embeadery

Ring of fire

2011-09-06T09:41:00.002-05:00

Austin's not burning - yet. Sure looks as though everything surrounding Austin is on fire, though. It was only a matter of time; the entire state is crispy.

Suddenly, selfishly, I'm glad we never got the energy to move from our convenient-but-sorta-boring place in central Austin after the girls grew past the stage of having to be chauffeured everywhere. About once a year I used to fantasize about a cabin in the Hill Country surrounded by junipers and wild grass. Not this year.

I'm also glad that so many of our neighbors have been flouting the water restrictions and keeping their lawns green.

Clearly disaster is not good for the soul (mine anyway). I guess I'd better do penance by collecting clothes and stuff for the people who've been burned out already.

Lusitania - finally finished!

2011-09-02T09:53:00.010-05:00

Actually, it's been done for a while; I've just had a hard time making myself set up photo lights in the sewing room. Now I've caught up and have reasonably good pics of all my recent stuff.

I had to soak Lusitania in a tub of water for 3 days to get all the Solvy out, but I'm happy with the way it turned out. So happy, in fact, that I'm going to inflict a lot of pictures on you.

Here's a shot of the whole thing:

This is what the face looked like after overlaying the sheer fabric. I was hoping the overlay would blur the texture of the embroidery stitches a little more... oh, well.

These two detail shots of the coral show some of the painted laces under the overlay and others on top of it...trying to create a feeling of depth here.

And finally, this super-detailed shot shows how the painted lace pieces merge into the machine embroidery.

Why did I waste time worrying about the earthquake?

2011-08-26T11:53:00.005-05:00

Now Hurricane Irene is pointed directly at Manhattan, and what are the Fashionista and her boyfriend doing? They're driving back from the shore to his parent's house in Connecticut, after which they plan to take the train back to NYC and collect her cat, after which they might take the train back to Connecticut. Assuming that it isn't already full up with people desperately trying to get out of NYC. Alternative: hole up in her 3rd floor apartment on the Lower East Side with a bathtub full of water, a box of MRE's, a flashlight and the cat.

Connecticut may not be such a great place to ride out the storm either.

At least there is a windowless room in the apartment. Her bedroom.

I have no fingernails left; I'm gnawing my way down to the first knuckle. Oh well, the yoga teacher keeps telling me not to rest any weight on my fingers; by next week that may no longer be an issue.

UPDATE SAT. MORNING - The good news: they've decided not to go back to New York. The bad: I was wrong about them being on the road to Hartford today. The kids are STILL leisurely packing up at the rented beach house in Rhode Island.

I wonder if it's occurred to them that a lot of other people are going to be headed inland today?

UPDATE SAT. EVENING - They're in Hartford. With his parents. And the six dogs. Could get interesting there if it floods.

Mary Ruth Smith workshop

2011-08-25T16:15:00.009-05:00

This workshop was a couple of weekends ago; I finally got the sewing room cleared enough to put up the lights and photograph a lot of new stuff, which I'll be posting as I edit the pictures.

This woman does amazing things with stitchery. With her it's not embellishment; it's like overlaying a whole new surface over a patchwork of fabrics, or using close-packed black stitches on white fabric to define shapes in negative space, or screen-printing a face onto fabric and then totally covering it with French knots. I don't have a picture of the French-knots face, but here are some snapshots of samples she brought to the workshop:

I think this first piece was all worked in back stitch on a black fabric, but can't remember. The stitches here are so close together, it's like tapestry.

In this piece she's working within the shapes defined by patchwork, and the stitchery doesn't completely obscure the background but adds dimension and interest.

Figures in negative space, with no stitching or very open stitching. Notice the one in the middle that looks as if it was cut from a black-and-white print of bubbles? Those are actually individually hand stitched circles.

The contrast between simple applique circles at the center and closely hand stitched concentric circles radiating out makes the lines of stitchery appear to shimmer.

And here's the piece I started in the workshop.

I wasn't actually trying to make something like a tree, but the strip of dyed cheesecloth up the center insisted on looking like a tree trunk. After contorting it various ways I said, "Ok, be a tree if you insist!" and rearranged some blobs of transfer-dyed lace to be the crown of the tree. I even started stitching the cheesecloth in wood-grain-y patterns (just visible at top right of the detail).

I should probably mention that Mary Ruth doesn't work exactly the way I did. She likes to work on a piece of fabric stapled taut to a frame of stretcher bars. I wrestled with that damn 18" square frame for the entire first day of class. It's not me. I quilt without a hoop. I embroider without a hoop. On the second day I quietly borrowed a screwdriver and liberated my fabric. I'm just bringing this up because if you want to stitch as heavily and closely as she does, a frame might be the only way to keep the work in shape. For the level of stitching I'm putting into the piece, though, it's not really necessary.

A shot of adrenalin

2011-08-23T13:18:00.003-05:00

Whoooeee. I was just coming home from the fabric store, turned on the news right at the words "...White House and Pentagon being evacuated," and I thought...well, you know what leapt to mind, especially considering we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. A few seconds later they said it was a 5.8 earthquake near Richmond, and such was my state of mind that I thought, "Oh, good, it's just an earthquake."

No reports of injuries or damage yet, just a lot of people all up and down the East Coast saying oh yes, they felt it. All the way up to New York.

The phone lines are probably jammed right now with people who have much better reason than I to be worried. But I do wish my daughter in, at the moment, Rhode Island, would call home.

Mindless entertainment

2011-08-22T14:31:00.003-05:00

Steve and I spent an enjoyable couple of hours in other people's air conditioning (a treat in itself) watching a movie I would never, ever have gone to if he hadn't read about it and told me its premise. Which is hilarious. "Attack the Block" posits that aliens mount a swarm attack on one of the few places in England that is actually dangerous: a council block. (For those unfamiliar with the term: a council block is kind of like the worst housing project you've ever avoided walking through, except that it is, literally, a block - a solid cube of crummy apartments.)

The film was low-budget, which meant that instead of admiring their wondrous computer graphics, the filmmakers actually had something resembling a plot - for instance, there turns out to be a reason why the aliens are concentrating their attack on this unpromising site; I won't tell you, because it would give away too much of the story. Yes, there actually is a story. And suitably scary fast-moving aliens composed mostly of black fur and glow-in-the-dark teeth. And an ironically realistic ending that is probably exactly what would happen in modern-day England, where you can get arrested for defending yourself against a subway assault with a pocketknife or shooting a thug who breaks your front door down.

Even for those of you who live north of the Mason-Dixon Line and aren't trying to save electricity by using somebody else's air-conditioning, it's worth the time. It's probably even better if you can understand more than a third of the dialogue (I don't speak council-block English).

Maybe next week we'll go see Cowboys and Aliens.

Yikes! The freeway's on fire!

2011-08-05T15:02:00.004-05:00

I had to go out this afternoon to get stretcher bars for an embroidery workshop I'm taking over the weekend, which meant either a longish freeway drive northeast or a longish freeway drive south or taking surface streets across town and hoping the itsy bitsy art shop on the Drag had them. I picked the freeway south.

Not a good idea. Okay, the blackened shoulder right at the freeway entrance didn't slow me down, it just made me acutely aware of the fact that our house is exactly half a mile from the location of that particular grass fire. It was the first fire south of the river that stopped traffic; I could actually see flames leaping up from half a mile away, which I figured was Nature's way of telling me to get off the freeway and take South Lamar.

Turns out that a loooong stretch of South Lamar is reduced to one lane for some reason. Also, a lot of other people took the hint from Nature and headed over there.

On the way back it was freeway all the way, allowing me to see that there were actually two separate big blackened chunks of shoulder south of the river, both still being sprayed down by fire crews.

And that's how it can take 3 hours in 107 degree heat to buy 8 stretcher bars.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I want to go water the roof of the house. Just in case.

And So it Goes in Shreveport: Hey Tea Party: Joe Biden Says You're a Terrorist!

2011-08-01T21:01:00.000-05:00

And So it Goes in Shreveport: Hey Tea Party: Joe Biden Says You're a Terrorist!

OK. Are we all clear what terrorism looks like now?

"Terrorist" is everybody's Word of the Day

2011-07-30T16:14:00.004-05:00

Apparently the hateful terrorist analogies weren't just something that was dreamed up by a local contributor. They seem to have become a constant refrain in the media:

Steve Rattner on MSNBC: “It’s a form of economic terrorism…These Tea Party guys are like strapped with dynamite standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour saying either you do it my way or we’re going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country with us.”
William Yeomans at Politico: "It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House “hostage takers.” But they have now become full-blown terrorists."
Maureen Dowd in The New York Times: "[M]any Democrats...yearned to see the president beat the political suicide bombers over the head with the Constitution."
Thomas Friedman in The New York Times: "If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission."
Martin Frost at Politico: "We now have a group of U.S. politicians seeking political purity, who seem to have much in common with the Taliban. They are tea party members..."
Margaret Carlson on PBS' "Inside Washington": "[T]hey’ve strapped explosives to the Capitol and they think they are immune from it. The Tea Party caucus wants this crisis..."

Strange how the same metaphor is suddenly popping up all over the place. You'd almost think they had gotten together and agreed on the line to take....naah, that could never happen.

H/T: Verum Serum for most of these links

Stay classy, Austin American-Statesman

2011-07-29T15:53:00.003-05:00

Today's local paper had two opinion columns that make for interesting reading when juxtaposed. The first, by Thomas Palaima, was written as a plea for more civility in political discourse:

Leach pinpoints "the increasingly hostile and ad hominem tone of national politics" characterized by "anger and name calling" that "damage our social cohesion."...Recognizing you in me and me in you would be a first step toward making mutual plans for a better future, toward moving forward in mutual respect. A first step toward bringing decency and humanity back into our public actions, before it is too late.

This is followed by John Young's column, which I suppose the editors felt epitomized the mutually respectful tone Palaima was calling for, with comments like these (bolding mine):

By air, the missiles of a warring party — the tea party — are observed registering red on the map, anti-tax drones beep-beep-beeping their way toward the mainland.....

The president seeks to rally the nation with a prime-time address. A menacing House Speaker John Boehner follows, pulling out a golf shoe, hammering it on the lectern, and implies that unless the White House and Senate capitulate to Republican demands, in so many words: "We will bury you."

(Funny, I watched all two minutes of Mr. Boehner's address yet somehow managed to miss the Khruschev imitation. If we weren't being so mutually respectful and all, I might call John Young a liar at this point. But that wouldn't be nice. I'll settle for respectfully wondering what medications he's on.)

As President Barack Obama said Monday night, the voters asked for a divided government, not paralyzed government. Fiscal jihadists in the House are dedicated to the latter, with belts of explosives hugging their hips.

Way to go, Austin American-Statesman. I'm so proud that my local paper doesn't promote any name-calling or hostility.

A modest proposal

2011-07-21T11:57:00.003-05:00

I assume by now everybody has heard more than enough of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and its subsequent shut down. I just want to mention that this morning an article in the paper gave me a brilliant idea. It seems the Taliban are claiming that text messages announcing the death of Mullah Omar are false and that somebody has been hacking into their phones.

I have no idea about the truth of this, but it does seem to me that hacking into the Taliban's phones would be a Good Thing with lots of possibilities for causing dismay and disruption. And since we suddenly have all these unemployed journalists with much experience along these lines....couldn't Britain install them all at, say, Bletchley Park, and set them to work serving their country?

Place your bets (on our fiscal future)

2011-07-18T12:24:00.003-05:00

Today I love this quilt by dellastella; first because I'm shooting for a dimensional effect in my next bed quilt (of which more later) and second because the image of blocks falling out of the sky and piling up uncontrollably (at least, that's what happens when I play Tetris) seems like a perfect metaphor for our financial dilemma.

Normally I don't say much about economic issues, because they're big and complicated and I'm not an economist. But after reading the last week of pronouncements from pundits, I'm not so sure they understand economics any better than I do. I've read all of the following predictions and probably some more that I've forgotten:

1) There will be no debt ceiling raise, old people and military families will starve, the credit rating of the US will crash, Armageddon is coming and it's all the fault of the Republicans for refusing to raise taxes. (The default Democratic position.)

2) Ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto and it's all the fault of Obama and the Democrats for not putting forth any budget at all, let alone agreeing to spending cuts. (The default Republican position, except they usually leave out the part about starving Grandma.)

3) Ditto, but it's no big deal because the government has plenty of money coming in to pay interest on the debt, Social Security, and military pay; we'll just have to immediately cut almost all other spending. (Sounds to me like, "I've maxed out my credit cards but it's no big deal because I can pay the interest and the rent on my apartment as long as I quit using electricity and eat only once a day.")

4)Even if the debt ceiling is raised, our credit rating is going to crash because we have a ginormous debt and a humongous deficit and no credible plans for dealing with either. (Standard and Poor's position, I think.)

5) The economy will be saved by a flat tax and spending cuts, but we're not going to fight very hard because we're afraid nobody will love us. (Republicans)

6) The economy would be destroyed by a flat tax and spending cuts, so we're absolutely not going to agree to anything along those lines. (Democrats)

7) Look, we've agreed to compromise and allow some spending cuts, why won't you cooperate? (Democrats)

8)You say "everything is on the table," but won't say what, specifically, that means; we're not going to sign on to vague generalities. (Republicans)

9) Eric Cantor is childish and a lousy negotiator (Democrats)

10) Oooh, look, Obama just banged his sippy cup and threw his strained peas all over the room (Republicans)

Now why would I think that none of the pundits have a clue? One thing for sure - they can't all be right.

I am somewhat annoyed that we're sinking into a bottomless sea of debt and the folks on Capitol Hill seem to be interested in pointing to the other guy and shouting, "It's his fault! Look, people. If I'm about to drown, how about you stop arguing about who pushed me overboard and somebody throw out a life preserver?

I do notice a couple of things that would seem to weaken the Democrats' position (but then I would, wouldn't I?)

