Category: Rebel stitching

coffee pot posts, fiber art, Rebel stitching, Slow stitch, tapestry, weaving

Sunday evening Smiddicks Post

Laurie

Can’t say that I’ve gotten much accomplished this weekend other than laundry. I looked over this stitching project and realized that life is too short to be compulsive about doing all this when I’m really not thrilled about most of the pieces. I whittled it down to the long piece and the mostly blue piece and spent several pleasant hours stitching while listening to Bonnie Raitt and Sheryl Crow, leaving most of my thoughts floating in the air somewhere, not a care in the world. It was good for me, because thinking about the world outside of this little house has been bringing me way, way down. When I didn’t like most of the stitching I did this afternoon, I looked at it as an applique opportunity. So maybe this will become a stitch practice, or a mood journal of sorts. One thing is for sure, it is SLOW.

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I had some amazing news on Friday after I posted my blog post – I sold “A Place You’ve Never Been” at the Tapestry Weavers South exhibition. Now, here’s the thing. I put a high price on it and “Cathedral” because I didn’t really want to sell them. I nearly called the curator to tell her to put NFS on both of them. But I thought, nobody is going to pay that price for either of them and if they do, I’ll put the money aside for something really nice for myself. The gallery commission was 50% so I put $1,000 on “A Place You’ve Never Been” and $10,000 on “Cathedral” (I REALLY don’t want to sell it.). So that’s $500 coming my way for the deposit on Laurie Doctor’s workshop in Italy in September 2024.

I’m not interested in making art for money. It sucks the joy out of it for me. You know, I just need something to do with my hands. I will never ever sell my art for cheap. It undercuts the value of my time and the value of other artists’ work. I’d rather give it away than sell it cheap.

However, I kind of fucked up, because I never thought I’d sell it, I didn’t get a good photograph of it in its final setting. I had wrapped it up to send it to another show in early May in which I was going to put NFS on it, and then I found out that I had to put it up for sale. So I never sent it, and I didn’t unwrap it. And guess what, I realize that I didn’t get good photos of the other two in their final form either. I finished getting them hemmed and backed and hanging devices on them at the last minute, and I didn’t stop to photograph them – just jumped in the car and drove with them to Asheville. I hope that I’ll be able to do it when I go to whatever kind of opening we have, whether it’s just a get-together or public. What’s funny is that for a while I was sharing so many photos of it in progress that I decided not to share another photo until it was framed and ready for display. Lesson learned.

Here’s a photo of it when I was testing out different color backgrounds, and a photo of it that my friend sent me when she was there and noticed the red “sold” dot on the card.

A Place You've Never Been

A Place You've Never Been at exhibit

I spent several frustrating hours searching for the best, most affordable way for us to go to Scotland in May or June, and it just ain’t gonna happen. Sandy and I went out to the used bookstore where I picked up a couple of travel books on Scotland and Great Britain, and when we went out to eat, I told him that he was going to have to pony up more money for this trip because I haven’t had time to save for it, and I keep my credit cards paid off. This isn’t like Portugal, when I had the airfare already paid from when I’d planned to go to Ireland in 2020, and the accommodations were inexpensive, and I had two extra years to save up for it. He is worried about his medical bills, so we decided to try to do it in September. I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it then either, but I’m glad to have made the decision not to try it in May or June, anyway.

This clears the way for me to go to Penland this summer IF and ONLY IF I can get a scholarship, which, since I am older, I figure is a long shot at best. But it’s only $5 to submit the application, so I’ve decided to put one together over the next week or two. The deadline is Feb. 15, just before my 62nd birthday. I will try not to be disappointed if I don’t get one. I’ll just need to find another way to have fun this summer. I’m sure some kind of workshop will pop up that I can do in person. Maybe I just need to knuckle down and actually get a body of work together – now there’s a thought. Actually doing art instead of dreaming about going to workshops to do art!

fiber art, political activism, Rebel stitching, Tiny Pricks Project

Thanksgiving Week and Tiny Pricks

Laurie


Here we are on Thanksgiving week, ready to celebrate the only holiday I participate in other than Festivus. And the big news is that Sandy and I will be spending it at Lake Waccamaw at my cousin’s house, my heart space, the house that I mourned for the past year because nobody who saw the flood damage from Hurricane Florence thought that my cousin’s wife would spend the money and make the huge effort to save it. But she did! It won’t be the same – all new furniture and appliances since the antiques were ruined. I’ll know more when I get there.

And my sister and brother-in-law finally moved out of the rental house and back to their house on the shore down the road.

