thelmasmith

I’ve been here and not here. I signed up with Pima College for a Printmaking class and a Museum and Galleries Practices class. So I’m running to town three times a week and trying to shoehorn grocery shopping and errand running into that fuel usage. It’s interesting but fatiguing.

The first printmaking assignment was not intimidating. Thank goodness. I’m rather pleased with myself as I had never done carving before. This is the scan of the proof sheet for Lady Alice. The print block is 4″ x 2″; I was using up someone’s purple ink. Click to enlarge.

The second printmaking assignment was alter ego. I finally asked Karen, my table mate, what she had done about the topic. “I know who I am and I’m happy with my life; I don’t need Wonder Woman. I just did what I wanted to.” This after I had been through four iterations that neither fit the assignment nor was anything boldly graphic. I could not figure out how to carve the things I had drawn.

I had been through my image files on the external hard drive and even dug out the snapshot files from before I owned a digital camera. Nothing made any sense. Finally at one in the morning, after tossing and disturbing every cat in the house I just gave up and got out of bed. I went and pulled a snapshot of a tree I have always loved. The hell with the assignment; I know I can make a good positive/negative out of this one.

This is the unproofed plate. Click to enlarge. I painted the grey battleship linoleum with gesso so that I could see my cuts. My fingers and fingernails tell me that there is some clean up to be done once I see a proof. I can feel the chumbles that will give me trouble.

The textbook prices will make one cringe. However, when I saw the amount of technical detail in this one: A Printshop Handbook: A Technical Manual For Basic Intaglio, Relief, And Lithographic Processes. I did not hesitate. One good text book is worth a dozen, popular press, quilter focused, technique and process books. This one is authored by Beth Grabowski. I wonder if there is any kinship with Kerr Grabowski.

The other textbook, The Complete Printmaker is both historical data and technical information. I think one could work a lifetime with these two books.

So, though I am more than usually silent, I am here and I am working. I have four days a week at home. Day by day I have been working my way through deadlines; real ones and ones I have imposed on myself.

The other fly in the ointment is a speeding ticket. How humiliating to drive a roadster and get caught in a speed trap going so fast: 46mph.

Pictured above are Sonji Hunt and Rhonda Blasingame. Do go to Sonji Says for a much more complete description of the class. Rhonda, please contact me; I’m unable to find how to email you.

Among the things I firmly believe is the idea that textile art is not well served by being kept to itself. We use the words art quilt and wonder why no other artists are interested in our work.

I went to the Tougaloo Art Colony in Jackson, Mississippi, last week because the words said art colony. I have never spent a week so joyously.

Ceramicists, painters, enamelers, textile workers, all noted and acclaimed instructors, most who were professors at other institutions came together for a week of very intense study. Very intense study was combined with very intense discussions, meals, trips out here and there.

Adding to the mix of intelligent conversation and hard work was the multi cultural aspect of Tougaloo. Above are Debbie, Sonji half hidden, and Annie from Chicago. Sonji will have much better pictures and more details.

I think this was about the point when we had all painted yards and yards of fabric and were beginning the next step in Sonji’s process.

It was quite interesting; each of us immediately had a recognizable painting style. We were creating layer after layer of painted fabric. Each layer from the big stack related to the painting before it.

Rosalind, our teaching assistant, is backed by Rhonda’s rust dyed works just behind Rosalind and on the left. The bright multi colors to the right are all Sonji’s brought to give us some idea of what and how the process goes along.

Do not be fooled by Rosalind’s seemingly plain pink fabric; when done it was a gorgeous blue fabric with pink underlays.

I’ll be more on my game tomorrow and the next few days. In the last eight weeks I have made fourteen separate flights. The airlines are fourteen for fourteen. Every flight was either delayed, double booked, canceled, delayed for mechanical problems, delayed for lack of crew, or delayed by weather. In spite of the cost of fuel I think next time I will drive.

