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.

Finally finished! Now the trick is to get it mounted and framed and displayed. I’m good at making stuff and then I lose the motivation to do anything with it once it’s made.

This design came from a photograph that I took of a centerpiece at Spannocchia, near Siena, Italy.

They’re starting to look like oranges, aren’t they? Ha! That’s cool, I don’t care. I’m learning as I go. The bottom lemon on the left was the first one I finished, and I learned that I should created bigger blocks of color instead of sprinkling a dozen different colors in order to get the effect I want. The middle bottom one reflects that. I thought that doing all these French knots would make me a little crazy by now but instead I find it very meditative. I think about stars and galaxies when I do this.

Oh dear. I have ended up joining so many fascinating social media groups that my art work remains in my head, an unacceptable situation which I hope to remedy this weekend since it is too frickin cold to work outside and we have no plans.

One good thing is that Sandino’s work schedule has changed to 10-7. When he worked from 3-12, I was asleep before he came home and gone to work before he got up, so the weekend was the only time we had to do things together. I was a little worried about this change, since I love my solitude and am pretty much already set in my ways like an old widder woman, but after two weeks of it, I think that it is a better deal. I still get two hours alone at home, and they are the two hours after work when I need to adjust and decompress. Sandy took me out on Thursday night for drinks and soup and that was nice. The weekend is the time when I feel most compelled to make art, so the guilt factor of ignoring my husband during the only time we had together is now gone.

All restaurants and bars are now smoke-free in North Carolina. If this isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is. I think that they had to wait for Jesse to die before this could be possible.

I wonder how much, if any, permanent damage will result in the Back Forty from this extended extreme cold weather. Almost every night for over the past week has gotten down into the teens, and we’ll have a few more before it is over. We have all reached the point where a high in the low 40s feels like summer to us. I’m just hoping that my rosemary and fig tree survive, but they can be replaced. I still prefer the bitter cold to temps in the 90s-100s. I’m telling you, I would be an excellent candidate for emigration to Canada.

Canada is on my mind a lot this week, because a June papermaking gathering was announced on the papermaking list that takes place on the ocean in Prince Edward Island. That immediately got my attention, because I’m a huge Anne of Green Gables fan, and one of the trips I’ve wanted to take for a long time has been to Acadia National Park and that area. So, of course, I jump on Orbitz and the Prince Edward Island tourism website, look at flight prices (much cheaper to fly into Bangor, Maine and rent a car to drive 6.5 hours to Charlottetown, PEI) and oceanfront cottage rentals near the workshop site. I see it as doable, with a camping side trip to Acadia, if Sandy will go for it. He wants to go to the Caribbean, but it would be much more expensive to do what he wants to do in summer. We’ll need to work this out if he wants to go. I may end up going by myself for a shorter trip and rooming with some of the other participants, which would be good too, just not as extensive a trip as I would like. I did promise him that he could pick the next big vacation location, and he has been saving for it.

Critter report - everyone except Jazz, no surprise there, are great friends now and this morning Guido licked Theo on the head. They have finally let Theo play their feline games.

Signing off now to work on my first embroidery in years. I have to decide between the design of the carrots, the beets, or the lemons to start with. Probably the lemons is the best one to begin with. I can see the carrot design as a excellent choice for tapestry. Here they are, from my photos filtered through photoshop…

http://slowturnstudio.etsy.com

There are a lot of things that I need to learn about selling on Etsy, and I figure that I’ll never learn until I try.

For sales that do not need to be shipped, please contact me at slow.turn.studio at gmail.com

T’ank you veddy much.

I start this weekend feeling pretty doggone good about the week behind me.

My critique went well, and I have some good ideas now on how to develop the first print further. Right now I’ve moved on to carving one of the window designs from Spannocchia.

Wednesday, we had our second tapestry box class. Two nights were probably not enough. The number of students were reduced by about half, but that was much better because it gave me a chance to get around to everyone and do some weaving myself. We might get up a little tapestry group, so if you’re in the area of the Triad and you’re interested, write me a comment and I’ll email you if we get enough interest. We’ll probably meet on Sunday afternoons, and we’ll bring small portable projects and help each other out with ideas and problem solving. If you have never woven tapestry, I’ll be glad to get you started on a cardboard loom. It’s very easy to learn the basics.

I did a lot of collage this week and it was very satisfying and relaxing.

