Category: coronavirus

Update

June 10, 2021

Things I have done since January 23, 2021

  • got my COVID-19 vaccination shots! I can hug people again!
  • accepted a commission for a piece for a friend’s parents
  • found work as a teacher at a micro school, two days a week, maybe a dozen kids, ages 6-14
  • addressed 35 years of paint on the dinghy my father designed and built, as a start to refinishing it
  • reached the one year mark for playing my guitarlele, and celebrated with a concert for a dozen children, all waist high or shorter
  • taught two Making Tiny Art classes for the Northampton Center for the Arts one online, and one (loosening restrictions and vaccinations) in person!
  • worked on a class description and syllabus for a fabric coloring and collage class for Northampton Center for the Arts
  • cleared off my desk twice (but you couldn’t tell right now)
  • went to see my mother in another state for the first time in sixteen months, hugged her a lot
  • mounted an exhibit of my work at the TDBank lobby in Amherst, MA
  • had people over to dinner, gone out to dinner and had a pique-nique at a dear friend’s house (hugs all around)
  • mounted an exhibit of the Daily Project in my dining room
  • helped a friend with her father’s terminal illness
  • answered questions to for the Northampton Center for the Arts Featured Artist spotlight(!!)
  • reserved a dumpster so we can get things out of the cellar so the mason can fix the (non-weight bearing) wall that is composed of melting(?) bricks
  • applied for a mentorship (I would be the mentee)

It’s been a while – what have you been up to?

Equinox

September 23, 2020

UMass has a Sunwheel. It is a tiny astronomical henge designed and built by Dr. Judith Young. She installed one, and it was mowed over, then she and some students installed another and it was … modified, and finally she filed paperwork and got another department onboard and chose the driest piece of swamp she could find, and installed the third, which stuck, and eventually she added much larger pieces of Goshen stone to the outside, and it is quite delightful.

In non-pandemic times, there are faculty presentations at each solstice and equinox. This year there was a filming of a presentation, and us peons milling about in the background.

The thing about an equinox that is very different from a solstice, is that the sun is changing rising and setting locations, and times, at maximum velocity. The equinox has to be attended at the date and time established or you have missed it. The place the sun will set tonight is about 4o south from where it set last night, so catching it means something.

For one 24 hour stretch, everyone around the world had the same amount of daylight and darkness. For everyone, the sun rose properly in the east, and set as precisely as possible in the west. It is nice to think about, when everything else is on fire.

last 50

May 3, 2020

All fifty are there – the gaps are because I was making double sized pieces on Sundays, so they do not fit together as well.

I am having a hard time stopping, and finished 103/100 today and posted it.

It’s good to have a hobby?

all distraction, all the time!

April 16, 2020

I think this is now a blog of ways I am distracting myself – herein, more weaving.

Having done some more weaving now, I think I need to think more carefully about what to use for warping. I have used the Lion cotton yarn and it is fat, and some linen string I have lying around and that is skinny and fierce – there has to be some intermediate string that warps up nicely and can hold some tension. The franken-loom is surprisingly useful. The sett (the number of warp threads per inch) is close to 8, which means I can also warp it at twice that, 16 ends (warp threads) per inch.

I think I need to take the teeth-combs off the inside faces of the blocks they are mounted on, and mount them parallel to the strings and facing out – so that tensioning the loom pulls threads more firmly onto the teeth rather than letting strings slip or get bumped off the top.

There are all kinds of recommended choices for warp and weft and I have access to those recommendations courtesy of the Little Loom class I signed up for, but I also have a budget of basically zero and a lot of things on hand already, so found and repurposed has to be the majority of the weaving right now.

distractions for a pandemic

April 13, 2020

Last year I signed up for Rebecca Mezoff’s class on weaving tapestry on little looms. She is a delightful teacher, and I enjoyed the class a lot. I was working on a loom I had cut from thin plywood using the laser cutter at Smith College – the first loom I made was too flimsy, and the next several attempts were respectively not cut all the way through, excessively burnt and off center. I decided I had enough things to work on in the fall and stopped weaving for a while.

With the pandemic and resulting directions to stay home, I have revisited the idea of tapestries, particularly weaving small, four selvedge pieces. After a good deal of thrashing about in the shop yesterday, I produced a prototype small loom with adjustable tension.

The “comb” parts came from one of the heavier failed laser cut looms. The rest is scraps and a large bolt scrounged from various bins. While I am pleased with myself for accomplishing this object, it turns out to be less than completely functional. The teeth are too fat to make a selvedge (a woven edge that does not need finishing) and the not quite deep enough to hold multiple loops of string for a string supported warp. I found these things through trial and error, and a series of false starts.

On the left, from top to bottom, my first, second and third attempts at weaving, along with another picture of the loom. Not shown, the various warp experiments that failed to stay in place long enough to weave anything. On the right, my first four selvedge piece, with a penny for scale. The side selvedges are spectacularly wobbly, but the basic idea is there, and I am pleased.

And I have ordered a Mirrix Saffron loom, because while I could indeed continue to work on this one, it will be so much easier to get going on a loom that is designed to do what I want from the ground up. And having had a lot of fun weaving, and a good deal of aggravation getting set up, I’m all about decreasing aggravation, and increasing the fun quotient.

I should likely talk about the Daily 100, and the creative project next time!

bewildered?

March 27, 2020

I honestly have no idea what to write about right now. My state (Massachusetts) is beginning the sharp increase of cases of COVID-19. Although we are in the western part of the state, we have cases in town, including my friend the mayor. Once the virus reached the people I know, it changed my feelings about pretty much everything.

I have been distracting myself with making blocks for an actual quilt quilt, not one of my usual pieces of quilt-adjacent artwork. I have finished binding a book that was waiting for more than a year to be done. And I have kept on going with #thedaily100project (#66 of 100 today! 2/3 finished!).

As far as I can tell, the entire world is shut down and shut in. Tell me your coping mechanisms, I could use some more –

stay safe, stay well, take care of each other