That means I plan to go back to Tougaloo next Art Colony. It will be an entirely different group of professors. I have no idea what I will sign up for. I do know that I wanted to get my hands in to every medium that was taught next week. I’m hoping they will extend the Art Colony beyond one week

It is so pleasant to come home and review all the posts on Planet.textilethreads. So much is going on. The synergy is building. I am really enjoying all the images.  Many thanks to all the artists who are building such an exciting community.
I had planned on using my vacation to be more disciplined about posting. However, life gets in the way. Here’s a late nineteenth century advertising sign; apparently thelma is a southern name.

A southern first name, and an uncommon one, at that, is okay, now that I’ve lived with it for more than sixty years. My great great grandparents left Virginia in the early nineteenth century. They anticipated the need for the Emancipation Proclamation.

This is a sealing iron, probably 1930s to 1950s vintage. I bought it to go with the beeswax.   I haven’t tested it to see if it works.  It will come apart easily.  I can probably rebuild it if I need.  It’s a nice companion to my 1950s GE iron.

I have not had the time or self discipline to work yet. I have two more excursions this month.

Beeswax and collagraph are calling my name.  I’ve an embellisher that I want to spend time with.  I’m also going to do some more focused study on abstract design.  I think that being forced to commit to design principles in abstract will enhance my work all around.  Once I have the design principles I’ve been using for fifty years reinforced, refreshed, and updated, I hope to use that active information to jump start my work again..

I hope I will have found both the direction and the ability to close out more mundane reality and work.

My friend, the Spider, has been working for months with me. He has created Planet Textile Threads. With his help and a lot of Google work and hot links followed, we have peopled PTT with some of the most fascinating people from around the world in the field of textile arts.

Planet.textilethreads is a privately owned, invitational restricted, RSS feed. The members are requested to post to their blogs a few times a week. It is limited to a total of twenty four artists.

Here are a few figures to help visualize the traffic. The figures are not exact for April as we had server crash last week of April. In January, 2007, we had 129 unique visitors and 990 hits. February had 241 unique visitors and 898 hits. March had 501 unique visitors and 5232 hits. April, in spite of some lost data has grown spectacularly: 1800 unique visitors and 15,400 hits. Bandwidth usage has grown from less than twenty mega bytes to more than 720 mega bytes.

All this growth has happened without any notices on the lists on the net. Word of mouth referrals tell us that this sort of growth will continue.

Since PTT is about at it’s limit we have created a more broad based blog aggregation service.

Quilt Voices is a new, subscription based, blog aggregation service. Various other textile artists and people who have businesses who support our work will be included. Both people who provide web based supplies and those who run brick and mortar stores are welcome to membership in Quilt Voices.

You can see the beginnings of Quilt Voices at the hotlink above. Selling directly on these blogs is not allowed. There are no restrictions on post content so long as they are in good taste. We expect quiltvoices to bring you the sort of interested volume, and growth of volume, to your own websites that we are experiencing on PTT.

Subscriptions will be $1US per month, payable annually via PayPal. Those people who have textile related web only businesses (less than $50,000 gross, annually) may subscribe at $7 per month, payable annually. Large volume businesses and those in physical locations may subscribe at $15 per month.

This notice on thelmasmith.com and on planet.textilethreads is the first public notice. I expect to develop Quilt Voices over the summer. When everyone is settled in by the time school starts in the northern hemisphere I will begin marketing Quilt Voices internationally.

Like Planet.textilethreads, now, with it’s increasing readership and volume, quiltvoices.com will become known as THE place to get your textile fix with one click with your morning coffee.

To get your blog featured on Quilt Voices please
send and email to Spider AT quiltvoices DOT com with the following information:
Name = ……….
Blog Address = http:// …….
Status = Hobbyist or Small Business or Business

Only Paypal is accepted as a method of annual pre-payment.

I finally cleared off the rest of the detritus from the six foot long work table that has my Juki set flush into the top. I’m looking for a 1960s vintage, sturdy, typing table with locking wheels. I need a task specific table for the Pfaff Smart 350. It’s a needle felt machine that is newly in the marketplace. Until today my only experiments were to darn my wool socks.

I decided to do some experiments. Yesterday I had torn eight inch widths of muslin, cotton flannel, cotton sateen, and a fairly heavy silk.  I decided to work both with hand dyed wool roving and with scraps of red matka silk. Here’s the sample with the cotton sateen face.

