I ended up choosing “Firestorm” and “Sentinel”. I really liked Conflagration right up until I said it out loud, at which time I decided ew, it would really suck if I had to say it out loud very often. It might not sound awful in everybody’s voice, but it certainly does in mine. I got a phone call today because I’d left something off my entry form, which other than making it obvious to yet another stranger that I’m a total dill was happy confirmation that my package arrived in time.
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thankyou to everyone who took the time to comment or email, and for the suggestions. Thanks to Brenda too, for helping me figure out categories so I could concentrate on the naming conundrums. Somebody emailed me saying “I have always believed titles should give the viewer a clue to the inner meaning of the art work”, which is how I feel about it. A key, perhaps, or something like a koan. I like input from other people (on everything, not just names) because it externalises the arguments for & against and sets me off on trails I may not have found on my own – I’m in my own head and my own company more than enough, and a little pushing & pulling from outside can really help clarify & focus. Left to my own devices I take FOREVER to work through the process, Alison:
I hadn’t really thought about them as similar (well, briefly on the surface like “hmm, is it weird to enter two tree things in one show when it’s not like I do trees all the time?), but I do have a bit of a thing about trees. Individually they do “mean” to me life, and striving (and success), and accommodation/bounty, and shelter, and spirit, just for starters. More than just symbolise, really; I’m a bit of an animist & have been known to talk to trees. Different trees feel like different things. That fig has always seemed to be watchful and waiting, something of a guardian or sentinel but just as much a waystation – it’s not in a forest, it’s on the edge of a cleared paddock by a main road on the edge of a suburb. It’s not alone, but I never properly registered the other trees along the fenceline a bit further up the hill; this one just commands attention (mine, anyway; I know several people who’ve been driving past it for umpteen years & never noticed it, which just boggles my tiny mind heh). Hmm. Sentinel. [TA: ha - thanks Patty! I just realised that was your suggestion; it snuck in and took root obviously] Trees en masse, “the bush” as ecosystem/organism, is different; more secrets, and much more about the cycle of devastation and rebirth. As Susan said:
The bushfires (and any regeneration cycle springing from them) are much more symbolic than whatever you’d call my relationship with individual trees. Careless/callous assholes perpetrating devastating arson and natural events leading to disaster, being engulfed and consumed by a completely unpredictable & uncontrolled process which is contributed to by aspects of your own makeup, the desolation of the aftermath, waiting for rain in an endless drought, overnight lushness amongst all the scars and deadwood. The older the forest is the more scarred it is but the more stubbornly it clings to the expectation of regeneration (after writing all this, I really want to do a black black black burned scarred stunted piece now with a tiny tiny glimmer of hope heh). I’m really very grateful to everyone who’s contributed to this process, because it has definitely helped me figure out what was going on in my head regarding these pieces. I think I am going to go with Conflagration for the bushfire. An old friend suggested Bounty, which made me go to Rare Bounty, but I stopped liking that after a couple of hours. I’m also rather keen on Macrophylla Microcosm. Sentinel is sort of growing on me, but seems a bit limited … plug it into the thesaurus and one of the results is Custodian, which has rather more of the content I wanted. Right now I’m inclined to go with either that or MM. [ETA: and now I'm tending more towards Sentinel] ok I need help coming up with undaggy titles for these quilts (as yet unfinished, but the entries for the june show are due this week). You’ve all seen them before (well, the regulars have). 1)
it’s a bushfire, in case that’s not obvious from the pic at this size. There are more detail pics here if you want a better look. [ETA more info: this one is almost certainly the first in a series. It may be a very small series, but a series nonetheless (I have another piece of fabric folded up waiting for space on the design wall). I may end up going for something like "Bushfire #1" or "Firestorm #1" ... unless I take the position that it's part of a "seasons" series, which to me means fires or floods (because in Kempsey shire we have daily - hourly, even - microseasons with baseline tendencies toward cold or hot rather than proper spring, winter, autumn, summer). Anyway, if I decided to go that way, I could go with the more poetic first impulse of "Fire & Rain #1" ... thoughts? ] 2)
crappy photo sorry, need to get a better one. Massive fig tree w specimen boxes below – figs in one, leaves etc in others, probably some “drawings” of fig wasps etc in one if my idea works and possibly a spotter’s worksheet for the critically endangered Coxen’s fig parrot. [ETA: Not part of a series. I know there's another one based on the same tree, but that's a very different work. Unless I do go ahead and create quilts based on all the trees I've fallen in love with, which would leave me wanting some kind of "Tree #1" type title I guess. My brain's totally riffing on a thesaurus theme based around trees & semi-rural landscapes ... something based on the "arbor" prefix would do nicely. Arbor Real? I think I read too many Xanth books when I was younger ... I've had a suggestion of Fig. A ... I'm somewhat tempted by "see Fig. A", if I could count on the italics being preserved ... too punny?] anyone got any ideas? This crap is why people call things “untitled #32″ heh Ma finished it yesterday, learned how to email photos from [censored] iPhoto, but I ended up all narcoleptic on the chair here and went to bed at bloody 8.30 or something (take note folks, that’s like 3 times this week before 10. IT’S NOT RIGHT I TELL YOU) instead of posting photos. I did manage appropriate gushing before falling off my chair though.
