Green Thumb

April 27, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been out in the backyard clearing one of my flower beds out to make way for vegetable garden. My dad and Victor built me a box for a raised bed yesterday. My mom is still kind of laughing at me. Why? Because God has a sense of humor, that’s why. Through my teenage years we lived out in Howell in a 100 year old farm house and 10 acres. My mom has a monster size green thumb, hence, we had one monster size garden. She was always trying to get me to help out and me with my teenage attitude wanted little to do with it. Why would I? It was hot, the weeds never stopped and ultimately I always had something crawling on me, biting or stinging me. So here I am, years later, planning my own garden and my mother thinks it’s rather funny on some level. Yeah, maybe, I’ll admit it.

Oh, still have things crawling on me when I am out there working. I just wear more clothing, no matter what the weather! Gloves, I love my gloves. Occassionally I will take them off for planting but usually they are on and do not come off until the job is done. My plan is to get most of the heavy work done before summer hits. Who knew it would be 80 degrees in April? So I’ve been out in the mornings before the heat hits. I think the seven year old has potential to pick up my teenage attitude towards gardening. He will help for a little while but then complains that it’s to hot and goes inside. At those moments, I think I hear God is chuckling at me.

So the plot has been cleared but I still need to seal up the box for the raised bed before I put it on the ground. I would be working on that today but 30mph winds make that pretty much impossible. So it will have to wait for another day. Farmers Market opens on Saturday where I plan to scope out the veggie plants and I am a little excited.

Oh don’t worry, still doing the artwork by night. Victor has delved into the world of drawing and we’ve had lots of fun with new pens and tools. Currently waiting on some new pen brushes to arrive. There also a great new store called Hobby Lobby that opened up in our area. We go in there as a family and just have way to much fun in the art supplies. Plus there is a comic book store a few doors down and a game store in the same parking lot. Now that I think about it more, that strip mall is actually kind of dangerous for us!

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Vivitar

April 23, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Back in college, I took lots of photography classes. One day my professor showed us how to do Polaroid Slide Transfers. I didn’t participate in that project at the time because I was just flat broke and couldn’t afford anymore supplies. Since this was one of many classes I had with this professor, he took pity on me and waived me from doing the project. But I always remembered the project and wanted to do it.

For my last birthday, Victor got this for me from the world of Ebay. It’s a Vivitar Slide Printer. They don’t make them anymore but it’s the cheaper version of the Daylab.

Vivitar Slide Printer

It took me several months to finally get to the project, get everything together to use it and find directions that didn’t come with it. Not to mention finding a place to get the slides developed. But at long last, I worked for two evenings on it and had a lot of fun (after a short bit of frustration and learning). Memories of the darkroom and photo chemicals came back to me as I opened the processing prints (I missed those smells!). After the first night I got some cool prints and one transfer that I can say was somewhat successful.

Drying image transfer

People usually use certain types of watercolor paper for the negative transfer but since I’m into the whole fiber thing I was trying it with white cotton. I have some other fiber ideas to try down the road but I decided to keep it simple first time out.

Night two went a little more smoothly. The boys liked to push the big blue button and make the thing flash. I got several more successful images this time around since I had worked out some of the kinks of the machine. I know that I need use darker slides because it likes to overexpose some. Here are some of the cooler images I got. The first one is the original on photo paper and the second is the image from the negative on the fabric. This one in particular I opened the developing image to soon. Teach me to watch Chuck at the same time. It’s a close up of my grandmother’s sewing machine, in case you were wondering.

Polaroid Transfer sewing 01 orig Polaroid Transfer sewing 01 cloth

This one is of an old clock. Like the above ones, the first is the original on the film paper and the second is fabric.

Polaroid Transfer Clock 01 orig Polaroid Transfer clock 01 cloth

I know you may be wondering what I am going to do with these. Well, I do have a project going on right now but I’m not sharing just yet. These photos are cool because you can go back and color the negative transfer with different mediums (ie. colored pencils). The original photos can be put into a warm water bath the images can be seperated from the photo paper and placed onto almost anything else. So lots of fun to be had here.