There is red-orange, black and a purple brown wool needle punched both as cobweb felt and as disciplined, controlled lines. The red matka silk was manipulated in the middle swath and just needle punched on the lower right. The dupioni silk was a scrap; half of it had fuseable web on the back.

The three layers took the felting well. I think if I decide how and when and were I’ll do this sort of work with a design rather than random testing I will either lay the face fabric on the flannel or just felt on the base fabric. The needle punch holes are quite apparent.

Here is the sample I laid up with a muslin base, cotton flannel, and a heavy silk.

Same materials, handle slightly differently. The purple silk ravelings took the punching nicely although they drew up a lot shorter than they started. Do click on the thumbnails as the needles I am using are too coarse and have damaged the fairly tightly woven silk face. I am in the process of ordering some size 42 triangular needles. I suppose while I am at it I should inquire about size 44, too. Back is as boring as the front.

I’m encouraged. Even though I damaged the silk sample the process shows a lot of hope. I’m particularly interested in the cobweb silk. If I can solve the fineness aspects of the needles I have some lovely space dyed roving here.

There is still almost the full width of the samples I made up. So I’ll lay them on top of the wool box. That way maybe I’ll be able to find them when I have more experiments in mind.

As an afterthought - here’s the task specific modification of an old typing table that holds the Bernina. It’s particularly useful as it’s the same height as all my card tables. I can extend it to side or back simply by wheeling it out away from the wall.

I’ve been spending the day procrastinating. I’m also processing a lot of personal information. Here are a few of the non coincidental coincidences I’ve experienced today.

Baba Yaga stands in my kitchen. She over sees my cooking. If I have eastern European genes I am not aware of them. However, here is a story of Yaga.

Do go to the top of that page after reading all about the ancient goddess. Then, take a look at what happens when you take an ancient goddess and put her in charge of a Sonoran kitchen.

Here she is supervising a quesadilla.

More importantly, go take a look at Yaga’s fabrics and designer clothing.

Another beautiful day in sonora.

I worked almost all day and finally came to the desk about three.  Got the winter clothes sorted out of the closet and put away.  Dumped out the donation bag of widows weeds for Valarie James Las Madres project and added some summer clothes and reconsidered and removed others.

Got black clothes washed, dry, hung up.  Same with whites including my towels.  Also a piece of the peruvian pima cotton sateen.  I have decided that the brown back on my fancy banana leaf pillows though beautiful is distracting.  So I’ve a piece of sateen in a green dye bath.

All the Left Turn Lane came back from the Pomona Downtown Art Center.  They had been there since December.  Since they were in the community conference room and the art center is associated with Pitzer etc.  I wonder if I can legitimately call it a solo exhibition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_Colleges

Anyway, the dye board was set up in the garage and I got everything unpacked (bulk packing) and individually rerolled and wrapped and put away.  While I was at it and had the ends off the storage tubes I decided to get rid of some of the space wasters.

I did my best with the cat bat.  When that storage unit was in the house it had no ends and was tunnels for cats.

While I was at it I rolled all the rest of the sateen off the core and folded in by the yard.  There was ten yards before I had to get it back out of the closet and tear the pillow length.  I think it’s nine and a half now.

I’ve been rereading the paint and dye books.  The Tuckman & Janas Creative Silk Painting keeps talking only about “new” instant set dyes that need no steaming. They never mention a name or a brand; it is most frustrating.  The stretch or not stretch page is followed with a stretch with tape over stretcher boards.  Stabilize with freezer paper, loose stretch (over an open cardboard box), stabilize on adhesive boards, stabilize on a smooth flat surface.  Aaarrrgggg  -  they do mention the complete book of silk painting at only $27.  Since the book in my hand is more than ten years old I should be able to find it second hand.  Do I want it??

Kate Broughton’s textile dyeing makes references to acidic mediums and acid dyes almost as an afterthought.  It gives several different ways of working.  Including laying silk on washed, ironed, white canvas, doing the dye painting, letting everything dry thoroughtly, peeling the two apart, touching up the mirror image on the canvas, and steaming the whole shebang.  The particular artist then makes totes out of the canvas and I’m not quite sure what with the beautifully hand painted silk.