Cool, eh? If you’re going to Melbourne AQS you might even see it live heh. (thankyou to both Tanya – who’s been a bit of a lone voice in the wilderness round here lately heh – and faerydi for the nice comments!) As for me, I’ve done sod all passing for useful but housework since whenever it was I finished the quilting. In my own peculiar housework-avoidant kind of way (for eg, purging the pantry to avoid doing the dishes. Doing the laundry to avoid the dishes. ). That & feel sorry for myself, what with the alien in my sinus cavities and stuff. Well, I have been thinking about various projects – and by that I mean Thinking About, plotting and planning and scribbling and stuff, not the “thinking” that is merely sitting around with your thumb up yer bum Not Doing – and I did start an “I am” (which feels a bit shallow and trite after Tanya’s powerful effort), and I have read a few books to the girlchild and so on. If the stupid plumber shows up tomorrow (stupid trees, stupid pipes, bah!) I can run some ebay stuff to the PO, and then I think I need to knock a few postcards etc out before finishing the bushfire. I’m looking forward to Wednesday & my darling girl being in daycare so I can dedicate the whole day to work. and for once I’m not scratching my head at the results. It’s a little embarrassing, but I can’t help kinda believing in wishing on stars and chasing those “santa claus” seedheads. </dork> (if only it were that easy heh) I’m definitely not well, JFTR. Dammit. I think one of the creatures from Alien has taken up residence in my sinuses. I fully expect head-exploding gore at any moment if the faceache is any indicator. Not fair, I’ve been being so good with the eating and sleeping lately :( Mum’s making another bag, and I got nominated to quilt the front & back panels. I started on the back so I could figure out what the hell I’m doing before I have to tackle the front, which is made of a really yummy multicoloured bit of our fabric. Purple we got more of, you know?
note half-unpicked mess in the bottom left. Didn’t work so changed tack, but meanwhile freemotion quilting is a total shit to unpick so it’s probably going to take as long to unpick that little section as it took to quilt the whole thing lol. unpicked & finished, & the front quilted as well. By lunchtime, even. Sent off with Dad a few minutes ago so mum can make it up, along with all the threads I used & some rattail etc I happened to have in a delicious purple.
If you’re attending the Melbourne quilt show next week and you happen to see a lady walking around with a bag that looks suspiciously like this, that’ll be my mum. Say hi :)
stupid headache. Ow. It’s been raining rather a lot up this way. Not quite nonstop, but as good as (sudden flashbacks to living in the heart of Sydney, and the rainrainrain and the chill and the weird combination of melancholy & excitement it used to make me feel). To combat the chill, I dug the bushfire piece out from the
just got a bit left to do above the trees and then I can figure out how I’m going to finish it off. I originally intended to frame it (probably in black) but I’m pretty much off that idea now. Whether I add a border or not, it’ll have a facing rather than a binding. Right now I’m off to bed, cos it’s 3.17 am and I’m working at the shop tomorrow *yawn* SLOOOOOOOOW. That is all. Oh wait – spreadable REAL vintage cheese is surprisingly yum. Especially on Wholegrain Ryvita with soy & linseed. *urp* That is all. Once upon a time I was all pagan and shit. Well, I still am probably (heathen, at any rate), but back then I was really into the whole shamanism cosmic crystal woo-woo thing as an active spiritual practice. I used to make beautiful tools & toys for other pagans too, but the goes around never came around & I had to fold it (and stuff it – the entire business remnants, crystals, leather, sticks, bones, feathers, shells, etc & so on – into a series of boxes, from which I still occasionally mine something useful therefore with which I am still encumbered). ANYWAY. So I had a thing for Manannan, which when I wasn’t paying attention expressed itself in a liking for very unsuitable “unreachable” boys (bloody Geminis), which was kind of annoying given that behaviour & personality traits acceptable in a tricksy god of the sea are just plain aggravating in human men. He was mine & I was his, at least for a while, and it was in his most playful form I knew him & called him Ghilla. He was fond of going about back in the dim bright days as Gilla Decair, the “bad