slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

recent posts

about

About Me

  • A Year of Artistic Inspiration – Link Love

    2010 has been such a brain-busting, heart-opening, imaginative adventure for me, despite the fact that I spent a lot of it bemoaning my tendinitis and thinking more than doing. I decided to do a post about all the teachers that I have been inspired by this past year (and during a little of 2009).

    Susanne Martin has been an amazing friend and teacher. She has gone way above and beyond the normal mentoring with me, supplying me with equipment and expertise and labor in beating paper pulp for me. She has even (with husband John’s help) delivered me the goods! I am so grateful for her kindness and help. And we’re planning to go to the Focus on Book Arts conference in June. She and Judy Strom and I are going to have a blast!

    Right now, I am deep into the book Eco Colour by India Flint. I love getting interesting colors from nature, and the surprises from resist dyeing delight me. Back in the 80s-90s I spent a lot of time with dyepots. Now I remember why I was so fascinated by them.

    A new influence on me is Jude Hill. Looking at her “spirit cloth” makes my heart beat faster and I forget to breathe for a moment. Guess that means that I’ll be weaving some of these onionskin dyed fabrics together very soon. And rooting through my old clothes for more scraps. I do have some old rag balls from when I was locker hooking rag rugs, so that will probably be the saving grace for my hands. Scissors aren’t really my friends right now.

    Future and past teacher: Albie Smith. I am wriggling with anticipation for February 17, 2011, the day that I turn 50 years old and will begin a three-day class with Albie at An Artful Journey in Los Gatos, California. I took a daylong class with Albie at Art and Soul in Hampton, Virginia in May, and it whetted my appetite for more from this gentle but firmly-pushing teacher whose color-drenched work is marvelous eye candy. I hope that one day I’ll get to take a papermaking class with her as well. I love her pulp-painted work.

    Another huge bookbinding influence as well as photography inspiration is LK Ludwig. I took two of LK’s classes at Journalfest in October 2009, and an online class of hers in late 2009 because I couldn’t get enough of her insights and thought provoking prompts. She has helped me push the envelope in personal journaling with photographs.

    Dan Essig will always be special to me. He was my first bookbinding teacher and so was a life-changing instructor for me. I’ve taken two daylong classes from him at art retreats and spent a week in his Wooden Books class at John C. Campbell Folk School. I love his work and appreciation for the odd and ordinary found objects and funky illustrations.

    Melanie Testa tries to blog Every Single Day! I took her soy wax batik class at Art and Soul in Hampton in May and her friendly spirit has buoyed my spirits ever since. Every time I open my copy of Inspired to Quilt I find another page where she doodled a little star or heart or other encouragement. Batik is another resist technique that I’ll be exploring more in 2011.

    Diana Trout, author of Journal Spilling, has become my friend too. Her wry wit and totally authentic demeanor is a joy to be around. Her teaching has freed me of a lot of my self-imposed constraints, and that may be the most important thing that happened to me all year. Here’s the post I wrote about her class at Art and Soul in May.

    Traci Bunkers is just plain cool. Traci Bunkers would be who I want to be when I grow up, except that she is younger than me. Traci is probably me in an alternate universe where I am single and living in Kansas. I’ve taken three classes with Traci. The one in May was McGyver Roller Printing, and her book Print and Stamp Lab is a playground. She taught me how to carve stamps and is another artist who has stretched my brain. Her willingness to share her very honest personal journals online is much appreciated and admired.

    Carla Sonheim: Wow. What can I say about this beautiful woman? She is the Silly Queen. She doesn’t like glue so she uses packing tape. She helped me transform junk mail into amazing, unusual painted papers. My favorite quote of the year is from Carla: “It’s square enough.” Her book Drawing Lab will convince the most stubborn “non”-artist that s/he can draw and have fun doing it.

    “Outside artist” embroiderer extraordinaire Susan Sorrell. Took an online class from her at the beginning of last year that I am STILL working on! I became so obsessed with stitching that I stitched my way into serious numbness problems with my hands! I love her style. I love embroidery. I wish that I could do more of it. She is seriously funny on Facebook too.

    Roxanne Padgett’s class at Journalfest was so easy and fun that I actually almost had a panic attack from all the goodness of it. Really. Rarely, but sometimes that does happen to me. When I raid the remnant bins at JoAnn’s or root through my sample and scrap pile, Roxanne’s class fills my brain. Her motto is “Fear No Color.” She makes me want a sewing machine in the worst way. Too bad sewing machines hate me.

