3.5 x 2.5″
cotton yarn, cardboard, brown paper, shipping label, ink

See this post for the story behind it.

I jammed up my printer playing with this brown paper and I think that I killed it! But I do like the effect it made on the words. The “prettier” side is actually the back of the card. It is supposed to have my contact information on it and I have to figure that out. I have a blue gel pen at work that might do the trick.

This is my first artist trading card. There are only two rules for ATCs - they must be 2.5 x 3.5 inches (baseball card size) and they must be traded or given away, never sold.

This was a lot of fun and I think that I’ll keep it up. Hopefully I’ll have plenty to trade when I go to Art & Soul in early May.

The Take It Further Challenge for February had two options: a color combination and/or a concept prompt of “What are you old enough to remember?”

I wanted to do both, but blanked out on how to do it until yesterday. My concept had more to do with technology - the phone system, mimeographs instead of copiers, etc. I thought about collage and I might still work with this idea, since I have a great secretary’s manual from the 1930s to work with. (By the way, I’m a secretary, and I’m the daughter of a secretary.) But I ached to do some more with tapestry, so I began by pulling out yarns that were a close match to the color challenge.

I couldn’t find the shade of brown, and it irked me because I felt that it was so familiar that I must have it somewhere. I stopped and took a few moments to straighten up my studio, and there it was - my cardboard box that I used as a loom for the tapestry bag. I decided to incorporate a small cardboard loom into my project for the brown color, and I cut the box into small pieces. One piece had the UPS shipping sticker on it, and I thought, I remember when there wasn’t a bar code or number on every single thing that was sold or shipped, and you didn’t have a different password or ID number for every different purpose, and the technology that is supposed to make our lives more efficient has complicated our lives in many ways.

Then I realized that this was the piece that I would use for my loom.

The bar code is meant to look like the weft on that side, but I am so tempted to weave the whole thing. I’ll upload the finished object when it’s done.

(Later that evening…)

I wove a frame around the bar code. I’ll finish this tomorrow night. The weaving is done. And it was fun.

As you can tell, I’ve dropped out of the 365 Crafting project.  Life intervened.  I’m still working in my studio though. 

Saturday and Sunday last week I spent a lot of time in my studio.  One thing I worked on was painting over sheet music to be recycled in a interactive peace journal for a class group project.  You can still see the music underneath and there are places that I left unpainted that I thought had words that might make good prompts.  The other pages are from a beautiful old children’s book about birds.  The pages in the journal are all recycled from books and paper I found on the free shelf at Edward McKay’s.  Of course, now I’m worried about our choices - is this old paper going to hold up?  I guess that the way to look at it is that it just needs to at least hold up through the end of this class!

Today I’m going to paint a few more and join pages into pairs by gluing strips of construction paper down the middle where they will be folded.  I made a couple of pockets from a old CD package and I’m going to make tags from card stock that we’ll attach raffia ribbons to.  The tags will have prompts on them and be put in the pockets.

Anybody that has a favorite quote or idea for a prompt about peace is invited to leave it in the comments!

The four of us are all working on different aspects of the book, so others are doing the cover and binding it and putting together a creativity kit for people to add their own thoughts in many ways.

I also finished the first “fabulously ugly” scarf and I think that it will be quite pretty, although I’m afraid that it might be too thick and stiff.  The yarn packed down a lot more than I thought it would even though I was not beating it, just pushing it into place.  I’ll see when I take it off and wash it.  It took a long time, but that was fine, because I needed the comfort of the steady rhythm this week and last.  I’ll begin the second one today, and weave it more loosely from the beginning.

Today I did two things - I sent off a packet of letters from 12 people in an attempt to stop the N.C. Agriculture Dept. from requiring farmers to add black dye to raw milk. And I went to an antique festival where I found a bunch of old milk bottle cap labels, some from small North Carolina dairies that are long gone, driven out of business by our agricultural policies. It is illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption in North Carolina.

So I’m playing with the caps and parts of the envelopes I received for a collage about raw milk.