awesome diagram. ‘Scuse norty bits.
I’m just back from a school excursion to Sydney for the Biennale, so I’m too buggered (and in demand from the small blonde person) to write a proper post. Had a ball though :)
|
||||
|
just popping in to say I’m LOVING school even though it’s wiping me out too much to post. I’ll try & remember to take a camera in so I can show what we’re all playing with. I also need to take some pics of what my daughter’s been up to – last weekend she suddenly decided she wanted her nana to show her how to embroider, and she really did a lovely job. It’s not really surprising; she used to beg needle & thread from me (I’d give her blunt darning needles & plastic canvas at first, but she was careful even at 3-4 or so so I gave her real ones and proper fabric) so she could “sew sumpin’ like mama”, so I guess she was bound to do something more serious one day! okay I’m going to take my poor arthritic, aching-from-cutting-cardboard-for-embossing-plates fingers to bed. Something more exciting soon, promise :) In case you missed the attempts at resurrection with accompanying explanation: somebody hacked the blog and replaced it with one of those wanky little graffiti pages bragging about how much the hacker roolz. I reinstalled several times, but every time I uploaded a backup (all from pre-hacking, I’m not that stoopit) I’d get locked out again. Tedious as all get out. FINALLY got it to work by editing the hell out of the SQL, and then when I went to upload all the image files I had (I THOUGHT!) downloaded ,discovered I only had some of them. I do not know why. I can only assume that the download was interrupted without me noticing. So, at the moment there are only a bunch of images from 2006, and you’ll have to bear with me while I find & upload the missing pics and then edit the links to them. It doesn’t bear thinking about, how long that’ll take. I really hate hackers. This will take even longer than it otherwise might have because (ta da!) I’ve gone back to school. A long time ago and far far away I did about half of a diploma of fine arts. This year I started again – I was going to try and join yr 2 of a program that started last year, but in the end opted for starting over. Largely because it’s been 18 yrs since I was anywhere near a printing plate or an etching press, so revision I needz it! Anyway, I am loving it. LOVING. Awesome teacher, really nice group of people, and most of them are even “mature age” so I don’t feel like an old fart in a sea of teens. Most of them also seem to have done a cert IV or something last year too, and even the two youngsters are fresh from years of highschool arts, so there are no real newbies and everybody’s just leaping in. It’s pretty exciting :) And tiring; man I’m exhausted, especially after the two days on-campus. And drawing is totally kicking my arse – if you’ve never done life drawing on an easel you have no idea (and I’d forgotten!) how physical it is. Onyroad. So, you can probably expect to see more non-textile art here for a while, at least until I con them into giving me the run of the place so I can do some printing on fabric etc ;) My imagination’s gone a little wild with possibilities … even in the appalling heat of late … I just don’t seem tohave a lot to show for it! Some gifts, so you won’t be seeing those for a while, some random stuff, some xmas stuff, and other than that it’s been experiments (some failed, many worked – so far – but are stage 1 of 3 or something) and doing some mini postcard workshops and the quilters newsletters and working on the website and so on. I made some gorgeous silk fusion and not-silk fusion (hemp, paperbark, pima cotton, soy silk, wool, etc) to be used for some small works, but I don’t have pics of any of it yet (not sure there’s much point … silk fusion doesn’t look nearly as awesome in pics as it does in real life, and you’ve all seen it before). I’ve done quite a bit of hand stitching – nothing spectacular, but certainly enjoyable. I was totally head down bum up getting work finished for the upcoming exhibition, until Judypaint rang me to say “um, er, um, I’m an idiot, I booked the gallery for NEXT year not this” … I was so very glad I hadn’t gone ahead and ordered the roll of batting and other stuff I’d procrastinated on that day! lol So now I get a whole year to finish what I started and also do some work that I had wanted to include but knew wouldn’t get done by deadline. Yesterday I dyed two of at least 4 pieces of fabric for a series that’s been percolating for quite a while and finally got sketched and annotated recently; am hanging out to get started on those. I also got stuck into the official website, which is painful given that I’ve forgotten more than I remember about php and so on … then I had to stop that to concentrate on the newsletter and dyeing orders and a workshop, so I didn’t get very far on my modifications :p Have I mentioned before how bad I am at juggling? Bad. I am not the kind of woman people point to as proof of that theory about women and multitasking. I am a bury-myself-in-it girl, which is not at all possible with kids and dogs and phones and so on, and the older I get the less able I am to get back on track. I’ve been thinking about talking to the doc about my meds, see if there’s any chance trying something different might de-fog my brain. I did used to be sort of smart and even quick-witted at times, believe it or not! Here are a few glimpses of the WIP in the workroom …
FTR, the above are all roughly FQ-sized, and the below are F16ths (from the same FQ, actually, so you can see how hopeless my camera is colourwise!)
