986 scraps, and had a blast. The idea here is to take 1″ scraps (on grain, no need for bias), and twist them around piping cord, like a barber pole, and coil up the cord, stitching it together, round and round, with a triple step zig-zag.
I’ll let the photos do the explaining, now that I found out how to put in a caption!
A flat circle would make a fabulous hot mat for the table or kitchen.
Great minds think alike! Actually, I did make a round mat, and it is on my dining room table as I write, I did that first, to play around with the machine and make all the settings correct. I’ll take a photo of it and add it to the next blog! Maybe I’ll just make mats instead of the bowls. Would be easier. And probably more useful…