I will have handbound books, matted woodcuts, and a few cards (see below) on handmade paper. Susanne Martin will share my table and she will have handbound books and handmade paper. The event lasts from 4-9 p.m. Since the beach is probably a bad idea, come to downtown Greensboro instead! You’ll be safe from Hurricane Earl and have lots of fun at First Friday!

“Squirtly”, copyleft Laurie O’Neill, 2010

But Will It Make You Happy?

On the bright side, the practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.

This was a very timely article in the New York Times, considering the new mattress and refrigerator that I have craved and really needed for so long and bought just this week. I spent a pile of money, but I’ll pay it off in one or two months from my savings, since I try very hard not to carry any credit card debt.

And it is a nice segueway into my other pieces of life this week. A little over a year ago I wrote this post about how I planned to live out my life. And I’ve held myself true to it. I wring out all the goodness I can out of this life, although it has not been as easy as I would have hoped this past year or so. Regarding the statement from the article above, it is possible that I spend a little too much time anticipating the future rather than living in the present moment, but so be it! I’m pretty happy, happier than many people, I think. Much, much happier than I used to be.

I signed up for Albie’s class at An Artful Journey in Los Gatos, California in February 2011. I’ll be able to spend three whole days working with her at a beautiful retreat in the redwoods. This is a done deal. The first night there I will be celebrating my 50th birthday!

And I signed up for Art & Soul Hampton again in early May 2011, although I’m just going for the weekend this time. I wasn’t planning to, since the Embassy Suites screwed up my billing so bad the last trip and staying there is expensive. But I’ll see if I can find a cheap hotel nearby for two nights, drive up on Friday night and come home on Sunday. It is a terrible time for me to take off work, and there is almost always a family reunion that weekend. Still, I really wanted to take this class and this class, and since it is within driving distance and I won’t miss work, I decided to go ahead and do it!

Because anticipation is spicy and juicy and keeps my energy and hope alive!

Oh, there were other things that went on this week that I was going to write about, but writing this made me want to get up off my butt and do something else.

Ah, a sweet comment from Albie Smith. What a wonderful way to start a Saturday.

So many things have happened this week. After I posted on Sunday, I messed around with my woodcuts and used my printing register for the first time. The two new proofs (Jake and a Spannocchia scene) were not to my satisfaction, but now I see what I need to do once I can carve again. They were pretty good, actually. I got the sly expression in Jake’s face in just a few lines. It was subtle, so I’ll have to be very careful when I refine it.

I printed off a couple of Mama Kitty and named it “Waiting for more.” Then I went to the studio, dug through the books and stuff on the floor from the shelf crash a few weeks ago to find my woodcut prints. Luckily they weren’t damaged. I piled these books up on the metal shelves next to the door. This will end up being a hassle later. Steve is framing a few items for us and he is matting my woodcuts from a couple of years ago. So I should have them for sale at the Indie Market Sept. 3. Susanne is either going to share the table with me or I will put some of her work out for sale, so it will be an interesting array of book and paper arts.

I opened the refrigerator and saw something that I noticed early in the morning but didn’t make a connection. This time it was obvious - there was water dripping from the top of the refrigerator. I opened the freezer and almost everything was thawed out. I’d sort of expected this to happen soon because it is older than our stay here (9 years) and it has been making clicking noises for a long time. But I hoped that it would last until the next Energy Star appliance rebate program in the fall. Luckily I had the little chest freezer that I bought last fall for paper pulp, and it had enough room for the few things I saved.

When I opened the refrigerator part again, it was warm and I hustled to get what I could into the dorm-sized fridge in the studio in the back. We had just enough time to get to Sears and order a new one that would be delivered Tuesday. I am very happy to have the excuse for a new Energy Star refrigerator with a lot more room. And I added a lot to the compost pile over the next couple of days. It was a bit sad to lose so much food but that fridge was badly in need of a purge anyway.

Then we drove to Summerfield to have dinner with Steve and Rita Maloy, and had such a wonderful time. Steve gave me my first full-time bookstore job and I worked with him for 6-7 years. We have so much in common with them both and they both are so funny - I laughed so hard. Almost everything they served for dinner was local - either from the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market or from their garden - and so delicious. Sandy normally would not eat eggplant and he asked for seconds on the eggplant parmesan. And blueberry sorbet! I never knew that could be so good!