servant” (he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy! heh), teaching & learning & playing tricks on the overinflated. Capricious as he can be on the surface, he’s deep and enduring and nourishing and supportive, and I obviously still love the old sod. Art & spirit are apparently inextricable in my life – one leads to the other, always. I’ve been quite determinedly non-spiritual for a very long time after a near-mortal wounding, and for much of that time was also not practicising art in any form. If whatever creative pursuits I toyed with threatened to become Real, I vamoosed off down some other pathway (this is proving an incredibly hard habit to break, in case you hadn’t noticed) or distracted myself with the vast timewasting black hole that is the internet (again with the hard habit to break!). So I started out on the quilting thing all like ooh pretty colours!! and progressed pretty quickly to ok I’m just not whatever brand of insane is required to do all this piecing malarkey and slowly – inTERMinably slowly – stumbled off an unmarked path towards Art. Bugger Rome: all roads lead to Art, no matter how much I squish unruly innardsly bits. This of course woke the sleeping giant, eventually. I think I’m okay with that now, possibly even welcome it so long as my libido stays out of it all. Treading very carefully, though; I suspect I’m suffering the spiritual equivalent of osteoporosis nowadays, and I don’t want to be broken again. Why on earth am I boring you with all this? Well, because the danunda artquilty list is doing another journal challenge this year, and they’ve got a techniques and/or theme thang going on – individuals can do either, both, or neither. The Jan theme was “seasons” and the techniques were “Embellishment, Machine Embroidery, Free Motion Embroidery, Bobbin Thread, Buttons, Charms etc” … and the first thing I thought was “Sons of the Sea”. I hemmed & hawed all month trying to come up with something different, and after lots of big fat nothings finally decided that all RIGHT already, bloody Ghilla could come out to play. Cheeky bastard. So I started with a rough sketch in my notebook:
dug out a photo of the delicious Charlie Sexton & manipulated it a bit:
I wanted to address the pesky mischievous Ghilla, so he needed to be giving me the eye out from under those brows. Hunted around online for some eyes in roughly the right attitude & gave them to Charlie:
Looks right demented, don’t he? Serve him right for giving me grief. Printed him out on transparency film & did a water-mist transfer to my chosen fabric (will we talk about the 3 HORRIBLY dud attempts before the semi-successful one? Nah, let’s not):
After munging an attempt to fix/add the imperfect transfer, traced the main lines in photopaint & printed those out on regular paper so I could trace easier:
You can see I misaligned the eyes in my first attempt at tracing, so he’s not looking up at the viewer as intended. Oh well. Started sewing.
Lots of freemotion quilting, then I stopped to carve some letter stamps from erasers & stamped with silver fabric paint. Back to the machine & freemotion embroidered the eyes, did some too-white bobbin work (yummy chenille I never got round to dyeing), blended a bit with more threads, bridal tulle, and a buttload more stitching. Gave the whole lot a rub with more silver paint. He’s looking quite a bit lighter & frothier than I intended, but I’m not sure what to do about that (if anything). I’ve got some little glass marbly things that I think will be going in amongst all the surfy stuff (kind of like shisha mirrors), if I can figure out what the blazes I did with my nice sharp-pointed embroidery scissors. Any one of the half dozen pairs would do :/ He’s also wanting at least one triskelion (at least I am, having laboriously traced a bunch of original antiquities in coreldraw thankyouverymuch):
perhaps I can make/decorate a button or two? If nothing else, I’ve played with a bunch of new stuff in attempting to make this: bobbinwork, stamp carving, stamping on fabric, photo transfer, layering under tulle, rubbing paint over already-quilted surfaces (nifty effect). just spent several hours converting a sketch into a coreldraw file so I could print it out at size & see how insane I am to even think of it. I suspect I might be by the time it’s finished … but I do love being able to print out colouring-in pages, or just play with colour direct on the computer. I might play with it as a colouring exercise for a while before thinking seriously about trying to piece it … whatcha think?
