Accept as true nothing which you do not clearly know to be so. Avoid hasty judgment and prejudice.
Eleanor Roosevelt book quoting Descarte.
The left margin has the code for the word, truth.
I have had a difficult time documenting this piece. I hung it in several locations and no matter what, the images do not clearly show the piece.
Materials–Packing envelope, fiber, paper, wood glue.
Scale–38″ x 14″ x .25″
Cover Code–”No” on the left side, “Regrets” on the right side.
Stitched a small magnet into each corner for the wrap around closure.
Code on Interior Pages–Don’t let the past take your future.
The quote is from the Joe Coomer book, Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God. It is one of my favorite books. He also wrote Pocketful of Names, and One Vacant Chair. All have an interesting female character who also happens to be an artist.
A single letter is embroidered on each page.
The code for each letter and punctuation is embroidered in grey on cream packing paper with a rust patina and mounted on brown packing paper.
Code is the Letter F
Code is a Period
The spacers are embroidered in cream on brown packing paper with a rust patina and mounted on cream packing paper.
Green painters’ paper separates each word and lines the book.
The pocket near the last page contains a note about the work.
The scale is roughly 3.25″ x 4″ x 3.25″.
Materials–Paper, fiber, tree wrap, metal, CMC, PVA, magnets.
The paper used had metal bits placed on and or pierced through the surface. A sodium solution was applied to encourage rust and salt crystals on the surface. A solution of CMC was applied to each page to protect the surfaces.
A few Details–
Tomorrow will be the 10th anniversary of the death of my dad.
Currently researching how to make art in the book format. Thought I would try a few things and also make a little piece to celebrate my dad.
The code is based on Morse/Celtic Tree Code.
Code is Dad
Code is Date of Birth and Death
Ten Years
Lost
Not
Forgotten
Materials–Paper, paste paper, cloves, fiber, roofing felt, knife (found in Dad’s things).
4.75″ x 3″ x 1.25″
Paste paper–Recipe based on Penland video–
My Senecio articulatus looks elongated. During the day it sits on a window ledge. Why elongated? Could this be normal growth?
This morning I googled Senecio articulatus. Most of the images did not look like my plant, but an interesting and very cool thing happened. I found a link to a botanical illustration site. One Senecio articulatus illustration was dated 1781. Gives me pause to think my plant could be connected to the plant in the illustration.
I spent some time looking at several illustrations. The images are so beautiful.
Senecio articulatus at PlantIllustrations.org
Links and Photos Plantgenera.org
Great day for finding loads to view and read!
2020 Goal
Complete all work in progress.
Completed stitching together Thoughts piece. Today I will be adding cream wool stitching around entire piece.
Read a couple of weaving books over the holidays and liked the idea of warp threads used to hang woven pieces.
Planning to twine jute twine vertically through the hardware cloth. Yes, I meant to use the word twine twice. Currently thinking attaching the jute warp threads to a thin metal rod. I like the visual of a couple of nail heads holding the lot on the wall.
Also will add a piece of jute-wrapped rope for the border. Should help to integrate the materials and nicely finish the piece.
This is the border on See a Penny.
Previous Posts on Thoughts Piece
Thoughts in Progress, Tuesday, May 14th, 2019
Thoughts in Progress, Thursday, May 16th, 2019
More wallpieces to complete.
Also have a stash of small 3-D work in progress that needs to be realized.
Weaving on a Little Loom by Fiona Daly
Weaving Within Reach by Anne Weil
In the post I use the words twine and twice. The words look similar. Not just because they start and finish with the same letters, but because the figure-ground is nearly identical. I authored a CD, Appearances can be Deceiving that focuses on figure-ground relationships in a variety of customizable settings.
The CD is available for purchase through Learning Fundamentals.
The quote is from Firewall, part of the Wallander series written by Henning Mankell.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of my mother’s ischemic stroke. An event that changed everything.
Last year was a challenging year. My younger sister survived her third surgery for oral cancer, but while in recovery had an ischemic stroke. She did not survive.
Two months later my mother had an ischemic stroke. For a few weeks the prognosis was positive-negative, hopeful-no hope. Before summer I lost the two most important women in my life. The women who knew me when I was a child. We grew and changed together.