I feel like that guy on the xkcd comic, the most boring [edit - least interesting, sorry] guy you’ll ever meet:
… okay, so I’ve got more than four posts, but I feel a bit like all I do is apologise for not posting more, lately (and now I have a complex about how boring I am; THANKS SO MUCH XKCD!)
Off to bed. Doing a mini workshop/demo thing tomorrow, sat & sun at the Coffs quilt exhibition (at the racecourse, near the airport, if you’re in the vicinity) … don’t ask me how I ended up being first every day; Wendy Martin doesn’t know me very well hey ;) Bleh I’m nervous. I did finish it in plenty of time (shut up Judy) but only got the label put on today, and I didn’t want to post pics until they’d seen it. Now they have, so here it is:  The Lion Sleeps Tonight Hiding in the quilting are a couple of crabs (he’s a Cancer) & a couple of other critters, lots of leaves & a tree or two, som bamboo & grass & a hut on stilts, and some lyrics from one of the most awesome songs ever. a few detail pics:
 giraffe  hefalunk  forggle  [/caption] label
now I just need to figure out how to quilt it … and these guys at least have a watery home, even if I haven’t decided what’s happening next: the girls were over today for our Saturday gig, all but me (and Loz,who wasn’t well so just enjoyed the company) working on a Ricky Tims convergence top. Wendy took off before I could take a pic, but here are the other three: Judy (auditioning frame fabric):
Rosemary (more subtle and moody IRL):
Mum:
I finally got a bit of a spurt on with the baby quilt – I’ve been stalled on it for various reasons, so I spent the last few days fiddling with strips of fabric on the design wall while I listened to the river roar until things started to click. I now have many many strips of many many fabrics which I’ll have to come up with an alternative use for heh. There’s still applique to go in the two empty panels, not to mention quilting etc, but it’s looking orright, yay & whew.
heading over to mum’s now for dad’s birthday dinner and whatever … an exciting evening of TV, no doubt :)
Anyway, so, bah. Miss E is sick, and we’re having weather of biblical proportions AGAIN, and my house looks like a special kind of bomb – maybe the opposite of those smart bombs that only take out people? – hit it, so I’ve been cheering myself up a little with some lairy fishes. No idea what I’m going to do with them – the main idea was to showcase our fabric for shows – but there’ll probably be patterns/kits for sale once I figure it out. I’m not sure whether it’s ok to post a pic of the challenge entry, so I won’t for now.
not that I don’t enjoy occasionally reading about the minutiae of other people’s lives, including what they eat, but this rather tickled my funnybone.
After dropping E off at school and coming home to rinse the sweltering ick off from swapping out the home readers (OMG with the muggy today, bleargh), I made my way down to the showgrounds for the senior cits … whatever it is, show thingy. Expo or something I think they’re calling it, mostly an informational thing but with some stuff for sale. U3A and various oldefarte activity displays as well as a show of art by various locals (seniors, one assumes), people from the council & the library & centrelink, a security systems guy and a woman who vanished before I got around to seeing what she was selling (hrm, maybe that’s where ma got the scooter infobag?). Oh, and quilties, of course, which is why we were there. A bunch of the girls were putting together charity quilts, and they had some stuff for sale and an assortment of quilts on display.
this is very cool. If I can get my hands on some of that golden digital medium everybody’s talking about, I’m going to have a lot of fun with this toy. how awesome would it be if I was one of those people who can get three quilts, two totes and a four-course dinner all done in the same day? Unfortunately I’m utterly not that person; I’m the sort of person who redid the same blanketyblank load of smelly flood-soaked linens for the 3rd time hoping that it is indeed the charm, also washed the girlchild’s school uniforms and hoped the stinky linens haven’t contaminated the machine (it appears not, but I guess we’ll see if she starts emanating basement funk when she gets all hot & sweaty), sighed a lot while accomplishing very little in the way of kitchen-tidying, made one one-pot dish serve two meals, tidied the workroom so Mum & Laurel have room to play tomorrow, and wasted time on facebook. Oh, and got another zebra done.