Okay, so the next few days are spent going in and out of the studio a lot, and the door tends to stick. Finally I got most everything back into the house. I was finally able to get to making paper with the cotton/corn shuck pulp, and when I opened the bucket, it smelled bad and was beginning to rise like bread! Well, it wasn’t so awful that it was undoable, but it wasn’t pleasant. I didn’t want to waste it. Susanne’s husband told me on the phone that it would be okay after I dried it in the dry mount press, and it was. I added dill to the pulp to help with the smell while I was pulling it, and it was a lovely addition.

I cleaned up everything and took some items back to the studio to store, but huh? The door won’t open. The aluminum shelves had fallen down behind the door. I finally got back into the studio this morning, and I have another big mess on my hands. I had to push the door hard enough to bend the frame of the shelves to get inside. I was worried that I would break the door, but the only other way I could see to get in would have been to cut the bottom panels out of the door. With our mosquito problem, I did not want to do that.

Anyway, that is the saga of my totally screwed-up studio situation. I think that the only thing I can do is to 1) seriously purge to make enough room to move things around and 2) move the yarn to more lightweight shelves and put the heavy books and supplies where the yarn and light items are now.

And really, all I want is to spend this time making stuff. Really, universe, is that too much to ask?

OK, this is too long. I’ll start another post with my second cup.

Lately I have fallen in love with Hand/Eye magazine. Their website content is absolutely awesome, and they send out emails and Facebook updates with the most fascinating articles. I decided that I wanted the print copies so I subscribed. The Central Asia issue blew me away. The magazine is gorgeous, with color from edge-to-edge.

And best of all, Hand/Eye introduced me to India Flint. She has a book coming out, and you can bet that I’ll be right on top of it as soon as it is published.

This has been a pretty good week. Susanne made lots of pulp for me in her beater, so I have made three batches of paper this week.

I used so many ingredients in these that it is a little complicated to describe. From left to right:

1. Abaca (a type of banana fiber), okra, daylily, joe-pye weed stalks. Mostly abaca and okra. I added a bunch of dried rosemary because I wanted a paper that had a lot of texture. I only pulled a few sheets with the rosemary.

2. See above, without the rosemary.

3. Cotton and corn shucks. I embedded maple leaves near the end of this batch, when the pulp was very thin. I laid down one thin sheet, sprinkled these pressed maple leaves from last fall, and then laid another thin sheet on top. The leaves are bleeding brown into some places, so I may be painting this sheet with a wash.

4. All the above ingredients, minus the rosemary, plus a small batch of recycled paper pulp from my blender. I added onion and garlic skins to the blender.

So here is what I did with the last batch. I had saved and frozen some #2 pulp. I made the recycled pulp (#4). In the meantime, Susanne had made the pulp for #3 for me. So I began with #2, added #3 and #4. As the #4 pulp ran out, the paper became lighter and lighter as I added more of the cotton-based pulp. I’ll never be able to reproduce it, but it is one of the prettiest batches that I’ve done. I will be using more onion skins in my paper.

The cotton and corn shuck paper (with tiny flecks of the previous batches throughout) is very thin. I have another bucket of it, which I will use without any additions. It should be slightly green and creamy colored, almost white. I’m going to try to make this batch thicker.

We’re enjoying a cool weekend, finally! Unusually cool for August 1, in fact. Yesterday Sandy and I tackled cleaning up the stack of shrub and tree prunings from the last time it was cool enough to work in the yard. I began yanking out ornamental grapevine and honeysuckle and English ivy and wild yam vines that quickly overtake our property if I don’t cut them back severely each late winter and spring. Which, of course, neither of us were able to do this year, so it is a jungle. We filled all the trash cans that we could for city pickup, and only managed to do about 10% of the yard, at most.

At one time I would have picked through the vines for usable basketry material and made some random-weave baskets. This time I plucked out all the dead daylily stalks and leaves to use for papermaking.

Figs are ripe and the fig tree is so big that if I get serious about picking them I will need a 8-10 foot ladder. They are sooooo good. There’s nothing like eating a fresh fig right off the tree.

We have a lot of Sungold and volunteer cherry and grape tomatoes now. A few green Cherokee Purple tomatoes - I hope that I will get at least one tomato sandwich out of this year’s crop before the critters wipe them out again.

I soaked dark red kidney, navy, and black beans last night to make a chicken chili today. I picked a few peppers yesterday to spice them up. The jalapenos nearly got too big - one turned red already. I guess I’ll save the seeds from it.

I also had lots of Jacob’s Cattle beans. In the past, I’ve let them dry on the bush and used them for soup and planting the next year’s batch. I decided to pick all of them yesterday, snap the tender ones, and shell the ones that were too big for green beans. I added the few butterbeans that were ready. The field peas are working on a second crop.

