Pisces Moon Studio

My son, when he saw this week’s outfit, wanted to know if that was the Easter Bunny she was wearing.

It rained here last night. A lot. We’ve got flood warnings out for small streams and the Cahaba River, with another two inches or more of rain expected.

My dehumidifier has chosen this particular moment to give up the ghost, meaning that my studio is currently running at 88% humidity. Which means that my fabric painting is misbehaving with all the extra water in the air. It’s only 66 degrees (19° C) in here, so I can’t use the air conditioner to dry out the air.

It also means I have to go buy a new dehumidifier, which was emphatically not in the budget right now.

Ah, well. I have excellent music playing and I have two sewing machines set up and a large variety of previously painted and dyed fabrics with which to work.

I think I’ll go sew.

I’m finishing up the update for the Art2Mail postcard website. The Title Challenge will be unveiled this Friday, April 1, and I hope you all come to see it.

Don’t worry, I’ll remind you again on Friday.

Because I’ve been HTMLing for about a week, I haven’t had much time for making art. When I finish this project, I have another website to design and send off to the owner for approval, and at that point I hope to be able to sit down and make art and have something new to show you.

Winter is over. I wore shorts Saturday for the first time and Sunday I got my first (half-dozen) mosquito bites.

Now you must understand that mosquitoes will home in on me from a radius of approximately 17.2 miles, and that I am uncomfortably allergic to quite a few species of them. This evening I look like I have the mumps — both sides of my face swelled from the welts.

I’m also either allergic to or can’t stand the smell of every insect repellant on the market, so that’s not a solution I can live with either. Those of you who live in cold climates and are housebound for seven or eight months because of the snow? Cold weather is the only time of year I can go outside here. I’m housebound for that same seven or eight months, only in the summer, because of the heat, humidity, and insects.

We’ve already decided that when my husband retires we are moving to New Mexico. In all the time I’ve spent there, I’ve been bit by mosquitoes two times, both near an acequia, and neither one was a species that caused an allergic reaction. I love the desert and I can breathe at high altitude (no allergies!) and I do not mind the heat as long as the humidity is low.

Besides, I can’t get really good chiles rellenos anywhere in this part of the country — no Hatch chiles.

Of course, as I told him a couple years back, we can’t go back to the national parks for about a thousand years, until they build some more ruins. He’s already seen them all.

… in the Easter parade!

Happy Easter to everyone, and may all your chocolate bunnies have extra-big ears.

Got an email last night:

“Is the FBI watching your blog? I tried to post a comment and got sent to the FBI home page!”

Well, yeah, I think that would have scared the poop out of me too!

After some digging around, I think this is what happened. Read the rest of this entry »

My website’s been awfully slow to respond all day today. Around 3:00 this afternoon it occurred to me that my email had been awfully quiet as well, which is most unusual. Asked the nice tech support folks to check things for me and make sure it was all running as it should.

I came back after dinner to 382 emails.

I guess the mail server needed a dose of ExLax, or something. See you tomorrow, on the other side of the mail….

Back in January, the author of Croque-Choux wrote a post on sun printing using Setacolor paints. This technique is not new to me — I’ve taught it, among other things, for the past several years — but I was fascinated with the hand-shaped stencil she used to illustrate the process.

One thing that I am very good at is research. It took me maybe twenty minutes to find out that the hand-shaped stencil is used in India for body decoration, specifically as part of a bride’s wedding ensemble.

The day prior to the wedding, the bride’s mother, her sisters, her aunts and her friends all come over and decorate her body with temporary tattoos using a vegetable dye (henna) in traditional designs. In past times the designs were painted freehand, but now the self-adhesive stencils make the process easier for those doing the applying. The stencils are adhered to the palms of the bride’s hands and various portions of her body; the henna is mixed and painted over the stencils; and the bride has to sit for about seven or eight hours to allow the “tattoos” to take. During this time, the older women do her hair and give her many tips on how to please her new husband on her wedding night.

The henna lasts about two weeks or so on the skin. After the wedding, as long as the designs are visible on the palms of her hands, the bride is expected to be a full-time bride and devoted only to her husband — she is not responsible for cooking, cleaning, or other housework, which is done by her sisters and her family.

I think I might be tempted to just *not wash* my hands for a while, don’t you?

Back to finding the stencils.

They are available from quite a few online sources that specialize either in tattoo flash (artwork) or henna tattoos, but most of the US sources charged $5.00 and up for each stencil, plus shipping. Undaunted, I paid a visit to the Frugal Fabric Artist’s Friend:

I ordered a set of the stencils from a seller in India. They took about a month to arrive, but I was ridiculously pleased with my new toys and immediately painted up a bunch of both round and hand shapes in various colors and techniques.

Yesterday I finally had a few moments to make postcards from some of the prints.

The hand shape is pretty limiting — there isn’t much to be done with it except use it as is. (I suppose I could do some kind of crossing-guard “STOP” thing….)

I’m unexpectedly much more pleased with the round shapes. Lots of exciting possibilities there!

I love the elegant folds and the rich, heavy texture of this week’s gown. It makes me want to dig out some silk charmeuse and make something absurdly gorgeous with it.