here they are together on the background block. Probable background block. Maybe. Did I mention this is all seat of the pants? It’s all seat of the pants. That block may go back to being vertical, but if it stays horizontal, does anyone have an opinion as to the posing of the equines (are zebras equines? Surely they are. Whatever, I can’t be bothered googling)
or do they just look bad on the spotty background and I should save that for something less eyemangling like monkeys? the view from my workroom this morning:
Town’s going to be under water by this arv, not sure how bad or how long for. If the bloody rain doesn’t stop soon, maybe days. There’s been something like 450mm in the last 4 days, and that’s just here – it’s been raining upriver too (they’re already flooded in) and I hear all the way out to Armidale, so the poor old Macleay is carrying a whooooole lotta runoff. And occasional bits of tree. SO glad we’re up on the hill :) making surprisingly fast progress on the underlying structure. Who knew you could wing it when piecing? chucked a strip on either side of one of the wonko slices.
made a few blocks for possible inclusion:
playing with layout ideas ..
that pretty much worked as intended. Which is kind of a shock, really. And if I think about it very much part of me wants to have a fit of the vapours (uneven!! wonky!! unmeasured!! unmatched!!! besides, nobody gave instructions so how do you know you’re doing it RIGHT??!) so I’m pretty chuffed that I just did it. Took me all day to work up to “just” doing it, of course, but even so. Before trimming on top, after on the bottom – about 40″ long I think (haven’t measured).
Unfortunately we had a bit of a casualty while I was sewing – her highness is very enamoured of my new teeny iron, and begged to be allowed to iron some ‘terial. After trying to drum it in how careful she’d have to be, I let her have at it, and she did really well for about an hour before ironing the knuckle of her thumb. She took it about as well as you’d expect a highly-strung drama queen with a cold to, so we spent about an hour on the couch & then her bed while she screamed and wailed and sobbed. Teeny blister. I wonder if she’ll pay attention now about the oven and stoves and stuff? |
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2010 doodleblog.kaliane.com - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Anyway … erm. Have been a little busy. Sewing, shows and show prep, trying to get two new patterns ready for sale (finished <– this one tonight. It needs blocking, can you tell? lol), so on & so forth. Oh, that’s right, and messing around with the club newsletter, and dyeing SO very much fabric (and good golly miss molly is some of it to die for. I like it when my own fabric makes my mouth water! *G*) and trying very hard not to freak right the hell out about having agreed to participate in a month-long exhibition with 3 other textile artists. There, cat’s out of the bag, now I HAVE to do it! lol 
I rather fell off the blogging wagon there, didn’t I? Seems to have been one thing after another for nearly two months now, and I sit down in front of the computer with about enough brainpower to play a mindless facebook game or two. Birthdays, visits, two shows, I woke up one morning to my laptop giving a very good impersonation of an expensive doorstop and while it’s come good I expect it to be cactus any day now, my usual panicky rush re deadlineblah blah blah, and then to top it all off mumble suddenly started giving a distressingly convincing impersonation of a cat dying of old age and I had to butch up & take her to the vet. I buried her next to Black Cat over at mum & dad’s place. She was super old and was definitely OLD for the last couple of months so it wasn’t unexpected, but it’s definitely a bit sad and it’s very weird having no critters at all. Anywhere. Aaron & Stacey took birdiegirl back, and even Boris is off with Ross & Lisa, so there’s not even a stupid nephewdog to pat. It feels wrong – I can’t think of the last time I didn’t own a pet, even if my accommodations meant it was temporarily housed elsewhere.The idea of getting another critter so soon after mumble’s departure also feels wrong though, so I guess I’m putting up with wrong for a while.
my baby girl turned six yesterday. She woke me up over the moon with excitement, opened presents, had breakfast, opened more presents, I finished the skirt I’d drafted wrong ~6 months ago so she could wear it to lunch, where she got more presents. We went shopping and socialising after lunch, then home for a few more gifts from her dad, dinner, and a few hours of playing with her new books. Very cool day, all in all.
Mudder figured it would be dead, so we took a bunch of sewing stuff down with us (it wasn’t bad at all really, esp given that the stall was free! heh). She made her first postcard with her first freemotion quilting the other day (and I forgot to get a pic, dammit) and wanted to make some more, so that’s what she did. Despite having left her darning foot at home and nobody else having one that fitted :/ You can do a fairly convincing landscapey-wriggley-lines thing with an ordinary foot though, esp if you lessen the foot pressure, so that’s what she did. I ironed a bunch of scraps to batting, and when she went off to talk I had a crack at the machine and made the centre of this. It was going to be an abstract, just colour exercise really, but it kind of turned into a tree. Well, a bit of one. So then I decided I didn’t want to cut it down so I’d make it up to journal size, which I did, but then I trimmed chunks off because the wide frame was overpowering the centre a bit. I used a lot of holy fabric scraps in this one, and I’m pretty pleased with the result. I may add a little more quilting, but the binding’s on so I guess it’s at least temporarily finished … 
CHITCHAT