About a month ago when I first got on Facebook, I searched for Michael Pollan’s name and found that he had a personal page. So I asked him to be my FB friend, and didn’t really expect anything to come from it. This week he confirmed my friendship along with about 100 other people, so Michael is on my list of FB friends! How sweet is that?

The weather is beautiful already this morning so I don’t know why the hell I am still sitting here in front of the computer!

I’ll get out to the gazebo today and start my tomato, pepper, and eggplant seeds. The other seedlings have been moved to the front porch to begin hardening off. I did a little weeding yesterday afternoon, but I can see that I’m going to have to become friends with the hoe. I’ve always liked to get right down in the dirt. It’s my Southern white trash genes.

Normally I would just drop some cardboard and newspaper over these weeds, or some black plastic to heat them to death if they’re really tough. But this is ground ivy, which just runs under and over that stuff. I usually like to pull up as much as I can and start from there. It got ahead of me this past fall, and there is a very healthy patch of it around the pear trees. It’s like dealing with the blob.

Oh well, I’m at the bottom of the coffee pot, so it’s time to stop yammering and get on with my day, starting with grocery shopping at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market. Enjoy the weekend!

You can see the steps in the progress here.

Whew! It’s almost too hot to drink coffee this morning. Hot and muggy. This house has aluminum siding and I think that it makes it into a solar oven. It’s supposed to get near 90 today and the next few days, and it’s humid. Still, I hope that we can put off turning on the AC as long as possible.

I do turn on a small window unit in the studio. When it’s hot like this, it gives me even more incentive to go out there and play where it is comfortable. Last year we had it in our bedroom, but a certain somebody who was housesitting lost his key and broke into the house by removing it from the outside. I decided that I was not comfortable with that kind of vulnerability.

My husband can handle heat much better than I can. We lived together for 13 years without AC before I went peri-menopausal and decided that enough misery was enough. We installed two window units in that house. Now we have central AC in this house, but we use it as little as possible. Obviously last summer when the temps went into the 100s for days at a time it was running a lot.

We have ceiling fans in one half of the house, and the windows are placed in that half so that we can get a breeze moving from the front to the back. The other half of the house where the two bedrooms and the computer room are are harder to cool because there isn’t a way to get a cross-breeze going. Remember that if you are planning to build a green structure. Very important.

Anyway, I didn’t think that I’d be writing about heat this morning, but that’s what happens in these coffee pot posts. You never know where they will go as the caffeine hits your brain cells.

Yesterday, I got so excited about my art journey that I thought that my head would explode. I get like that - I tend to have panic attacks when I’m overwhelmed, whether it is with fear, anger, joy, or ideas. It’s one of those things that shuts me down artistically, for obvious reasons. But I have not had a panic attack this week, although my chest is a bit tight with anxiety. This is a very good thing. I can work with this.

What happens is that I get blocked for months, sometimes years (in the last case, quite a few), and then the dam breaks, and I am nearly manic with all the ideas and projects that I want to do. I am obsessed. It’s all I want to do, all I can think about. People talk to me about serious subjects, and I hear them, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking about what color thread I’m going to use to bind this particular book.

So I’m spending most of my spare time creating. The Back Forty is finally at a point where it is simply in the business of growing, and I have little to harvest other than cherries and turnips. This is what is great about my method of gardening - most of the work is done in the winter and early spring, then I slide through the hot summer months, if I do it right. There will be a sparse period right now because I didn’t plant enough early enough, but that’s fine.

My epiphany yesterday as I was sewing up the slits in the Elements tapestries, and I’m sure that all of this was just barely below the surface, was that I’d use them for the covers of a book. Then I knew what I’d do for the cover of Squirt and Mama Kitty’s book - a tapestry of the two of them. I pasted up a quick idea for the cartoon. The title might change. Remember the Ferrell Family from the Carol Burnett Show? That shows my age, but for some reason the Ferrell Family really cracked me up. That’s why I wanted to name Squirt “Daryl Feral,” but Sandy wouldn’t go for it.

So here’s when it hit me, and I don’t know why it seemed so earth-shaking when it was so obvious. Has anyone suddenly asked you what you would do if you could do anything? I would make books with tapestry covers and handmade paper from plants in my garden. Maybe other covers with natural found objects.

So that’s what I’m going to focus on. TA-DA!

Oh well, this was lovely, but I have to go pick up my chicken now. It will go into the crockpot so that I don’t have to mess with a hot stove.