    Here’s the story about Leighanna Light, Thingmaker. I had a major migraine the morning I took her class. I managed to get dressed, get downstairs for coffee (otherwise I figured that I would never get over it) and popped into her class to ask for the class materials and to tell her why I wouldn’t be able to make it. I saw her samples and said, uh, I’ll go back upstairs, get my supplies, and try to get through the demos. I ended up having one of the most fun classes ever. My migraine passed after an hour, and at the end of the day I thought in wonder, “Damn, I came so close to missing this class!”

    Jody England Hansen: I took her class at Journalfest on making niches and boxes to hold really cool objects in books, including smaller journals. I really liked Jody. I would take another class from her in a heartbeat. I felt like I tried to do too much in her class and that was frustrating, but it was because she made me want to do more. She was another teacher who had a warm heart that showed.

    Last but not least, Orly Avineri. I will see her again and her class from the outside at An Artful Journey. I took her class “Mapping Me” at Journalfest 2010. I felt inexplicably weird that day, but I left her class with some really great artwork. I have a feeling that she would be a wonderful teacher in a smaller class where she didn’t have to spread out her attention so thinly. I’m looking forward to seeing her again in February.

  • Tapestry progress

  • Notoriety

    I’m the featured artist in Go Triad’s Meet an Artist column today.

    The reporter interviewed me for about 45 minutes with a recorder, and chose the quotes and organized them for the article. Then a photographer came to my house and scared me to death with the prospect of my face in the paper again. I still remember the huge photo in the Life section a few years back with the caption, “The Agony of Defeat.” So I was nervous on a couple of levels.

    I’m happy with it.

  • Wednesday morning coffee pot post

    This wonderful week in which I have been ensconced at home with a white snowscape outside and the smoky smell of the woodstove within shows me how quickly I could fall back into agoraphobia. I am so comfortable and happy here in my home that the thought of leaving it today to go to the farmers’ market, to buy pet food, and to go to a lovely party with the newly named Greensboro Fiber Guild makes me recoil and procrastinate. It is an easy trap to fall into if you are prone to this disorder, and it is behavioral in nature, so the only cure is to force your self past yourself to the way out. So I will.

    “Ensconced” seems to have been my word of 2010. What will be the word of 2011?

    Miss Jazz is sitting contentedly on my lap. She seems to be so much better and happier. It was worth the money to pull her through this thing and give her a little longer in this life. She is a tough little kitty, that is for sure.

    Yesterday the HVAC people came to clean my furnace. They ended up staying over two hours because they couldn’t get the pilot light to relight when they were done. Finally, after replacing a part and getting it going, I got some bad news. The furnace needs some expensive repairs over the next year if we are to keep it. One part could cause carbon monoxide poisoning if it cracks or gets a hole and it is very rusty and thin. We have a carbon monoxide detector and Sandy is going to buy a new one today. The estimate for replacing the furnace and the equally old and wonky central air conditioner is around $7000. We have also talked about the need to replace our crappy ductwork and that estimate doesn’t include that.

    Sigh. In the same 24 hours I received the schedule for the Focus on Book Arts conference in Oregon in June. It is very inexpensive as those kind of things go – the prices per class are less than $100 a day and the room and board is only $65 a day to stay in a dorm apartment and eat at the university cafeteria. The airfare is much more expensive in June. It would end up costing me a little over $1000 to go to all four days of the conference and fly round trip. I had planned to stay an extra couple of days to see Portland, since I’ve never been there. Now the money is making me nervous. I don’t like being in debt. But I will pretty definitely go to the conference, at least. My friend Judy from Montana is sharing the apartment with me. We met at Journalfest in 2009 and immediately hit it off. I want to go very badly.

    Because of this, I canceled my registration for Art and Soul in Hampton at the end of April. I realize that I can’t do everything that I want to do. I feel like a screaming three-year-old sometimes, though!

    We did receive some more good news. Sandy’s biopsy from his colonoscopy was benign. The nurse from the endoscopy center said that it was the kind of polyp that could have very well turned into cancer if they had not caught it and removed it. So get your colonoscopies, people. I’ve seen colon cancer. You don’t want it and you don’t want your family and friends to suffer along with you.

    Now that those words are out of my brain, I’ll be on my way to do my errands. Later this afternoon I plan to begin working on a prayer flag that will be sent ahead of me to An Artful Journey. It will have a base of the onionskin dyed fabric. What wish for the world do I want to send fluttering out on a breeze? What wish do you want sent to the world, or yourself?

  • Blackbird tapestry in progress

    Don’t feel like blogging tonight, but I told myself I’d blog every day this week. I’d much rather be weaving this:

    It is based on the blackbird photos that I took on Christmas morning. The warp and one of the wefts is black carpet warp. The blue wool must be thrums from somebody because it is cut into lengths and rolled in a ball. I have a lot of yarns from weavers who gave me their loom “waste” and dye samples of small amounts.

