slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Creating tapestries

    I thought that I might share a little about my creative process in doing the mini tapestries. It’s so simple that it won’t take long. Reading Living the Creative Life and The Artist’s Way made me think about this, and I figure that it’s worth sharing.

    This is my current workspace in the Happy Room, on the futon that serves as a guest bed. Isn’t it a mess? But it’s really working for me, like I have a palette of yarn.

    I found that the trick to keeping my creative energy going is to always have a little cardboard loom ready. It takes about five minutes tops to warp a piece of cardboard, which I prepare by snipping slits top and bottom 4 or 5 slits to an inch. You can’t really get a lot of detail with this method, but the simplicity and limit is part of the charm for me. For more detailed designs, I use a pin loom, where I can get 8 ends per inch.

    I could draw a design on the cardboard, but what I do with the mini-tapestries is that I begin with a blank cardboard piece, pick up a color, and begin. It helps a lot to have an idea prompt. I have a theme right now of “By the Sea.” As I needleweave the yarn into the warp, an idea will begin to develop. If it doesn’t, I do a solid block of color. I figure that I can embellish the solid blocks with beads, shells, embroidery, or needle-felting later, so it’s definitely not a waste of time. The point is, I don’t wait for an idea. I just start weaving.

    If I’m not totally thrilled with it, it’s okay. I’ve only put a couple of hours into it at the most, and now that I’m interested in assemblage and collage, I figure that I’ll find a way to work with it later. In the meantime, I’m free to play, which is not something that usually happens with weavers. And playing was something that I struggled with so much that I even made “learning to play” a project for my “Creating Peace” class only last fall.

    If I get an idea for a more complicated idea, I’ll work that out later with a cartoon (design for a tapestry). I should make notes, but I have to work on that. It’s usually hard for me to stop weaving and start writing notes! I had a dream last night with an idea for a weaving that I awoke from and said to myself that I should write it down. Of course, the part of me that wanted to go back to sleep convinced me that I would remember this great idea in the morning. Of course, I have not remembered the details as of yet. I’ve had a lot of these dreams and they’re wonderful in their details, but by the time I get to the coffee, they’re a fuzzy warm pleasant feeling. So I need to work on my methods for recording ideas.


    Here’s a photo of the back of one of the tapestries. I designed these “signatures” in Word and copied eight to a standard 8.5 x 11 page, leaving a bit of space where I can attach a pin if needed, and then I used Ricë’s technique for printing them on a piece of muslin. I left the freezer paper on the back and cut them apart.

    Then I made hemmed backs of a watercolory-looking blue fabric to fit the back of each tapestry (using fusible webbing), fused those directly to the back of the tapestries, then peeled away one of my muslin signatures and fused that on top of the blue fabric.

    Here’s the (un-) funny thing – I decided to use fusible webbing for many of my sewing tasks to save my hands some stress and because I am such a klutz that I stab myself with needles and pins all the time. Well, here’s this fabulous alternative, right? I bought a little craft mini-iron that has a long rod handle and a little flat iron tip that I could use for little areas and corners where I might need more precision. So what was the first thing I did with my fabulous new tool yesterday? I mindlessly grabbed it in the wrong place and burned the hell out of my right index fingertip. If I don’t learn anything else from this hobby, I will learn mindfulness, the hard way if necessary.

  • “By the Sea” tapestries

    “By the Sea: Wave”; series of tapestry artist trading cards. Woven on cardboard loom. Linen warp, cotton weft. 3.5 x 2.5 inches.

    “By the Sea: Tidal Pools”; series of tapestry artist trading cards, woven for trading at Art & Soul in early May. I drew on memories of Sunset Beach and Tubbs Inlet for these seascapes. Woven on cardboard loom. Linen warp, wool weft. 3.5 x 2.5 inches.

    ^“By the Sea: Overcast Low Tide” – I think that we’ll keep this one, as it is too big for an ATC and I’m rather fond of it. The wool for the sky was space dyed leftovers from a weaving years ago. Linen warp, wool weft. 3.75 x 2.75 inches.

  • Mojo struggles

    So the question is…
    Now that I’ve gotten my art mojo back, how do I do the other stuff that I need to do? This house is covered in cat hair, but I did manage to clean the toilet and wash the dishes tonight.