For the past month, I mainly concentrated on the Tiny Pricks Project, but I have done some other fun art things. My most recent Tiny Pricks project is a large tea towel so it is taking a while. I should get it done tonight, hopefully! Scuppernong Books has already started pinning up our handkerchiefs, doilies, and crafty items spotlighting the unmatched wise words of our very, very brilliant Dear Leader, and we will add a few more before we send them all to Diana Weymar and the big Tiny Pricks Project. This has been very good for me: good for my stress level, my sense of humor, and connection with other people. I made new friends, which is not easy for me. You can see the Greensboro chapter’s projects on Instagram. I have finished three and three of the four are related to hurricane quotes.

I couldn’t resist doing one of his nonsense “word salads” and this is a bit hard to read, so I’ve typed it below the photo.

I’m going to maybe and I’m looking at it very seriously. We’re doing some other things that you probably noticed like some of the very important things that we’re doing now. But we’re looking at it very seriously because you can’t do that.

Wow, that’s a very serious amount of nothing said at all!

Speaking of nothing, don’t forget to do any shopping early this week so you can celebrate “Buy Nothing Day” on Friday. So there IS a third holiday that I participate in.

I think that I’ll put the other stuff in another post.

fiber art, Greensboro North Carolina, political activism, Rebel stitching, Tiny Pricks Project

Tiny Pricks Project Greensboro

Laurie

A while back several news articles began circulating on Facebook that got a lot of attention from me and my fiber artist friends. They were about Diana Weymar, an artist who created The Tiny Pricks Project, who says this about how it began on her website:

On Jan. 8th, 2018 I stitched ‘I am a very stable genius’ into a piece of my grandmother’s abandoned needlework from the 1960s. When I posted it on Instagram, the response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. Assuming he would become more presidential over time, with only the occasional ridiculous tweet, I decided to stitch one Trump quote a week. However, it quickly became a daily practice, as I tried to keep up with the outpouring of “unpresidential” text. Friends asked if I would host workshops so that they could join the project. Tiny Pricks Project has since become the largest textile Trump protest EVER with over 1100 Tiny Pricks and hundreds of participants globally. The series will go strong until Trump is out of office. The goal is to create 2020 Tiny Pricks by 2020!

One of my friends tagged a half dozen of us to see if we wanted to participate, and thus the Greensboro chapter of the Tiny Pricks Project began. We meet on Monday and Wednesday nights in a couple of different places to stitch the outrageous and surreal words of the man currently occupying the Oval Office on tea towels, doilies, and handkerchiefs that we pick up in various thrift/antique stores. One of us doesn’t stitch but has drawn and written designs for stitchers to pick up and work on. We started out at a local brewery but as fall progressed the lighting became too dim, so we now meet at our favorite local bookstore, Scuppernong Books, in downtown Greensboro on Mondays, and just moved our Wednesday night meeting to Leveneleven Brewing, a small brewpub across from the Greensboro Coliseum on Coliseum Boulevard.

We plan to do this for at least the next six weeks, after which we will have a small show of our work at Scuppernong before sending them to Diana Weymar for her project. You don’t have to come to the meetings to participate.

Last night we agreed that this project has been so therapeutic and fun that we will likely continue meeting as a group after the show.

Here are a few of the finished pieces. The top one is mine. If you are interested, please follow the Tiny Pricks Project Greensboro Instagram page.

Back Forty, butterbeans, fiber art, Greensboro North Carolina, More gardening, Rebel stitching

Here we go again

Laurie

(Note: I forgot to click Publish when I wrote this on Monday night.)

The week before fall semester classes begin is always a huge adjustment. It feels like going from 0 to 60 suddenly. Gone are the quiet days with few people on the hallway. Now I get to meet about 30 new people and do some public speaking. I’ve come to think of this as my “Sanity Box,” a little box of magic that I can take out during a lunch or other break and just hem squares or stitch them together. No major thought is going into this. Just doing.

A lot of veggies and figs have to be dealt with also. I am much better this year than I have been most Augusts. I attribute this to adding fish oil and vitamin D to my daily supplements. My therapist had suggested the fish oil, and I was vitamin D deficient for a long time. I feel better physically and mentally, although I still tire very quickly. The muggy heat doesn’t help. Yesterday evening I picked tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, eggplants, and figs, then cooked for a couple of hours. I still have a lot of cucumbers and figs to do something with. I don’t want to get out the canning equipment – it just seems like too much for too little, and I am not a huge pickle or jelly fan – but I don’t want them to go to waste. This weekend I put some cucumber slices in with my tomatoes and peppers in the electric dehydrator. They came out wispy and delicate, like soft thin leaves. I might experiment with this more. Sandy and I are planning a repeat of making fig newtons this weekend. Last year he made some good ones, but he baked them on the wrong kind of pan. The filling was great, though.