1) We've been told and told and told that Social Security funds really do exist, inside a sacred lockbox that is never ever opened for any other purpose. Now Obama says we may not have funds to cover Social Security in August. I wonder who's lying?

2) Historically, tax revenues have hovered at around 20% of GDP. So I'm not at all sure that tax increases would produce more tax revenues. Eliminating, say, the Department of Education would certainly result in less spending.

Not that it matters, because Armageddon is coming on August 2... or is it? Faites vos jeux!

What to do with all that leftover yarn

2011-07-15T16:56:00.004-05:00

Now this would have been more creative than simply putting the stuff in sacks for the Elder Spawn's yard sale. On the other hand, I didn't have anywhere near that much yarn. I might have been able to yarnbomb a chopped Harley, but not a bus.

This week's excuse for not getting much done is that the Younger Spawn, aka the Fashionista, is favoring us with a visit from New York. Today the two of them are off having a Sister Day so I went to Barton Springs...ah. They're back, looking all tan and sleek. They went to Barton Springs too, but later in the day, so they got in on the excitement. Apparently the lifeguards started blowing their whistles and screaming, "Get out of the pool! Get out of the pool!" which never happens there. Then all the lifeguards dived in and went underwater. Apparently somebody had lost track of a child.

That's a big pool. And much of the bottom is covered with water weeds. If it had been my child, I'd have had a heart attack.

Happy ending: they report that the missing kid reappeared safe and relatively dry, having (I assume) simply wandered off somewhere else without mentioning it to the parent. There are enough sloping green banks and trees and bushes around that pool that a child can easily disappear without ever going near the water.

Nothing exciting like that ever happens when I go swimming. Probably just as well; see heart attack, above.

Virtually scintillating

2011-07-04T17:54:00.003-05:00

The Austin American-Statesman has come to the rescue of us fireworks-deprived people in thirsty Texas* with an interactive virtual fireworks show. No, really. Check the link. They do suggest that for a really good simulation of the Independence Day show you should first turn off the air conditioning to get the full experience of being outdoors on a July night; then, after watching the virtual fireworks, go sit in your car for 45 minutes to simulate the post-show traffic jam.

I think I'll stay in the AC and re-read the Declaration of Independence. It still reads pretty well.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

You tell 'em, Mr. Jefferson.

I hope that, as a country, we still have the collective spine demonstrated by the 56 gentlemen who signed this document, many of whom paid dearly for having done so.

(*Round Rock and Georgetown are going ahead with their fireworks shows. If Austin goes up in flames because of a straying Round Rocket, we're going to declare them colonies and tax the bejasus out of them.)

Oops

2011-07-03T19:52:00.002-05:00

Some time after writing the previous post, it occurred to me - not that it matters - that I'm probably not getting my eyes checked tomorrow. The optometrist's office probably won't even be open tomorrow. Reset alarm clock for Tuesday morning.

Now I'm even more confused; I don't know whether it's tonight or tomorrow night that we're not having the traditional lakeside fireworks show because Texas is so dry that we don't light matches outside this summer. Heck, we even avoid heated argument and inflaming rhetoric. Nobody wants to be the one to send Central Texas up in flames in the middle of the Dryest Summer in Living Memory. It's actually worse than 1951. It's time to recycle my father's old joke from the Seven Year Drought:

Bartender says, "I give up, it's never going to rain again."
First man in the bar says, "I'll bet you twenty-five bucks you're wrong."
They shake on it and first man leaves.
Second man in the bar says, "Are you crazy? There's no way you can win that bet."
Bartender says, "No, you're crazy; I've collected on that bet three times already."

It's never going to rain again.

The trouble with invisible thread...

2011-07-03T15:30:00.002-05:00

...is that it's really, really hard to see.

I will bear this in mind next time I machine-quilt something. Is the time it takes to change threads for different areas of the quilt really more of a nuisance than constantly chasing a thread that's so fine I can't see what I'm doing?

Heck, a lot of the time I had trouble seeing the quilted line. It's easier now that I've worked my way down to the bottom of the quilt, where there's a layer of Solvy covering the top layer of corals. Still, I'm looking forward to a switch to brightly colored threads as I do some FME to finish the bottom edge.

Meanwhile, I'm getting my eyes checked tomorrow. Although I suspect the doctor will tell me the current prescription is already as good as it's going to get and the only problem is that I'm OLD. It's hell getting spare parts for something that was made in 1947.

How well do you see color?

2011-07-01T16:30:00.003-05:00

Test yourself here.

I got a 27, which isn't disgraceful for someone over 60, but I had expected to do a lot better.

(Via Ann Althouse.)

The die is cast.

2011-07-01T10:44:00.004-05:00

Les jeux sont faits. The Rubicon has been crossed. I've drunk the Kool-aid....I've spray-adhered the beautiful ombred sheer fabric onto the front of the piece and have begun quilting.

Above is a close-up of the "improved" corals after I added those transfer-painted bits of lace. Everything above the bottom edge of the quilt will be somewhat obscured by the sheer overlay, then I'm going to put some more coral pieces on top of it. In fact, production is momentarily stopped since it occurred to me late last night that it would be a heck of a lot easier to spray-adhere the new corals down and quilt them into place rather than applique-ing them down later. So I'm back to the stage of pinning stuff up, wandering around the room and saying, "Hmmmm...." Fortunately, since the Great Clear-Out, there is actually some floor space in which to wander; I wonder how long that will last?

Taking snapshots of the piece and downloading them to the computer seems to help me figure out what arrangements work. Anybody know why this is helpful? I haven't a clue.

The most interesting window curtains you'll ever see

2011-06-27T13:39:00.006-05:00

After pinning up some painted lace "coral" and staring at the results for a while, I felt it needed some brighter colors and some lighter lace dripping off the bottom edge. So I went thrift-shopping and came home with an armload of polyester lace curtains, and got out the transfer paints the girls had given me Christmas before last, and which had been sitting unused and unloved during the months of depression.

These paints are a delight to use. First you squeeze out a few drops of different colors, moosh them around on a piece of paper, and let them dry. (You can also paint very delicate, precise designs if that's what you want; in this case I just wanted a general look of glowing colors.) Any kind of paper will do; I used the back sides of a first draft, because I have a lot of first and partial drafts lying around. That was plain old cheapest-available copy paper from the office supply store, and it worked fine.

Once the paint's dry, you can start having fun. Cover your ironing surface with newsprint, lay out your polyester fabric, put the painted paper color-side down, and start ironing color onto fabric. G&S Dye, the source for these particular paints, says you can expect to get two good transfers out of every painted page, but with lace you get a lot more; I painted four pages and used only one. The stuff has no detectable hand at all, which will be useful if I ever want to drape the lace gracefully.

The whole piece is under the sewing machine right now, where I'm tacking down the pinned-on laces as a subtle hint that I'd like them to stay right where they are during the next phases.

Thrift shops have a ton of polyester lace curtains; I didn't use a third of what I bought. One piece even has sea motifs - starfish and shells and whatnot - worked into the lace. I'm saving those for the next water-themed piece, which is clear in my mind but not yet so good in Poser Figure Artist.

Just Beachy

2011-06-26T18:19:00.004-05:00

And very pleasant it was, too. Warm enough to slosh up and down in the water, cool enough to sit on the balcony and watch the waves rolling in. Despite the warning signs, I encountered no rattlesnakes and only one moribund jellyfish. And I now have a world-class collection of images of water foaming over sand.

When not in the water I was reading, among other things, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, for no particular reason than that I'd never read it before and occasionally I get this incomprehensible desire to become better educated. And no, that wasn't all I took down to read on the beach, but you really don't want to hear about the old John Grisham thriller or the new sex-and-shopping trashy novel. Huh? You do? Well, too damn bad. Go buy your own soft porn. I want to talk about Edmund Burke. Who was not only an extremely good writer, but almost prescient.

A lot of Reflections can be summarized and translated into modern English as follows: "You idiots, you had a system that was (sort of) working, and instead of trying to improve it, you broke it. Oh, my God, did you ever break it. This is not going to turn out well. There is no way this can possibly turn out well."

Bear in mind that he's writing in 1790, before the execution of Louis XVI, before the Reign of Terror.

He also had things to say that are eerily applicable to the present day: "Nations are wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt." Needless to say, he didn't think that was going to work out so well either.

But what really impressed me was this:

"In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who...possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account....But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master - the master of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic."

He wrote that in 1790 - and in 1799, two years after Burke's death, what did the French get? Napoleon Bonaparte.

I expect his spirit was looking down from Heaven and saying sadly, "I tried to tell you."

In progress...

2011-06-17T13:23:00.003-05:00

I've been happily applying clumps of bamboo fiber and long water-weedy trails of dyed ribbon to "Drowned Woman." Now it's time to step back and...ok, first I need to pick out and re-sew that one piece of ribbon that has an angle in it. And then I get to pin up various bits of painted lace that look, I hope, very coral-ish, and stare at the thing, and try to decide if that's too much, and pin up the ombre sheer that's to overlay the whole piece and see how it looks. The thing is, I painted a lot of lace, and I don't think there's room for more than 3 or 4 pieces, and...oh, well. I can see another water-themed quilt in my near future; I've got to do something with all the leftovers from this piece, hand-dyed sparkly ribbon and silk ribbon and gauze and organza and painted lace.

Probably won't make a decision before we leave for the beach, where I plan to spend several days placidly bobbing up and down in salt water, alternating with hand quilting "Shrine Composition II."

For one brief shining moment...

2011-06-12T21:14:00.005-05:00

...there was actually something like Cleanliness and Order in my sewing room. I've been clearing out my stash and classifying/putting away the pile of Things I Don't Know What to Do With that had gradually engulfed the cutting table, the little table beside it, and was encroaching upon the sewing machine table beside that. The Elder Spawn is planning a yard sale and was happy to carry away 2 large boxes of fabric and 3 bags of yarn; that helped considerably. Anyway, today I was feeling almost-done... and then I got ambitious. "That quilt I started yonks ago and got stuck on... the pieces and possible trims are filling up two big plastic boxes. I really ought to toss it and put away the fabric and then I'd be able to get, say, the two boxes of silk scraps off the floor and into the closet."

Well, whaddaya know, I'm not "stuck" any more. I've been happily stitching down cheesecloth "hair" on the floating figure.

A bit of background: this piece was inspired by a WWI poster based on the sinking of the Lusitania and a poem by Elinor Wylie. I'll spare you the poem (for now) but here's a scan of the poster:

So, you see, the "hair" has to look as though it's floating. I'm reasonably happy with the result:

And sewing is a LOT more fun than folding fabric and deciding what to do with various odds and ends.

And now my cutting table looks like this:

But there was that moment, earlier today, when the table was actually clear of everything but a cutting mat, a ruler, an iron, and the box for Mistyfuse scraps.

I should have taken a picture.

As the dust clears...

2011-06-06T21:14:00.003-05:00

So this week’s excuse for not blogging is that I've been shoveling out the sewing room, which is boring enough to do without writing about it too. Also, I’ve been trying to wait until I wouldn’t be ~~lured~~ ~~seduced~~ tempted to make tasteless puns. It’s really ~~hard~~ difficult to avoid feeling a certain ~~relish~~ ~~satisfaction~~ schadenfreude at seeing how thoroughly Anthony Weiner has ~~cooked~~ destroyed himself with a week of ~~De Nile~~ lies ~~climaxing~~ culminating in today’s ~~arousing~~ ~~exciting~~ surreal press conference. Ok, this is too ~~hard~~ difficult; I need a ~~stiff~~ strong drink.

And the picture has nothing to do with anything, except that with the sewing room in the state of chaos created by a serious cleaning and reorganization, about all I can do is fool around in Photoshop, combining a picture of some arches in Jaipur with a view of water churning behind the Seattle ferry.

Sky Stairs, and a stray flippant thought

2011-06-01T09:17:00.003-05:00

I opened up my news browser to a flurry of headlines saying that the Japanese seriously underestimated the tsunami risk when they built Fukushima.

A while ago, there was a story in the New York Times claiming that along the east coast of Japan there are carved stones set into the earth at intervals with inscriptions that translate roughly to "Don't build below this stone for fear of tsunamis." The story was about one village that actually read the manual and followed the instructions. They survived the tsunami.

So maybe the Japanese should go back to those stones and add a footnote: "Especially if you're building something with the potential to glow in the dark for the next ten thousand years."

And no, the picture doesn't have anything to do with all this. I'm just playing around a lot more in Photoshop now that I've got SuperPrinter and can, at least theoretically, print out images large enough to see the details without actually having your nose right up against the quilt. This is a staircase and a planet "built" out of a Hubble space photo.

As for how SuperPrinter and I are getting along...well, let's discuss that some other time. I think we're building a relationship, but it is fraught with frustration.

AutoPrez?

2011-05-29T14:43:00.002-05:00

Apparently President Obama didn't actually sign the four-year extension of the Patriot Act. After all, he's in Europe. It would be inconvenient.

Instead, he authorized having it signed by the Autopen, which is used to reproduce his signature on things like letters from the White House.

Making history. Indeed.

Inquiring minds begin to wonder: We've got the TOTUS (Teleprompter Of The United States) and the ASSUS (Automatic Signature Signer of the United States) on this side of the Atlantic.

Maybe Obama could just stay in Europe, and leave TOTUS and ASSUS to run things over here?

President speak with forked tongue

2011-05-23T10:13:00.003-05:00

OK, okay. Everybody and his brother, including Mr. Netanyahu, seems convinced that President Obama really truly meant that Israel-Palestine negotiations should start with the indefensible pre-Six-Day-War borders. Has nobody explained to this man (I mean our leader, not Israel's) that you don't start negotiations by announcing what one side has to give up? My grandfather the horse trader could have taught him a thing or two. But then, my grandfather the horse trader could have traded Abbas a blind mule in return for giving up the right of return and recognizing Israel...and he would have made the PA leader think he was getting a good deal. It's really unfair to expect the constitutional law professor from Harvard to dicker as well as a semi-literate poor white man.