Filed Under: Art, photography Tagged With: ,

The Enforcer of Tidiness

April 15, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Rocky Rocket and the old quilt

Oh sure, he looks cute, cuddly with his extra puffy, super soft, long fur. He happily greets anyone who comes along with little kitty chirps and offers his tail for petting to any visitor. But don’t let it fool you! Usually in the dead of night, while people sleep peacefully, he strikes. He chomps, never eating, just chomps with his rather sharp kitty teeth any plastic bag and it’s contents. Leaving behind zillions of little puncture holes in his path of destruction.

Since I store many of my fiber items zip storage bags I have had many of them destroyed. He’s gotten rather bold lately as well, striking right in front of me as I work on a project or watch a movie with the family. He even eyed my one of my projects once, then I really threatened his existance (with words and tone of voice) and he reconsidered.

But with his recent rampage of attacks against defenseless fiber and plastic, I spent the last two days resorting and organizing and cleaning the studio space. I would have been done with another project otherwise, but would have had a lot more kitty punctured items to deal with. So most everything is in a box or drawer and labeled. Hopefully that will keep me organized and help motivate me put stuff away. Otherwise the Enforcer will have to remind me and it won’t be pretty.

Filed Under: Art

Chicken and Biscuits

April 8, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Chicken and Biscuits

Mix one old log cabin quilt, one old feed bag, and one old recipe book. Throw in dashes of various paint, thread, buttons and whatever else works. Heat with iron when needed and see what happens.

Results may vary.

Filed Under: Art

Back to the blog, back to the art

April 2, 2009 by 2 Comments

So it has been a little while since I’ve blogged or done any artwork. Honestly, anything I wanted to say I didn’t want posted for the world to poke at. Lots of anger and frustration at the world and bits of life we are dealing with right now. And when I get this way the creative juice dries up. Some people can make angry art and work out their frustrations that way, but it doesn’t work so well with me. Since I don’t have the energy to stay angry for the next three years and nine months I wasn’t really sure how to deal with everything and that just added to the frustration. On the warmer afternoons I’ve been outside cleaning flower beds and moving heavy rocks to work some things out but that is only a temporary fix. Great for the waist line though! Saturday afternoon two different people called me to go see a speaker at church. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to work out in the yard, get covered in dirt, find spring plants sprouting and stay grumpy. But I went anyway. Yes, I’m glad I did.

The speaker was Immaculée Ilibagiza. She survived the Rwandan genocide by hiding in a 3′ x 4′ bathroom with seven other women for three months. All the while people (men, women, children) were being murdered, butchered with machetes simply because they were of a different tribe. This included her parents and all but one of her brothers. Happy story, I know. But the beautiful, amazing part of her story is her forgiveness of the murderers, one of which turned out to be the father of a girl she went to high school with. There is so much detail in her story that I can’t do any justice to it here. She is a truly humble and beautiful person. She uses the money she makes to fund orphanages in Rwanda. She allowed God to heal her heart even though she had a really good reason to hold onto her anger, vengeance and hate. I can’t recommend her books enough.

So I’ve turned off all the news sites and radio stations and turned on some music and podcasts. Discovered Ben Harper and a few other musicians on a great playlist on Rhapsody and I’ve been really enjoying those. I can feel the creative juice starting to move again. I even found several boxes of my old artwork and art books from high school through college and realized that some of it wasn’t half bad. I was reminded that I did get a degree in studio art and got to learn so many cool art mediums. I have been working on a couple projects, not anything I should be working on for any one of the great shows coming up this year. One of them may work in a rural type show if the group says it’s not to big.

Here’s a little bit of that one.

just a project

I have a pile of papers brimming with great opportunities for my artwork in 2009. So I need to kick out the funk and embrace the challenges otherwise I won’t move forward and where’s the fun in that.

Filed Under: Art