The coded Hawthorne quote used:
Words – innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
January 11, Frame of Stitched Squares
Layout of Stitched Squares
January 24, In Progress–Squares in Each Row Stitched Together
January 28, Rows Stitched Together
To Do List:
Bind and Stitch Cotton Rope Border
Stitch Paper Backing to Piece Without Perforating the Paper
Quotes are randomly generated on the site and thought this one was fun.
Emma, Nicky, and Luke
Recently the expression, “beyond the pale” has been used numerous times in reference to numerous things said by the republican presidential candidate. Yes that is numerous and numerous.
I knew what “beyond the pale” meant in the context, but did not know the origin.
Of course I did a google search. I found this great site, The Phrase Finder.
According to the site, beyond the pale is defined as the following:
This ‘pale’ is the noun meaning ‘a stake or pointed piece of wood’, a meaning now virtually obsolete except as used in this phrase, but still in use in the associated words ‘paling’ (as in paling fence) and ‘impale’ (as in Dracula movies).
The space within the paling fence was safe. Beyond the pale, not so much. Unless, protection becomes a trap.
I do like sharp and pointy things, so I am delighted with the definition. Several years ago I made the series Tools for Rent. It consisted of 11 bronze daggers, each bound into a cedar box.
The Phrase Finder is a truly fun site to find meanings and origins of phrases you may be using and to find phrases you might like to add to your future conversations.
Pale is also a homophone (pail), so that could have possibly lead to some confusion. Loads of words when heard can be confused for other words.
A few confusion words in the previous paragraph:
so (sew)
Some (sum)
heard (herd)
for (four)
I will end with this quote from The Phrase Finder site bulletin:
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.
From Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Have you ever been standing in a shop looking at what is on the shelf a few feet away, suddenly someone walks in front of you, and in between you and the shelf? You step back, out of their way, because you were not seen. Have you ever walked up to an automatic door and found yourself standing there waiting for the door to open? Your presence was not recognized by a sensor. How many times have you touched your iPad screen to open an app and nothing happened? Could you be invisible?
Got to thinking about, well being invisible. And since most of the time I don’t really care if I am noticed, I started thinking about things of substance in nature that are hidden or invisible. Things that have an important function, but remain hidden to the casual viewer.
I am in the process of using plant parts that are typically hidden in my invisible series. The parts are beautiful, often with patterns imprinted on them as the result of their function in the life-cycle of the plants.
These are the interior bits of Pandorea jasminoides. I collected some pods that I thought would be fun to use. When I opened the pods and removed the seeds, I found these beautiful shields.
I recently purchased a Pandorea jasminoides, specifically to harvest the pods, seeds, and other interior bits. This is the first harvested pod.
The Pandorea jasminoides bits were soaked in a glycerin solution to make them more pliable and easier to stitch.
Code to be used on Pandorea jasminoides bits.
The Pandorea jasminoides bits were stitched with Alpaca Lace yarn. Each piece was stitched with a letter of the quote–accustomed to being invisible.
The current plan is to make a page with the coded pieces on one side and a bound small round mirror of the other side. I seriously thought about making knitted and fulled pages, but I am not pleased with the results, yet.
Decided to try using some embroidered pieces for the pages.
The right side has–take notice in code. Not sure that I like it.
Each embroidered piece is 45 squares (11.25″) wide and 58 squares (14.5″) high. The openness of the stitches is one of the reasons for using the roofing felt in between. I love roofing felt–the way it feels, smells, and looks. I started using roofing felt when I was investment casting. Some of the roofing felt that had been used in the casting process had lovely plaster stains. I liked the used roofing felt so much I used it in my Headbox series.
“Regret. It piles up around us like books we never read.”
…is a great line from the movie, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recuit.
A few other regret quotes I have accumulated–
“…stained dark with regret and long-time abandonment.”
from Painted From Memories by Barbara Forte.
“…anger dissolved in a sigh of regret…”
from Deceptive Cadence: The Virtuosic Spy by Kathryn Guare.
“…time of early evening when the world seems trapped in melancholy, and all its regrets for all its mislaid plans for the day spelled in the fading clouds…”
from Where She Went by Kate Walbert.
And from The Gray and Guilty Sea-An Oregon Coast Mystery by Scott William Carter.
“…no room for even a sliver of regret”
I ran across two words today that could be used in reference to the shocking statements made by the man in the lead to become the Republican candidate.
Paralogism–a piece of illogical or fallacious reasoning, esp. one that appears superficially logical or that the reasoner believes to be logical.
Paracosm–a detailed imaginary world involving humans and/or animals, or perhaps even fantasy or alien creations.