But that's not the forked tongue part. That came during his speech to AIPAC.

First: I indicated on Thursday that the recent agreement between Fatah and Hamas poses an enormous obstacle to peace. No country can be expected to negotiate with a terrorist organization sworn to its destruction.

Very next paragraph: And yet, no matter how hard it may be to start meaningful negotiations under current circumstances, we must acknowledge that a failure to try is not an option.

So...Israel can't be expected to negotiate with Hamas/Fatah, except Israel must negotiate with Hamas/Fatah ?!?!?

Oh, well. Every so often I start to get upset about the President's predilection for backing Israel into a corner before peace negotiations even start. Then I remember that it's all froth upon the water, because as even he agrees, you can't negotiate with somebody who will accept nothing less than your total destruction.

But it's poisonous froth. Israel's position is perilous enough without creating the world perception that America no longer supports her.

Yes, but which 1967 borders?

2011-05-22T10:57:00.002-05:00

Everybody I know is jumping up and down and screaming about Obama's comment that Israel should return to "the 1967 borders." I'm curious about the ambiguity here. Does he mean the borders of May 1967, when Israel was about 9 miles wide in the middle and had the West Bank and the Golan Heights looking down on them? Or does he mean the borders of July 1967, when Israel had Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and all of the Sinai? See, there was this little war in June 1967. It changed the shape of the map quite a bit.

A purely intellectual question, this. There is no peace process. Israel cannot make peace with people whose avowed object is to destroy Israel. As long as Palestinian kindergartens teach their children hatred and "martyrdom," all this haggling about borders and settlements is like the Federal government going after medical marijuana while an apocalyptic drug war sweeps up from Mexico and across our southern borders....Oh, wait. That's happening too. Um, it's like cutting $53 billion from the budget when we're over 14 trillion in debt?...Oops, another bad analogy.

Where are the grownups when we need them?

It's here!

2011-05-11T17:33:00.000-05:00

The wide-format printer, that is. It's... um... large. Very large. And heavy. All I've accomplished so far is scrubbing the place where it's going to sit, because it's pretty clear I'm not going to be picking this sucker up every week to dust under and around it. And I have retired to the living room to peruse the 150 page manual.

Fortunately, a quick glance at the manual reassures me that I don't have to absorb anything like 150 pages of information. Wide borders, lots of space between paragraphs, lots of diagrams, and the usual safety instructions for morons. Like,

"This printer weighs 43 pounds. If you use a stand for the printer, make sure it can support at least 43 pounds."

"Take care not to spill liquid on the printer."

"For California customers only: The lithium batteries in this product contain Perchlorate Material." Which raises rather more questions than it answers. Is Perchlorate Material dangerous only in California? Or do they ship non-Perchlorated batteries to the other 49 states? And this thing plugs into the wall, in fact they're quite frantic about using the provided power cord and no other - so what the heck are the batteries for?

And, my personal favorite: "Do not drink the ink in the cartridges."

Enough hard thinking for one day; I'm going out for Mexican food with husband, one of my many brothers-in-law who happens to be in town, and the Elder Spawn, who just arrived after a hectic day at work and fell on the couch saying, "I need a drink. And food. And did I mention a drink?"

A magical evening

2011-05-10T10:32:00.003-05:00

Okay, it's not my favorite opera. In fact, it's probably my least favorite Mozart opera. The music is great, but the pompous, misogynistic libretto always annoys me. So this weekend's performance offered a threefer. A ballet choreographed by Stephen Mills. Mozart's music. And no words! Just ninety minutes of wonderful dancing and innovative scenes (they used shadow-puppet type screens for things like the serpent at the begining and Pamina and Tamino's trials by water and fire at the end.) Papageno was brilliantly done, with a flock of dancers in brilliant tutus following him as his "birds" - a lot better than having him carry the traditional cage. The pas de deux of repentance and forgiveness between Pamina and Sarastro brought tears to my eyes.

Just one quibble, and it's a minor one. Sarastro is supposed to be a great, wise, benevolent magician, the foil to the evil Queen of the Night (which always leads me to speculate: if he's all virtue and she's all vice, how did they get together to beget Pamina?). Anyway, I've never heard a Sarastro who was half as impressive as the Queen of the Night, but I thought that might be the fault of the pompous, mystical, misogynistic lines he's given.

Alas, even in ballet he just isn't very convincing. Maybe that's because of the intrinsic difficulty of portraying Good vs. Evil. (After all, in Paradise Lost, Lucifer has all the best lines.) Then, the costuming for this production didn't help: difficult for any man to look great and impressive in a white dress and ballet slippers. When he was joined by six priests in slightly shorter white dresses and they all started pirouetting around the stage I found myself thinking that it's been a long time since I read Greenmantle, and that triggered what they reminded me of: whirling dervishes.

Anyway, apart from the whirling dervishes, it was a fine ballet and I hope it has many more performances. Even Steve enjoyed it, though being ignorant of the plot he seldom had any idea what was supposed to be going on. I did try to explain to him that the "plot" of this particular opera is of such mind-numbing stupidity that it's impossible for the human brain to retain it, but he kept squinting at the program notes and trying to make sense of it. Having heard the opera enough times to know there is no sense to be made, I was able to just relax and enjoy the dancing.

The joy of digital printing

2011-05-06T11:10:00.003-05:00

I'm getting a wide-format printer!!!

I'm in the middle of making my second art quilt using digital photos (the first is lying around waiting for me to add some hand embroidery and beads and stuff, which is why I haven't posted any pictures of it yet) and have decided that I really really love incorporating photographs into my work and want to do more of it. A lot more. And being limited to an 8x11 size is frustrating in a lot of ways, not least being that I frequently want to print non-rectangular images and these get pretty darn small when you squeeze them down inside an 8x11 rectangle.

So...Wide format. Pigment inks. It's in the hands of FedEx even as I write this.

The possibility of being able to print nice large 16x20 images has revived my interest in digital photocollage; I did a lot of that some years ago but eventually lost interest because I couldn't print the collages out large enough to make the imagery really part of the quilt. I like to play around with masks and layering and subtle merging of images, and something like the photo above would only look like a small dark blotch at 8 x 11. This would be even worse:

Champagne and Fireworks

2011-05-02T10:48:00.002-05:00

That's how Austin was feeling last night, when the news of Osama Bin Laden's death was announced. Who says revenge is a dish best eaten cold? I would have preferred this revenge served up hot and sizzling on September 12, 2001. But even after nearly ten years, it's pretty tasty. It's not an end to much of anything - I'm sure the Taliban and Al-Qaeda aren't going to beat their AK-47's into ploughshares just because Dear Leader is gone - but it's a tasty morsel all the same.

It would have been even tastier if the President had used this as an occasion to announce, "Our work here is done and we're bringing our troops home from Afghanistan." Sounds so much better than "We've been here for ten years and we're not making any progress and we're leaving," which would be my second-choice announcement. Oh, well.

(Now if I were Osama, I'd have stashed away, oh, 40 or 50 non-event-specific videos ranting against the Great Satan with instructions to release them slowly over the next ten years just to keep Americans doubting and worrying. Let's hope Bin Laden wasn't as sneaky as I am.)

Shrine Composition #1

2011-04-25T19:51:00.005-05:00

...because I really suck at making up titles, and last year when I thought I was going to do a whole series of quilts around the idea of shrines this seemed like a great way to avoid the title problem forever and ever, that's why. Unfortunately for this plan, after Shrine Composition #2 (now being hand quilted I veered off in a totally different direction. Anyway, here's a not-very-good picture of #1; when the design board's clear again I'll put up the photo lights and take a better picture.

Here's a look at the central section of woven tubes:

And here are a couple of those dangly strings of beads I was whingeing about making:

and here's a really detailed closeup of three beads so that you can appreciate their full, craggy, glitzy, comples, multilayered glory.

Looking at the pictures reminds me that I really do love these beads.

I just don't want to make any more of them for a while.

Basket of Beads

2011-04-14T20:52:00.003-05:00

This is what happens when you don't think things through carefully:

I made a few of these beads with painted Tyvek and embossing powder and loved them and finally figured out a way to incorporate them into a quilt. The middle section of the quilt is composed of woven tubes and every other square is tied down with a short Tyvek bead. That required 40 beads. All well and good. I went on cheerfully designing with some strong verticals that looked sort of like columns, planning to decorate each column with a string of 8 or 9 longer Tyvek beads which I would, of course, have plenty of time to make while quilting the thing...

...Fast forward: I got to the binding stage and then remembered oh yeah, I have to make some more multi-layered, holey, embossed Tyvek beads to finish the thing.

I have now become quite painfully aware that it takes fifteen minutes to make each of these little suckers - and that's with the "efficiency" of actually making a three-bead-long tube and slicing it into sections.

I think I've got 63 beads now, albeit of charmingly varied dimensions. If I don't have that many, some of the inner columns will have shorter bead strings than the outer columns because I don't ever want to see Tyvek or embossing powder or a heat gun again!

(This is actually not literally true. During the final bead-making effort, a slip of the hot knife revealed a whole new world of possibilities to explore: mokume gane Tyvek beads! It is, however, true that I am quite willing to wait a few weeks before launching the exploration.)

Truly amazing altered books

2011-03-07T20:33:00.002-06:00

Normally "altered books" make me a little uncomfortable, because I am, or was, a writer; and I'm still a reader; and I'm kind of attached to, you know, the actual contents of books. But these pieces by Brian Dettmer take the concept of altered books into a whole new dimension. Go take a look. They're wonderful.

A lot of poorly dressed people bashing at each other

2011-02-18T17:58:00.002-06:00

And no, I'm not referring to the Wisconsin protestors, who by all accounts have been very civil. It's a movie: The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff's YA novel The Eagle of the Ninth. I've always liked the book, and the trailer for the movie looked okay, so Steve and I went to see it the other day.

And oh, dear Lord, what a lousy job they made of it; replacing virtually every element of the plot with a cartoonish exaggeration. The opening was actually pretty good, but after that...what were they thinking?

Book: young Roman who's been invalided out of the army and who speaks some British wants to go north of the Wall with his British slave, disguised as a traveling eye doctor, to find out what happened to his father's legion - the Ninth Legion that disappeared ten years ago.

Movie: "Hey, let's have him speak absolutely no British, and let's not give him a cover story, and let's not give him a better plan than just heading north at random, and let's have him and his slave arguing loudly in Latin for weeks before anybody notices!"

Book: they find the lost Eagle of the legion and devise a sneaky way to get out of the village and disarm suspicion. (I don't want to spoil the book for anybody)

Movie: they snatch the Eagle and get the hell out of Dodge at dawn, because it's going to be so much fun to be chased the length of Scotland by furious British tribes.

Book: they encounter one soldier from the lost legion who survived by surrendering and marrying into a British tribe.

Movie: There's not just one survivor from the lost legion, there are forty of them! And none of them have really bad rheumatism yet! And they show up just in time to help our heroes fight off the furious British tribes! They couldn't do that ten years ago when they had a whole legion, but they can do it now because they really, really care! And they're not the least bit worried about what this will do to their relationship with the tribes once our heroes have gone their way!

Okay, for the end of my rant I'm going to reverse the order, and give you a quotation from the book first. This is how Rosemary Sutcliff illustrated the cultural divide between British and Romans:

"Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. 'Look at the pattern embossed here on your dagger-sheath,' he said at last. 'See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.'

Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. 'Go on."

Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside...'Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to - if they ever had it.' He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. 'You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.'"

Movie: I HATE YOU ROMANS! I WANT TO KILL ALL ROMANS!

Snow day - Austin style

2011-02-04T11:29:00.005-06:00

When I got up this morning there was a beautiful white frosting over everything and Littlefield Fountain had frozen overnight. It isn't lasting, of course. This is a snapshot out of our front window taken around 11:30. It's already melted off the streets and cars are zipping past as usual. But never mind - the city has officially shut down for today. The public schools are closed. Austin Community College is closed. The University of Texas is closed. State offices are closed.

The rest of the country can now laugh themselves silly at the concept of a city that shuts down at the first hint of snow.

I think the real reason is that snow is so rare here, everybody wants to run out and play in it. Grownups too. It would be cruel to deny them the opportunity.

Now I'm going to go out and make a couple of snowballs before it all goes away.

Egypt Burning

2011-01-29T17:27:00.003-06:00

(Image from SkyNews)

...and possibly the rest of the Middle East as well. No, I don't have any idea what's going to come out of this. I guess it's not a foregone conclusion that Mubarak's going to fall...wait a minute, let me just check Al Jazeera's live blog...Nope, they're still calling for him to step down.

I'm just waiting with my jaw dropped, along with most of the rest of the Western world.

It's really hard to combine hand quilting with a constant compulsion to open my laptop and check the latest news, though.

Coming soon to a courtroom near you?

2011-01-22T12:42:00.003-06:00

There's a growing list of people who have been prosecuted in various European countries for speaking negatively about Islam. One whose trial is ongoing is Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff. (Yeah, I know, it's hard to spell. So inconsiderate of those Europeans to have funny-sounding names.)

She was originally charged with "inciting hatred” following a seminar she gave on political Islam which was blatantly misreported by an Austrian journalist who attributed quotes from other people to ESW, and also quoted remarks during the breaks as if they were parts of the seminar.

On January 18 her lawyer insisted on playing the tapes (made without ESW's knowledge or consent) of the seminar. There are four hours of tapes, but Dr. Rami felt that the first forty-five minutes were enough to demonstrate that there was no incitement to hatred; on the contrary, the tone of the seminar was one of sober respect.

The response? The judge decided to add a charge of “denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group.”

She is being prosecuted for quoting the Qur'an and Islamic scholars.

Apparently there are Muslims in Europe who believe that their religion can be defamed by quoting its own writings.

Gosh. Isn't that kind of, I don't know, self-defeating? "My religion is so awful that quoting my own sacred writings is defamatory?"