I am working on a memorial series. Typically I my series have 11 pieces. Several pieces are in progress but not quite completed. Partly the delay in completing work is the result of recovering from hand surgery. Still do not have my fine motor skill and manual dexterity in my dominant hand.
I using fiber to embroider on hardware cloth for my code blocks. Holding a needle for extended periods of time still causes hand and finger pain. Needed to figure out alternative ways for making things. Since I can loom knit, decided to give that a go. This will also be the first piece in a long time that does not have hardware cloth. It is a good thing to break a dependence on a material.
Who is Left…, will still have a metal component. The plan is to use safety pins to assemble the blocks. The safety pins will also add the possibility of green patina running down the piece.
Blocks
There are three colors of wool blocks: 41 tan for dashes, 51 dark brown for dots, and 52 cream for spacers. The 144 blocks will be laid out on a 9 x 16 grid.
Knit Pattern–Dash 41 Tan Wool Blocks
Cast On E-wrap
Knit E-wrap
R1 Skip, K5, Flat Knit
R2 Skip, K, S, K, S, K, Flat Knit
R3 Skip, K5, Flat Knit
R4 Skip, S, K, S, K, S, Flat Knit
Pattern rolls.
Knit Pattern–Dot 51 Dark Brown Wool Blocks
Cast On E-wrap
Knit E-wrap
R1 Skip, K, P, K, P, K, Flat Knit
R2 Skip, P, K, P, K, K, Flat Knit
R3 Skip, P, K, P, K, K, Flat Knit
R4 Skip, K, P, K, P, K, Flat Knit
Knit Pattern–Spacers 52 Cream Wool Blocks
Cast On E-wrap
Knit E-wrap
Only Knit Purl Stitches
R1 Skip, K, P, K, P, K, Flat Knit
R2 Skip, P, K, P, K, K, Flat Knit
R3 Skip, K, P, K, P, K, Flat Knit
R4 Skip, P, K, P, K, K, Flat Knit
Knitted Swatches with Cotton Cord Separating Blocks After First Fulling
Blocks for Code
The scraps are random sizes, might be fun to stitch together to make letters in a different code piece.
Been thinking about learning to use my mother’s sewing machine.
The blocks were fulled, not felted. Loops for pegs still visible.
Safety Pins
I ordered two types of bronze 3/4″ safety pins from amazon:
Household Mall 3/4-Inch Safety Pins, Bronze (1440 Pieces)
Firefly Bronze Metal Gourd Pin (1000 Pieces)
Received the Household Bronze pins. They are beautiful!
Waiting to assemble the piece until I see the Bronze Gourd Pins.
10 April They Arrived…
The extra space in the curve of the pin might work better with the thickness of the wool blocks.
The safety pins would be lovely for use in the i-cord bowl series I am planning to make. The title is Collected Memories. Got the idea when going through my parents’ collections found in random drawers.
A few years ago I dinked around with the idea of i-cord bowls. Wasn’t the time to develop the work. Maybe I was waiting for bronze safety pins.
According to the email I received from amazon, I may not receive the gourd safety pins until April 12th. So, I patiently wait for the order to arrive.
I was looking for the text, Anni Albers on Weaving at Archive.org, but it wasn’t available on that site.
I googled the title and followed a link to Monoskop. Information from their About page, “Monoskop is a wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities.”
I found loads of interesting information and a pdf of Anni Albers on Weaving text. It is not the expanded edition that is currently available for purchase online.
I searched for Anni Albers on the Monoskop site and found a link to a 1968 oral history interview. Followed the link to Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
Image of the text from the The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation site.
Added the Anni Albers on Weaving Expanded Edition to my Amazon wishlist.
When I visited my family in SC, I spent time wandering around and taking photos of plants, interesting textures, possible art making materials and processes, and things that struck me as odd.
As soon as I saw the moss growing on the grate inside a free standing wood burning fireplace, Don McLean’s American Pie started looping through my mind. Especially the line: moss growing fat on a rolling stone.
And while writing this post, again the song is swirling though my mind.
Not being a sit around a fire person, I had to google the proper term for the fireplace. It is a chimenea. According to Wikipedia this is the definition for chimenea.
A chimenea /tʃɪmɪˈneɪ.ə/, also spelled chiminea (from Spanish: chimenea means chimney), is a freestanding front-loading fireplace or oven with a bulbous body and usually a vertical smoke vent or chimney.