    I purchased this little copper pipe tapestry loom from www.loominatube.com at least a couple of years ago, put it on a shelf, covered it up with stuff, and forgot about it. I love this loom, and I’ve tried a lot of different homemade looms and a Schacht tapestry loom. I can create two sheds for the large areas of weaving and it saves wear and tear on my afflicted hands. It is heavy enough that I can prop it up on the keyboard tray of my computer desk and it doesn’t move, so I don’t have to hold it.

  • Inspiration and Wisdom

    Lately I have been reading a lot of ACTUAL BOOKS. The kind with a cover and paper and ink? In fact, I think that is why my left hand has taken a turn for the worse because I tend to hold a book in my left hand. Who knew that you could overdo reading?

    I guess a lot of this introspection began with a bout of depression that began in November. Then I found out that my hormone test shows that I am officially in menopause! I was ecstatic! In fact, I think that I frightened the nurse on the phone with my whoops of joy. All of a sudden, I am thrilled at the prospect of my journey ahead. I am excited that I am about to enter my 50s. I am embracing my cronehood (and yes, ZhaK, I am choosing to skip “hag”!) with open and loving arms. And I write this with total sincerity.

    My mother and I definitely have our differences. She manages to offend or insult me on every visit, and often harangues me on the phone about not attending church, which in her opinion is essential for being a good person. Yet, we know that we are very much alike in most ways. During my Christmas visit I was talking about my art and my traveling and how I could not NOT do it because it has become so important in my life and she blurted out, “Laurie, you are too self-interested!” Then she suddenly backtracked and started talking about when she was my age and totally caught up in wanting to travel and was always immersed in her art. She has been struggling with a lot of self-criticism, and often mentions that she feels like she was not a good mother to her children. I knew that she was talking to herself.

    Then she showed me a Christmas card that my father had given her just after I left for college. Daddy wrote that he knew after 35 years of marriage that there was one word that she loved the most: “Go.” (Daddy hated to travel and generally refused to go anywhere but Sunset Beach on vacation until the last few years of his life.) So his gift to her was a week’s vacation before April 15, and she could pick the place and week. Then he added a P.S.: “Can I GO with you?” We both laughed and cried.

    I am already like my mother. Watching her grow old has taught me that growing older is a beautiful thing if you will let yourself experience it fully with hunger to see what comes next.

    There is one major thing that I would like to learn and develop this year: compassion. I have learned that you can’t be compassionate for others if you do not love and forgive yourself first. If you follow your passion so that your heart can open to possibilities, compassion is much easier. Self-denial makes a person’s heart crusty and hard.

    As usual, I’m reading several books at once right now. One of the non-art non-fiction books has a definite Zen Buddhist outlook: Karen Maezen Miller’s hand wash cold: care instructions for an ordinary life. From her website:

    It’s easy to think that meaning, fulfillment, and bliss are “out there,” somewhere outside of our daily routine. But in this playful yet profound reflection on awareness, the compelling voice of a self-described errant wife and delinquent mother reveals the happiness at the bottom of the laundry basket, the love in the kitchen sink, and the peace possible in one’s own backyard.

    The other is Brené Brown’s I Thought It Was Just Me. This book is about shame, the harmfulness of shame, and how to develop shame resilience. It is ringing my bells on all levels. We all experience shame and it is an emotion that most of us cannot even talk about. This book is helping me lay to rest a few demons from my earlier life so that I don’t shudder at the memories, as well as helping me cope with my tendency to be a harsh self-critic. Learning the difference between shame and guilt is important. I did not think that there was a difference until recently, and this book clarifies the definitions of the two.

    Other good reads and future reads:

    The articles on Tiny Buddha, founded by Lori Deschene.

    Texture, William Powers’ blog. His book Twelve by Twelve is in my bedside table stack.

    Patti Digh. Her tweets are great too. Her book Life is a Verb is on my wish list for when I buy books again.

  • Day After Christmas in a snowy North Carolina

    This amount of snow is very exciting to us Southerners. When we get winter weather it is more often ice and sleet. Looks like you folks to our northeast are about to get dumped on.

    In the South, everybody runs out to the grocery store at the hint of a snow forecast and loads up on milk and bread. It’s kind of embarrassing when you really DO need milk and bread. So y’all stop doing that, okay? Fortunately, I really loaded up on food last week because I wanted to be able to concentrate on dyeing and art-making this week.

    I bought a potted Meyer lemon tree this summer, and brought it in about a month ago. It has been flowering like crazy so I hope to get some lemons this winter! I was told that I would. It has filled half the house with a heavy gardenia-like smell, which is great if you like that smell, and gag-awful if you don’t. Guess which camp I fall into.