It would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

If I were to quote Deuteronomy 24:47-48 or Isaiah 65:11-12 (look it up, folks; I'm not going to do all the work here) and say, "See, Christianity also supports the death penalty for apostasy," do you think believing Christians would sue me for quoting the Bible? Or would they rush to point out why I'm mistaken?

European countries have nothing like our First Amendment and over the last ten years, they have been increasingly passing laws forbidding criticism of religion, defining such criticism as "hate speech," etc.

Why am I worried about this?

Western Europe and the USA have been the poster children for democracy and human rights. Now Europe is crumbling from within.

And here? Think about the calls for limiting freedom of speech after the shootings in Tucson. Think about the total lack of support for Molly Ivins from anybody in power. Think about the fact that CAIR - the supposedly "moderate" Council for American-Islamic Relations - regularly tries to intimidate and silence critics of Islam by the threat of lawsuits - a threat that can be very effective if used by a large organization with deep pockets against an individual speaking on his own dime.

Please think about this.

Don't just go waffling on about how "all religions are really the same," and "Islam is a religion of peace." Are there good, kind, peaceful Muslims? Sure there are. Lots of them.

But a basic premise of Islam is that it's not just a religion, but a complete way of life: theology, law and government must all conform.

If there's no separation between church and state, it's not a religion; it's a political movement.

A tisket, a tasket, start another basket

2011-01-18T19:03:00.003-06:00

This has not been a good (achoo!) period (sniffle) for getting things done. If this is Austin, it must be cedar fever time. And everything I take for the constant snuffles makes me drowsy and stupid.

The other day it RAINED. Oh joy, I thought. Today I get to breathe and think at the same time! I'll go trim Shrine Composition 2, and make a backing for it, and, and...

Wrong.

It also rained in the sewing room. To add insult to injury, it rained in the corner where I had left SC #2. So the sewing room is kind of unusable, because all the stuff I had to move so as to mop the floor is filling up the room, and there are bolts of cloth propped up to drip-dry, and the quilt top is hanging in the shower. And I sort of don't want to put anything back in the Drip Area until we have had a serious conversation with the roofer.

Never mind. I'm resilient. There were lots of other things to do. I could wind all those skeins I dyed the other day.

As the picture shows, I actually did make some progress with winding skeins into neat little balls and tossing them into a basket. But when I abandoned this less than totally thrilling project for a while, my husband had organized the basket of yarn and two vases into a still life which he was drawing.

A truly resilient person would simply have brought out another basket and continued winding. Or picked up another one of the many UFP's littering the house. Me? I know an omen when I see one. I sat down and read a nice library book.

"This animal is dangerous...

2011-01-13T11:54:00.002-06:00

...when attacked, it defends itself." -old story, probably apocryphal, about a zoo sign

I'm trying to stay away from the unseemly sight of the mainstream media slavering and drooling as they target Sarah Palin over the Giffords shooting, but I can't. The sight has a kind of awful fascination, like the really disgusting watch-this-part-with-your-eyes-closed bits in a horror film.

Fortunately, The Anchoress has summed it up so well that I don't have to:

Misreporting Giffords death, unsure of anything about the shooter, mostly disinterested in the stories of heroism that helped to end the gruesome attack, the media lined Palin into their sites and pulled a trigger. They called in all the usual suspects and the narrative rang forth: Sarah Palin–and by extension anyone who agrees with her, supports her, or works in alternative-but-non-liberal-media–was the deliverer of death to America.

Many of us who are not emphatic fans of Sarah Palin–and even some who vociferously dislike her–have watched the press with jaws-ever-dropping.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand–who released a brief, appropriate statement of prayerful support for the victims, and said nothing more–was excoriated in a manner so out-of-control, so wild-eyed and over-the-top that it was reminiscent of the press in the aftermath of her 2008 speech at the Republican Convention, where they had resembled nothing so much as fulminating beasts of rage, unable to hold back their frustrated howls.

Yesterday, they were complaining that she was “hiding” from the media, who insisted on making her part of a story to which she had no connection.

And so, today, Sarah Palin–probably aware that she was damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t–made a statement. It was actually a very good, if a trifle long, statement. Immediately upon her delivering it, the media, like jackals went on the attack. ABC news, in a breathtaking example of cognitive dissonance, wrote: “Sarah Palin, once again, has found a way (!) to become part of the story. ”

The (!) is mine. The press hauls this woman into the story, makes her a focal point of it, and then asserts that she has inserted herself into it. Staggering.

I've tried to excerpt the main points, but you really should read the whole thing.

What I find most discouraging about this whole thing is that the possibility of reasonable, fact-based discussion between people with different points of view seems to have receded until it's vanishingly small. It's absolutely true that there's a group of people whose minds are closed to "facts and reason and science," but they're not the usual suspects.

Leafing It All Behind

2011-01-10T14:58:00.013-06:00

The other day I took a snapshot of this wonderful hole-y leaf. Since then we've had several chilly, damp, dreary days during which my communings with nature have been limited to walks around the block. Brisk walks.

In between brisk little walks and sessions at the sewing machine with Shrine Composition 2 (otherwise known as The Big Purple Thing That I Have to Stitch Together So I Can Put Something Else on the Design Board), I've been playing with this image in Photoshop.

Since the leaf is virtually monochromatic, it was easy to select just the leaf and work on that as a separate layer. First I played with Photoshop's Layer Style options. Using Drop Shadow gave a bit more crispness and definition to the image.

Adding Bevel gives the leaf a little more definition but makes it unpleasantly (to my mind) smooth...

...so I applied a texturizing filter - Craquelure - over that.

Then, going back to the original image, I played with the Atmospherizer filter from Harry's Filters via The Plugin Site to get some decidedly un-natural colors:

then made it a little brighter by duplicating the atmospherized layer and blending it with the previous layer using the "Hue" blending style.

Back to the original again, I used Cybia's Edgeworks plug-in with the "Bright" option to get this:

Once again, I intensified it by blending two copies of the leaf layer, this time using Linear Burn:

A different Edgeworks option - Shine - produced this from the original:

and I blended this layer with a copy of the atmospherized leaf, using Multiply, to jazz it up a little:

Finally, for a definitely science-fictional effect, I used Redfield's Jama 3D to get this image:

All the third-party plugins I've mentioned are freeware and should be downloadable from the links in the post. I haven't tried them with Photoshop Elements but I think they'd probably work with that program too.

Now I'm ready to print some of these on cotton and organza and play with them on the design board - only two loooong seams to do on Shrine Composition 2 first.

Are you serious?

2011-01-09T20:47:00.004-06:00

I was going to post some pictures of an interesting leaf after various Photoshop manipulations... Maybe tomorrow. The tragedy in Arizona has soaked up all my energy for today.

I just read a report that the shooter was trying to reload when a woman grabbed his arm. Which makes me think...I'm glad he didn't get to load a second magazine and continue the carnage...and wouldn't it have been a good thing if he'd been unable to buy 33-round magazines in the first place? Those used to be illegal.

George Packer has a post in the New Yorker in which he seems to be arguing that "it doesn't matter why he did it" but it's still the fault of "right-wing hostile rhetoric."

Hmm. I don't recall the left as coming up short on hostile rhetoric while Bush was president; I even engaged in some myself.

But where Packer really strains the bounds of reason is in this assertion:

Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.

The Constitution is right-wing hostile rhetoric?

As was famously said in another context:

"Are you serious? Are you serious?

Score one for the good guys

2011-01-08T10:30:00.002-06:00

As the Washington Post reports:

THE COPTIC Christian Christmas passed peacefully in Egypt on Thursday night and Friday, thanks in part to the efforts of the country's moderate Muslims. Thousands turned out to help protect churches following the horrific New Year's Day suicide bombing at a Mass in Alexandria that killed at least 23 people. Prominent Muslims, including President Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal, attended Christmas Eve services; the country's most senior Muslim leader, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, has led the way in condemning the attack and calling for tolerance.

True, as the rest of the article goes on to point out, the Egyptian government's record for religious tolerance on the whole is sorry and getting worse. This is the same regime that declared Nasr Abu Zayd an apostate and effectively ran him out of the country for daring to study the Koran as a historical text rather than as the unchanging, perfect, revealed word of God. It's the same regime that enforces religious laws that discriminate against non-Muslims in innumerable ways.

But I think the Washington Post was wrong when they snarkily reported this story under the headline "Egypt's Show of Tolerance." Never mind government policies: thousands of individual human beings voluntarily turned out to put their bodies between worshippers of a different faith and suicide bombers. That's brave and decent and good. I don't know if I'd have the courage to do that. Can't we honor these individuals without condoning the government they're stuck with?

No, it's NOT a "lunatic fringe"

2011-01-05T09:26:00.002-06:00

As everybody in the known universe is aware by now, yesterday saw the murder of Salman Taseer, governor of Punjab province in Pakistan. Taseer was assassinated for suggesting that it might just possibly be a good idea to amend the mandatory death sentence for insulting Islam - a suggestion that engendered massive riots and a nationwide protest strike a couple of days ago.

Bear in mind that "insulting Islam" can include anything from a scholar's observation that there are Aramaic words in the Koran to, well, a cartoon.

In a brilliant example of doublethink, the Guardian described this as "a killing that exposed a deep-rooted vein of extremism" just sentences before saying this about Pakistani scholars' reaction (bolding mine):

A prominent group of Islamic scholars said that the funeral prayers should not be offered and warned that anyone who expressed grief for Taseer could suffer the same fate.

The Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan group represents scholars from the mainstream Barelvi sect of Sunni Muslims. Although considered moderate, they have led protests in favour of the blasphemy law.

"More than 500 scholars of the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat have advised Muslims not to offer the funeral prayers of Governor Punjab Salman Taseer, nor try to lead the prayers," the group said.

"Also, there should be no expression of grief or sympathy on the death of the governor, as those who support blasphemy of the prophet are themselves indulging in blasphemy."

Now, a quick quiz for those who may or may not have been paying attention.

Moderate. Mainstream. Extremist.

Which of these words does not belong with the other two?

Now just in case anybody actually reads this post and wants to go jumping on me for being anti-Muslim, I am not saying all Muslims are evil murdering bastards who assassinate anybody who disagrees with them. Salman Taheer obviously wasn't. I lived in a Muslim neighborhood in Africa for two years and my neighbors never expressed an Islamic duty to kill me; they were real nice people. They did keep wishing out loud that I would convert to Islam so they could fix me up with a nice Muslim boy, but what the heck; my grandmother said essentially the same thing, if you substitute "Methodism, Methodist" for "Islam, Muslim."

I just want to point out that the Evil Murdering Bastards party is not a small fringe of extremists who misunderstand the Koran; it's a large group of mainstream Muslims who understand the Koran perfectly well. Take Sura 5:33, for example:

The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.

X-Rated Punctuation Rant

2011-01-04T19:36:00.002-06:00

Hysterically funny, if you're the sort of person who really cares about apostrophes (I do) and isn't offended by four-letter words (I spent ten years in the computer business. Once you've enjoyed a heated difference of opinion with a programmer from CalTech, your ears get sort of numbed to the profanity.)

With those caveats in mind, read on here. Preferably not while drinking coffee.

206 Bones, with a Side of Coconut Milk

2011-01-04T14:33:00.002-06:00

It's a dull, drizzly afternoon and I've been vegging out with a good suspense novel - Kathy Reichs' 206 Bones. And admiring her heroine, who starts the book tied up, entombed, cold, and hungry. I don't think it spoils the plot to reveal that she saws through her bonds, kicks out the (cemented shut) door and escapes through a sewer in time to save both her life and her professional reputation; after the 11 previous novels, one wouldn't expect anything less from Temperance Brennan.

But what really impressed me is what Temperance fantasizes about when she first recognizes her situation: Seared ahi tuna. Thai soup with lemongrass and coconut milk. Mussels in wine sauce.

Even when (metaphorically) tied to the railroad tracks, the lady remains a gourmet.

In her situation, I'm pretty sure I would have been focusing on:

(1) the high probability of imminent death
(2) a place to pee
(3) a cheeseburger
and (4) the extremely high probability of imminent death.

In that order.

Given Brennan's indomitability, I guess the least I can do - now that I've finished the book - is to go and have a serious discussion with my sewing machine, which started spitting out disgusting birds' nests of entangled thread yesterday.

Clouds and stones and trees

2011-01-03T21:08:00.005-06:00

Judging by the news reports, Central Texas must be the only part of the Northern Hemisphere that isn't freezing. Even Atlanta got 10 inches of global warming the other day. Atlanta. Here we had two bright, crisp, perfect days over the weekend - then today, when I had a chance to get out on a hiking trail, the sky was clouded over. The creek was dry, so I experienced the walk as going through a narrow band of brown trees and gray stones, framed at the bottom by the round white rocks of the creek and at the top by pearlescent clouds. Even so, I found some interesting things to photograph, like this humongous juniper tree trunk with multiple knotholes. It would make a great starting point for embroidery... or maybe for dyeing, with the knotholes marked off by round gathers held by rubber bands and the whole cloth tightly pleated.

Now to figure out how I'd hold the pleats in place...What I envision is a long plastic box that's only 2-4" wide. Sadly, nothing we buy happens to come in a box of those dimensions, so this will have to go on the back burner. It's getting pretty crowded back there, too.

Never Tamper With a Christmas Tradition

2010-12-21T19:22:00.004-06:00

Many, many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and our daughters were too small to read a calendar, I made a couple of simple little quilts to help them count down the days to Christmas. The top one is a Christmas tree and the bottom one is a street scene, and there are 25 velcro-backed "ornaments" which get transferred one by one to the tree.

This year I was having a head cold and otherwise distracted from Christmas and didn't bother to put the quilts up. After all, the "children" are twenty-somethings now, both living away from home, one in New York. Surely they wouldn't care...

Wrong. The Fashionista arrived from New York, looking amazingly grown-up and sophisticated in her City Black outfit, and demanded, "WHERE ARE THE CHRISTMAS QUILTS?"

