Fiber and Pulp

Creative Day 7: Dreaming in Color

Today was another crazy-busy day for me at the shop. This afternoon our new RJR Fabrics rep came (along with her regional sales director) to show us what is new and coming to buy for the shop.

The print above is part of the Desired Things collection designed by Robyn Pandolph, due out in September. This print comes in four? five? background colors (all of which I liked:) but we went for the taupe? khaki? one shown above. I LOVE this print ... and promised to buy some myself since the rest of my purchase committee (my two managers, joined today by yet a third employee:) was doubtful that we could sell it to our customers.

Dreaming about designs (and allowing yourself some dreaming/playing time) is important for creativity, right? :)

I also got a haircut and manicure today ... and discovered that the computer on my work desk is dark and unresponsive. (shiver) Probably dead/fried - but I won't mourn 'til my computer wizard husband signs the certificate. 

:) Linda (off to work on that Zendala again this evening)

Creative Day 6: Administration

Today I did quite a lot of what I mentally tag as 'administrative' tasks at work - saw a fabric vendor in the morning (got to painfully choose some of what I hope are sale-able fabrics for delivery over the next three months:) ... then spent a hour or more making telephone calls of various kinds (to our new credit card processing company, our computer software company rep, to a potential private student, to a couple of fabric companies about soon-to-arrive shipments) ... Followed by another hour to read, digest, tweet about, respond to and share emails ... refunded the tuition of a student for a canceled class ... showed one of my sales associates how to enter the discount for our current sale correctly for a customer's purchases ... made sure our teacher was paid for the class she was leading today ... discussed private lessons on general sewing skills with another customer and his daughter ... tried not to cause an avalanche in my office (definitely time to finish cleaning the back end - space is so small, hard to believe it has a front and back end!:) 

All necessary activities but not really creative in the strictest sense. :) Then I came home and laid down on the couch in my (thank you, god, for small comforts!) air conditioned living room and watched a couple episodes of The Dresden Files (courtesy of Netflix and my Apple TV) while reading magazines and beginning on the text of Allie Adler's new crazy quilting book (yes, I'm actually going to _read_ the text!). 

I had thought I'd go out in the cool of the evening to prune some more over-abundant greenery in my front yard ... but stiffened up so much from my reclining I decided to call it a loss. (sigh)

I did see some pretty flowers today - the top photo is of so-called 'common' daylilies. I love them! They are so exuberant and bright. :) Beneath them is a hybrid cultivar of daylily called Stella d'Oro (Star Sun?) - they are shorter plants than common daylily and bloom abundantly throughout most of the summer. Here in MD you see them a lot in the 'yard' around fast food places 'cause the pretty babies are tough as nails. :) Sunny and happy flowers.

Temperature out of doors was not too bad today (mid 80's) but is supposed to get to mid 90's tomorrow and likely 100 degrees by Wednesday. :P I am not, not, not fond of summertime in MD - too hot and humid. :)

I decided to do a zentangle drawing in my daily journal this evening as an at-least-token attempt to continue my 30 days of creative efforts.

The theme in last week's Zentangle challenge was 'stripes' - this week it is Zendala (mandalas filled with Zentangle patterns). When my mandala drawing was clearly limited to scratchy lines (my Micron pen has a disappearing nib:) and lop-sided circles, I realized that bed time is also a necessity.

Good night!

:) Linda

PS Ooh, I just remembered. Perhaps this counts as 'preparing to be creative?' I called up Wooly Lady today (I really admire their patterns, designs, and luscious hand-dyed wool colors:) and signed up for their auto-ship special feature fabric editions. Can't wait to get my first one - seven tropical colors of wool (Calypso? I think Lisa called it?:)

Side Thoughts

Generally I keep track here on my blog of my quilt making and other creative pass times ... and I rarely mention my professional life or my 'internal' life (I think; I guess a good observer could draw inferences and conclusions from what I say or don't say:).

One thing that I have come to feel very strongly about over time as I have matured is the desirability of being open-minded ... of being tolerant and inclusive rather than exclusive in social matters. (I guess my 'I quilt without obligation' button on the side bar might give you a hint about that?:)

As I may have mentioned already, my current profession (as shop owner and 'professional' quilt maker) is my third career as an adult. The first career I trained for is that of scientist (more specifically, natural scientist with a major emphasis on laboratory work).

