never never (never) hurry

November 22, 2011

I have been spending time with Alice in the studio doing Santa Claus things.

We'd decided on making four more hippos and rhinos, two of each, for the young cousins we are visiting for Thanksgiving. We got fabric yesterday, lovely soft fleece, and cut out pieces for all the aminals. This evening, we sat down to make them. Alice was working on an essay on the yin-yang symbol, and I was stitching away. Once the first was done (a blue argyle rhino) Alice started stuffing while I finished the second rhino. I stopped for a phone call, and came back see that Alcie had stuffed the green butterfly covered rhino, but it looked….odd. In fact, I had stitched the head where the tail should be. I'll have to cut off the head and restitch it to the correct end of the creature. 

So I've paused to regroup, and to remind myself to slow down and make sure I have things correct. To my credit, the head is right side up, just attached to the wrong end. I'll deal with it when I've had more sleep. 

parenting, or you never know where you’ll end up

November 19, 2011

I am sitting here in the middle of MIT, waiting for Alice to finish having fun. She's spent a happy two hours with Serpinski triangles, and spurned the lunch offered for a healthy mix of carbs, sugar and fat (crackers, yogurt and chocolate cheesecake) and is now learning things about Finnish. 

The parents all look vaguely familiar, the kids all look rather more familiar – there is something like finding one's tribe about it. And yet, and yet, parts feel …. odd. I pointed out to Alice that she's a slacker gifted child. We never forced an instrument on her, or a gymnastics routine, or anything really. No sports but fencing, and that intermittently. No special language classes outside of school. Nothing she hasn't requested, basically. Which makes her sane, and me her mother sane because I don't have to drive her somewhere every day. 

On further contemplation, it is a continuum. Like my beloved otherKate told me once, there's always someone feeding their kids more organic food than you are, and someone else who hits micky-d's regularly enough that they have the entire collection of mini-beanie-babies. You do what's right for you and your kids. Don't sweat the neighbors. Do what feels right and works for you. Change if it stops working. (which, parenthetically, is why we stopped going to McD – Alice kept throwing up, which is a powerful demotivator for any behaviour.)

So here we are, testing this part of the continuum. Parents are distinctly unwelcome – we're barred from the official lunching place, and tossed unceremoniously out of any classes we wander into by mistake. It really gives the kids a lot of ownership for the whole process. It makes Alice and me a little twitchy, because we've said we'd rendezvous between classes and travel together from building to building, just to keep me (and her dad, in absentia) from freaking out, not because she is bemused or bewildered. 

The program is for grades 7 – 12. I'm guessing it used to be for high schoolers, and they expanded it because kids are getting smarter younger, and then they couldn't figure out how to integrate parents of younger kids, so they stuck to a model that works. There is an adults program, but most of it looks reeeeeally boring (another lecture on choosing a college? no thanks.) So instead I get to sit still, and read a little, and knit a little, and walk around in nice weather and pretty surroundings. If there were no waiting for Alice, it would be a perfect vacation day. Instead I get to do exactly that and then get hugs when she comes out of class. Pretty good deal, all told. Plus, internet access in the middle of MIT is awesome. 

willow leaves

November 17, 2011

pages of willow

Working again on the sketchbook. These are some of the willow pages. I was particularly pleased with the idea of enclosing real leaves, as well as prints from real leaves. The stitched portrait was especially fun to make, with all those sweeping lines of weeping branches. I need one more willow thing – the seeds are hard to come by right now, but I may be able to do womething with the bark, or a willow withy. 

the rest of life

November 12, 2011

Things are nothing if not complicated. 

The hardest news is that Image, the grand old horse that I ride in Montgue, is not doing well. He was having a bad week, with fevers and swellings; the vet did some blood tests and realized he had a bactierial infection that had to be treated with IV antibiotics. Then when he was just starting to look better, he started swelling in all kinds of odd ways and places. The change was alarming enough that J took him to Tufts Medical Center yesterday, and she called today to tell me what they'd found. 

It looks like he probably has a rapidly metastasizing cancer. There is not much they can do for him, aside from palliative care, so with a few more tests to rule out anything that might possibly be cured, he'll come home on Monday and be loved and grazed until he has to be put down. 

I am thinking of animals that last longer than horses, or dogs, or cats. Maybe I'll take up working with elephants. Or parrots – they can go a long time too.

Beyond horses, life is pretty happy.

We went to see Gilbert and Sullivan's Sorcerer, one of their less produced works but a lovely light hearted version of it from the Valley Light Opera. I was walking down the hallway looking at photos of previous productions. We first started going in 1984 to see Trial by Jury and Pinafore. We attended nearly every year until Aerin was born, and there was a hiatus until Alice was big enough to admire the scenery even if she couldn't understand what was happening necessarily. And we've been annually since 2004. We've seen many of the players several times in different roles, and watched the Midshipmite from Pinafore grow into a sturdy tenor. There is something soothing about Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as deeply silly. 