Within minutes the girls had unearthed the quilts and hung them, and then they took turns moving ornaments so fast ("After all, we have a lot of days to catch up on,") that I got only one unblurred snapshot.

Finally, a passable arrangement

2010-12-20T19:37:00.004-06:00

So, I dyed all this fabric and screen printed it and discharged it with silkscreens of ancient texts (Irish, runes, and cuneiform) with a vague idea of doing a second shrine-inspired composition. (Shrine Composition #1 is on the shelf under the coffee table at the moment, being hand quilted; I'll pin it up and take a shapshot once the Great Purple Monstrosity is off the board.)

The idea for the Great Purple Monstrosity, aka Shrine Composition 2, is to go back to the origins of the word. "Shrine" comes from Latin "scrinium," meaning a thingie to hold books. I want the incomplete and overlapping layers of text to reference ancient writings; then I'm going to make a scroll to put in each of the "niche" areas. The niche idea is taking off from the niche full of fabric-wrapped books I saw at the Jama Masjid in Delhi a few years ago. I don't know why the "niches" here are half-window blocks. I tried some full-window blocks and didn't like the way they looked. I kind of like it this way, with some openness and some confusion about perspective.

Anyway, I've been pinning this thing up and fiddling with it and discarding "window" fabrics for quite a while, and today I finally don't feel compelled to move anything. I'll give it a couple of days and then start sewing - umm, well, with packages to wrap and stockings to stuff and Christmas dinner and both my girls in Austin for Christmas, it will probably stay on the design board more than a couple of days. We'll see. In the interim, if anybody has any suggestions for improving the composition, I'm all ears. (Try to ignore the fact that the strips aren't pinned exactly straight. I got awfully tired of positioning strips during the last week of the design phase.)

Now that I'm looking at the snapshot, I'm beginning to feel that the big windows should be below the smaller windows. Dither, dither, dither.

Out of tragedy, a hauntingly beautiful image

2010-12-09T10:44:00.002-06:00

I captured this photo from one of the many stories about the forest fire in Israel.

The colors are beautiful. The composition is excellent. If I didn't know the source, it would simply be a glorious image to go in my "inspirations" folder, next to innumerable Hubble space photos.

But I cannot look at it without thinking of the lives lost in that fire. Anything based on this image would have to somehow evoke the 43 souls the fire took. And even then...

How can we make art out of someone else's tragedy?

How can we not try to transform tragedy into art?

This is getting over my head. I'm going to go cut up fabric.

Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn

2010-12-09T10:24:00.002-06:00

I'm going to get back to artstuff soon... but today I'm waiting to see whether the DREAM Act makes it through the Senate. It looks like a good act to me. It's far from an amnesty; it's a path to citizenship for young people who were brought here illegally through no fault of their own, who MAY be able to get citizenship if they complete two years of military service or college education and don't screw up for ten years. Aren't these exactly the sort of people we want as citizens? I don't understand all the opposition to the Act. I just don't get it. Maybe there's some major, major loophole I'm missing?

So today, maybe, we'll find out; did this dream come through the gate of ivory (false dreams) or the gate of horn (truly prophetic dreams)?

Enough with the leaks already

2010-12-08T10:36:00.002-06:00

OK, up to now I've wanted to give Julian Assange the benefit of the doubt. Maybe posting all those war reports did give us information we needed to have (though there don't seem to have been any surprises in them), and the contention that he put Afghan informants and villages at risk doesn't seem so strong now that after, what, four months, there've been no reports that the Taliban put anybody in the reports on the hit list. Maybe they couldn't stand the sheer boredom of reading the reports. I certainly didn't make it very far into the data.

Diplomatic cables are dicier. I don't personally subscribe to the idea that all diplomatic communications should be conducted in the light of day and with full disclosure to all concerned, but I can understand that someone else might believe that. In any case, I think it's a hopeless ideal to pursue, sort of like campaign finance reform; diplomats are going to sneak off into dark corners, and money is going to flow into campaigns, no matter what you do.

But now Wikileaks has published a list of sites "that, if lost, might “critically impact” public health or the national security of the United States."

I don't see how this contributes in any way to the "open dialogue" that Assange claims to support.

I don't see how it can be interpreted in any way other than as an attack on the United States.

Given the nature of the Internet, it may not be possible to prevent this kind of information from getting out. But can we at least stop pretending that the person who published it had noble motives? Anybody who defends Assange now should understand that they are defending an active enemy of this country.

It CAN Happen Here

2010-12-06T14:15:00.002-06:00

Some of you may not remember the death threats against Salman Rushdie after he published a novel that some people deemed offensive to Islam. You may not have been too concerned about the murder of Theo van Gogh for making a film critical of Islam's treatment of women. You may feel that Geert Wilders deserves to be put on trial in Amsterdam for "inciting racial hatred against Muslims," because he criticized the Qur'an... and anyway, all that's over in Europe. We have free speech in America.

Do we?

In mid-September of this year, a cartoonist named Molly Norris changed her name and went into hiding. The reason? Death threats against her from that lovable cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, fan of those good ol' boys Al Qaeda, currently believed to be hiding out in Yemen - threats that the FBI advised Norris to take very seriously (though they offered her no help whatsoever). The inspiration for the death threats? In an attempt to satirize exactly this kind of censorship-by-intimidation, she suggested an "Everybody draw Muhammed Day."

An American citizen is forced underground in America by threats from a religious extremist.

In August of this year, President Obama found time to weigh in on the constitutional right to build a mosque in New York. In September, he found time to comment on an obscure whackjob in Florida who threatened to burn a Qur'an. So what did he say in defense of an American citizen exercising her right of free speech?

Not. One. Word.

The New York Times? Buried the story in "Local News." No columnist felt it worth mentioning.

The ACLU? In the month following Norris' disappearance, they found time to speak up for the freedom of teenagers to send naked pictures of each other by cell phone, for the right of Westboro Baptist Church to picket military funerals with signs saying "God Hates Gays," against the idea of banning websites that openly sponsor jihad against America.

But for Molly Norris?

Not. One. Word.

Freedom of speech is being eroded in Europe. Here, we have a Constitutional amendment that explicitly guarantees free speech. But the First Amendment is just words on parchment if we do not exercise our rights and speak out in support of everybody who voices unpopular opinions. Not just the unpopular opinions we agree with, or the ones that don't inconvenience us. All of them.

Freedom of speech: use it or lose it. Which are we going to do?

Another detail, and some details

2010-12-04T13:50:00.004-06:00

I managed to get a slightly better snapshot of one of the embellished circles in Dreamworlds, and now that you can see it I thought I'd add some details about the making of this quilt.

This thing got started because, while rearranging fabric shelves, I noticed that over the years I'd acquired a number of pieces of lace with metallic accents, and I thought they'd look good over black. The background is a black suede-ish FUO (fabric of unknown origin) which I picked because I thought the slightly textured stuff would make a better contrast than just plain black cotton.

I made the quilt as a collection of square and rectangular blocks, each containing one, or two, or none of the embellished spheres, so that I could work on the embellishments without having to manipulate the whole quilt top.

The first stage was to cut circles of metallic lace and fuse them to the black pieces. Cutting out the lace itself was easy enough - I ironed freezer paper circles on and cut around them - but fusing with black Mistyfuse was a total PITA. Mistyfuse is so light and wispy that it likes to drift and ripple and generally not behave like a flat surface. Cutting out circles of it to go under the lace circles was hard. Lining them up with the lace circles for fusing was even harder. No matter how carefully I placed the pieces before laying down the parchment paper and fusing, some of the Mistyfuse would manage to peek out from under the lace and make a nasty shiny blotch on the black suedecloth. I spent a lot of time scratching the stuff off with my thumbnail.

I feel really stupid about this because there ought to be an elegant solution to the problem - there should be some sequence of freezer paper, cutting, fusing where everything is held stable all the way through - but I couldn't think of one. It's like getting the cannibals and the missionaries across the river - until you think outside the box, at least one missionary always gets eaten - and I didn't get out of the box here. If anybody can think of a better way to do it, please tell me!

(But don't tell me I should have used Wonder Under. Yes, it's paper-backed, and that would have given me the stability I wanted. But it shows through the lace. I made some test pieces of lace-on-black using Wonder Under, white Mistyfuse, and black Mistyfuse, and black Mistyfuse worked way better than the other two.)

After that, it was just a matter of searching through and playing with glitzy fabrics, cords, ribbons, buttons and whatever else came to light in my stash. The only hard part was that I had to reorganize four more stash drawers just to find the stuff!

Each circle went more or less the same way. First I tacked it down around the edges, then I bordered the edge with some narrow metallic braid. (I did try combining those steps. It was a mistake.) Then I "cut" out smaller circles of synthetic sheers, using a Versa-tool to burn the circles out and seal the edges in one step, and didn't burn myself hardly at all. Well, not more than 2 or 3 times. Next came any other relatively flat embellishments, like ribbons, yarns, or satin cords. Finally I added gathered circles of wired ribbon, puffy yo-yos of sheer fabric, and buttons.

I hand quilted it with Sulky holographic sliver thread. This was my first time using the Vivian Mahlab school of quilting (don't sit at a machine, do it by hand, don't worry about tiny little stitches, make the color of the quilting thread part of the design) and I loved it. I really, really, really do not like sitting at a sewing machine and wrestling a quilt under the needle for hours; it was much more rewarding to hold this piece on my lap and see the bright sparkling lines move over the black. Anyway, I don't think the sliver "thread" would have held up in a machine.

Slipping one past the PC police

2010-11-28T18:13:00.003-06:00

Several weeks ago, a number of newspapers (including my hometown Austin-American Statesman) decided not to publish a "Non Sequitur" panel by Wiley Miller, apparently thinking that even using the name of Muhammed in a caption was... well... gee, it might offend some people. Take a look here and decide for yourself how offensive it was.

Today, to my great delight, he got one printed that satirizes the pusillanimous editors. It's online here.

GO WILEY!!!

(For those who haven't been following this sort of thing, the original cartoon was probably a reference to the case of Molly Norris - which is much more serious, in fact outrageous, and I'll probably expound on it in a later post because it has been effectively buried or not even reported in most news media.)

Actually, though - if you're finished chuckling over the cartoons - this episode is serious too. This kind of self-censorship is a step towards giving away our freedom of speech.

Don't know about you, but I'm rather fond of free speech. In fact, I am generally in favor of the whole Bill of Rights.

Comments bug

2010-11-21T15:07:00.003-06:00

Robbie of Robbie's Paw Prints just pointed out that comments are bouncing back. Oops. I closed my old email account this summer and am now using mb(at)flameweaver.com. After some bemused poking around the Blogger site I found the old email still hidden under the Comments tab and changed it. Everything should work now - inshallah.

Has it really been a year?

2010-11-19T19:45:00.003-06:00

Okay, this is embarrassing. I spent a good part (well, actually a really bad part) of the last year slogging through the worst depression of my life. Along with most other things more complicated than breathing, this blog was abandoned. I couldn't bead. I couldn't sew. I definitely couldn't do something so audacious as posting my work out in public, acting as if anybody would be interested in it.

Well, that phase seems to be over. I started Making Stuff again a couple of months ago; today I photographed a small wall quilt and I'm going to put up a couple of the pictures. Right now. Before I start to hyperventilate. Before I talk myself out of it. After all, it's not like anybody would still be looking at this blog when it hasn't been updated for a year, right? So I'm basically talking to myself here.

Darkly Sparkly

2009-11-30T17:20:00.004-06:00

I've had these two pieces of titanium-coated drusy for some time but every bead combination I tried seemed to be overwhelmed by their emphatic sparkle. When Artbeads invited me to try out their cubic zirconia beads I requested purple ovals and was delighted to find that they more than matched the color and sparkle of the cabochons.

The picture makes the CZ beads look more reddish than they really are; I think it's because they were photographed on a warm-colored rock. In real life they're almost a perfect match for the sparkling purplish drusy stones.

I used a spike-ended loop fringe on the bottom of the piece and to embellish the "head" and the lower part of the strap.

FTC REQUIRED NOTICE: I received the cubic zirconia beads (but not the rest of my materials) free of charge from Artbeads. I am not being paid for this blog entry or for endorsing Artbeads' products in any way.

Lacy Looped Fringe Instructions

2009-11-20T12:42:00.003-06:00

Loop-ended fringe

Just as with spikes, you can end a spike fringe stitch with a loop instead of with a big bead and a pivot bead or any of the other variations we’ve already discussed. All by itself, I have to say this doesn’t make a terribly exciting fringe.

It should be obvious from the diagram how you do it: string on enough beads for the desired length of fringe, then string on enough more to make a graceful loop (the 7 pictured are a minimum; I actually like my loops with 8-10 beads) and then go back up the first lot of beads you strung. (Again, probably more than 5. Think 10, 15 beads at a minimum if you want a gracefully swaying fringe.)

Where looped fringes really come into their own is when you start adding loops before you get to the end, like this:

It does make a difference which way your thread runs, so bear with me while I dissect this one in a little more detail:

String on 4 beads. Now string on 7 more beads and go through the 4th bead again, in the same direction as before. (If you keep stringing in the same direction as before your loops will dangle gracefully. If you string back into the base fringe in the opposite direction then your loops will stick out. You could think of them as perky and individualistic, but I find the effect is more like that of a person with very curly hair on an extremely bad hair day.)

And that’s about it, really. String on 4 more beads, then do another 7-bead loop maintaining the direction of stringing, keep on this way until your fringe is long enough, then close it off with one last loop and run the needle back up through all the main fringe beads but without passing back through any of the loop beads.

Massed together, these multi-loop fringes can give a beautifully rich and lacy look. I used them to decorate the strap and half the beading on Crazy Lace Cascade. The original crazy lace agate stone had bands of even color on one side and a wild tumble of pale peach and pearl curls on the other side; I tried to duplicate that effect in the beading, with fringes falling over the stone as well as around it. (see previous post for a picture, or go to my website for a really detailed picture.