I regularly read general science literature (Scientific American and Science News for example) as a way to keep up with the fields I am interested in (no way to keep up at the professional reading level without being a professional - too much new science has happened since I was trained in the 70's:).

Today in the weekly email newsletter from SA comes a short note that just reinforces, for me, my personal feelings about societal viability and relates directly to my observations.  I want to share this with you here for a reason - read it, think about it. How does this relate to your life, your life-style? Think about whether what you do from day to day affects your world's sustainability. What kind of world do you _want_ to live in? :) If you want to read the original, you can find it here.

Tight versus loose cultures
Cultures may respond in profound ways to natural disasters and human-caused threats. Using survey responses from 33 nations, an international team of scientists finds that “tight” cultures with strict rules about social behavior and little tolerance for nonconformity have frequently had to deal with dense populations, scarce resources, natural disasters, territorial attacks by neighbors and epidemic diseases. “Loose” cultures willing to let people do their own thing typically have faced few threats, the scientists report in the May 27Science. Tight cultures are more likely than loose cultures to have unelected rulers, limited civil liberties and widespread religious beliefs.—Bruce Bower

:) Linda

Creating Day 5

Yet another invigorating day with creative fellow workers! :) The MetroThreads Mixed Media special interest group met this afternoon at my shop for three hours. We spent quite a bit of time discussing program ideas for the next year and a new structure for keeping technique notes and samples that I am _really_ excited about (will tell about that in another post).

The program for the day was Flower Pounding. I have done a bit of this in the past but just put the results into my mental 'bag of tricks' and went on. Today, for whatever reason, the technique is really appealing to me - maybe I have some hammering energy in my for once? LOL (actually, my arms are kind of tired after hammering for an hour, on and off:)

There are plenty of fine points and tips/tricks to pounding flowers and leaves to make prints on fabric - but any child can do the basic work. :) The photo above shows the immediate result from mashing an azalea blossom and then a violet leaf. You can probably still see the bits of mashed material in places - when the whole thing has dried I'll scrape the bits off and iron the whole piece to fix the colors. Then I'll most likely go in and use my Pigma Micron pens and maybe some hand embroidery to further define the images.

Some of what I made will go into a sample book ... but I think I will use many of the bits I made today to create fabric postcards or similar items. Fun! :) Here are some more photos:

I don't actually know the names of all the flowers you see above - but there were geraniums, azaleas, tradescantia, ferns, violets, etc. ;) I'll try to remember to share here what I do with these ... and the others that I have not photographed ('cause they were not dry and still had too much 'mush' on to see the print:).

What a great weekend this has been! One for my personal history books, as they say. :)

:) Linda

Creative Day 4

Today I want to celebrate being creative with a group of fellow artists. :) I attended the regional SAQA (studio art quilters association) meeting today (in Clarksville, MD). Talk about inspiriational!!

The photo above shows the hands of Susan Callahan working to apply paint and patterning to a gelatin plate in preparation to painting fabric. I had done gelatin printing before and so just watched and kibbitzed (don't know how to spell that word as Yiddish is not my native tongue:). Some gorgeous things were made (photos below)! 

I am so excited to see that Susan (who is a professional chef) made ROUND gelatin plates - never, ever occurred to me to do that. What she got on her fabrics was glorious - and already round. :) Many of the folks there (hmm, maybe 9 or 10 people?) did leaf printing of various images (some positive, some negative, some shadowy prints:) ... as well as playing with various texturing objects like netting, sequin waste, marbling combs, etc. Here are a few photos of things laying out to dry - there were many more cool things done but my camera ran out of charge (sigh):

We did a wonderfully rich show and tell session while sitting to eat lunch in Debra's studio ... lots of give and take and freely flowing help. :) Then, I gave a hands-on about using Shiva oil paintsticks ... and Debbie B. talked about using foils with fusible webbing to add rich accents to fabrics. 

Glorious! Making art work is often a very solitary activity - and artists need to get out and play every once in a while to enliven their brains. :) 

After our day was over, I drove back to my store to get my sweetheart (who was doing the book keeping chores) and then we went grocery shopping. I'm sorry to say that I've only been reading email and vegetating since we got it all home and put away. (whew!) I will do a bit of journaling later about today's impressions and maybe another page in my story journal before bed. 

