Blogging is not publishing…

Or so the word came down from the mountain last night, as I finished up my blog post.  I’m guessing Julie Powell (of Julie and Julia fame) would probably disagree, look where her blog got her, and of course TLo, with thousands of followers, probably the best source for who is wearing what in the fashion world, a fashion icon in and of itself, I’m going to guess they would probably disagree that blogging is not publishing.  It all doesn’t matter really, as long as the answer is, for the purposes of HGA and entries into their Convergence exhibits, “Blogging is NOT considered published by anyone’s standards.”

So there you have it.  Thanks to those who emailed me about this subject, and thanks Cally for starting the conversation.  I have so loved following the whole design process, especially in bloggers like Tien, from the initial idea, “I’m going to weave my wedding gown…” to the final days of hems and appliqued lace, and beaded trim.  It would be so great to see a garment you’ve been following like that in a Convergence exhibit, so I’m glad to hear that blogging doesn’t count as publishing as far as the HGA is concerned.

That said, I woke up this morning, and rethought how I finished the piece I pulled off the loom yesterday.  First, the piece is titled, Rest in Peace.  It is a diptych, for those who haven’t studied a lot of medieval art (like my poor husband who said last night in the pizza restaurant, “What’s a diptych?”) here is the definition courtesy of Answers.com.

diptych n. A work consisting of two painted or carved panels that are hinged together. An ancient writing tablet having two leaves hinged together.

Having looked at my share of ancient art, diptychs and triptychs have always fascinated me, two or more images that tell a story of sorts, where the images together tell a more powerful tale than each alone.  With that said, I had two images that I thought, needed to be “hinged” together, and so I wove them side by side in my inlay technique I’ve used for much of my two dimensional artwork over the last two years.

RestInPeaceHere is the shot I showed yesterday of the two images before I cut them off the loom and separated them into two.  The image on the right, is of my two children on top of the World Trade Center, in August of 2001, two weeks before 9/11.  We decided on the spur of the moment, to take a couple of days at the end of the summer, 2001, to take the kids into Manhattan, we live so close we never think of it as a vacation destination.  The view from the Top of the World was breathtaking.  And I noticed that all around the perimeter of the tower, behind the fence they were leaning on, was barbed wire, coiled high, to prevent the ultimate suicide I guess.  Little did they figure two weeks later…

The photo on the left was a shot either my husband or I took of the towers, graphic, like monuments rising to the sky, like tombstones in a graveyard.  (We both shot lots of images that day, and are both claiming rights to this one…)

I created little postcard packets from each of the images, like I’ve done with others in my Personal Post Series.  And then I went in search of a way to hinge the two together, like a book, like a diptych.  My first attempt didn’t work at all, I took apart a small notebook, but the spine wasn’t a continuous spiral, and it was too big and cumbersome.

Diptych_RestInPeaceMy second attempt, shown here, was to hand sew jump rings between the two halves of the diptych.  The rings were small, and problematic, without soldering them together, they kept slipping out of the thread connections that held them in place.  I didn’t want to have to take a trip to a store to look for round rings that weren’t split.  So this is where I left off last night.

This morning I woke up with a brain storm, I keep a stash of office supplies in the guest room cabinet, and I rooted through to see what notebook spines I could find that could work here, like a spiral tube.  I found the perfect spine in an old notebook of my son’s.  (He would start a notebook, three pages into it, he’d lose it, so I have a lot of almost knew notebooks from his school days, with only two or three pages written on…)  How poetic.  So I cut off all the jump rings and replaced them with this continuous black ringed spiral which so much more resembles barbed wire.  Or a kid’s copybook…

I called the piece “Rest In Peace”, it tells the story of two buildings that were brought down in a horrific way, and I paired it with an image of my children standing on top of those buildings, the day the towers fell is the day my children’s childhood ended.  Life would never be what it was for them before 9/11.Rest_In_Peace_DiptychDetail They now live in a world where people are willing to die to make a point, where orange alerts, and bag searches just to Rest_in_PeaceFinalgo visit an art museum are all very ordinary.  They now live in a world where we are at war, in places they had yet to study on a map in elementary school.

My son is in boot camp, as I write, training to fire an M-16, to become a soldier.  (On a brighter note, I got another letter from him today!  Woo Hoo!)  So this piece is pretty powerful to me.  I don’t expect a juror looking through hundreds of images on a computer screen to get all that from my drab little piece, but I’m really happy with it.  Here are the final shots, with the barbed wire/copybook hinge.

I Made It!