Crazy Lace Cascade

2009-11-15T14:38:00.003-06:00

I'm finding all sorts of creative ways to avoid getting back to the Massive Sculptural Beadwork Project From Hell. Actually this piece was finished a while ago, I just hadn't had time to blog it. It uses a multi-loop fringe stitch that I developed for the new book to create that lacy effect on the left hand side; I'm quite taken with this effect and plan to experiment with it more in future pieces.

I plan to post a book excerpt showing how to do this crazy looped fringe later this week, in case anybody wants to play with it.

The piece I'm actually working on right now, inspired by Artbeads' invitation to try out their line of cubic zirconia beads, has another fancy fringe, but quite different, designed to show off the CZ's. More on that when I get it done.

Fibrous Matter

2009-11-07T16:51:00.003-06:00

Inspired by Maggie Grey's Textile Translations, I recently got hold of some mulberry bark and gampi fiber and was playing around with them. (No, I don't know what gampi fiber is. I guess it comes from the gampi tree.) Both of these substances can be soaked, teased out into interesting webs of fiber, pinned to dry, then painted and embossed and applied to fabric.

So can cheesecloth, and it's a lot cheaper and easier to get hold of.

Anyway, I had this background lying around - painted handmade paper embellished to foiled black felt - and stitched my experiments to it, thinking they look sort of like a coral reef. Of course half of everything I do looks like a coral reef, and it gets worse the longer I'm deprived of vitamin Beach, but never mind that now - just tell me what you think. Purple is one substance, pink is another, and orange is a third. Anybody want to have a go at identifying gampi, mulberry and cheesecloth?

Beadwork Title Generator

2009-10-27T19:32:00.003-05:00

Okay, so I haven't quite worked out all the bugs yet...but a friend's comment that she is having trouble finding names for all the pieces she has made, reminded me that in my romance-writing days I actually wrote a simple-minded title generator full of words like "Love," "Heart" "Flames" "Burning" "Passion" "Desire" etc. The code is long gone, but it was pretty simple. How hard could it be to come up with a beadwork title generator? Different set of key words, obviously. But my first thought is to write something that makes a pass through Bartlett's Quotations, so that "Mostly Green and Gold Thang," could become "Golden Goblet on the Wild Emerald Tree," and "Red Carnelian Pendant," becomes "Crimson Wing," and.....Pretentious? oh, ok. I did say that I hadn't worked out the bugs yet.

Babbits

2009-10-26T09:38:00.002-05:00

I have it on good authority that a group of Native American intramural basketball players at the University of Northern Colorado decided to call their team "The Fighting Whites" and chose a caricature of a white businessman from the 1950's as their mascot.

While I applaud their cultural sensitivity, I feel that they could have done a lot better for names. How about "Mad Men"? Or, going a little farther back, "The Gray Flannel Suits"? or "The Babbits?" Oh,heck, I bet nobody who reads this blog, except Vernon, has even heard of Babbit. Can't expect that of a bunch of college kids.

Chihuly Form Out of Progress

2009-10-24T14:49:00.004-05:00

Well, you can't really call it "in progress" when you've packed up the materials in a plastic shoebox to get them out of the way for other projects, can you? I hope to get back to that necklace before it becomes another UFO - but I did design it rather on the grand scale; peyote ruffles are one thing, but sculptural peyote ruffles are...a lot of seed beads. And before all that there was, conservatively, sixteen miles of bead embroidery, all backstitch, no oddments added for variety, all in the interests of creating a smooth base before the necklace shape breaks into waves, which it's just beginning to do and I have seen enough green beads for a while.

So it's back to small projects like this abstract angel, which I'm calling "Winter Light" - very restrained for me, nothing but kyanite and transparent rainbow beads and a small fortune's worth of rainbow Swarovski cubes. I really wanted to showcase the chatoyance of the kyanite rather than showing off my fancy bead embroidery here.

Now I'm ready to cast aside all restraint and make something as frothy as Chantilly lace. Watch this space!

Artistic Photo Quilts

2009-10-20T20:15:00.003-05:00

Last week's Quilt Festival in Houston was the usual orgy for the eyeballs; I don't think I'm allowed to post any photos of the quilts here, but what the heck - as usual, half the exhibits were No Photography, and SAQA was good enough to put out their own book of their two exhibits.

A slight design flaw (from my point of view; from the pov of the organizers, probably a Machiavellian scheme to get people to spend money) was the fact that there were hardly any chairs or benches in the quilt side of the show, but lots of places to sit down on the vendors' side. I blame this for the fact that I came home with three books and a new clip-on magnifying device for beading. One of the books was Charlotte Ziebarth's Artistic Photo Quilts, which is directly responsible for my spending more time fooling around with Photoshop than doing anything else since the quilt show. It's full of inspiring headers like "Bad Pictures Can Often Be Useful," and "Out of Focus Areas," - and examples to back up her assertion that you don't need a stunning, award-worthy, professional-looking photograph to make a stunning quilt. I love this woman!

The picture is one I took some years ago while hiking, divvied into sections and manipulated using some of the many ideas in her text. Now if I can just stop playing with Photoshop filters and go get some more color ink cartridges and print the sections, I think it might make a really nice small quilt. (And if it doesn't, you'll never hear about this particular bright idea again.)

One thing that frustrates me somewhat is that while Ziebarth gets magnificent results with the Cutout filter, I'm not getting much use out of it when I try to manipulate my images of Rajasthan. Cutout seems to transfer brilliant reds and oranges into muddy brownish earth tones. Any Photoshop gurus have a suggestion to fix this problem?

Chihuly's Persian Forms

2009-10-10T11:59:00.002-05:00

I got hold of a book on Chihuly's Persians in Santa Fe and have been thinking about using some of the ideas (stripes of color, undulating shapes) in a beadwoven necklace. It'll probably take forever and what's worse, I may need several tries to get it "right", but I think I'll start working on something. In between, of course, finishing the little pieces that are still "in progress." Chihuly Persians

Lace on a Grand Scale

2009-10-07T16:12:00.003-05:00

I'm disappointed that they don't have a picture of the 600-pound laser-cut oil drum, but the few pics they do have are fantastic - wish I could get to Philly to see the exhibit!
Lace at the Design Center

Beaded Forest

2009-10-06T14:24:00.004-05:00

All the inspiring photos from Santa Fe are in my head, alas; I spent a LOT of time in art galleries, trying to absorb the essence of pieces we can't possibly afford to buy. (Basic paradigm here being, if it's shown in a Santa Fe gallery, we can't afford it).

I've been beading and finishing pieces like crazy, though. This one I'm calling In the Forest of Myth - rather a pretentious name for a pendant that fits in the palm of my hand, but that's what I was thinking about while beading the piece; deep forests with branching tree trunks lost in foliage, with spirit faces and birds with Messages - it all started with the cabochon, which makes me think of deep green pools in among brown and golden trees.

You can do a lot of thinking while beading even a small piece.

Kente Quilt I

2009-09-22T17:13:00.002-05:00

Just to show I did something besides beadwork this summer...here's the top of the first kente quilt. There were going to be three of these, one for me and one for each of our girls, because Katie's Nigerian boyfriend last year brought me tons of African print fabrics. However, now there are only going to be two, because Katie broke up with Wale and no longer wants her bedroom dominated by West African fabric. I expect I ought to splash the kente prints around more lavishly in KQ2, but I don't know....I really like the brilliance of relatively small pieces against all that dark blue.

Tomorrow we're going to visit friends in New Mexico, so I'll get no craft work done at all for a week, but with any luck will come back with lots of inspiring pictures.

Twisted Ribbon Stitch

2009-09-18T11:46:00.009-05:00

Twisted Ribbon Stitch

Today I actually feel intelligent enough to take a small excerpt from the new book. I'm quite pleased with this stitch and hope anybody who's interested will be able to follow this slightly abbreviated description.

The twisted ribbon stitch, worked with joined spikes, takes advantage of the fact that they are joined at the top to force the line of beads from vertical to flat and back to vertical. You can do it with seed beads only, but it’s absolutely eye-popping worked with bugles, so that’s how I’m going to show it.

First stitch: bring needle up at A, thread (sb, bb, sb) and bring needle down at B. Because this stitch strains the thread against the bead edges at top and bottom, it’s important to buffer your bugle beads with at least one seed bead at each end.

(Huh? That’s not a spike. It’s lying down flat against the fabric. Has she gone out of her mind or what?
Just wait for the next few stitches, ok?)

Bring your needle and thread around under the fabric and come up again at A. Go back through the first (sb, bb, sb) but this time do not bring the needle down through the fabric. Instead, string on another (sb, bb, sb).

Now bring your needle down at C, take a tiny stitch, and bring needle and thread up just beside C.

I think you can see where we’re going here. You keep making those joined spike stitches, without going back through the fabric at the top, and as the line of spikes gets longer it will gradually become more and more free of the fabric until eventually the spikes can stand upright. It’ll probably take about 10 to 15 spikes to reach this point. When you do, if you push the last spike upright with your thumb, you’ll see the line of spikes making a beautiful curve.

Obviously, once you let go of the last spike, the beads will just flop down on the fabric and your beautiful 3-dimensional curve will be lost. So what you want to do now is to anchor it somehow, and you do that by working another 10-15 spikes and stitching through the last one to anchor it to the fabric in the opposite direction. Now you’ve made one “twist” of the “ribbon.”

If you really want to get fancy, you could try changing colors at the midpoint of each twist, implying that you’re twisting a ribbon with different colors on each side.

More beadery

2009-09-14T13:08:00.002-05:00

Wish I had something to put up here besides pictures of beadwork, but that's about all I've been doing lately. Vernon suggested I excerpt some of the new stitches from Spikes, Loops and Fringes in case anybody wants a preview of the new book but I'm in a mild depression which makes concentrating on the book feel terribly, overwhelmingly difficult.

I can still stitch beads on Ultrasuede, though; in this case it's relatively few beads and a handful of Swarovski crystals because I wanted to showcase the blue pietersite cabochon, not my wonderful bead embroidery. I've been fondling this cabochon for a couple of years; it's scary to commit one of my favorite rocks to a piece of beadwork, but after all the Austin Gem and Mineral Show is in just 5 weeks and if I were at all short of pretty rocks (which I'm not) there'd be every chance to restock then.

Small Klimt Necklace

2009-09-08T11:08:00.002-05:00

I've been working on several smaller bead embroidery pieces this summer - in fact I've got quite a lot of bead embroidery done, since it's something you can do sitting down with a fan blowing on you! This piece may not look all that small, but it is in comparison with my larger Klimt Necklace, which is now at a gallery and unavailable for me to wear. As with the larger one, it's worked on gold-foiled suede and the gold glimmers through the millefiori beads; but this one uses a Lucy Lu magnet of "The Kiss" instead of an expensively hand-painted porcelain reproduction of Judith in Klimt's "Judith with the head of Holofernes."

Incestuous backgrounds

2009-09-04T12:41:00.003-05:00

Last night, inspired by Vernon's digital work, I was playing around in Photoshop with one of my pictures of the raku/green necklace (now "officially" named "Sea Forests." The Twirl filter combined with a bit of Liquidize around the edges and some layering, flipping, and blending of the image produced this image, which looks vaguely dragon-like to me. I'm thinking about printing it out and emphasizing the dragon-ness of the form with judiciously placed beads and embroidery. It does seem kind of weird to me, to take a snapshot of my own art and squoodge it around and use it as the basis for another piece. I wonder how long I could keep recycling like this? If I do bead the dragon, can I photograph and Photoshop it and come up with a quilt design? The challenge appeals to me.

Of course, first there's the challenge of using my extremely rudimentary drawing skills to move from this swirly shape to a recognizable dragon. Hmm, where did I put that book on how to draw dragons? I'm going to have to do something about wings...

Backgrounds for beadwork?

2009-09-03T19:28:00.004-05:00

My talented friend Vernon Sims has been playing with a fractal program and sent me these two images, which he thinks might make good backgrounds for beadwork. I don't know - the red one in particular is so rich that I might print it out and just sit there staring at it and salivating. It almost seems criminal to cover part of it with beads. What I'm wondering is whether beads could enhance it at all.

Crocheted Coral Reef

2009-09-02T13:27:00.002-05:00

A member of our local fiberarts group discovered this glorious construction, which is now traveling around the country. Alas, right now it's on exhibit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That's a fair distance from Texas; I'll watch, and wait, and pray it comes somewhere closer.

For some time I've been harboring a fantasy about making a beaded coral reef on a base of handmade felt, but so far it hasn't got much past a fantasy - every time I finish a beadwork project I start a new one on Ultrasuede. I really need to slow down, collect my fibers and make the felt.

Gelatin Monoprinting

2009-08-29T20:32:00.003-05:00

So I've got Frances Allford's article in the latest Quilting Arts, on monoprinting fabric with fabric paints on a gelatin plate; and I've got a book about monoprinting paper with water-based inks on a gelatin plate. The only thing is, I want to print fabric with the kind of multi-layered, dreamy images shown in the book on paper.

These are what I got from two weekends' experimenting with thickened dyes on gelatin. The first weekend's work was so pale it washed out. The second time I mixed really strong dyes and the color was so strong I could hardly see what I was doing; when half of that washed out, I was left with these results.

Part of the problem seems to be that the dyes sink into the gelatin; my gelatin printing plate was totally saturated with color by the end of each day. I suppose it's time to get on the dyers' list and ask if anyone has had better results with this method, or suggestions as to how to get the dye onto the fabric rather than into the gelatin.

Raku/PMC necklace

2009-08-03T11:22:00.004-05:00

I finished this piece just before we left for Nova Scotia, but didn't have time to photograph it until this weekend. It's built to showcase the round bead dangling at the bottom, a true masterwork combining raku with PMC which I bought at a bead show a couple of years ago. The large rectangular bead just above it is titanium-sprayed drusy quartz, and the tiles on either side are raku beads in green and copper (bottom rows) and abalone squares (top row). The fringe on the neck strap took forever to do. At least I didn't have to bother with a clasp; this one is a keeper which I will never ever sell, and I don't like clasps because they get caught in my back hair, so the strap is one continuous piece of free peyote from one side of the front piece to the other.