The butterbeans are overwhelming at the UNCG garden. Very tall and thickly planted. There was a lot of Japanese beetle damage at first but I outplanted them, I think. Hardly any beans, though. I think that the intense heat wave in July stopped them from flowering. I hope they will produce soon so I can get some bean in the freezer before a heavy frost happens. I pulled up most of the eggplants and the lemon cucumber vines. I was tired of them and the eggplants were buried by the bermuda grass and peppermint that I lost control of very early on. Once the Roma tomatoes and one zephyr squash plant are done, which should be before the end of the month, I am abandoning that plot. However, I do think that the grass and mint may have helped hold in moisture during the dry spell when I was traveling.

Sandy and I walked downtown on First Friday, heard music with friends on Saturday, and went to the Greensboro Science Center and out to dinner with a dear out-of-town friend on Sunday. So we had a busy social time. This poodle at Gate City Yarns agrees that Sandy is great and tried to lick him clean.

Lord, I just want to sleep and play in the studio. Daydreaming about going to Ireland. All the books I want to read. Weaving with cloth strips keeps nagging at me to come back to it. There are not enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do. How do people get bored at home?

art, art retreats, bloggy stuff, fiber art, Rebel stitching, Slow cloth, Upcycling, weaving

Latest news from moi

Laurie

Suddenly I feel like Miss Piggy today. Couldn’t tell you why.

A lot of things have happened since I last posted. I stopped paying to have my blog ad-free and the ads are pretty disgusting, so I may break down and upgrade to a paid account. I hate to do it, because between that and paying for my photos to be hosted on Flickr, that adds up to over $100 per year. I can’t really let the Flickr account go because I have linked most of my photos to that account. That would be an enormous amount of work to correct that. Plus, I really am attached to my domain name. I’ve had it since 2005. The thought of letting it go has become more intolerable to me.

I am going to convert this over to more of an artist website, and my postings to Facebook and Instagram should appear on the sidebar. But that will take a while. Maybe over the winter break. I’ll have made a decision about whether the cost is worth it by October.

^^^Pablocito, studio assistant, and the reason why there is aluminum foil everywhere. (He doesn’t like it.)

I took a week’s vacation at home in late July because it was slow at work and I have a lot of vacation time built up. It was marvelous. Really, I almost preferred it to traveling.

The first thing on my agenda was to warp up this “new” Beka rigid heddle loom for a sakiori workshop later that week. It was not anywhere near as simple as I thought it would be, and by the time I rewarped it and got the tension right, it took three days and some help from a friend! However, now I know some things I should and shouldn’t do with this type of loom. For one thing, I doubt that I will put three yards of warp on it again.

This patchwork from Jude Hill’s online class (see below) really scratches an itch for me. I love that it is portable. The only problem is my hands can’t take as much hand sewing as I would like to do. My sewing machines (plural) are a constant pain in my ass to keep running and maintained, but I did abuse them pretty badly when I was doing the denim and t-shirt quilt projects. It still amazes me that you can buy a new cheap machine for as much as it is to repair one.

Anyway, bitching aside, I LOVE making these little “puzzle pieces” and putting them together in different ways. It reminds me of my favorite toy growing up, which I think was sold by Tupperware. It was like Legos, but with tiny little pegged pieces in different shapes that could be pushed into a plastic grid. I constantly played with it sitting on the den floor, and I still have a box with the pieces somewhere. It drove my father nuts because he was always stepping on them.

Later that week when I felt like dealing with warping a loom again I caught up on the Rebecca Mezoff/Sarah Swett “Fringeless” online class that I began LAST SUMMER, and by the end of the week, I had this Mirrix loom warped and ready to go. The warping method produces a four selvedge tapestry that is ready when it comes off the loom, no sewing in ends or hemming edges required. To be honest, it was pretty easy once I got the hang of it.

Then on Saturday, I went to the sakiori class that was taught by Dawn Hummer of Saori Song Weaving in Chapel Hill, and sponsored by the Triangle Weavers Guild in a great space that they rent on an ongoing basis in an old school near Durham. I didn’t really learn that much, and I don’t need any encouragement to cut loose and play, but it is always good to hear how and why other artists do what they do. I got to see Saori looms and how they work, and that was really cool. It was fun and that was the whole point. I decided to make some pieces to use as book covers. Here is the first one. There is room on the warp for many more.

