thelmasmith

Here is a photo of my colleague, Tanya Watanabe. Although she lives in Japan she is one of those citizens of the world.

When I come back from a trip I empty the suitcases first. I put the art supplies and the dirty laundry in their place. That’s after sleeping for about twenty hours.

Today was my day for opening the mail from the last ten days. I paid the bills and shredded all the sucker bait mail including all the blank checks with my name on them. Then I got to the large, nicely wrapped package that I knew was from Tanya. I had saved it and savored it as the reward for getting all the boring work done.

I am totally blown away ! ! ! Look at the treasure trove that came out of that small box.

I folded each in half and pinned them up over other things on the pinning wall. The two shorter ones may be – - – oh, rats, I cannot find the John Marshall book on Kimono that gives the proper names. The orange has a lovely lining.

And look at the hand painting on the sleeve. The back has a much larger hand painted mountain scene. The front has a similar painting on each side of the front.

The lavender kimono in the back of the first picture is a lovely brocade. This floral pattern is either hand painted or print in an overall design. Although it has relatively short sleeves it is a much more formal kimono as the long length indicates it is designed to be worn with an obi that will take up some of the length.

This last detail is from the middle kimono. The color in the photo does not do it justice; it is a rich café au lait with delicate, restrained hand painted motifs.

Tanya, I do not know how to thank you enough. These kimono are magnificent. There is no way I can cut them to use in textile art; they are much too gorgeous. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Several things today. Do go and see this YouTube video.

This one called Elektro.

This image is compliments of Google.

The following is a request from the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Please take time, make time, to continue each day by voting for this project with the American Express Member’s Project.
URGENT REQUEST to help NMWA:
June 17th is the DEADLINE to RATE our project!
NMWA / American Express Members Project : ID: 04062

WOMEN ARTISTS: NOT IN THE BOOKS? PUT THEM ON-LINE!

The winning American Express Members Project will receive up to $5 million in funding and visibility with millions of people and the media.

Please go to www.membersproject.com for complete details and clear, simple instructions on how to REGISTER and RATE our project (it takes less than ten minutes).

Please register ASAP and give a FIVE STAR RATING to:

Project # 04062: WOMEN ARTISTS: NOT IN THE BOOKS? PUT THEM ON-LINE!
Help us attract funding and gain UNPRECEDENTED visibility for NMWA through a program that American Express estimates could attract 5 million of their cardholders and countless more through media coverage.

The DEADLINE is June 17th, but please REGISTER and RATE us with 5 STARS TODAY, so we stay high on the list, have a greater chance to become known by more people, attract their support and rank in the top 50 project finalists. The Top 50 Projects will be announced July 3rd, the VOTING begins then, and the winning project will be announced August 7th. Please forward this to your friends! Thank you.

Contact:
Howard White, hwhite@nmwa.org 202.783.7983

National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20005
202.783.5000

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.

Valarie James is both an artist and an activist. She takes no verbal stand. She just shows you, with her art, what she sees.

Her work is progressing far beyond this La Madre, which was shown in 2006 in the exhibition Changing the World One Thread at a Time. She speaks of secrets we will never know. She collects precious, heirloom quality, hand work on textiles in the Spanish language.

A documentary, called The Trail of Thread is in process.

Remember, the other week I told you that I had read Art Is a Way of Knowing? It was particularly challenging for me. The minute I was done I took Women Who Run With the Wolves off the shelf.

I have finished reading the book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. The hotlink will take you to one of the 225,000 Google references on Dr. Estés. The book was originally published in 1992. The image and copyright quotes used here are under the fair use for educational purposes clause of the copyright law. I encourage you to find a used copy of the book.

Remember the day I posted about Baba Yaga? She is probably the most pantheistic archetype spoken about in this book. I guess I know her because she is someone I know. It’s not a typo; just a contradiction in terms. Here are some of the quotations that have been important enough for me to note inside the fly cover.

“It is true, I will not lie to you; it is easier to throw away the light and go to sleep. It is true, It is hard to hold the skull-light out before us sometimes. For with it, we see all sides of ourselves and others, both the disfigured and the divine and all conditions in between.”

“. . . . we throw a burst of fire into the darkness of psyche so we can see what we’re doing . . . what we’re truly doing, not what we wish to think we’re doing.”

“Ignorance s not knowing anything and being attracted to the good. Innocence if knowing everything, and still being attracted to the good.”

I have subscribed to the announcements provided by ArtScene. They appear in my email several times a day. Almost always they are accompanied by images that provoke thinking. Again, another source of images and information that are geographically inaccessible. I tend to think of the work of artists as work belonging to a very broad universe. ArtScene and magazines help me keep in touch with all sorts of things that are not within arm’s reach.

Recently, they have invented a radio – I don’t know whether to call it a station or a system as I think it is internet only – ArtScene Visual Radio.

The image is copyright ArtScene Visual Radio and is provided here for educational purposes under the fair use clause of the copyright law.

PS, my server has been acting up.  I have lost the thumbnail setting on my WordPress.  It will be fixed in the next few days.  Thank you for your forbearance.

The mail man left me a rubber banded stack of paperbag envelopes today. I have seven copies of this new magazine from Spain. I am completely flummoxed. My spanish is just barely enough to understand that writer, J. M. León Moriche, has captured my thoughts about person to person conversations among the citizens of many nations. ArtePatchwork serves Spain and Europe. For those of you who are bilingual, have fun with the website.

There are seven additional artists featured with good, four color, images. I have magazines for each of you. I find that leaves not one for myself. I shall have to scan and print for my portfolio. I don’t know who will get the slightly used copy. Here’s the list:

Eve Under Scrutiny, Pamela Allen, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Rebirth, Scott Murkin, Asheboro, North Carolina

Choices I, Peg Keeney, Harbor Springs, Michigan

Trapped, Lisa Chipetine, West Hempstead, New York

The Coat of Old Responsibility, Jane Herrick, Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Who’s Counting, Eileen Doughty, Vienna, Virginia

What We Know, Lauralyn Sciretta, Tucson, Arizona

The article is magnificent. León Moriche has grasped the concept of societal commentary.  His appreciation of that concept combined with textile art is evident. When I find assistance for a professional translation I will see to it that the artists receive a copy. In the meantime, I’m over the moon.

I think this publication is suitable for every textile artist world wide. Not only will it serve to tweek your multilingual struggles, the text is exploratory and intelligent. The magazine is probably two thirds editorial reportage. The balance of the information is focused on those of us who are still learning. It is not just patchwork, it is threads, and yarns, and all sorts of learning. Well worth the quality of the printing and the images.

It’s a lesson to bureaucrats in the United States that we, as citizens, should honor our hispanic compadres by matching their efforts to be not only bilingual and multilingual but to become multilingual and multiliterate ourselves as well.

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.

Do click on the Reader Stats tab at the top of the blog.  There is a tool for zooming in to the left of the top of the map.  You can zoom(+) , choose to move your zoom north, south, east, and west.  You can also select from the map, satellite, and hybrid viewing selections.  The Xs that seem to obscure the world map will resolve themselves to your home computer as you zoom in.

Have fun! ! !