With, as I said, lots of fringe. Possibly a little too much fringe - it certainly felt like that when I was working on it!

The Tidal Bore

2009-07-28T12:28:00.007-05:00

...was something of a disappointment. a 2-3" "wave" of muddy water ambling its way to the very top of the Bay of Fundy; ok, it's traveling uphill and scientifically I daresay it's very interesting, but I did not get the major kick out of it that all the Canadian tourists seemed to get.

Apart from that and from not getting to go through the section of Cape Breton Park where meese are said to abound, Nova Scotia was very nice and a welcome refreshment from Texas in summer. Lots of picturesque rivers , old houses and barns,
fishing villages,
and the good fortune of being in Halifax on the day the Tall Ships were there.

I had a bunch of ideas for the new bead embroidery book and scribbled madly in a notebook in the evenings; now we're home and I'm implementing the first brilliant idea, which is "CLEAN UP THE STUDIO SO YOU HAVE A PLACE TO WORK ON SAMPLES."
It's amazing what came out of the piles of "Miscellaneous Stuff" between the beadwork station at the right end of the table and the kiln at the other end; the details are now mercifully blurred in memory, but I distinctly remember some pictures of Sarah in her short-red-hair phase, which was at least 7 years ago. And that was only halfway down the layers of Stuff. I was half expecting to find a couple of my old college roommates at the bottom of the pile, but no such luck - just more Stuff that I should give away or use.

Summer Needlefelting

2009-07-10T12:46:00.006-05:00

I haven't had anything to say for a while because the unending succession of triple-digit days has made most of my brain cells sweat out through my skin. There ought to be a medical name for this condition. Dog Days Dumbness? I have a feeling that "dog days" are supposed to be associated with August. Well, so are daily temperatures of 104 and up, and we're getting those now. So.

I've been working....slowly and as you'll see, not very intelligently... on making a handbag from needlefelted fabric. Started with some truly glaring red felt left over from an old project, foiled bits of that and covered some of the foiled bits with synthetic sheers. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not supposed to be possible to needlefelt synthetic sheers to acrylic felt, but you know what? The sheers pucker beautifully and the needling helps to hold them in place for the next step.

At this stage it's still pretty ugly.

Then I collected a basket of silk scraps in pinks (salmon to hot), golds, oranges and greens - some opaque and some sheer - and needlefelted those over the naked felt, the foiled felt, and the edges of the synthetic sheers. Here's a half-and-half picture. The left hand side has been covered with silks, the right hand side is still waiting for its second coat.

After that I couched a couple of yarns in hot summer colors - the variegated yarns that inspired this color scheme in the first place - still using the needlefelter. Which isn't supposed to work to attach synthetic yarn to synthetic felt, but it does...at least temporarily.

I will admit that after all this embellishing, for a final step in the fabric creation I moved over to the sewing machine, put gold thread in the bobbin, and stitched freehand gold circles all over the fabric, just to make absolutely sure that nothing pulled loose. This stitching had a serendipitous side effect; the synthetic yarns had a frizz of fine shiny threads around them, and the stitching held those little shinies down close to the fabric and made the whole thing sort of gleam.

Finally, having made the fabric, it was time to line the two pieces I'd cut for the flap and the strap, assemble everything, and put the magnetic purse snaps in.

Do not try this at home on a day when your brain has melted and run down to your ankles. I tried to get away without measuring, using the eyeball algorithm instead, and as you can see, the purse came out distinctly lopsided!

What the heck - I love it anyway, and I'm going to take it with me to Nova Scotia, where we're headed to escape the Texas summer for ten days. Mmm. Seafood, glacier-carved coastlines, seafood, Cape Breton fiddle music, seafood, whale watching, chances of a close encounter with a moose, the tides in the Bay of Fundy, and did I mention seafood?

Bronze Age is over!

2009-06-24T17:14:00.006-05:00

And here you all thought it ended around 600BC, if not earlier. Nah. The real completion occurred in June 2009, when I finished sewing the sleeve on this quilt and took some final pics (not that good - I am continually amazed at what inconsistent results I get despite using photofloods and a camera that is many megapixels smarter than I am). I'm calling it "Bronze Age Settlement With Artifacts."

Here's a closer look at some of the artifacts:

A hoard of silver coins, a Goddess figure, 2 plates - one terracotta, the other polychrome - reconstructed from potshards.

Another look at the polychrome plate, and two bronze spear heads. They've got a lovely greenish patina on them; too bad it didn't show up in the pictures.

A feast of anachronisms. The little fat Venus figure is Neolithic, but I like her so much that I decided this style lasted into the Bronze Age. See the patina on her? Then there's the ax head in the upper right, which came out looking more like iron than bronze; well, my husband says that some bronze age metal workers accidentally made tools and weapons that were a funny color and harder than they expected, due to "impurities" in the ore. Let's chalk this one up to impurities and not assume my people were so far ahead of their time that they had an iron forge in the woods.

And finally, a look at the outermost building, where the messy work was done, and where two bone implements for scraping leather hides were found, along with the remains of a terracotta plate. The wealth of this household (as evidenced by the silver hoard) probably didn't make it back to this outbuilding where the poorest farm laborers lived.

The Fearless Felter

2009-06-22T11:35:00.011-05:00

I've quilted the Bronze Age quilt, I've bound it, I've made a bunch of itsy-bitsy "artifacts" with polymer clay and patinas, and now I'm sewing them on....and it doesn't look that much different from the last picture. I do plan to take a bunch of detail shots of the "artifacts" when that job is done.

But...I've got pictures today. Have I ever got pictures! I just finished editing some photos of my friend Vivian Mahlab's quilts. Vivian usually works on so big a scale that, not having the side of a barn to play around with, there's no way I can photograph her work. But when we went to Jane Dunnewold's workshop in January she brought along some old place mats which she dyed and screen-printed along with her Big Serious Fabric pieces.... and then she came over to my house and embellished them. Vivian will needle-felt anything to anything, and if the two materials don't cooperate, she'll gently urge them together with some teased-out silk fibers. She grabbed pieces apparently at random (I'm sure there's some plan, I just can't figure out what it is) out of the Silk Scraps Box, applied them to the place mats, then took them home and quilted them and had four totally stunning small quilts.

Felt Solution

2009-06-12T17:42:00.002-05:00

All the dithering about whether to use black cotton or black and white striped cotton on BronzeAge came to an end when it dawned on me that I could probably needlefelt black felt pieces to the background fabrics, and then they would be securely attached and there'd be no fraying and I wouldn't have to quilt over the edges to keep them in place, which I'd also been worrying about because black thread would show too much on the reddish background and red thread over black elements might look like a design element of its own instead of fading into the background as I wanted it to. I love this solution; it's elegant, in the way that a three-line, mind-illuminating mathematical proof is elegant.

Now all I have to do is find the black batting, pick a backing fabric, put the sandwich together and quilt it. (This is the stage where I wish the Quilt Elves would come in at night and finish the job.)

Oh - and binding. I think I'm going to use the black and white striped fabric for a binding.

And,possibly, artifacts. I'm thinking about adding some little wire coils and polymer clay "potsherds" and other doodads to the quilted surface, as if they were objects found on an archaeological dig.

Strong Women Day

2009-06-10T16:31:00.002-05:00

Today, June 10th, has been declared Strong Women Day by the Quilt Mavericks - in honor of strong women everywhere in our lives and in history - the ones who got us where we are now, the ones we look up to for leadership, and the ones nobody knows about who are quietly calling up the strength to free themselves from bad situations and to define their own lives in the face of fierce opposition.

(I will demonstrate my own strength now by not whining about the fact that Esterita Austin had to cancel her trip to Texas. No workshop - at least not this year. Oh well, at least a lot of my crumpled hand-dyes have now been neatly pressed and folded.)

High contrast fabrics

2009-06-09T15:44:00.004-05:00

Come Saturday, I'll be driving down to San Antonio to take an afternoon workshop with Esterita Austin, whose work I've admired for a long time. We're just going to make one 15" by 20" piece, so naturally I spent the whole morning selecting and pressing fabrics to take down. What the heck - it doesn't cost any more to drive down there with 60 pieces of fabric than with 6. She says to bring:

"fabric that is MULTI VALUE and MULTI COLOR in the same piece. Usually batiks, or the splotchy type of fabric (that looks like a painters wipe cloth) is best. PLEASE have very darks ranging through mediums to very lights in the same piece. Hand dyes are great if they have a FULL range of value in the piece. The batiks with a soft linear design may work well."

Here's some of what I'm taking (the fabrics are stacked, so there's more than shows in this snapshot). It was easy to collect fabric that looks like a painter's wipe cloth, because I always have some soda soaked pieces of fabric in the workroom to mop up dye spills, and when they become sufficiently colorful I rinse them out and add them to the stash. The rest was a bit trickier and made me realize how much midtones and blues dominate my stash.

We're also supposed to bring a 15" x 20" piece of cloth for a background, preferably something that suggests night sky or sunrise/sunset colors. I think I'm going to cut this slice out of a larger hand-dyed fabric.

Black and White and Grayscale

2009-06-07T16:04:00.003-05:00

Well, the Katie Z's survived their night of carousing without having to pull out their picture ID's and without even getting all that drunk. I guess they're growing up.

Me, I'm being indecisive. While they were out drinking I cut out sample pieces of black and striped fabric and pinned them to the background fabrics. I like the striped better - it's more interesting - but the black clearly shows up better; it's really obvious when you change the picture to grayscale.

Now I'm thinking about using both fabrics; black for the rectangles, gray for circles and a long barrow indicating an earlier settlement. Feel uneasy about the compromise. I do have a tendency to make quilts that look good from a foot away and dissolve into a no-contrast blur from six feet away. Is using the striped fabric going to do that to this piece?

Darker, brighter...

2009-06-05T10:05:00.003-05:00

Overpainting wet fabrics with highly diluted Setacolor Transparent Purple toned the bright orange down quite a lot, more than shows in this picture. After the paint dried I made rubbings with gold and copper Shiva oil sticks; those will have to air dry for several days before I heat set them and sew them together. That's ok since my brother-in-law and niece are coming for the weekend and I'm putting California Katie in the sewing room.

My niece is (California) Katie Zoraster because one of my daughters is (Texas) Katie Zoraster... my reasoning was that even if David and Cherie used the name first, Katherine is my absolute favorite girl's name and I was going to use it for my first daughter regardless, and anyway since they lived in California and we lived in Texas the existence of two Katie Zorasters shouldn't cause much confusion.

Ha. Now (California) Katie has plans to go bar-hopping with (Texas) Katie and Steve keeps snickering and saying he hopes they'll be carded, because he wants to know what will happen if two girls simultaneously pull out id's in the name of Katie Zoraster. I have a feeling that what will happen could involve BIL David and me driving down to the police station in the small hours of the morning to verify the girls' identities, so I kind of hope they don't get carded.

Overdyed fabrics

2009-06-03T21:14:00.002-05:00

After a day of discharging and overdyeing those bright orange fabrics with screens and sponges, they're still too bright, but somewhat improved, and definitely more complex and interesting. Tomorrow I hope to hit them with fabric paints and oil markers - I don't think they'll absorb any more dye.

Selecting fabrics

2009-06-01T20:38:00.003-05:00

So for once I was actually able to pull out the fabrics I wanted without throwing the entire contents of my stash all over the room. (Probably because I wanted to use hand-dyed fabrics for the background and my stash of those is getting dangerously low.) Actually these particular background fabrics aren't quite what I want...too bright, and not enough interesting texture...especially the bottom one, which is a tablecloth that I dyed in overly bright colors several years ago and never did anything about. So the next step is to take them into the workroom and go over them with some more layers of color and texture. That should make for an interesting few days.

I haven't decided whether to use the black pinstripe, the solid black, or both for the site plan figures. Will probably have to cut out some bits of both and pin them up against the background after I've worked those bright orange fabrics over for a while.

Playing with Paper

2009-05-31T16:47:00.002-05:00

This morning I was looking through one of Steve's books with plans of Bronze Age settlements in it. (I was reading it because it was on the couch where I'd flopped down; I don't know why he was reading it.) I don't know what attracts me so much about these maps, but after looking at the illustrations for a while I went off and doodled my own little settlement plan with some dyed and printed papers. I think it wants to become a small quilt; the question is whether I dare start even a small piece in the sewing room which I have just cleaned up to make room for one of my nieces to stay next weekend, because when I make a quilt I do tend to fling fabric around the room with abandon. Oh well, I can always use the Shovel-It-Into-A-Large-Box approach to temporarily cleaning up the leftovers.

Raiding, looting and pillaging

2009-05-30T15:13:00.005-05:00

At least that's what it felt like this morning, when Hill Country Weavers (probably the best yarn shop in Central Texas) had a sale and invited their customers to come and set up tables to sell off the odds and ends in their own stashes.

Knitters, I suppose, think in terms of multiple balls of yarn, and haven't much use for one ball or worse, part of one ball of yarn left over from a project. For me, a single ball of yarn is like a lifetime supply; I may use a couple of yards to embroider with, a few more yards to couch to a surface, a few more - especially if they're glitzy - to loop over the surface of a jewel scarf. So here were all these lovely ladies selling off their leftovers at bargain-basement prices, and I felt like a kid in a candy store. I filled up a shopping bag with odds and ends of fantastic yarn and fiber, and my friend Vivian did nearly as well scoring interestingly colored yarns to quilt with.

(It's not that I don't like knitting. I love freeform knitting and crochet. But in central Texas, what's the point? I already have a Good Wool Sweater, and I haven't worn it since I got back from Ireland in the summer of '97.)

