Back to landscapes

I don't remember now what drove me to make a new landscape. But whatever the reason it happened at a good time. I had just been asked about teaching a landscape class here and was really not sure how I was going to answer. I was not enthusiastic about the idea of teaching the class again. But while I was working on this new landscape I realized that part of the problem was that it had been so long since I had made a landscape using the techniques that I teach. While I was laying out the fibers I found myself thinking of ways to explain the hows and whys of what I was doing so a student could understand. I started to get excited again about being able to share my knowledge and watching students when they get that "aha" moment.
So I have scheduled a class for May 4th and 5th. If anyone is interested in taking this class please email me at dchristianart@gmail.com for details.
Here is the landscape that I was working on.

It is another piece that I don't consider finished but I am getting to be OK with that. If I can get out of a piece what I wanted to feel, or learn, or express, does it matter if I take it as far as I feel it could go ; especially when there are so many more ideas to try?
And I have been trying quite a few new things. I wanted to participate in the "Sister Mississippi Textile Fiber Arts Project" and made a piece that is inspired by the colors of water. (Use the link above for more information about this project and the water walk.) Making images of water is not new for me. On my Facebook page  I created a photo album of just pieces that were inspired by or contained images of water and found I had 34 pieces to show. For the Mississippi piece I experimented with embeding some cording that we have here from when my mother did macrame. I am really pleased with all the textures in the piece.

 

I also did some new-to-me dyeing using ice and snow. I got some wonderful results.

The center of that piece had this image of a butterfly in it.

I had a piece of silk yardage that I dyed at the same time as the green scarf above. I decided to use it as the trial to see how the pattern felts up. I also wanted to see if the dye stayed put....it didn't...but I still like the piece of felt. I will need to research more about how to set the dyes. Doing this piece I was thinking that I should change my business name to 'Felt Impatient' because I rushed through much of it and as a result it is not a nice even piece of nuno felt. Taking my time might have helped when I was reading the instructions about this type of dyeing too!

The other bit of felting I did was the result of cleaning up the 'studio' for the Easter holiday meal. I had a bunch of silks out and while I was sorting the scraps into colors I decided that some of the bits were too small to keep. But instead of throwing them away I decided to throw them on a pile of wool and felt them in. The result was a piece like the one I sent to the Sister Mississippi project.

Sometimes it is fun just to experiment with colors and textures without aiming to make anything in particular.

Spring-ing

It is that time of year when things start revving up, an awakening, not just in the external world but in my mind as well. My thoughts jump from one thing to the next with lightening speed, and each new idea or task MUST be acted on NOW!! The creative thoughts can be like a bombardment of the brain. I love the feeling of coming alive again and beginning to have some energy and desire to take things on. However, I do not enjoy the rapid cycling of mood, the turn from joy to despair can happen in an instant that comes along with it. It is the time for me to be on the look out for the signs that a real mania may be taking root. The tricky thing with mania is that it feels so good and energetic that, like taking a drug that you intellectually know it is dangerous and bad for you, the allure is really strong.
 
So far the desire to clean and organize has been the strongest and I have been managing to keep it real as far as not starting too many projects. One of those things has been a sudden need to get the old family photos scanned and put into boxes according to generations/eras. I am able to find some reasoning to why I feel the need to do this now. One reason is that Dad has been looking for an old photo of an ancestor for a relative that is doing research into family genealogy. This relative has a photo copy of the picture from my mother that she made long ago. We are not even sure that the photo is here. The other reason is that I finally hooked my scanner up to my laptop. One of the good things about this side of the bipolar spectrum is that I tend to tackle those things that have been on the 'someday' list for years. So not only have I been organizing and scanning these types of photos...

(Little me with my big sisters circa bbb. (before baby brother))

 My grandmother, great grandmother, and great great grandmother and family

 My dad with his elf ears

 My mom (the phrase at the top is part of a family story)

 Yours truly in first grade...I think

And some unknown person in a fading photo that HAD to be scanned before it totally disappeared!
And if I am preserving photos I MUST finally deal with the photos that were 'rescued' from a fire in the early 1980's that burned our ancestral farm.

And since the weather is getting a bit nicer and we have more daylight hours I am spending a lot more time outdoors. Pruning the fruit trees...

 ...building more of my stick fence with those prunings...

and guarding the chickens since we had another attack by the hawk. Of course it killed my favorite chicken of all time, my Silkie, Grumpykins. Here she is as a day old peep, showing why my daughter gave her that name.