I thought that I might share a little about my creative process in doing the mini tapestries. It’s so simple that it won’t take long. Reading Living the Creative Life and The Artist’s Way made me think about this, and I figure that it’s worth sharing.

This is my current workspace in the Happy Room, on the futon that serves as a guest bed. Isn’t it a mess? But it’s really working for me, like I have a pallette of yarn.

I found that the trick to keeping my creative energy going is to always have a little cardboard loom ready. It takes about five minutes tops to warp a piece of cardboard, which I prepare by snipping slits top and bottom 4 or 5 slits to an inch. You can’t really get a lot of detail with this method, but the simplicity and limit is part of the charm for me. For more detailed designs, I use a pin loom, where I can get 8 ends per inch.

I could draw a design on the cardboard, but what I do with the mini-tapestries is that I begin with a blank cardboard piece, pick up a color, and begin. It helps a lot to have an idea prompt. I have a theme right now of “By the Sea.” As I needleweave the yarn into the warp, an idea will begin to develop. If it doesn’t, I do a solid block of color. I figure that I can embellish the solid blocks with beads, shells, embroidery, or needle-felting later, so it’s definitely not a waste of time. The point is, I don’t wait for an idea. I just start weaving.

If I’m not totally thrilled with it, it’s okay. I’ve only put a couple of hours into it at the most, and now that I’m interested in assemblage and collage, I figure that I’ll find a way to work with it later. In the meantime, I’m free to play, which is not something that usually happens with weavers. And playing was something that I struggled with so much that I even made “learning to play” a project for my “Creating Peace” class only last fall.

If I get an idea for a more complicated idea, I’ll work that out later with a cartoon (design for a tapestry). I should make notes, but I have to work on that. It’s usually hard for me to stop weaving and start writing notes! I had a dream last night with an idea for a weaving that I awoke from and said to myself that I should write it down. Of course, the part of me that wanted to go back to sleep convinced me that I would remember this great idea in the morning. Of course, I have not remembered the details as of yet. I’ve had a lot of these dreams and they’re wonderful in their details, but by the time I get to the coffee, they’re a fuzzy warm pleasant feeling. So I need to work on my methods for recording ideas.

Here’s a photo of the back of one of the tapestries. I designed these “signatures” in Word and copied eight to a standard 8.5 x 11 page, leaving a bit of space where I can attach a pin if needed, and then I used Ricë’s technique for printing them on a piece of muslin. I left the freezer paper on the back and cut them apart.

Then I made hemmed backs of a watercolory-looking blue fabric to fit the back of each tapestry (using fusible webbing), fused those directly to the back of the tapestries, then peeled away one of my muslin signatures and fused that on top of the blue fabric.

Here’s the (un-) funny thing - I decided to use fusible webbing for many of my sewing tasks to save my hands some stress and because I am such a klutz that I stab myself with needles and pins all the time. Well, here’s this fabulous alternative, right? I bought a little craft mini-iron that has a long rod handle and a little flat iron tip that I could use for little areas and corners where I might need more precision. So what was the first thing I did with my fabulous new tool yesterday? I mindlessly grabbed it in the wrong place and burned the hell out of my right index fingertip. If I don’t learn anything else from this hobby, I will learn mindfulness, the hard way if necessary.

“By the Sea: Wave”; series of tapestry artist trading cards, woven for trading at Art & Soul in early May. Woven on cardboard loom. Linen warp, cotton weft. 3.5 x 2.5 inches.

“By the Sea: Tidal Pools”; series of tapestry artist trading cards, woven for trading at Art & Soul in early May. I drew on memories of Sunset Beach and Tubbs Inlet for these seascapes. Woven on cardboard loom. Linen warp, wool weft. 3.5 x 2.5 inches.

The next two will be pins:

I’m not done embellishing the one on the right - I plan to bead an edge around it.
Left: Linen warp, cotton, wool, and chenille weft, shells. 3 5/8 x 2 3/4 inches.
Right: Linen warp, cotton, wool, and chenille weft, shells. 3 1/4 x 2 5/8 inches.

“By the Sea: Overcast Low Tide” - I think that we’ll keep this one, as it is too big for an ATC and I’m rather fond of it. The wool for the sky was space dyed leftovers from a weaving years ago. Linen warp, wool weft. 3.75 x 2.75 inches.