Looking...

Somewhere in this house is a Sharpie pen. Not just any Sharpie pen. The ONLY Sharpie Pen I have and use almost exclusively in my studio. But I haven't seen it since I got back from my trip. Can't figure out where it is. Can't remember when I used it last.


Have done the pat down and the peak under of the stacks here and there. Have spent more time looking for it than it would take to go buy a new one. But I'm stubborn. It MUST be here SOMEWHERE and I will EVENTUALLY run across it. I'll return it to that little basket with the scissors and the pencils and the other pens.


Of course, this would happen sooner if I just cleared the mess off the various suspect places it might be. I'm trying not to let it possess me, this frustration of not being able to put my hands on something that is ALWAYS in the same few places, but isn't now. Silly. Frustrating. I feel a cleaning binge coming on...then I can either feel triumphant when I find it or totally perplexed when I don't. If I just bought a replacement, it would appear right away and I wouldn't have to straighten up my mess...It's a thought.

What I Love (And Hate) About Designing

It's thinking I'm all done, the work ready to be framed or bound, my mind thoroughly made up and all doubts addressed and set aside...and then discovering the piece needs something else. This happened not once, but twice over the last few days, and it's what I hate about working on my own designs, yet love - that unexpected solution that sparks a bit of excitement in me again and makes the work better. I'll start with Broken Promises, my Azalea Mosaic requiring no batting, no stitch, and at one point not even a background. I was going to use a traditional mat over it and slip it into a frame. But then I found the perfect background to create a fabric mat, and fused it to that. Still, I thought it was going straight into the frame, but I couldn't do it. Something about that fused edge made me uneasy. I thought about the decorative stitches on my machine, one all jagged that would carry on the broken theme and decided it would be the perfect ending. After trying several threads and adjustments, I settled on this variegated one that picked up several colors in the mosaic. And of course, the real thing did not read the same as the sample. Grrr...

The yellow in the thread was pretty bright, so I thought I could fix what I didn't like by inking over it to tone it down. Nope, that wasn't the whole problem. The problem was the stitching looked fuzzy in direct opposition to my other clean lines. It also lent an air of agitation to the piece, and although the theme of broken promises could include agitation and irritation, that was not the feeling I had when arranging the pieces. No, it was more sadness, disappointment, a quiet resignation. So the ziggy zaggy thread had to go.


But now I had holes that were not going to disappear, so something would have to be stitched in its place. I opted for this dark green rayon thread in a satin stitch wide enough to cover the holes. I only made one pass - the brokenness can show through a bit in this cleaner finish. NOW it is ready to slip into its frame.


Then it was on to finishing Slippery Slope. One of the drawbacks of hand-dyes and batiks is that the base fabric is quite fine compared to most commercial cottons. A yellow like I planned to use would allow the busy batik it would lay upon to shadow through, so fusing was not an option. I reverted back to backing it with a piece of Decor Bond cut to the exact size the yellow portion needed to be. I trimmed the yellow about 3/8" beyond so that I could turn it to the back, creating a smooth edge finish. I mitered the corners and used glue baste to hold it in place on the back. I could lay down a line of glue, roll the edge over and hit it with the iron, immediately holding it in place.


The idea was for the yellow to look a bit as if it were floating on the background. I centered the mosaic on it and fused it in place, then centered that unit onto the batik background which had also been stabilized with Decor Bond. A little glue baste several inches away from the edges held it in place for the next step.


I didn't want to stitch this piece to the background and decided to slip narrow strips of fusible web along the under edges of the yellow, then ironed with a piece of release paper protecting the top. Using fusible under the entire piece would be overkill since I'd be stitching through that section.


And here is the stitching - I opted for the heavier silk buttonhole thread and was glad I did. It gave just the effect I was hoping for. And here is where I thought I was done, except for adding one more line of stitching.


I was a little unhappy, though, with the way my yellow frame was working. I proportioned it with wider sides to accommodate the fact that I planned to put this piece in a 12 x 16 inch frame. But it just looked a bit blah and off to me. Hmm. I don't know why I thought of it, but suddenly I wondered if it wouldn't improve things, the balance if I added narrow strips of green in that wider border side. And to my mind, this gave the piece the additional interest it lacked. On a whim, I pulled some leftover background from the first Azalea Mosaic, cut strips, compared that look to strips of the green in the center, and decided the speckled one looked better. But I also could see that adding the rejected strips out into the batik, offset like the line of the quilting, would make it even better.


Now it really is done (except I must confess it's not really in the frame yet - that's a photo-shopped one), and I am so much happier with it. I hate it when all the auditioning and thinking and envisioning goes from excitement to disappointment, when I want to be done but I'm not. But then, when these glimpses of what could be come to me, I love working through the process once more.

Karma Friends Award

Here's another blogger award and Scrappy Cat has seen fit to include me among her picks to receive it. Thanks ever so. Here's what it's all about:

The Karma Award: These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kinds of bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.