This time on top of the china doll (one every year since she was born, and the girl does love her Beautiful Special Dolls) there was a PotC tin of biscuits (she saw the skull & crossbones and went “cooooool!” heh) and bags of various sorts filled with goodies – a pink handbag full of dried fruit & caramels, a koala pencil case with shiny new pencils, a tiny leather? handbag with chocolates. Judy gave her a gorgeous little pink poodle shoulderbag for xmas, so the child is well set for bags for the foreseeable future. Speaking of bags: mum got a bee in her bonnet about bags a while ago, which ended in us laying in a bunch of patterns from Studio Kat designs. Which resulted in me being roped into making a sample of the PortaPockets by the girls at lunch the other day. Well, I was thinking about making one for myself anyway because it’s a terrific idea, but I’ll blame them for the hell of it. The patterns are good, albeit bloody fiddly – I managed to get it sorted despite having a massively brainfarty sort of day involving things like carefully cutting pieces out on the fold and then absently, distracted by conversation, cutting through the folds … and let’s face it I’m not, frankly, good at following other people’s directions. I tend to leap ahead to where I THINK things are going, and sometimes go pfft I’m not doing X I’ll do Y instead, and then half an hour & a mile of thread later find myself saying “ohhhh, that’s why she said to do X” … it’s like being one of those annoying people who finish all your sentences but get it wrong every time. Well normally I’m not too bad at the guessing, but every single preconception I had about this pattern was wrong lol. Once I accepted that I just had to do as instructed (why else buy a pattern, after all? I’m such a dork lol) it went swimmingly. I even unpicked – yeah me, I unpicked – or redid the bits I stuffed up (like for instance stupidly making the elastic on the pockets tighter than suggested, what the hell was I thinking?) and turned a couple of other mistakes into features (inserting a contrasting strip into the pockets that were meant to be cut on the fold, for eg). I put a loop to snap my keys to and a strap for holding whatever instead of the cc holders, because ccs etc go in my purse not my bag (so does money, but I left the billfold/coin purse section in because you can always use a zippered compartment. If I were making it again, I’d probably make the compartment the full depth of the bag). Do people really transfer all their ccs etc from bag to bag every time they change their shoes? That would make me insane. Mind you, so would changing your bag because you change your shoes/outfit; I used to take a cute little bag if I went out on the town sans child, but that was the limit of my bag-changing habits. Who needs to drag a sketchbook, a first aid kit, an assortment of kid treats, a diary, a handful of writing/drawing implements, and the other random detritus that collects in my regular bag (ah, now there might be a rationale for regular bag changing …) along to go dancing/drinking etc? If you do get an urge to draw, well, that’s what coasters are for.
Oh, I also received some neat weird stuff I ordered a few weeks ago:
Making a mask/headpiece should be considerably easier with the head as a base, especially if I end up incorporating the crystal balls. The hair is frankly kind of disturbing. One of those things that is kind of cool in small quantities but creepy in bulk, like skeletons or dead trees. Big bag of hair. On my sewing table. Um. Weirdly goldish fake hair, lots of. I think I need to braid it up & hang it somewhere, which would still be creepy but in a way I might find more amusing. |
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The sequins don’t look pink in real life, JFTR. I honestly don’t know how people who make large hyperembellished quilts do it. This journal quiltie is like to kill me with the eyestrain and numb bum and crick in the neck and stuff. I was WIPED after today at the shop, where I filled in all quiet moments (of which there were many, today) with beading. Fell asleep on the couch around 7, woke up properly (ie, had been merely dozing between requests for this or that and random kiss attacks etc) around 10 with my poor girly sprawled elegantly on top of me, put her to bed & tried to catch up on email etc but gave up & went to bed at 11. Woke up at 3.50 with a crashing headache, which I really hope is just from overdoing the close work & not related to the oddly sore throat I developed for a while this afternoon.
Sequins, seed beads, shell discs, MOP button, glass pearls, glass half-marble thingies. Shell discs & glass thingummies are behind holes I cut with yet another pair of sharp-pointed scissors that I had to buy today because I still cannot find a single pair of the others. Holes are overedged with beads and/or some painted chenille.
now that’s out of the way I can get back to the bodice. I bought some beads for it (well, for the project; only the seed beads are likely to end up on the actual bodice) & dug out some more from the existing collection. I keep having little flashes of inspiration about headpieces and so on. 
10 (I think, I’ll have to look) little crystal balls I thought might make very cool-freakyweird eyeballs (one of which meantime makes a really neat distorting viewer)
a head which seems about the right size for the torso I’ve based the bodice on, and
6 metres of hair for Rapunzel stuff. 
CHITCHAT