How can a man who wants to be the President of my country claim to want less government while attempting to make laws to restrict health care for women?
Today I was asked to make a red target icon that doesn’t look like the target used by Target. I googled archery targets to get a notion of what might be visually expected. I didn’t remember that the center of a target could be yellow.
Whenever I perform searches for work projects, I often receive hits that are of personal interest. Today I found arrows at the Museum of Anthropology, the University of Missouri. I made several series based on weapons, so I’m always delighted to see lovely artifacts that also have a dark edge to them. I especially like sharp pointy objects.
According to the site the artifacts are Javanese target arrows. The description states that the shafts are made of bamboo, a material that I have used quite often in my work. I found that it was a bit difficult obtaining the surface that I wanted until I hit on using heat. Beware though, bamboo can catch fire from the inside. Before you know it, your piece can be aflame.
I chose to use bamboo because it is a prolific grower, its cultural myths, and its use in a variety of rituals.
After I finished the icon job, I went out to water a newly planted hellebore. I noticed that the bottlebrush in the courtyard apparently doesn’t like its location. It is thrusting out from the house and in doing so appears to be using a bunny ornament as a support.
When I went back to proofing the database of thousands of words, I found a couple of interest–
antemeridian
of, relating to, or taking place in the morning
antefix
carved ornament at the eaves of a tile roof concealing the joints between tiles
I am addicted to Netflix streaming. Recently I listened to Next Stop Wonderland a film I viewed several years ago. I remembered liking the film for the dialog and the Bossa Nova sound track.
The dialog has some interesting notions–
“contemplate something beautiful”
“…it’s important to have some daily ritual in your life that gives it a sense of consistency.”
Reading has always been an important part of my life. I like to start the day reading something to set my day. At the close of the day I enjoy reading something as well.
One of my favorite scenes in Next Stop Wonderland occurs in a bookshop. Erin, the central character, drops a book; it falls to the floor open and face down. She picks it up and is about to close it when the book seller says,
I love books–reading them, thinking about them, the way they feel in my hands, the way they smell. When I was young I was taught to respect books. The book should not appear to have been read. Then something happened. First I started dog-earing the top of the pages to mark text in the upper half and the bottom of the pages for text in the bottom half. Then a double fold made if the text I wanted to remember was on both sides of a page.
Now I use books somewhat like a sketchbook. The books that I like quite a lot have dog-eared pages, highlighting, and underlining. And then there is my obsessive note taking, jotting down ideas, and making sketches in the white space.
This is a small stack of books that I liked very much when I first read them and when I reread them. Actually I liked them so much, I gave them as gifts. The stack includes work by Joe Coomer, Percival Everett, Brian Morton, Abigail Thomas, Margaret Atwood, and Richard Preston.
When I was preparing the links I realized that nearly all of the books have descriptions of an artmaking process. The exception is Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer.
I am in the process of proofing a database of words for a couple of projects for speech language pathologists. Today I ran across a couple of words that I wasn’t sure were in fact words.
The letter combinations seemed like perfectly acceptable spellings, but something seemed amiss. Turns out they are in fact words and a bit connected as well.
The words I questioned as being such are, stoup and roods. Stoup is a basin that contains holy water and a rood is a crucifix or a painting of such. Coincidence, serendipitous that both words are religious objects used in rituals?
Free to Choose is part of my Cleanse Your Palate series. Each glass is bound with wool, has a word in code, and is filled with clove soap. The holey rock rosaries are braided and knotted with “Forgive Yourself” in code.
I had a vague notion that nyctograph was a form of writing but I had to google the word to find out its proper definition. I found several hits that stated it was a form of night writing, without the aid of illumination, devised by Lewis Carroll. I could not however, find the actual symbols Carroll used.
I don’t know how many times I have attempted to write notes in the dark of night and find the next morning what I had written was difficult to read.
I like the idea of a symbol system using a template rather than graph paper. I could use any available scrap of paper or even my arm. I took to writing on myself when I was giving art sessions at a maximum security forensic facility.
This is a sample of the grid template that I found at Wikipedia.
I pretty much use Morse and Tap Code, or reference to them in my work. Coding for me started when I made a series of bronze daggers and titled them after folks who were particularly difficult. I couldn’t leave it at that so I devised a code based on my nephew’s name and date of birth disguising the actual names. This piece is titled Filfeh, which does not exactly follow the rules of spelling. A few other titles were, Anoa, Nivner, Reima, Anxen, and Frea.
I have attempted to use other codes–Celtic Tree Ogham and the Pigpen Cipher but they haven’t worked with the materials I was using.
Perhaps they will find their way into a series in the future.