Today I’ll carve out some art time. I’ll probably make a small batch of paper from some of the frozen pulp leftover from last weekend. I don’t want to overdo it. Yesterday I picked up a Quilting Arts and Handwoven magazine. I want to stitch and weave again so badly, and I know that is exactly what would set the whole healing process backward again. I did get a great idea - well, it’s not a new idea to me, just a reminder of a previous idea - I can weave strips of fabric to make bases for further artwork, as well as weave strips of handmade paper, like Susanne is doing now. She was making paper on her porch yesterday with horsetail. I want to make some horsetail paper too!

And I’m daydreaming constantly about the next art retreats that I’ll attend - Journalfest in late October is paid for, and I was able to use my “rewards” off my credit card to pay for my airfare for the first time! For my fiftieth birthday, I’m going to study with Albie Smith in the Santa Cruz mountains among the redwoods.

Life feels pretty good right now. I felt like Gene Kelly yesterday as we ran around doing our errands in the light rain. Part of the reason is that I’m ignoring the news.

Wow, at 10:20 a.m. the heat index here is already at 105 degrees. It will definitely be an indoor weekend for us. Sandy is not supposed to go out for long in temps above 85 and I’ve never been able to take the heat. One of many reasons I’d like to move to northwest North America, but it would be a extremely slim chance that I would give up my great job willingly. Something terrible would have to happen, like what happened at Greensboro College, and I can’t foresee that possibility at all. I loved my job at Greensboro College, too. It’s just that its leader at the time didn’t care about his employees. I’m so glad that they have turned things around, but I’m sad that it was after so many good people either were fired unjustly or driven out by outrageousness.

Whoa, how did I end up there? Well, the coffee pot post is supposed to be stream-of-consciousness, an exercise in writing constantly until my little 4 cup coffee pot runs out. I do it on weekends or holidays when I have plenty of time and I try to do it at least weekly.

Now that that lil bit of angst has been blown out of my system, I can report a much better week with the hand problem.

I’m planning to make paper today if Susanne can make my pulp this morning. It’s so hot and the mosquitoes are so bad that if she can’t do it, I’ll hope to do it tomorrow. Lifting vats of water is the only problem here, and Sandy can help me with that. The rest I should be able to do without much pain as long as I take lots of breaks, because I’m doing it with both hands in balance, rather than holding a needle and my hands in tension.

I’ve been preparing okra stalks all week. These are stalks that Charlie brought to me last fall when the Montessori school garden was cleaned up for winter. I broke some up to store in the studio, but most of them I left on the ground on top of pine needle mulch under the pear tree to break down over the winter. Then I forgot about them.

So, the first step was to remove all the ants and pillbugs that had taken up residence in them. I busted them up into pieces small enough to fit in my canning pot, and didn’t notice the ants until the frantic exodus when I filled the pot with water to soak the stalks. So out they went to the deck for the first night, ants carrying the eggs of the colony to find a safer place. I hate ants, and I love ants. It’s complicated.

I noticed a few paper fiber-capable plants around the deck to add: joe-pye weed stalks, day lily flower stems, and a dracaena-like houseplant that never made it through repotting. So I added those to the mix. The black fibers on the outside of the okra stalks were literally peeling off on their own.

I soaked the stalks the next day, and boiled them that night with soda ash for a couple of hours. Inside, so it was stinky even with the range hood fan on. It was too stormy outside to do it, and I was determined to get this done so that I could scratch my itch to do something art-wise. Sandy helped me put the pot on the deck, and I left them to soak in the soda ash water for the night and day.

The next night, I rinsed the stalks and poured the soda ash water out in a part of the yard where I’m trying to kill the undergrowth. You do not want to pour soda ash water in your garden, too caustic. I did this just until the water ran mostly clear, as I could not deal with the skeeters having me for supper any more.

The next night, I took the stalks inside and worked on them in my kitchen sink. I cut the tender stalks down to pieces of 1-2 inches and pulled the outside fibers off the tough stalks, then rinsed them until the water ran clear through a screen. The tough stalk pieces went into the compost pile.

Last night, I took them to Susanne, who will beat these along with some abaca fiber into pulp in her hollander beater for me.

That’s the saga of the beginning process. Now maybe you know why I charge so much for my handmade paper books! Recycled paper is much easier, but there is something appealing to me about getting down to the essentials of a thing. I love the earthiness of natural paper.

Pictures later? Maybe. Stay cool, y’all.

After the post on Saturday about joining an art co-op, which now I admit contained quite a bit of forced optimism, I pretty much fell in a stress hole. And you know one of my favorite Molly Ivinsisms is the First Rule of Holes: When you find yourself in one, stop digging. Instead I was trying to operate under the Power of Positive Thinking, which is all well and good when you’ve actually thought something through past the point of “I want it now!”