In other news, I’ve had to learn how to live without air conditioning for a few days. I hope it won’t be much longer. It is good for me to be reminded not to take this for granted. Work is revving back up with the fall semester classes beginning in only two weeks. The Tapestry Weavers South retreat is in nearby Elkin, NC on Labor Day weekend, so I have that to look forward to. After that, I doubt I will be able to afford any other art retreats or workshops because I am going to have to dip into my savings to pay for the Ireland trip before January, and to be responsible I will pay my savings back. It will be totally worth it to go back to Ireland, where I belong.

Back Forty, dyeing, Rebel stitching, tapestry, Tapestry Diary 2018, Upcycling, weaving

Saturday morning WHEW thank God post

Laurie

I’ve been living for the weekend lately.

Here’s my newest obsession – taking online instruction from India Flint. Her first foray into a structured online class just began this past week: The Alchemist’s Apron. (By the way, that price is in Australian dollars and the exchange rate for US dollars makes it much lower.) Stitching has saved my sanity lately – honestly my work should not be this stressful. It’s the best job I ever had but bad ju-ju from anxiety and frustration is contagious for me.

The weather has been pretty whack, just as it has been almost everywhere else in the US and Europe. It’s hard to know what to do with the temps going up and down the way they have. It snowed earlier this week and was predicted to snow again this weekend, but I think that the forecast has changed. We haven’t gotten enough sun to really warm up the soil and the greenhouse. I spent some time yesterday evening and this morning filling an egg carton and peat cups that I found in the back building with seed starting mix and water. They need to absorb a lot of water before I use them. My garden usually gets a late start compared to others in the area anyway. I started a few broccoli seeds and will figure out a place to begin tomatoes and peppers inside. There are few sunny spots in my house.

Some critter left a rather large dump in my raised bed, and I wonder if it was a raccoon. After shoveling it out I covered the bed in wire fencing. That will not make the husband happy. He does not like my gardening methods, but organic gardening can’t always be pretty, especially if you don’t have the room to sacrifice some of it to the critters. I’m just praying that the woodchuck will not come back this year.

I went to the Greensboro Permaculture Guild seed swap on Tuesday night but wasn’t feeling great and didn’t stay long. Great group of people, though, and someone brought some warm freshly baked bread that was so good I wanted to snatch it and run away and gobble it all down by myself. However I resisted that wild urge and helped myself to a variety of beans, including Jacob’s Cattle and cannellini beans. I shared some of my Whippoorwill and Dixie Lee field peas that I have saved over the years. The Whippoorwill field peas originally came from Monticello.

There I met a young man and his daughter who I am going to call later this weekend and arrange to hire him to help me prepare a couple of planting beds for the summer.

Deep Roots Market is having their Taste Fair this afternoon from 12-4 which is unfortunate timing since today is also the day for the March for Our Lives. Greensboro’s march and rally is from 2-6 p.m. I will show up for part of it but I need desperately need art time.

I have filled a pickle bucket with iron scraps and vinegar and water to make a mordant for natural dyeing the shirt I will transform into the apron for India’s class this week. It was supposed to be in a big glass jar but most of my rusty bits were too big for the jar. It’s been a long time since I’ve attempted any natural dyeing because of my upper body problems. The exciting thing that happened is that I finally found my stash of naturally dyed cloth in the bottom of a hamper this morning. Most of it is silk though, and will probably be saved for something else.

My mood has been as whack as the weather and my tapestry diary this past week shows it. I’m kind of bored with it and I wonder if I will have the willpower to push through that and finish it. Some stitching will make me much happier today.

art, Back Forty, Bagstories, Rebel stitching, Slow cloth, tapestry, weaving

Sunday update

Laurie

I don’t have much to say today, because HEADACHE, but I wanted to document that I planted Green Arrow peas in planters, Sugar Ann snap peas in the raised bed with the pineberries, and sprouted chunks of Yukon Gold potatoes in another planter. Now for another day of rest and stitching while the rain comes down.


Vegetable beef soup was made yesterday, so cooking is off the list today.

I have one goal today that I keep putting off – take the backing off the tiny tapestry “Pacific Pines,” square it up, and sew the backing back on. This is the one that I’m sending to the ATA unjuried small format show.

Before photo of the Back Forty. My hope is that it will look much prettier in coming weeks. The formerly screened gazebo in the back is going to be stripped of its fabric soon. I can’t buy a fabric roof and screening that stands up to the limbs and vines coming at it from the back. We may move the metal structure out into the sunnier part of the yard and screen it with metal screening. Sandy wants to do some wattle vine and stick weaving around it, which I think is a great idea. It would make an excellent structure for growing mushrooms inside if we did that. But I can’t even think about that now. Maybe next year.