So, a wood burning chimney. Odd that moss found its way to growing inside the chimenea. It is sitting on a concrete patio in daily full sun. The chimenea must offer enough shade and protection to prevent the death of the moss.
Sad that the moss will be destroyed the next time the chimenea is lit.
Don McLean’s American Pie was popular when I was in high school. So much so, my high school English teacher thought it would be cool to decipher its lyrics. The result, even today I remember the bulk of the lyrics for the 8 minute 36 second song.
More connections–I remember my best friend from high school who died suddenly five years ago. Not in a plane crash, but he was the director of my hometown airport. Connections of all sorts can be found when you least expect it. Certainly wasn’t thinking about him when I started this post, but it would have been something I would have shared with him. He would have understood my moss/song connection. We would have talked about the song. When we first heard it. And other reminiscing.
Thinking about my friend, reminded me of a Henning Mankell quote from one of his Kurt Wallander books, Firewall.
Who was left who connected him to his earlier life?
Washington Post article about American Pie written by Justin Wm. Moyer.
I received my MFA from Washington State University in Pullman, WA. While there, I was using cuttings from trees and plants in my mixed media work. I became a bit familiar with some of the folks in the Horticulture Department when I was looking for potential sources for art materials. Not only did I find great materials, I also found starts of numerous plants that I grew in my studio.
While I was traveling over the weekend I read the Washington State Magazine Summer 2017 issue. The magazine is full of interesting information about folks at WSU and alumni. Since I have been caring for Monarchs in my gardens, I specifically wanted to read the article about Monarchs.
After reading a number of interesting articles, I read an article on the Newsmedia page about Linda Chalker-Scott’s book, How Plants Work: The Science Behind the Amazing Things Plants Do (Science for Gardeners).
I read the excerpt available on the amazon site and decided to purchase the kindle version of her text. Even though I love books, especially beautiful Timber Press books, I didn’t want to wait 2 days for delivery.
Linda Chalker-Scott also posts on the Garden Professors blog. After reading a couple of posts, decided to subscribe.
Last night I took a look at the book, Making Books That Fly, Fold, Wrap, Hide, Pop Up, Twist, and Turn. I bought it several years back when the nieces and nephews were young.
There was a single dog-eared page with the header, A 3300-Year-Old Time Capsule. According to the text, in the 1980s George Bass and a team of archeologists excavated the site of the Uluburun ship wreck off the coast of Turkey. The 3300 time capsule was a diptych.
Curious, so I googled George Bass and Uluburun ship wreck. I found additional, more complete information on the diptych in a Johns Hopkins Magazine article from 1997.
Sifting through mud that had filled a huge storage vessel, Cemal Pulak, then one of George Bass’ grad students, found fragments of wood and pieces of ivory. He pieced them together and discovered that they formed a diptych, a sort of ancient writing tablet that consisted of two wooden leaves hinged together with ivory. The leaves would have been coated with beeswax that then could be inscribed with a stylus. No one had ever before found a diptych so old.
After reading about the diptych, I then searched online for an image. This image was found on a page associated with Dr. Deborah Carlson and Jose Luis Casaban’s Introduction to Nautical Archaeology at Texas A & M University.
Not keen of the ivory bits, but liked the idea of scratching through a surface. It is a lovely piece.
I did not continue the search to find the method used to assemble the pieces, but would have been amazing to do something similar to the staples used in some restoration.
This is an image from Past Imperfect
Past Imperfect has images of beautifully repaired objects. I am particularly fond of the glass and ceramic pieces that have been creatively repaired with the addition of a metal component.
When I made this piece as part of myTools for Rent (bronze dagger) series, I wanted to use the piece of wood for the front panel, but it was cracked. I drilled holes and wired the panel together.
The majority of my work is meant to appear to be artifact, to have had a previous life. After seeing the image of the diptych it occurred to me that in the future, I just might want to “age” the objects that I make to near the point of destruction. Then reassemble them.
Cemal Pulak, Associate Professor
Frederick R. Mayer Faculty Professor of Nautical Archaeology
George F. Bass, Professor Emeritus
Texas A&M University
Gwen Diehn, author
Making Books That Fly, Fold, Wrap, Hide, Pop Up, Twist & Turn: Books for Kids to Make