She was one of the two moms and the other mother hen and the chicks would not go to bed that night. They were looking for her and even when I scooted them into the coop they checked each nest just in case she was there. That made me cry. I still miss her. 

 But I did not get chickens just to keep them locked in a cage so I do what I can to protect them and just have to take these loses as part of the circle of life. We all have to eat. Thankfully I scared the hawk off before it got a bite of its meal. I hope it will go back to looking for dinner elsewhere so both the chickens and I relax a bit when they are out and about. Thankfully I have such a good rooster in Fred...

he spots that hawk and warns his girls with three distinct noises. One that means 'keep your eyes on the skies girls', one that means 'run for your lives', and another that means 'hide and be quiet'. He often spies the hawk and the only way I can find it in the sky is by looking where he is looking. Sadly, the two mommas and chicks had formed their own rooster-less group, and it is possible that Grumpykins died trying to save her chicks, who would have been easier prey.
The little bit of felting that I did do was to work on another illuminated piece. Since the house was still fairly clean from my Felt-Together weekend I invited another friend to come play felting. Chris and I became friends years ago; see this post for the back story. She worked on making a vest and I worked on laying out this...

which may be a candle holder...

or maybe a lampshade...

or maybe it will just stay like this.

And continuing with getting together with friends I also had a wonderful time going to the bulb show at Smith with one of my old class mates, my forever friend Kristen. We met in at an orientation luncheon given for the Adas (aka women who are going to Smith at a nontraditional age) and we have remained friends ever since, even though we may go for a very long time without any contact. Those are forever friends...the kind of people you feel a strong connection with right from the moment you meet that never goes away.
Here she is 'photo bombing' (popping in to someone's photo of something else) something which I have never heard of. In this case her appearance made the photo better.

These beautiful flowers at the bulb show...

inspired me to start this piece using colors that are very unusual for me to work with.

It is still very much a work in progress.  It needs a bit more fulling but I am adding some stitching first. I am not sure where I am going with this or if it will get done or just added to the pile of UFOs. Especially since Spring is springing.

P.S. Talking a lot more than usual esp. quickly is another sign of mania...is the same true of posting on my blog?

Friends, Felting, and Fun.

The Felt-Together with friends was just what I needed; I think it was for some of the others as well. I always have this weird thought before hand whenever I invite someone that they really don't want to come here but that they feel obligated because I invited them. I know it is not true but I still felt so good when everyone was thanking me for organizing this get together. It was a really good time! For these Felt-Together's there is a core group of five friends and we invite other friends to join us for the weekend of fun and felting. Since I have a small space for working in I only invite two additional friends. This time there were only five of us but it was just right. The alternate friend who came this time was Robin's sister Susan who was the spitfire of the group. It was so much fun to have these two sisters interacting with the typical big sister vs little sister banter and hear the family stories. I love the Blakney family!

Most of us worked on small jewelry-ish projects. My friend Joei worked on one of her nuno collage images. Unfortunately I only took one photo the entire time.

I did some experimenting. I had several yarns that I had never tried, one of which was a so called eyelash yarn. My beautiful (inside AND out) friend Cher wore a lovely felt garment that had some of that type of yarn. I loved the effect when it is covered with a layer of wool. Some of the fringe ends come through the wool layers and some form loops.

I also experimented more with some wire mesh I bought on clearance a while ago. I really did not know then if it would felt in but it was shiny and on clearance so how could I resist? It works amazingly well. 

I used some to encase a glass gem that was another long ago shiny MUST purchase.

I also experimented with felting the pieces of silk that I painted and silk screened a bit ago. I really like that the inks act as a kind of resist so where there is more paint fewer of the fibers come through. This means that the piece can have several different textures even though it is one piece of cloth and one kind of wool. This will definitely get played with some more.

My bestest friend Joei spent an extra night here and when she asked me what I wanted to do next I told her I needed to start a bigger project. If the studio stayed too clean I would not be inclined to do anything since I would not want to make a mess. I seem to need a certain amount of mess to be able to create. Too much and I can't find anything...too little and I don't want to get anything out. I got out all my white stuff to make some lampshades. This had been on my to-do list for a long time...ever since taking the Illuminated Felt class with Sharon Costello. I love the light that comes through the felt, and we had some pretty ratty looking shades here that would be good to practice with. I finished two. I am happy with the felt but need to work on my proportions and shaping. Looking around at other lampshades here I realized that they all look odd if you are looking at the lamp and shade as separate pieces. These were stiffened with  Golden GAC 400 medium made for stiffening textiles.