    This weekend I hope to finish up the paths in the Back Forty if it doesn’t rain me out. I’ve got the stuff, but I need strong arms to carry it from the back of the Fit to the back yard. There is a lot of weeding to be done. The kind of weeds that a newspaper mulch doesn’t quite suppress. I should go ahead and plant some beans, I guess. My tomatoes, peppers, and cucumber seedlings aren’t quite ready yet, and we’re supposed to get down in the 30s by Monday night. So I’ll tote the trays back in.

    Normally, weeding the Back Forty in the spring is meditative bliss for me, but not this year, because I’m constantly beckoned by the muse. And she’s serious about it. I’ve got more ideas than I could possibly create in a year right now.

    I’m excited tonight because Ricë is giving away some of her stamp collection and she is sending me a box! I never thought of stamping as being a particularly creative art before I started reading books on collage and multimedia and surface design. I didn’t have my mind open to it. I never thought about carving my own stamps, although when I was doing ceramics, I used everything I could find to stamp my clay with different textures and shapes and lines. If I had kept up the ceramics, textural designs and slab pottery and tiles was the direction I was heading. Now I realize – when I carved designs into clay, I could have been carving stamps. I’m just continuing where I left off in 2002, it seems, in a different medium.

    I wanted to work with found objects and texture, and I wanted to work with fibers. Well, here we go.

    This weekend is the last one for a while in which I have no plans other than to hang around the homestead, which I consider to be the. best. place. ever. So I’m fighting between the urge to get this garden and housework done when I have the time, or ditching it all to finish the tapestry ATCs and pins and fill my origami trade boxes for Art & Soul. Thing is, it is necessary to do things other than create art. I keep thinking of that movie Iris, with Judy Dench as Iris Murdoch (I’ve decided that Judy Dench is the most amazing actress on the planet). She and her husband were a creative couple, and their house was an unbelievable mess. I don’t want a house like that, but if I followed the muse every time she crooked a finger at me, we’d be doomed to filth and weeds three feet tall.

  • Earth and fire

    Here are the first two small tapestries of a series of four. This is “Earth” and “Fire.” Guess what the other two will be!

    I took a piece of the cardboard box that I used for my tapestry bag and decided to work that part of the design in different colors. The loom is just string wrapped around a piece of cardboard with slits cut across the top and bottom – nothing expensive or complicated about that! I used some of the multitudes of leftover scraps of wool yarn that I have hoarded over the years.

    These are 4 x 6 inches each and could be used for fabric postcards if I wanted to go that way…I think that I will mount them together as a wall piece though. The challenge is getting them mounted and maybe framed. Once I’m done weaving, it is very hard for me to follow through on presentation. Maybe I’ll do a simple one-color quilted square to mount them on.

    I still need to sew together some of the slits from the back and probably will fuse a backing to them.

    I wanted to show you my little seascape tapestries, but I can’t seem to get a good photo of them. I’ll keep trying.

  • Monday blues

    Boy, what a rotten Monday I had. Someone overheard something I said out of context and very strongly accused me of being a racist to a lot of people. I had explaining and apologizing to do and now we both feel like shit, but I think that she understood that I was sincerely sorry that I hurt her. I told her about how Obama’s speech on race touched me and that I think that it’s important that we talk and listen to each other about race. I’ve done a lot of crying today and I wouldn’t be surprised if this shows up as a Monday migraine tonight.

    Anyway, I haven’t posted about my artwork in a while. Partially it’s because I hate taking the photos. I can’t get the color and focus right without a lot of trying. I wish that I could weave, read, blog, and take photos at the same time, but I’m not that talented. So I keep promising a post on tapestry, and I will follow through. Soon.

    When I find myself twiddling my thumbs, waiting on hold or waiting on an email, I’ve been folding little origami boxes out of heavy paper I’ve gleaned out of junk mail. This could become an obsession. Best of all, not only am I recycling paper, I’ve come up with lots of embellishment ideas and I think that I’m going to make these some of my trades at Art & Soul.

    Serendipity: I opened one of the new used books I bought, Art Stamping Workshop, and one of the projects was about these boxes – the technique is called “masu.” In this project, you stamped a design on fabric and fused the fabric to paper so that it can be folded with crisp edges. This idea perked me up considerably. I like vessels and containers, and my hands aren’t really strong enough for pottery or basketry. THIS I can do.

    Tonight I’m working on a little series of tapestries that I’ve begun in the Happy Room. I’ll probably take a Xanax and hit the sack early so that I don’t grind my teeth all night.

  • Books, books, books

    I am totally overwhelmed with the books I’ve bought in the last few weeks. It’s like a book fiend has taken over my body. Yesterday Sandy and I did a big purge of books to take to Ed McKay’s today, so I could get my new stacks of books off the floor and onto shelves.