My picks are as follows. Please check out their blogs. Some post regularly, others less so, but all have wonderful, warm content and are generous in sharing their work and their knowledge and their feelings. Perfect blogger friends!

Olga of Threading Thoughts
Dijanne Cevaal of Musings of a Textile Itinerant
Margaret Cooter
smarcoux at Dangling By A Thread
Pat Denino at Wandering Wonderings
Constance Rose Textile Design
Linda Stokes Textile Artist
Delores Fegan - Art Quilts

Actually, almost any of the blogs I follow could win this award, so please, don't any of my other blogging friends feel left out. You get my Karma Friends Award too - you just don't have to pass it along!

William Glackens

Back in April, I introduced you to "Natalie in a Blue Skirt" by William Glackens (see this post). I shared my interpretation of the painting, noting that this may not have been what the artist intended: "She appeared to represent everything that I didn't have but longed for: wealth, success, sophistication, happiness and an easy confidence. She looked like nothing could fluster her, there was no haughtiness or exclusivity in her demeanor. She wore her accomplishments modestly. She was comfortable in her own skin."

I've always wondered if this was a portrait of an important woman, or at least someone important in Glackens' life and if it was actually painted in the 1920's as I had guessed. I realized how little I knew about Glackens himself, so decided to see what I could find out about this painting, the artist and Natalie.


In the book "William Glackens: Life & Work" by William H. Gerdts, copyright 1996, I found my answer. While Glackens painted many works portraying family members, alone or in groups as in "Family Group" from 1910 above, he also created many figure paintings during the teens, 20's & 30's that were "strictly studio images of mostly professional models...occasionally identified by their first names...Sometimes the titles are individualized by elements of costume..." My painting exhibits both. The book goes on to say that beauty did not seem to be a requisite for posing for Glackens. According to his son, "Father was always prone to hire models who needed a job, and that is why so many of his canvases were of exceedingly plain females, though paintable."

As to how the models are portrayed in these "studio" paintings, I may have been pretty close to the mark: "Whether the models were poor or not, they do not appear to have come into the studio from poverty row; they are usually quite well dressed, suggesting their ownership of paintable costumes." Natalie may not have been affluent, or a socialite, but she apparently was a professional, and a confident one at that.


Glackens' palette changed over the years, and the colors used in the Natalie portrait on the right are consistent with those in other paintings from this time period, including "Family Group" on the left. There's even a similarity in pose between the women in these two paintings, the way they are angling to the left and almost lounging back in their respective chairs. I love finding connections like these.

The Wonders of Technology

I was digging around in a closet the other day and ran across some photo enlargements from the 1970's. The one above was taken in the same area as the ones I took on my day out in Post Falls earlier this year (see this post). If you remember the story, I'd dropped my camera in the river on that original visit, but had the film developed anyway. I was a little surprised at the composition - apparently I've been fascinated by tree shapes longer than I remember. I wasn't sure if this was one of the damaged photos or just a print that had faded over the years.


I have an Epson Stylus Photo RX500 - a printer that also scans and copies. So I scanned in this photo, hit the Color Restoration button, and voila...The magic of technology! It looked right to me. Today I ran across the original print in a photo album, unfaded and identical in color to the modified scanned version. Amazing.


Here's a similar composition from my recent visit (but with a tree that is not nearly as interesting). The fascination with those rock formations is as strong today as it was 30 years ago.


This is the other enlargement I ran across and frankly couldn't remember where I'd taken it or when. It did not have the same discoloration but I suspected it was slightly faded. Today I tracked it down in a slide box, scanned the slide and confirmed that the enlargement has indeed faded a bit. Now I know it was taken around 1977 and I think somewhere near Camp Cross on Coeur d'Alene Lake.


Again, certain fascinations must follow us all our lives. You might remember this recent photo of "stairs to nowhere" taken on my walk around Brownes Addition. (see this post).


And finally, another slide from that same time, also near Camp Cross and confirming that farm equipment has long caught my attention. Don't you love the rust?

Contemplating...

...threads again. This is after double checking my various dimensions, cutting the Decor Bond and backgrounds for the two remaining azalea pieces, fusing said Decor Bond and working out in my head how I will be attaching the various layers to each other.


As I suspected, I'll be using no batting on this one, and have decided to run lines of stitching about 1/2" to 3/4" apart through the center portion from one side to the other. What seems to look best, if I can trust the draping of threads, is for the line to angle from the left down to the yellow where it will go straight, then as it passes over the appliqued section it will continue dropping down in several swoops. Straight again over the yellow, then angling down and off the edge, sort of following the drop in the leaf print on that side. (Does it help to know I'm calling this "Slippery Slope?" Click on the top picture and you should be able to see what I'm talking about.) As for color, a definite no to the purple and the green, a no also for one of the red and yellow variegated threads, but a possible yes for the other one. I think either of the yellows (one silk buttonhole weight, the other rayon light weight) might work but it depends on how much I want the thread to show I think. I'll let my subconscious work on it overnight and see what I think tomorrow.

The Troublemaker

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Well that explains why I've irritated people all my life...