    The eucalyptus dyeing project should help a lot with that.

    Here’s what we woke up to in Greensboro, North Carolina and it is still snowing.

    Santa dropped off some catnip for the kittehs, so here’s the other entertainment for me this week. Even Miss Jazz got into the fun last night. Guido is still into it:

    Guess dusting this week wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

  • Merry White Christmas!

    We returned to Greensboro a day earlier because the weather forecasts have been all over the place, and they were calling for several inches of snow in southeastern NC in the morning – they rarely get much snow and given the unpredictability of the whole scenario, we decided after a call to a Greensboro friend that we should probably avoid driving out of there tomorrow. I was told that it had started snowing in Gboro at 1 p.m., and we were beginning to wonder if it had all turned to rain when we hit the county line and there it was on the ground. Fifteen minutes later we were home on a street covered in snow. So I think that we made the right decision. The latest forecast calls for 3-5 inches here. I had a good time at “home” in Marietta and we were not eager to leave but it will be nice for Sandy to have a whole day off at home in Greensboro. I have the next week off.

    I grabbed up a small bag of acorns and bark from the extremely old white oak in Mama’s yard for some dye experimenting on our rush out to get home before the roads got bad.

    This morning my mother woke me up because there was a massive flock of blackbirds covering the soybean field behind her house. When I went out with my camera, they all moved up and into the surrounding trees. The sound was incredible. I got a few nice shots, even the ones without so many birds…

  • Christmas Eve Preparations and Onion Skin Dyeing Photos

    First and foremost, I will bake the broccoli casserole for Christmas dinner tomorrow. This is usually my sister’s dish, but she is celebrating with her husband’s side of the family this year, so I get the honors! Yay, I was getting tired of doing the out-of-season asparagus casserole. I was able to buy broccoli at the farmer’s market, although most of the other ingredients can’t really be updated to local and still achieve the same degree of yumminess. Unless you call Duke’s mayonnaise local, which could technically qualify depending on your definition.

    But I somehow missed buying onions on my many food-buying trips over the last week and so I’m waiting for Mr. Sandy to help me out by going to Deep Roots to buy some for me. It’s surprising since l was all about the onion skins this past week! I have to start gathering a new batch.

    In the meantime, I’m getting ready for my big eucalyptus dye-fest after Christmas. I have a variety of cotton fabric swatches and yarn hanks simmering in a mordant of alum and soda ash right now. They will have plenty of time to soak over the weekend. Many of them will be dyed over the onionskin dye, which should be interesting. The wool scraps will not have to be mordanted so I am just soaking them. I’ll make some silk yarn skeins too. I love dyeing small amounts of silk to use in my tapestries. Silk takes dye so wonderfully. If I have time I’ll wind off some silk/cotton blend yarns. The different kinds of fibers take up dye differently so you end up with these marvelous heathery results.

    Here are a few photos of the first go-round with the onion-skin dyes. The most vibrant results are on the wool scraps. I rolled oak and maple leaves in some of the bundles and tied them up. The strong lines are where the ties made a resist and the dye didn’t penetrate. Resist dyeing is a fascination of mine that I haven’t explored in a long time.

    Unrolling a bundle of wool fabric in the sink – ooooh!

    Cotton bundle unrolled – the strongest colors show up on the outside of the bundle and get lighter as you go toward the core.

    Drying them near the woodstove.

    You can see some of the leaf prints.

    I’ll photograph the yarn skeins after I get back.

    Merry Christmas!

  • Happy Festivus!

    It’s a Festivus miracle!

    Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.

    Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?

    Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!

    Kramer: That must have been some doll.

    Frank Costanza: She was.

    Ah, I need to get into the Festivus spirit. I have spent way too much money lately. Most people have no problems with carrying credit card debt. Me, it eats away at me if I don’t pay it off every month. And yet, and yet, I bought a 1935 washtub with a wringer at a vintage shop yesterday. What was I thinking? I’ll tell ya. I was visualizing how it would be the perfect thing for my papermaking.

    And that’s my problem lately – I have had little to no control when it comes to spending money on art supplies or books. But, gah, they have a great sale on cotton carpet warp at Webs! No, seriously. They really do. Go see for yourself.

    Today is the last day of work before I get a nice long Christmas holiday break. I have lots of things to show and to write about. I have my Fry-Daddy out on the kitchen counter, which is about to get a workout melting soy wax for batik. I have done a bunch of onion skin dyeing and I’m about to start all over with eucalyptus. I’ll be at my mother’s house without Internet access this weekend, but it’s gonna be a fun week next week. Stay tuned.