    Some of these new stacks are of old books. For example, when I visited Mama a few weeks ago, I snagged the 1952 set of World Book encyclopedias, which I’m sure made me the geography trivia whiz that I am today. If today was in 1952. I always had my nose in these encyclopedias, and they meant nothing to anyone but me.

    I also brought back my much beloved copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, spine well creased from obsessive re-reading, and a copy of Treasure Island, which I never read but I found a piece of paper in it where I had made as many words as I could out of the words Treasure Island. I made up a lot of word games as a child out of these books and encyclopedias. I found my old stamp collection and a list I had made of “My Library,” which included such diversity as Huckleberry Finn, Flip Wilson Close-up, Steppenwolf, How to Write Codes and Send Secret Messages, and Gardening Indoors Under Lights. I doubt that I actually read Steppenwolf, but I may have given it a try. The librarians on the county bookmobile had a very hard time keeping up with me – I’d have finished my stack of books they picked out for me long before they came back in two weeks.

    There was a real treasure trove of old books in the free section of Ed McKay’s for a few weeks. I’ve picked up a lot of old school books and other interesting books from the turn of the century up through the fifties. I have enough novels from the free section to last me two years. And, believe it or not, I had been hitting the library on a regular basis, but I’m going to give it a rest until I read some of what I have at home. I started reading Wendell Berry’s novels from the beginning, and that felt like going back in time to talk to relatives long gone.

    Yesterday, Sandy and I went to Empire Books, where I never made it past the cookbook and arts and crafts section. Sandy found a perfect copy of my favorite artist Andy Goldsworthy’s Time for $18. I picked up a $4 copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, three wonderful craft books: Art Stamping Workshop, Beaded Crazy Quilting, and Paper into Pots, and a 1950 half autobiography/half cookbook called Love and Dishes, by Niccolo de Quattrociocchi, an Italian restauranteur in New York City. It has recipes from all the famous NYC restaurants of the time. I’m really looking forward to digging into this one.

    It is a good thing that I don’t live closer to Empire Books. I might go broke. I really, really need new clothes but I spend all my money on books, art supplies, and good food. My priorities are pretty good but I might need to get a little more practical.

    So, what started this post was a question from Moomin Light in the comments of the last post: What creativity books have I been reading? I mentioned Living the Creative Life, by Ricë Freeman-Zachery. I’m also reading her book Stamp Artistry.

    I was already into The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron, which I like but I’m going to wait until summer if I do the lessons.

    Danny Gregory’s The Creative License is so incredible that I nearly have a panic attack each time I open it, but it’s next. I read his Everyday Matters last year, and I’m a lurker in the Everyday Matters Yahoo group.

    In addition, I’m feeding my inner child and dreamer with Dan Price’s illustrated journal Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life. Because I spent a good part of my childhood winters building hide-outs and lean-tos and treehouses to read my books in.

    I have Amazon links to these books in my pretend bookstore, if you’re interested in learning more or buying them. I’ll update it with my newest books later today.

    Yes, I’ve been a book hound since I graduated. It is delicious.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Sitting here half asleep, trying to plan the weekend while the coffee lasts.

    High on the agenda: more coffee.

    First in line: the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market on the corner of Yanceyville and Lindsey Sts., where I will pick up excellent snackies and a few grocery items for the week. I’m pretty good for groceries, since I am trying to eat out of the freezer and make room for future chicken stock, once my chicken CSA starts.

    Then to Deep Roots Market, where I will buy things like coffee and toilet paper.

    Then to Harris Teeter for beer and cat food.

    Then to Joann’s – cotton and linen is on sale and I found some great deals in the remnant bin since the remnants are an additional 50% off, and small pieces are fine for what I do.

    Greensboro’s Earth Day Fair is this afternoon – I hope that it doesn’t pour down rain. Or worse, wait until it begins and then start to storm. I’m not doing the Slow Food table there this year, but somehow I feel a little guilty about it. I’m insane for feeling this way. No one helped me with it the last two years. It’s just that it’s a bitch when the weather is bad at these outdoor fairs, and I pushed the fact that it was important for Slow Food have a presence there. You also have to park about a half mile away from the table, so there is no easy exit.