I’m sure you are all sitting on pins and needles (pun intended), wondering if I made it yesterday to the gallery talk. In all my years of airplane travel, I was truly surprised at how uneventful the flight was, easily moving in and out of Newark, Houston, and then the tiny Des Moines airport. I landed at 4:15, grabbed all my bags, and was on the road by 4:30, which by New Jersey standards is the beginning of rush hour. We hit the interstate, and sailed along with what I thought was no traffic at all, and pulled onto the campus of Grinnell College at 5:30. A quick dump of the bags, and I was off to the restaurant, where I had a lovely dinner with tapestry artist Kathe Todd-Hooker, who weaves tapestries from sewing thread) and Pat Spark, who is well known for her watercolor felt tapestries.  Kathe and Pat have a joint business selling books and materials, called Fine Fiber Press.  The Faulconer Gallery director and curator treated us to a lovely dinner, and we all had a fine relaxing time. We made the quick dash to the gallery around 7pm, where a very large assembled crowd had gathered, and I rode in quite the style, the curator’s truck had been glitterized by a group of young people involved in, well, I can only call it something of a performance piece? I give you the “Sparkle Truck”.
glittertruck
The truck was completely covered with glitter. It was very cool.

The gallery talk went smoothly, the equipment all worked, I had some wonderful responses after my presentation, and I have some time today to go back and really look at the show, Small Expressions 2009.

Stay tuned…

A Sunny Day?

Wow, the sun actually came out today.  What a surprise!  Course more rain due in tomorrow, there was even a front page article in the newspaper today about how serious climate/weather pattern changes are here.  Well the plants are loving it!

shippingI’m now in wind down mode, tying up loose ends, starting the preparations for my trip next week to the Midwest Weavers Conference in Grinnell, Iowa.  I’ve never been to Iowa, so this should be a treat.  A week before I leave, I need to ship out the consummable stuff, like the handouts, raw materials, and some monographs to sell.  So yesterday, I spent the entire day printing and binding stacks of monographs, and the handouts, and burnt out my year old new binding machine.  Bummer…

The box is packed, and on its way to Grinnell, and the good news, is it contains about 50 yards of Red Dot Tracer, which I’m happy to say, is finally available, from Pellon, after months of gnashing of teeth and complaining, and moaning, I got 150 yards of it via UPS yesterday, in time to chop it up in two yard packs and ship it with the handouts.  I have been in a quandry since HTCW stopped shipping early last fall, and the product became unavailable.  Pellon bought the plates for the Red Dot Pattern Tracing Material, but they printed it on their Tru-Grid base, though improved from the original Tru-Grid base, this one is more stable than the old one, I still don’t like it because it doesn’t hold a pencil mark well.  For a number of reasons, this is really important to me.  I have multi-sized patterns I use for my classes, and the lines have to stay true and accurate.  And so do the lines the students trace.  Anyway, the Red Dot has now been printed on a different base, one closer to the original one from HTCW, and I’m hoping it will perform as well.  I’m crossing my fingers.

So, now to the next project, which is a gallery talk I have to give next Wednesday as one of the exhibiting artists at HGA’s Small Expressions Exhibit at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery.  I wanted to finish one of the pieces on the loom that I started last spring, so I could get a shot of it and include it in my talk, since it is woven in the same technique as the pieces on exhibit there.  (If you click on “Small Expressions” under “Upcoming Events/February 24th” – which was when the show originally opened in Missouri, you will see the pieces they selected for exhibit)

loomsilkI’ve blogged about this technique, a Theo Moorman Inlay on a cotton ground, in many previous posts.  Search for “Big Sister” and you’ll find many references.  I printed the image on silk, and then cut it into quarter inch strips, and wove them back into the loom, in sequence while weaving a backing fabric at the same time.  One of my blogs has detailed shots of the process.  If I have time I’ll search for it.

wtcAnyway, the image here was shot the end of August, 2001, while vacationing a mere 20 miles away with my children.  We took them to the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, and then up to the roof of the World Trade Center.  I titled this photo “Top of the World”.  I don’t need to tell anyone what happened a mere two weeks later…

It is a chilling photo, the shaky appearance of the towering structure, from the rewoven strips, two innocent children doing what children do when posing for a photo for dad, (notice the rabbit ears my son is sneaking in behind his sister’s back),  I am haunted by this photo every time I look at it.  Reweaving it back together row by row, was somehow healing.

My daughter walked in tonight while I was photographing this for the blog, and plopped her latest adventure in boxesfront of me, a large paper box, carefully folded into a square.  She said, “Guess how many boxes are inside of this?”.  I took a wild guess at 10, and was sort of surprised when she told me I wasn’t even close.  Can you believe there were 20 little paper boxes, all just a fraction smaller than each one they nest into, and she proceeded to unwrap each origami box to unveil the next box, until she had them all lined up on my cutting table.  The smallest one was half the size of my thumbnail.