I will end this post with photos of those growing chicks. I am really hoping that they are hens but I am starting to see signs that that may not be. But I won't really know unless they crow! They sure are interesting looking with a mix of Silkie feathers with Ameraucana feathers. 

This photo looks like they are getting a talking to from one of the moms.

Late again posting and not much felting.

I sat down to write a blog post last weekend but got interrupted and never got back to it. (I got interrupted two more times since). I have realized that I am doing the same thing with my blog that I used to do with writing letters. Yes, I am old enough to remember when we used to write full page letters, sometimes many pages. I tended to put off my letter writing because I felt like I needed a big chunk of time to do it in, and had to be in the right mood, and...well you get the picture. And the longer I put it off the more there is to say to catch up on all the 'doings'. So today I am just going to bang a post out and not worry too much about what it says or how it is written. I also have not been felting much or taking many photos and the photos are the best part.
The non-creative, non-felty things I have been doing include taking care of (aka just watching) these new chicks; though with two mommas they don't need any watching.

Even though they are much more feathered out now they still get cold and have to snuggle under mom sometimes...

The cold weather has been making chicken and duck care a bit more of a chore because of the frozen waterers and not being able to use the hose to fill them. The other day the ducks got fed up enough with not being able to properly bathe that one of them tried this...

That was funny but this is just all kinds of wrong.

 

Along with the cold dealing with the clean up after the blizzard (named Nemo by the national weather but Charlotte here in CT) took a lot more time than I expected. We got just under 2 feet of snow and not much wind so we were quite lucky. 

 I had quite a time digging a path to the door of the chicken coop, first I had to 'shovel' the trees!

 I don't think I have ever seen the front porch covered this much with snow.

Here is proof that ducks are dumber than chickens. The chickens did not even cross the threshold but the ducks tried to fly/swim through the snow as though there was some place without snow to go to, quacking loudly the entire time. I had to pick one of them up to put it back in the coop when it became exhausted with the effort.

With Dad's help I finished mounting my Tiffany window piece just in the nick of time to enter it in to the West Hartford Art League's 'Out of the Loop' fiber art show.

When I dropped it off I was a bit disgusted to see that one of my former students submitted the piece that she had made in my class. This is the third time that has happened even though I tell students that this is not allowed since the piece is in part mine. Many exhibits state in their rules that pieces done in a workshop or with an instructor are not allowed. Sigh, I guess that is just the risk of sharing knowledge and techniques, but that does not make it right.
While I was down in that area of the state I indulged in a trip to Dick Blick, a large art supply store. Among the items I purchased were fabric printing inks. My mother used to do silk screening and we still have all the tools. I only did a bit of experimenting but I can see a lot of possibilities for making patterned silk to use in my felting. I really want to explore the ways that the transparent inks overlap. It is similar to watercolors in that way. I played with monoprinting too and loved that. Before I do any more I want to see how the fabric felts in.

The one bit of felting I did was rather involved and kind of mixed media. I have been wanting to do a still life. But since I have a habit of not just trying one new thing in a piece I also explored painting on the felt....and I did more exploring of my idea of creating a kind of relief picture. The piece is also about art vs. craft. What is it that makes one thing automatically considered ART? Is it the medium? There seems to be a kind of hierarchy in the art world with sculpture and oil painting being at the top. A still life is such a classic genera of the painting realm. In art history it is easy to see how this attitude could have developed. A friend who bought one of my pastel paintings often asks me if I have done any more painting and says he doesn't 'get' my felt work. I will admit that this attitude has changed some over the years; and that even I have the same prejudice. That is why I was so thrilled when one of my felt pieces got an award in a traditional 'fine art' show.
I am quite pleased with how the piece came out, especially since I was not looking at an actual still life and was just working from memories, but in the photo below you will see that my critics are not too sure about it.

 It is hard to see in the photo but the vase and table edge come out from the background by about an inch and a couple of the pussy willow stems are fully three dimensional. I painted the edges of the canvas and some of the edges of the felt as well.

The rest of my time has been spent doing some much needed cleaning and organizing here. I decided to schedule a 'felt-together' with friends to give me incentive to do those tasks that can always be put off until tomorrow. So this weekend I will get to do some felting and definitely have some fun.