    On Thursday, though, I am doing a Slow Food table with Renee of Sweet Basil’s restaurant at the showing of Wild Caught, a documentary about North Carolina fishermen at Weatherspoon Art Museum. Renee offered to prepare wild-caught fish hors d’oeuvres! I’m loving that she is so interested in getting involved with Slow Food. Except for Masood and Anna of Zaytoon, other restaurants around Greensboro seem to be uninterested. There is also going to be a little farmers market in the back of Weatherspoon from 4-6:30, when the film begins. We’ll be set up inside, from 6-6:30.

    So I have an excuse to go to Sweet Basil’s this weekend. I have to take Renee some flyers. Not really, but that’s my excuse. Ooh, maybe we can hit Empire Books while we’re over that way. It is a really good little used book store. And Guilford Garden Center for some landscape fabric and hardwood mulch to finish the paths up, if it clears up this weekend.

    I enjoyed a good thunderstorm last night, nestled down in fresh organic knit sheets with a great new book. I splurged on these a few years ago, and I’m spoiled for any other kind of sheets now.

    I’m deep into reading books on creativity now. Last night, I was fascinated by Living the Creative Life, by my new friend Ricë. Wow. What a wonderful book. If you’re at all interested in unleashing your creativity, I highly recommend it.

    The Toyota has been dead as a doornail for the past two and a half weeks, so I have to get all my running around town done on Saturday and Sunday. I haven’t minded staying at home during the week at all. However, we need to get it jumped off and either repaired or charged up in the next couple of days because my brother-in-law will be in the hospital for a few days starting tomorrow night and I need to be on call to help if needed.

    And during the time that I’m not running around doing these things, I’ll be at home weaving and listening to podcasts, and trying not to think about how the bathroom needs to be cleaned.

  • Back Forty Update

    I’m back to the phase when I think that I’ll quit blogging and just live my life, but that never lasts long. Right now I’m blogging out of a weird sense of obligation that only bloggers understand, but a few days from now I’ll probably have to restrain myself from doing several posts in a day. I AM trying to balance the blogging addiction, and lately it has been working, partly because I have so many other things capturing my attention.

    Such as the Back Forty – I took down the greenhouse yesterday so that hopefully this next predicted soaking rain will benefit the lettuce, beets, and carrots planted in those beds. I transplanted a lot of leek volunteers. I took advantage of the wet earth and dug up a lot of dandelions and thistles, especially in the middle of the path that I’m about to mulch, thanks to the help of Gwen, who brought me some more cardboard.

    I’ve been cooking again too. Nothing fancy. It’s only me for dinner these days, but I’ve never minded leftovers too much. Tonight I’m baking a meat loaf and a local pasture-raised ham steak spread with peach preserves from one of our Amish farmers. Also peas and corn from my freezer – I need to make some room in the freezer for my chicken CSA which will begin in a couple of weeks. I’ll eat most of the chicken but I plan to make and freeze stock. I’m going to try to get more serious about producing my own food this year. Not being clinically depressed should help with that goal.

    Seedlings inside will go out to harden off in the next few days. They’re looking good – I also have a few cucumbers that I got from Stew that I hope will do well in containers. The only thing that did not germinate at all was the Red Marconi peppers I got from the seed swap at the CFSA conference, so I might have to buy a few sweet pepper plants. I love growing peppers.

    Okay, back to the stove then back to weaving.

  • Slow Food potluck

    Our Slow Food convivium is starting a regular potluck night on the last Sunday of every month, and last night was the first one. If you have never been to a Slow Food potluck, hoo boy, is that some good eating! There is always an assortment of people with all kinds of interests, so when one group is watching the game in one room (it IS March in North Carolina), some are swapping toddler stories, a couple of others are discussing mushroom cultivation and another group is talking about raw food.

    On the table, the feast included roast venison, deviled eggs, turnip greens with ham and homemade hot vinegar sauce, salad with soba noodles and tofu, and orange cranberry sweet potatoes. The only requirement was that the dish contain at least one local ingredient.

    Sandy and I both attended, so I took two dishes with the main ingredients fresh from my garden. The first one is proof that vegetarian food is not diet food. I tossed sliced leeks and fennel bulbs with butter from the farmers’ market and braised (simmered) them in water and lots of butter for a long, long time until the water had simmered away and the leeks and fennel turned into silky melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Then I ground some fresh black pepper and grated a little Pecorino Romano cheese on top. This is a typical Tuscan style of cooking vegetables, except the Tuscans probably wouldn’t combine the two.

