Pisces Moon Studio

Of course, now I wake up with a fully-formed idea that is going to require beads.

On an email list yesterday, I posted a notice about a UFO that I was willing to send out for adoption. This morning, I woke up with Dylan Thomas’ “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” rattling around in my head, and I knew what could be done with the UFO.

The offer for adoption is withdrawn. More later… After I pick some more beads off the floor.

Yes, it’s true. I’m coming out of the closet.� That is, the closet where I store all my beads and other shiny gewgaws for attaching to quilts.

I hate beads. I hate sewing the slippery little suckers onto the fabric. I despise trying to pick them up onto a needle and then get the doggone thread to keep from twisting as I attempt to stitch the thing in the spot where I want it.� I despair every time the dog runs under my feet and jostles the work table and the bead box turns over (again) and I have to get down on the floor (again) with the big flashlight and tweezers (again) and individually pick every single one of the blessed little *&^%&*(#$Y() out of the @#$#@%@ carpet. Again.

I hate beads and the ponies they rode in on. No one is getting beads on any of their postcards from me.

So there.

Taken yesterday, January 28, 2005:

Her original appearance (January 13):

Click on thumbnail
for original post.

and Update #1 (January 19):

Click on thumbnail
for original post.

Taken yesterday, January 28, 2005:

Her original appearance (January 13):

Click on thumbnail
for original post.

and Update #1 (January 19):

Click on thumbnail
for original post.

I’ve been playing with a really interesting product, heat fixable pastels manufactured by D’Uva Fine Artists Materials. I bought them last summer prior to teaching my last surface design class at the Taos Institute of Arts.

The cool thing about them is that they are made from an industrial waste product and are completely non-toxic. No fumes from fixative; they are completely water- and lightfast when set. They don’t come in a huge range of colors, but you can buy them in powder form and mix your own, if you like.

I don’t recall where I heard about them, but I know I immediately started looking for a supplier. There are several mail order suppliers, but I also found them stocked at Forstall Art Supplies right here in my town. (Note: this isn’t the Forstall in New Orleans, the one with the website; that’s his brother.)

So there I was, browsing through the art store. The Local Forstall Brother came over and asked in Cajun-flavored accents what he could “he’p me fin’.”

I opened my mouth, then suddenly closed it again. How in thunder was the name pronounced?

“I’m looking for a particular product and I’m not sure how to pronounce it,” I confessed. “It’s a heat-settable pastel, and it might be called –” I hesitated and then said weakly – “Doo-VAY?”

“Ah!” he said triumphantly. “You want Doooooooooovah!” and led the way directly to the display.

I bought every color he had.

So what good is a heat-settable pastel?

This rather silly little daisy card started out as two bits of quilted flotsam, both sky blue and each too small to use to make a postcard. I butted the edges together and zigzagged it, but the quilting was running in two directions and it obviously was a match made in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory.

D’Uva pastels to the rescue. Lightly grazing the “forest green” (which matches Kermit the Frog on his uneasiest days) over the bottom portion, I turned the horizontally-quilted part into a semblance of cartoon grass. Hit it quickly with a warm iron (30 seconds at 225° – use a press cloth) and the color is permanent.

A little random stitching with emerald green floss and an appliquéd daisy. Another sample for the postcard class is done and two more bits of studio leftovers are recycled. A good day’s work.

[Update] The center of the daisy is done in French knots with ribbon floss.

The petals are not fabric; they are cut from the lid of a yogurt container. I melted a hole through each one with a heated darning needle and stitched them to the background.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been listening to the music of Jeff Lorber. He’s a keyboardist, which is sort of like saying that Itzhak Perlman plays the fiddle. He’s also a composer and the founder of Fusion, a musical style which borrowed from classical jazz, R&B, and early rock to form the basis for contemporary jazz.

I’m not a trained musician. I can hear and enjoy the complexities in music, and presented with the written score I can read it without too much difficulty. It’s rather like taking two semesters of French in college and then ten years later finding oneself in Paris – yes, I can sorta-kinda read the newspapers and street signs, but it takes some mental effort at translation and there are some words or phrases that I won’t know unless I look them up in a dictionary.

Jeff Lorber’s “State of Grace” is like that. I can hear that there is something beautiful-but-strange going on with the time signature in the middle of the piece, but unless it is written out for me I can’t tell exactly what it is.

Is someone out there familiar with this piece and willing to “translate” for me?� I’d be forever grateful.� :)

Listening to:

Artist unknown

I found this painted on the side of a warehouse near downtown. Notice how the artist extended the tail of the ghost from the metal siding onto the concrete footing of the building?

I haven’t often seen graffiti showing that much attention to detail.

The microwave oven died on Sunday. At least, I think it died. It would go for a random period somewhere between ten and thirty seconds and then shut itself off abruptly without beeping, no matter how much time was programmed on it.

It’s only just over a year old, but I have hated that microwave since I brought it home. Oh, it’s big enough and powerful enough and it cooks (cooked) evenly, but it has a couple of absolutely maddening quirks. The interior light comes on while the food is cooking but not when you open the door. Who needs to see inside while the turntable is going round? I want to be able to see whether or not the cooking is completed when I open the door and check the food.

And the turntable mechanism – it required a great deal of care to not dislodge the glass turntable from its track when placing or removing the dish from the oven. Once the thing was off track, it took both hands and careful maneuvering to fit it back into its completely inadequate holder. But the oven wouldn’t work unless the turntable was properly positioned.

The new one

I have heaped bad wishes on that oven since the day I brought it home, but I am too cheap to simply throw it out (or Freecycle or give it to Goodwill) while it was working. Karma finally caught up with it, and now I have a new one with an interior light that behaves as it should and a turntable mechanism that actually stays put when the dish is removed.

Small blessings.  :)

Downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It’s the narrowest little place in the world, tucked into a space that was once a shared staircase between the two buildings that flank it:  Pete’s Famous Hot Dogs.

You open the door, which takes up almost the entire front of the building, and you go inside. There’s the grill and the counter on the right, the wall on the left, and just enough room for an average-size person in the middle. Behind the counter are Gus and Kathy, dispensing hot dogs and soft drinks in bottles.

My daughter knows them, and she can’t believe I’ve lived all my life here without ever having a Pete’s Famous.

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The local quilt guild has asked me to teach a workshop on making fabric postcards. I presented a program on postcards to them last week, showing many of the cards I had received from the Art2Mail group, only to have several people ask why I had not brought any of the cards I had made.

Well… the short answer is that I mailed them all away!

So for the next week or so I am working very small, making postcard-size little quilts to show at the workshop.

I use this phrase – “postcard-size little quilts” – because of a mild controversy that’s arisen in the last week. A very well-known and well-respected art quilter commented that she was a little tired of seeing people talking about postcards and artist trading cards – that she wanted to see other people “real work.”

I thought about this for several days, participating in an email discussion about what constitutes”real work” and whether or not the postcards are a distraction from doing the work, or perhaps can be used as a stepping stone or learning tool. Or perhaps – for those like me who enjoy working very, very small – making postcards is the real work.

Zen Garden
Click on image for larger view.

I don’t *want* to make six foot by ten foot things that look way impressive inside a huge convention center or museum. I want to make tiny, intimate pieces that demand that you come up very close and have a private conversation with them. I like working small. And 4″ by 6″ pieces of art to mail are, right now, the perfect means to the “real work” for me.

So I will leave another artist to be the Harry Winston of art quilts. I’ll rake some sand in a lacquered tray and place one perfect weathered granite pebble on it. Rocks is rocks, no matter whether they sparkle or not. :)