You have to love hanging around with my daughter.  She disappears into her room, and comes out with the oddest adventures, she should have been studying for her Spanish final tomorrow, but folding paper boxes was much more soothing to her soul, and she was quite proud of her accomplishment.

Ah to be 16 again…  See, that’s my problem.  I never blow anything off I’m suppose to be doing for the shear joy of creating.  I’ve gotten way too responsible in my old age…

Speaking of old age, we had a couple of great theatre adventures, last Friday we saw The Full Monty at the Papermill Playhouse, which was absolutely a terrific piece of theatre, the cast was unbelievable, one scene stealer after another, and if you live anywhere near Northern NJ or NYC, get yourself a ticket now!  The show runs until July 14th I believe.  There is a cameo appearance by stage veteran Elaine Stritch, who according to the papers is 84 years old.  I want to be able to get out there and still perform in my studio and on the road at 84.  That would mean I have another 30 years to go!

And last night, my husband and I escaped to the movie theatre to see “Up”.  Another Pixar/Disney hit, one of the most charming stories I’ve seen in a long time, well, you just have to take my word and go to the movies.  You won’t be sorry.  The star of “Up” is a very old man, who is about to be forceably taken to a retirement home, the love of his life is gone, and he gets his house to lift off into the air with a gazillion helium balloons and flies it all the way to Paradise Falls in South America.  I know it sounds like the oddest plot line imaginable, but to see it, and how the story develops, is truely amazing.  It is almost believable.  It has been a long time since I’ve been to the movies and heard an audience applaud at the end of a film.  The show was packed, and they did applaud.

Back to the Projects

So my usual Monday morning task is to dust one level of my house.  Since yesterday was a wash, with the guild meeting, and feeling lousy, and my daughters five hours of extra-curricular events, I’m lucky I had the 10 minutes to blog.  So I picked up the dust cloth and started dusting this morning, and the upstairs is much harder than the downstairs, because it has a) my husband’s office, and b) my studio.  As you can imagine, both rooms are a nightmare to dust.

fabricI moved the roll of fabric from what I originally described as Project 5, way back in the beginning of January  off of my loom to dust, moaning that it may be awhile before I get to my poor naked looms.  But I have fabric still to sew…  I returned the roll of fabric to the top of my loom castle, and then decided to actually move it to my cutting table.  The sari lining I had originally put with it in the January photo, was instantly replaced with one of the new ones my husband just brought back from India.  It is a gorgeous cyan blue, with little Jacquard motifs in gold metallic.  It is a better match, even though the original sari would have worked, the original sari competed with the lime green piece of felt I made with a friend on a whim.  I love the edge of the nuno felt piece, the irregular felted edge would be so amazing peeking out of a princess seamline like piping.  And I found three big buttons that I liked with the fabric as well.

patternSo I poured through my back issues of Burda, and found the pattern I think ties this all together, shawl collar, lightweight jacket, princess seams, welt pockets, cuffs, and I like the little belt in the back.  Oh, and it calls for three big buttons…   🙂

So I feel like I am embarking on a new relationship, whenever I finish a project, there is a mourning period, where I am actually depressed, I feel like a passionate relationship ended, that it is gone from my life.  It is all about the process for me, and when the project is done, it just hangs in the closet, or goes out for exhibit, but it is the passion of figuring it all out, laying awake at night, jumping out of bed to get through what I need to accomplish so I can dive into the latest solution.  You can probably tell this brought  me out of my slump…

There is so much going on in the studio, but I am slowly chipping away.  I finished the latest five alterations for the HS Musical production, which came in after I finished the 27 dresses.  And I got a rough outline for my architect sister’s website.  Just waiting on the final photos of all the home additions and renovations she designed, the befores and afters (which totally amaze me, I know what I can do with a piece of fabric, but to do that with a house? )  I am feeling a bit better today, thanks to my mom’s famous home remedy for stomach ailments, sip on honey and vinegar mixed in tepid water.  Works every time…

I got the work shipped out for Small Expressions, and generally got back into the swing of things.  My to do list is onto the second page, which is always scary, but I’m in a brighter mood, with a project to execute, and I’m actually beginning to feel human again after the stomach virus from the weekend.  And it is suppose to be 60 degrees tomorrow.  Can spring be far away?  There is less and less snow/ice remaining, and pretty soon, little shoots popping out of the ground!  And you know what that means….  Gardening season!