For the rest of the weekend, I was anxious and miserable. I was impatient to hear from them and stared at the phone and checked my email repeatedly. I was trying to decide what to make for the gallery, in case I was accepted, instead of deciding what I wanted to do next.

This is why I do not often sell my work. I get completely knotted up in what I think that other people want me to do, whether that is the case or not. And it SHUTS ME DOWN.

Finally on Sunday night, I took some quiet time to deconstruct my feelings and realized that I would be miserable with either a YES, NO, or MAYBE answer.

So I’m going to go pick up my stuff at Artmongerz and tell them that it’s not them, it’s me. It was a good idea, but not the right one for me at this time.

I feel much better now.

Two good things came out of this - I learned how their co-op worked, and I was motivated to get a couple of paintings framed that had been laying around for years. Now can I get motivated to hang them on the wall?

It has been a stressful week, but for the most part it has been good stress. I am psyched up and excited about the future. I haven’t had a panic attack, though, which is very encouraging since I have been super-wired and sleep-deprived because of hormones all week. In fact, I haven’t had a panic attack in, gosh, over two years, I think? Maybe my chemistry has straightened out. I have actually had dreams that are the exact opposite of my recurring anxiety dreams. In these dreams, everything’s chill, no hurry, all under control and we relax and enjoy ourselves.

Donna emailed me and asked if I wanted to be on the board of Friends of the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market, and I said yes. Sounds like my first meeting will be Monday night. I don’t really know what is involved with being on the board, but it is a way for me to contribute to the local food movement here.

Thursday I met with Betsy at Artmongerz and talked about joining their artists’ co-op. The bad news is that our discussion was very confusing for both of us at first. She was expecting big woven wall hangings, and I brought in a box of little pieces, mainly books. Then she asked me questions which I couldn’t answer to her satisfaction and I didn’t understand why she didn’t understand my answers. It must have been me, though, because Paul, the other artist there, didn’t understand me either. That really discombobulated me. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I realize that they didn’t know that the books WERE the art, not to be filled with my “other” art. I do plan to do that one day, especially with woodcuts, but for the most part I want to concentrate on structure and papermaking. Anyway, it is possible that they are not interested in my books, which would be a dealbreaker. I made it clear that books are my passion and my current direction. They really liked my labyrinth tapestry and the lemon embroidery, but those pieces take a lot of time to make. I plan to weave more tapestry - in fact I have a great design now waiting to be started, and three in progress. But I can’t just whip them out.

The good news is that I can afford it, and I think that I will get along great with the artists that I’ve met so far. She really wanted me to have art to hang on the wall, and so I can frame some woodcuts, and I have a couple more woodcuts in progress now. She liked my monoprints that I made in Washington too. I really took them along to show my handmade paper, and what I could do with it. In fact, one mistake I made was that I meant to show her my intentions and my abilities, rather than what I have to sell now. It’s just that I’m moving quickly into other directions, and I have given away and sold a lot of my work and not had a chance to replenish. I’m focused on my future.

Anyway, now I am anxiously waiting for an email or call with the verdict. If they welcome me, I will be very happy but will have to spend more time in the studio, here and there, and not let migraines or exhaustion stop me for long. I will have to put up fresh work each month, which will be very good for me. If they turn me down, I will have to remind myself very firmly that it is probably a matter of fitting in with their vision rather than my talent. I’ll probably need some hugs and confidence building. Then I’ll pick myself back up and remember that it is all probably a part of the scheme of my life. Maybe I am meant to pay my car off this year instead. Maybe selling my art will be too stressful for me and the universe is protecting me from what I don’t know.

I wove all week long and washed and dried the fabric last night. The texture and color is fabulous! I have a towel/breadcloth, a long table runner, and a little sampler (shown below on the loom) that I think will become a book cover. Today I started measuring off another long striped warp for the Baby Wolf 4 harness loom, this time more random with stripes based on the Fibonacci sequence. If I get into the gallery, I plan to take my small 8 harness loom there, so I’ll need to design something for it.

I took a couple of oil paintings from five years ago to a local frame shop this afternoon, and an old friend who does framing on the side will get the next job of the woodcuts and embroidery and whatever else he is willing and able to do.

Background finished. Maybe looking at this will jumpstart me to begin the applique on the cardoon flower, stalk, and stems, which is my next step. Then I’ll begin stitching the “thistle” part.

Right now, I’m going home at night and reading about art and quilting and embroidery instead of doing it. But it’s all good. I just need to break out of this soon.