thelmasmith

There is not much mystery when I label images correctly.  Amazing what one does when tired.

My apologies to all the people kind enough to comment.  I finally got the comments up on the blog today.  Sionwyn is a clear winner based on the time stamps.  Hello, my friend, it has been many years since we spoke.

I’ve sort of been down for the count.  My body has gone into rebellion mode; it is demanding inordinate amounts of sleep.

I’ve a nice group of unidentified objects.  They are from Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine.  Maybe by tomorrow I’ll get them sized and identified A, B, C, etc.  Then I’ll put them up for study and identification.

Let’s see how we can do on identification. The first person who correctly identifies this image will receive a small gift. Please leave your email using DOT and AT to avoid spam. I’ll contact you.

The Mothers - No More Tears

Make some time and take some time to watch this YouTube introduction to a film in progress. The complete documentary will be called A Trail of Thread.

The haunting music in the film clip is called Water in the Desert.

I live in the Sonoran Desert. I know many of the immigrants. I learned long ago that I cared little what language was spoken as I saw good people who worked hard for a living and loved and disciplined their children.

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.

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.