Wimberley mini-vacation

2009-05-29T09:27:00.004-05:00

And a very pleasant couple of days it was - until the homecoming. We stayed at the Creekside Inn, which has a wide green lawn meandering down to Cypress Creek with wicker chairs here and there for guests to sit and read, or just watch the creek flowing by. The public room inside (think living room squared) was decorated with glass art from the studio of local artist Bill Meek.

Then...we came home and faced up to the reason for our flight - fogging for roaches! It's been a relatively dry May and they've been showing up, not single spies but in battalions which all my scrubbing in the kitchen has failed to eradicate. I doubt that setting off a few fog bombs will do the job either but there certainly were a lot of dead roaches on the floor when we got back. Ickkkk. And then, of course, every dish and surface in the kitchen had to be scrubbed.

I need a scullery maid.

There hasn't been much time for art in these last few days, but last night in an insomniac moment I stayed up trying to turn one of the photos of cypress roots into a header for a fairytale:

Defining the SolvyLace border

2009-05-26T14:44:00.004-05:00

So far we've been making ragedy-edged bits of SolvyLace that are fine for making bowls, or appliqueing to a solid fabric to make an interesting base for embroidery, or setting a lacy window insert into a dress or a quilt. But suppose you want to use the SolvyLace on its own - for a scarf, for instance? You might trim the edges with a rotary cutter and hope they stay even. You might bind the trimmed edges to make sure they stay even.

Or - and this is my preferred method - you might start making your Solvy sandwich by laying down a wide ribbon all around the outer edge, and then make sure your stitching goes into the ribbon so that it'll be well anchored to the rest of the grid.

That's how I bordered this sample, as well as the "Jewel" scarf to be seen here.

And that, I think, is quite enough variations on the Solvy sandwich; and a good time to end the series, because tomorrow and Thursday I'll be out of town.

SolvyLace - Dyed After Rinseout

2009-05-25T11:42:00.006-05:00

This, like the heat distressing variation, requires a little planning ahead. You want to use only threads or fabrics that you can dye - and, if possible, thread that you can dye also. For this piece I layered a variety of smooth and textured whire rayon yarns for the Solvy sandwich. I didn't have any white silk sewing thread - and, as DharmaTrading points out, when you need it is a bad time to go looking for it - so I used white rayon thread and hoped for the best.

After sewing the sandwich and rinsing out the Solvy, I soaked the piece in a soda ash solution for a while, wrung it out very gently, and applied minute quantities of dye with an eyedropper. The Madeira rayon embroidery thread didn't take the dye; it must have some finish that made it resistant. The rest of the piece, though, dyed very nicely indeed.

Color Blended SolvyLace

2009-05-24T11:33:00.005-05:00

Select a collection of fabric scraps (as usual, I prefer sheers, but it's up to you) and blend across the spectrum like this:

When I put this piece together, clearly I was thinking too much "blend" and not enough "lace."
So to get a lacy look afterwards, I heat-distressed it just like the previous piece. This almost worked, because nearly all the fabric was synthetic. I had, however, used some hand-dyed green/aqua silk to make the transition from green to blue. That's the big ugly brown spot in the lower left. And that is why it pays to think about what you're going to do next with the piece, and what type of fabrics you want to use, before you get the wrong stuff neatly stitched into the grid!

We Interrupt this Series of SolvyLace Variations...

2009-05-23T18:57:00.003-05:00

....for a day mostly consumed by Nap Attacks. I got up this morning, made coffee, got dressed, started to list a beaded pin on Etsy here, and fell asleep in the middle of uploading pictures. I got up again this afternoon, poured a Coke, got dressed, started to list this scarf, and....didn't quite fall asleep until the listing was complete, anyway.

Tomorrow I'll show a Color Blend variation before and after heat distressing...I'm too sleepy to write it up now!

Heat distressed SolvyLace

2009-05-22T10:18:00.000-05:00

In this case "heat distress" does not refer to the way everybody in Austin feels about the arrival of summer both with a bang (the sun) and a whimper (the rest of us). It's the fabric that we're going to make seriously unhappy.

Start by laying down a base of sheer synthetic fabrics. (You can use solid synthetics too, as long as they're something that melts under the heat gun; but I prefer to stick to sheers here.) It's best if you choose analogous colors here that will layer well, since you do want to let the pieces overlap and blend. When the sandwich is made, stitch, rinse, and dry as usual.

Here's the starting point. Kind of boring, isn't it?

I've stitched a larger grid than usual - lines about 3/4" apart - to give the fabrics plenty of room to move and crinkle while they're being zapped.

Next step: Put the fabric on a heat-resistant surface like a ceramic tile or a concrete driveway and zap it lightly with the heat gun. (NOT a paint stripping heat gun from the hardware store - the kind of heat tool you find in crafts stores for melting embossing powder. We want to distress the fabric, not incinerate it.)

Even with the lower-power heat tool it's easy to go to far and wind up with a shriveled, plastic-hard blob. So work slowly, moving the heat gun to a new area every time the fabric you're heating begins to react, and maybe stop after the first few passes to evaluate how it's going.

This is more interesting than the original, but it still has a way to go. Back to the ceramic tile and heat gun!

Now this is a nice lacy fabric. Two of the synthetics reacted in particularly interesting ways, and I look forward to playing with them more after this project of samples and variations is done.

One fabric I used was a very sheer synthetic overprinted with a gold metallic grid. The sheer parts vanished almost completely and the grid remained.

Another fabric was snipped from one of the super-cheap, three-dollar saris I bought in India. This stuff melted in a very lacy way, which not all synthetics do; some of them just curl up and shrivel into hard beads.

Ribbon SolvyLace

2009-05-21T11:51:00.000-05:00

Variation 3: use only ribbons and yarns, laid down lengthwise, and sew crosswise over them.

What more to say? It makes a gloriously light and beautiful piece with only half the work. This sample would have worked better if I'd used a broad ribbon at each edge, and better yet if I'd pressed the creases out of the broad ribbon before laying it down; live and learn.

2009-05-20T17:52:00.000-05:00

These pics illustrate two variations in one piece.

Variation 1: use only threads and yarns

and

Variation 2: instead of rinsing out all the Solvy, just give the piece a quick rinse and mold it over something to make a 3-D piece

This little bowl was formed over a spherical paperweight with a piece of SolvyLace made from leftover ends of yarn and given only a quick swish through the rinsing water. First I wrapped the paperweight in Saran wrap just in case the drying Solvy decided that its destiny was to adhere forever to the glass, then turned it upside down and found a cup to hold it in that position, then molded the damp SolvyLace over the bottom half of the paperweight (so that the resulting bowl would have a flat bottom. It spent the afternoon drying in a sunny corner of the back yard before I removed the paperweight and Saran wrap and tried to get a good shot of the bowl. The first picture should give you an idea of the delicacy of the piece; the second picture shows its true colors in sunlight (ok, except for the corner that wound up in shadow. That's one of the catches of using a camera without an optical viewfinder; in really bright light it's hard to see the screen and realize what you're actually taking a picture of.)

Variation 3 coming tomorrow!

SolvyLace mini-workshop

2009-05-19T15:45:00.000-05:00

What is Solvy and where do I find it?

Solvy is a transparent, water-soluble stabilizer sold by Sulky. It's been around long enough that variations and competitors exist, but for today, we're just going to work with the orginal, plain vanilla Solvy. You can find it among the pre-packaged stabilizers at most big fabric stores; if that doesn't work, try sewing machine shops, especially those selling the gazillion-buck embroidery machines.

I buy it in multi-yard rolls, which gives you an idea of how much I use it; you may want to start smaller, with one of the packages that are easier to find. You should be able to get a 20" x 36" piece for under $5.00, and that's plenty big enough for this workshop and for the variations I'll be discussing in the next few days.

Working with Solvy

The single most important thing to remember about working with Solvy is: DON'T GET IT WET (until you're through with your project and ready to wash it out). If you're drinking something, put it on a separate table until you're done. If you're drinking from a glass that "sweats", like the icy mugs I like to use in summer, don't even touch the mug until you're done. Do not lick your fingers to persuade the edges on a folded sheet of Solvy to unfold; they'll merge with each other and become One for All Time. Don't get it wet.

The second thing to remember is that it's flimsy, it likes to whip around and fold over on itself, it is resistant to the idea of dangling from your fingers while you look for the scissors or some old newspaper or the spray adhesive. So get your work surface(s) and tools and materials ready before you start.

Tools and materials and all that

For this particular project (making a small, say 8 x 10, piece of Solvy-lace) you
will need the following:

-Spray adhesive of your choice

-A collection of fabric and thread snippets in the colors you want to use. Sheer fabrics are particularly good; so are the metallic mesh net fabrics you can sometimes find at the glitzy end of the fabric store.

-Interesting yarns and ribbons in the same color scheme (optional)

-Thread that will not be too conspicuous against your chosen color scheme. I like a variegated thread when, as now, I want the sewn thread to blend in with the fabrics and yarns I'm using. For this project I used a Madeira variegated rayon machine embroidery thread.

-Scissors

- A white work surface on which to lay out the bits of fabric, etc. This is not absolutely necessary but it's a big help; it's not always obvious where the edges of the Solvy are if you're looking through it at newsprint.

- Some spread-out newspapers on a flat surface, or some other way of containing/absorbing the adhesive you're about to spray on one piece of Solvy, so your entire work surface shouldn't get sticky.

-A sewing machine set up for straight stitch

And that's it. Everything except the newspaper and the sewing machine is in this picture (I didn't think you needed a photo of yesterday's newspaper, and if you need a picture to recognize a sewing machine, this project is not for you)

Step 1: Preparing the Solvy

Cut two pieces of Solvy, the same size and shape, about an inch bigger on all sides than the piece of Solvylace you want to end up with. Since this is just a test run, I used a rectangle of Solvy left over from last week's mini-workshop and cut another piece off the roll. But if you have specific plans for your piece, it wouldn't hurt to measure it beforehand and then cut precisely sized pieces on a cutting mat.

Put one piece of Solvy aside – hanging it over a chair back works well. Set the other piece on the newspaper and spritz it lightly with your spray adhesive of choice; then pick it up by two corners and slide it back onto the white work surface.

[N.B.: That's what we did during the mini-workshop and how I did this demo. It turned out to be not such a good idea. All the people who made test pieces managed the Solvy Slide with grace and elegance, but me – I had bits of the Solvy waving in the air and sticking to themselves. You can probably see in the next picture how the base Solvy is wrinkled in places and no longer exactly a perfect rectangle. From now on, for small applications like this, I'm going to place a sheet or two of typing paper on top of the newspaper, put the Solvy on top of that, and work without moving the Solvy to a different work surface.]

Step 2: opaque scraps

Most of the time, when I make a piece of Solvy lace, it's going to wind up appliqued to something else; so there's a bottom side and a top side. And I work from the bottom up so that I can see how the piece is developing.

I want this piece to be lacy and mostly, but not totally, translucent; so I started with some tiny snippets from a couple of wonderful metallic brocades, trying to distribute them evenly around the surface.

Step 3: sheers

Now it's time to bring in the sheers. I happen to have lots of green synthetic sheer snippets left over from a previous project; there's also some green-dyed silk organza, some rose-colored silk sheer with metallic threads in it, and some lovely iridescent and wrinkled apricot sheer synthetic. Let the sheers overlap each other, let them overlap the opaque pieces of the first layer, but don't worry too much about covering every square inch of Solvy with them.

[N.B. For this test piece I'm mixing synthetic fabrics with silk. For some of the variations we'll discuss later in the week you may want to use all synthetics, or all silk; you may also want to cover the Solvy more thoroughly or less thoroughly than I'm showing here. Right now we're just getting a feel for working with the materials.]

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Step 4: mesh, threads and yarns.

I like to swirl these gently across the surface as a last step. Sometimes I do a lot of sparkly thread, but in this piece I just used some scraps of a very open gold mesh and a few loops of a light green railroad thread. The other yarn that I had laid out initially, the eyelash yarn, seemed like too much for such a light and airy piece
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Step 5: making the sandwich

Press down lightly on all your design elements, encouraging them to adhere to the bottom piece of Solvy. Then protect your white work surface if necessary, either by sliding a piece of newspaper under the Solvy or by reversing the slide-to-the-newspapered-side move. (Of course, if you've taken my retroactive advice and worked on a disposable sheet of white paper on top of a protective layer of newspaper, you don't have to do either of these things).

Now spritz the layered work lightly with spray adhesive, retrieve that second piece of Solvy – you know, the piece I told you to hang over a chair back in Step 1 – and lay it gently and precisely over your layered work. Press down lightly again and there you have it: your Solvy-lace sandwich, ready for the sewing machine.

Step 6: stitching the grid

Take your Solvy sandwich and stitch across it in one direction, keeping the lines between ¼ and 3/8 inch apart, at least most of the time.

After you've covered the piece one way with straight lines, turn it 90 degrees and do it again:

Now your Solvy sandwich should look something like this.

Step 6: washing out the Solvy

This invariably takes longer than you think it does, especially if you want to end up with a nice, soft, drapey lace fabric. If you take the Solvy sandwich to the sink and run warm water over it, in just a few moments it'll feel as if all the Solvy had washed away. This feeling is deceptive; if you leave it to dry at this stage, you'll have a stiff piece full of plastic - good for some applications, but not for all. I usually leave a piece overnight in a nice big tub or bucket of hot water, changing the water whenever it occurs to me to do so.

In the morning, take out the piece and lay it flat on a towel to dry. This won't take very long at all, and when you're through you will have a piece of your own unique, lacy fabric that nobody else can duplicate or buy.

Watching vinegar evaporate

2009-05-15T18:48:00.000-05:00

Nothing at all happened to the brass finding; it must have had some protective coating or oil on it that I didn't notice. I'll probably scour it and try again.

The fabric with bronzing powders worked a treat, though. The "gold" paint reacted only slightly, around the edges, but the "copper" paint took on so much patina that the painted streak almost disappears into the green background. (Duhh, maybe next time paint a piece of white or black fabric so you can really see what's happening.)