The sketchbook project continues, but I'll have to post more about it tomorrow. 

tree portraits

November 9, 2011

portraits; elm, oak, sycamore

Using the (extremely smart) cell phone, I can take pictures of things even when I forget my camera. These were taken using a cool app that emulates old film cameras: a Brownie ( got one of these for Christmas one year, I remember it with great fondness), a Russian orange box, a Polaroid (of a vintage I recognize from my childhood) and a pin hole camera. I particluarly like this format, from the strange Russian orange box. 

I'm working on several folios at once, experimenting with things that work, and things that don't.

The leaf prints from yesterday were made by coloring on the back of a leaf with oil paint sticks, and then ironing it, paint side down, on the page. It hightlights the veining in the leaves, and some of the edges, it keeps paint form going everywhere on the workbench, and ironing leaves makes the most evocative smell.  

 

elm leaf, sycamore leaf

November 8, 2011

elm and sycamore leaves

I'm making a set of pages for each of a series of trees. You've already seen some of the pages for oak, these are leaf prints for sycamore and elm. I think I am working from an individual tree for each set of pages. Each bunch of leaves came from a specific tree. 

I made a lovely discovery: after calling the set of pages the oak folio, I thought I should go look up folio and make sure I was using it correctly. To my delight, I was.  Wikipedia says a folio is a pamphlet or book made up of full sheets of paper folded in half, printed on each of the four pages that result. Folded sheets can be nested to make gathers, and the gathers can be stitched and bound as signatures.

Since I am working with full sheets of, well, sheet actually, and folding them in half and nesting them to make signatures, they really are folios. The pages are old sheets ripped to a reasonable size, and painted with accidentally colored gesso. 

leaf on leaf, oak

November 6, 2011

leaf on leaf, oak

Thinking on more ways of showing what is interesting about this oak tree. This is a print (two prints actually; one on silk, one on cotton behind it) of a leaf, taken from one of the branches that broke in the recent storm. 

sketchbook beginnings

November 4, 2011

oak folio

I realized I was overthinking the sketchbook project. Since I draw with thread, all I have to do is sketch with thread, and then think about how to make it more book-like. So, above is an oak, and the beginning of a set of parts of an oak tree (bark, leaf, seed, maybe something else). I have three more sets of fabric pages, which I think will be dedicated to three other trees. 

Sounds like a plan to me.  

past the weather

November 2, 2011

We have power again, and have gained 100 years of technology more or less, overnight. Al was trying to figure out how far back in time we'd gone when we could cook on the stove, and the water ran, but there was no heat except from the stove (and the people, and the candles) and no light and certainly no internet. It was his thought that we'd lost 100 years of progress in one quick blink. After we regained power, and before friends did, we hosted many people for eating, cooking and several showers. The best comment was from Rachel exiting the shower. She was asked "how do you feel now dear?" and answered "cleaner than you" which brought down the house.

The town and the power company seemed to communicate well, and they got us power back well before their first estimate. I am thinking we owe a lot of thanks to the crews that came in from other states, like the man from Oregon that Cathy was talking to at the top of a phone pole, or the guy from South Carolina who was taking down a tree in Montague.

I successfully delivered two original works, and 10 photographic reproductions (mounted, signed and shrink-wrapped) to the Crane Estate on Monday. The driving got more and more normal as I apporached the coast – fewer trees part way across the road and leaning precariously on phone and power lines, fewer branches blocking off half the road. Mum and I had a lovely lunch (thanks Mom!!) and I drove right back home again.

After a day of breathing and not-driving yesterday, except for a really good lesson on Image, I realized I have to think about November.

Historically November is NaNoWriMo which is short for National Novel Writing Month. The goal is simply to finish a piece of work that you've been hung up on, or have started but haven't finished, or have thought about but never started. The rules can be summarized as: "write, and don't look back." The theory is that once you develop forward momentum it is easier to keep going. The general advice is to write like crazy in November and spend a month revising (like, say, December) and then if you think it is worthwhile, send it out to someone. Not everyone is working towards publishing a book. Many people join simply because they want to have written a book, and this is a handy support group for doing exactly that.

Last year I joined some people working on a craft version of this, called NaNoCraftMo, where we tried to work on something every day. That was when I started trying to capture the pond I am so enamored of in fabric, and produced a series of pieces my mother loved. You can see those here, here and here. Those helped me produce the pieces I just handed in to the ladies in Ipswich. So NaNo was a useful exercise, and I am going to do something again.

Several months ago I joined the World Sketchbook Tour, but I have had trouble focusing on the sketchbook. If I work every day in November, it will be full, and interesting and done. And then I can mail it. My theme is A Path Among Trees which is perfect for the things I've been noticing lately. All I have to figure out is how I can make my fabric things work in a sketch book.

And then I can spend December doing something completely frivolous and foolish that I can choose from a list of frivolous and foolish things I've been keeping for moments like that.