slowly she turned
Living the Slow life in North Carolina
Category: art
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I should be binding a book or stitching on my scroll right now, or at least laying down in the dark with an ice pack on my face since I woke up with a vicious headache and a sinus infection. But I’m doing better, about to wash out my head pipes with a neti pot,…
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As much as I realized that I need to work on my ceramics class, I knew that it would be dumb to build a scroll box or stand without even beginning to make the scroll, so I devoted yesterday to dyeing with the broomsedge I’d collected. I made two dyepots for comparison. One was with…
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September was a wonderfully busy month. The first half was consumed by the planning and anticipation of seeing my relatives at our family reunion and my mother’s 90th birthday party. My aunt and first cousin came from Colorado to stay with my mother for ten days, during which time the bottom fell out (flooding) over…
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I can’t tell you just how freeing it has been to my spirit to not worry about making art for sale any more. I’ve definitely had some physical challenges, but they are nothing compared to the mental roadblocks I run into every time I start selling my work on a regular basis. I always think…
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Tonight is the last night I’ll be at home for a while, and Sandy is at a friend’s house playing a game. I’m listening to the rain and enjoying the quiet. Tomorrow afternoon, Sandy and I will go to Missy’s house on Lake Orange, where we’ll relax and play a little while. Then Sandy will…
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Preparing the rhododendron leaves while our fabrics and yarn skeins soaked in a mordant bath with alum. We only used the older leaves, not the new, sticky shoots and new leaves. The breeze felt great but it kept blowing out the gas stoves. The rhododendron leaf dyepot: We simmered the leaves for about an hour…
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Dede ponders the answer to a question. I couldn’t wait for the India Flint workshop so I signed up for a workshop with Dede Styles at Cloth Fiber Workshop on Saturday. I’m so glad that I did. She gave us a great lesson in identifying local wild dye plants, with information about when to harvest…
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Yesterday was a day of experimentation with natural dyes with just the tannin-laced water of Lake Waccamaw as a mordant. The onion skin dye was very successful, although it is very hard to mess up yellow onion skins for a dye. What I did notice was that the color yielded more reddish tones, which I…
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I am back in one of my happy places – my cousin’s house at Lake Waccamaw. This time we are here alone for a couple’s art retreat. Sandy brought canvases and paint, and I brought dyepots, fabrics, yarns, hot plate, Procion dyes, and acrylic paints, paper, brayers, collage materials, and my Gelli plate. Also a…
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Last week I had the privilege of taking a small workshop with Lyric Kinard at her house in Cary, North Carolina. “Abstract-a-licious” was a inner-child embracing, extremely helpful class about designing for abstract art quilts, but the exercises that she introduced us to could be easily adapted to any kind of abstract art. Lyric went…
slowly she turned 