Tomorrow is another play day - the mixed media special interest group is going to do some Flower Pounding at my shop in the afternoon. Funny how it seems either to be feast or famine with my life - never a steady flow! LOL

:) Linda

Creating Day 3

Yesterday as I was driving home I noticed that the wildflowers in the median strips on our highways are blooming profusely. If you look at the chart above (courtesy of the MD State Hwy Dept.:), you can see the kinds of flowers I saw yesterday -- red corn poppies, blue spikes of rocket larkspur, bright yellow coreopsis and a number of others are growing really well this year (along with everything else green:). We've had an abundance of rain the past two months - I love seeing it go into color! :)

I have still a number of tasks to do here at the store today. Took one of our cats to the vet this morning for her 'elderly cat annual wellness checkup' (along with my son, the cat's 'Daddy':), went to the 'spa salon' I patronize and had my (ahem) excess facial hair removed, and finished quilting and binding my charm quilt so far today.

I am really pleased with how this little quilt has turned out (although somewhat chagrined to find that my quilt making skills really are getting a bit rusty):

Sorry about the awkward angle of the photo - there is a set of tables in the way of getting a straight-on shot in the small classroom. :) I even managed to free motion my initials and the date to finish the quilt (don't know if you can see them in the upper left corner?): I'm pleased with the virtual hourglass block that emerged from the quilting design - an un-anticipated side benefit. :)

Now I have to spend an hour or so gathering up my materials and samples for a demonstration I'm facilitating tomorrow at the regional SAQA retreat on using Shiva oil paintsticks. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else in the group has been doing, too (especially since I've had so little time for being 'artistically' productive). :)

Once I get all that packed up, I can go home and vegetate. Well, except for my day's Creative Effort - haven't decided, yet, what it will be.

Maybe I'll have enough energy to work on my current Sketchbook Project idea. I started in on my sketchbook and, after gluing a number of images in to work with, realized that I need to leave blank pages between my spreads to glue together (one of the things I want to do, besides paint and such on each page, is some hand embroidery - want to protect the back of my stitching). Sigh - so typical of my not to think far enough ahead.

Now I have to backtrack, carefully removed the images I have glued in, count out sets of pages leaving blank ones between and re-glue my focus images into the sketchbook. :P Probably have to resort to dental floss for the removal, too, as it has been several days and the glue will have set pretty well by now. :P

Never boring in my life, that's for sure, though it does have more-than-ample doses of chaos! :)

Linda

Creative Day 2

My creative impulse for today was to do the borders and start quilting my Kaufman Charm Square Challenge quilt (this baby needs a name in the _worst_ way:).

When I trimmed the squares down I had pieces that were 5" long by about 1/2" wide left over. They were so cute, I could not throw them away so I sewed them into a border strip for the quilt. :)

As I was making the border, the quilting design came to me in a sudden flash of inspiration. It is working out even better than I thought it would. There are alternate 'virtual' squares on point and then little 'hourglass' squares that show even more color combinations. (happy dance)

:) Linda

Create for Day 1

(Blackberry flowers courtesy of Leeds Daily Photos)

What is in bloom in my yard right now is the volunteer blackberry tangle growing around the base of our Ash tree by the driveway in front of our house. (sigh) Needs pruning out but I did not get to it today.

I did manage to create some today but I'm surprised that I did. I had to come home 'early' from the shop yesterday as I developed a real stiff headache (I don't very often have headaches and I have very little skill at coping with them). :P Early, of course, means before the 10 p.m. time my sweetheart came home from paying bills there. (sigh) :) Anyway, I came home and went straight to bed ... and still had the headache when I woke up today.

I spent most of the afternoon laying on the sofa downstairs. Our internet, land line telephone, and cable tv service were all out for most of the day (came back around 6:30 p.m.) - so I could not make the three phone calls I needed to get done (pharmacy, doctor's office and car service appointment). :P

By dint of much hard rest and sloth, I finally got over the headache, though - one accomplishment. :) I got out the Storybook moleskein I am working on and added several pages of hand-written text to my story ... a very-much-in-progress project which may take me a couple months more to finish, dysgraphic as I am. I forget what the deadline is but toward the end of this year (if my memory is correct - always a problem for me:). Another Art House project.

Since I don't have my camera here at home, you'll have to do without a photo of my writing (I really would not want to damage your eyesight, anyway, it's not a pretty sight:). Managed about two hand written pages which is quite a lot for me!

:) Linda