Another artist in the same book talks of acid dyes, wet in wet like watercolor.

Even dharma says very little of particular use.  There is something “everybody” knows that I’m not getting here.  I have dupont dyes, untouched.  Single sentences about water and alcohol.  Asides about vinegar or citric acid crystals.  Even the “recipes” from each artist’s paragraph may mention vinegar but no one ever says, “Do this with the vinegar.”

I’ve got to go fold white clothes.  Obviously I’m not going to start painting on silk in the next day or two.  However, I do have three quite large bunches of what I would call silk broadcloth folded up and in a marked container.  I have to figure this out sometime.

I’ve been telling my friend and website administrator, the Spider, that I would make use of the debian logo he sent me more than a year ago. Debian is the open source software that is the basis for Ubuntu, and myriad other open source software systems. Here is the logo as I received it.

The smaller of two enlargements, getting parallel lines marked so that straight of grain can be maintained. There is one almost twice as large that will go on an ivory background and will have the debian of the logo added at the bottom to balance the design.

The red silk for the logo, itself, fresh from the washer and dryer.

The silk in a macro image. It appears to be hand spun and hand loomed but I do not know if that is true. Look at the interesting weave that shows before ironing. As I got it ironed I let it flow into my old leather armchair. Next time I looked that way Little Smoke Cat had made herself at home. I hung the silk on the coat hook on the workroom door.

The beginnings of placing the image on the batted quilt ground prior to beginning appliqué.

The placement of the mirror image, freezer paper, pattern on the ironed silk.

The rough cut pattern adhered to the silk. The pattern is mirror image and on the back.

The right side of the silk logo. It is still rough cut with the freezer paper on the back.

The pattern with almost all the freezer paper cut away. Bridges of paper remain to hold detached bits of silk to appliqué in place.

This is the point where I need to turn the extra under. In fact it will be pressed over the back of the freezer paper in as many places as possible. The silk is prone to raveling. It is too late this afternoon for me to decide whether to add fine fuse to the points and sharp turns to help control the raveling.

FineFuse is a tool that is a mixed blessing. It is probably the softest of the synthetic fuseables and no longer on the market. As soft as it is I question whether I want to use it with a fine straw needle and silk thread. So, I’m shipping this blog and thinking the situation over.

The biggest sigh on this lovely spring day. Finally I am beginning to see tangible results. I’m beginning to feel that I can actually conquer my workroom sufficiently. I am beginning to lay out books that I want to reread.

Take a look at the used up, worn out, side of the dye board. If you click on the image you will see the warts and scars from seven years work. It has been balanced on edge on the wagon and banished to it’s alternate place. It lives, now, clamped to the quilt storage system in the garage.

The closets are tidy. Everything is sorted and labeled. I no longer have to dig through all sorts of extraneous materials to find what I have in mind.

Now comes the well, almost part. Take one step down into the sewing portion of my workroom. The ironing board has been put away. The extra card tables that come out to hold up big pieces of fabric for stitching have been put away. The well, almost, part is the sewing surface itself. As other spaces have gotten clean and tidy this space has collected things that need more thought.

The bookcase remains dizastical. My husbands word; it is a hybrid of disaster and fantastic. Work on this space has been put on hold. I need to make decisions on which books to keep. There are a lot of out of print books that have been read once and shelved. Eventually, I will list each one on the website. That too, is on hold.

The rest of the spring cleaning will wait for next week.

The dye board was almost clean. I was down to pressing freshly washed silk gauze and organza. Life intervened, again. A chance note on a list brought two lovely ladies to my door. Two, vintage, restored, 1955 General Electric mangles have new homes. A good, 5000º Kelvin, twin tube, fluorescent on a rolling stand, the one I kept falling over, went to a new home.

So, I continue working on my spring cleaning. I did get the silks ironed and put away until I get time to dye and paint and use them for a nuno base. Look at the silk I found in the cleaning. There should be enough to make a very classy tunic.

Then I ran across this off cut.

Good thing I got so much cleaned up. Here’s what the dye board looks like after removing all the things that were stacked on top of the mangle.