    The other dish I took from a wonderful, well-known food blog, 101 Cookbooks. I have had a sealed plastic bag of farro from Spannocchia since October 2006 when I bought it there (in Italy). When I looked it up in Italian cookbooks, I was instructed to soak it a day ahead of time and I just couldn’t remember to do it, and eventually forgot about it. I saw a link to this recipe and remembered the farro and decided to try it. Turns out that you don’t need to soak it at all, and it also turns out that I liked the flavor a lot! You can order farro, an ancient variety of wheat grain, from Anson Mills in South Carolina. I used lettuce, beet greens, and claytonia from the Back Forty, garlic chives from the Back Forty instead of a shallot, honey wine vinegar from Quaker Acres Apiary, the rest of my olive oil from Spannocchia, and goat cheese from Goat Lady Dairy. This recipe was a winner and very easy:
    Citrus Parmesan Farro Salad.

    Yum – I was so stuffed – I guess I didn’t mention the Swedish cake and the chocolate/Guinness stout pie.

  • About cats and grief

    I am delighted with the progress I’ve made with Mama Kitty this week! I’ve petted her quite a bit. I feed Miss Peanut and Mama Kitty on the front porch, where Miss Peanut lives in the Peanut Shack (she is mostly blind), and although Mama Kitty eats with her daughter, she likes to hang out on the back deck and annoys a few of the neighbors, I suppose. Mostly she sticks close to home and if I’m out in the yard she follows me around and supervises, with an occasional security check of the studio. I’m particularly fond of Mama Kitty because she is Squirt’s mama and they share a lot of personality traits, even though it has taken years to earn any of her trust.

    One night I fed Miss Peanut and Mama Kitty didn’t come to my whistle. I went to the back deck where she was, and I scooped her up. I gave her a good kitty massage before I put her down. She ran around in a little circle, and then I picked her up again. This time I walked with her to the chair and sat down and tried to pet her in my lap, but that was a little too much. I put her down and she again ran around in a circle back to me instead of taking off. So I walked with her up to the front porch, talking to her about how Miss Peanut was going to eat all the canned food if she didn’t hurry, with her following behind me just like a happy little dog.

    Now, I can’t get too attached to Mama Kitty. It’s bad enough already. She is very bony and I can’t get her to eat anything with de-wormer or medicine in it. She is 12 years old and semi-feral. I’m looking at potential heartbreak here. But I’m thinking that with this progress, I could possibly get this vet who makes house calls to come over and update her rabies shot, and do anything else possible for her. Plus, I could probably apply some Frontline or Revolution to her neck and make her life a lot more comfortable.

    Yes, I am very wary about getting too attached to another of our cats. The way I felt about Squirt was so far beyond how I feel about the others, but I’m sure that was because I fed him by hand as a kitten. As far as he was concerned, I was his mama, and he was probably as close to a son as I’ll ever have.

    I’ve thought a lot recently about the paradox that I’ve been happier than I have been in years since Squirt died three months ago, when I thought that Squirt’s death would surely send me to the loony bin or even leaving home on one of those middle-aged spirit journeys. I think that a good part of it is from changing my antidepressant and Sandy getting his job back. But it’s a lot more than that.

    I have dreaded the day when I would have to put Squirt to sleep for ten years, since I fell in love with him as a little baby. I never could imagine how I could deal with it, and in my imagination I couldn’t see being with him as he died, and I couldn’t see NOT being with him as he died. I was with my father when he died, and it was a horrible experience. I couldn’t be with Sharky when I had him put to sleep. But I was with my little Squirtley, and I looked deeply into his eyes as he passed from this world, and he is at peace, and I survived.

    I guess that I didn’t realize how deeply that dread had pervaded my life. I still miss him terribly, but I am relieved as well. Isn’t that strange. It makes sense, but I don’t really want it to make sense. I don’t want to be relieved that Squirt died. But I know that I am relieved, not because of his death, but because his death released me too. It is very complicated, the mixture of my grief and my happiness.

    Now when I check my stats, I see that I get a lot of hits of people looking for solutions about feline CRF, and it saddens me that they will see a story with a sad ending. I realize now that Squirt must have been sick with CRF for a long, long time before he was diagnosed, plus he had so many other medical problems. In the end it was liver failure that got him. Just the difference in how much water I need to put down for our three other indoor cats now that Squirt’s gone has made me realize how long Squirt was sick. His thirst had increased over a long period of time until it was excessive enough for me to notice.

    So if you’re reading this because you’re desperate to find a solution to your cat’s CRF, I hope that you won’t despair. The fluids that we gave Squirt really did seems to help him. It’s just that he had come to the end of his life. It was an excellent life, and one that enriched mine forever.