A while back, I made Turtle at Sunset. In preparing for the show at the bank and to send some new work to Ducktrap Bay Trading Company (the art gallery here in Camden that sells my work), I decided to give him a new background. I had some hand-dyed fabric that would have looked great stretched on stretcher bars (the kind painters use to make their own custom-sized canvasses), except there wasn’t enough of it.

So, I painted an 8×10 “gallery wrap, deep-edge” canvas to look like the fabric! Gallery wrap means that the canvas wraps to the back side of the canvas (usually it only goes onto the sides and is stapled there) and is stapled on the back. This way, you can paint the sides and have a finished piece that doesn’t need a separate frame. Most canvasses are about 3/4″ deep, which looks kinda wimpy to me, so I bought the twice-as-expensive “deep-edge” canvas, which is 1 3/4″ deep and stands out nicely from the wall, giving a polished look to the piece. At least, I hope it does! Here’s what he looks like now:

I took him to Ducktrap yesterday, so hope he sells to someone this summer! I’ll be adding more of the new pieces in coming days… hope you’ll surf in to visit!

Well…. it’s summer in Maine, and it felt like it. Hot and humid, so it was lucious to be at Kathy’s house for the first time, enjoying the breeze from nearby China Lake. The good news is that I actually remembered to take a picture of us at lunchtime! Here we are:

Deborah had always recorded our meals in beautiful detail…I didn’t manage that this time, but at least we got the one photo! We had: cheese-broccoli quiche from Kathy, summer salad with fresh peas from Kate, bread from Sarah (who wimped out and did store bought… I got up at 5 to drive Joshua to wrestling camp, so had logged over 150 miles before got to Kathy’s house at 10 ish…), and watermelon and berries from Hannah (who, please cross your fingers on her behalf, had someone looking at her house (it is for sale) for the second time while we were there).

Mostly we got caught up, enjoyed a momentary respite from what is for all of us seeming like a VERY hectic summer, shared a few bits, and talked about our show next summer at the Camden Public Library! It will be part of the Maine Year of Fiberarts 2007, and we’ll have more details on that later on. It was great… we came up with some great ideas (which we need to run by Deborah, since we didn’t bring her new landline number with us!!!! aaargh…need to put it into my cell phone so I have it with me!) with ease and ready agreement and fun ping-ing of ideas. That’s what it is all about.

And of course pictures… the only thing I remembered to snap a picture was some cool bracelets Kathy bought recently while on a family vacation in PEI (Prince Edward Island):

I shared some of my new, small pieces…and PROMISE I *will* upload photos here in the coming days…..

Well I’m whupped (as in exhausted, debilitated, ready to drop in my tracks…). It never occured to me that it would take TWO full days to remove the upholstery on a single chair, but that is what it has been….. I managed to skip lunch (Me?!) two days in a row (unheard of!) I was working so hard at stripping this chair:

Over three years ago, I bought fabric to re-upholster the chair. Yep…when Marie and I went to Spring Quilt Market in Portland (Oregon) in 2003, I bought umpteen yards of fabric to cover this and another chair. I planned to do the work that winter. Of course, in January 2004, we realized we needed to move and put the house on the market. You can’t have the unholy mess of a big re-upholstery job in the living room while showing the house, so it got postponed.

We moved July 2004 and spent the next six months or so unpacking and settling in to our new house on the other side of the US (from Washington state in the far northwest to Maine in the far Northeast…note the theme: North! where it’s not hot.) Just as I was about to deal with the chair, Paul had a heart attack and open heart surgery in February 2005. and I was (thankfully temporarily) single parenting while he got well again (he’s fine now!).

(what you are seeing here is the seat, right side and back..the white stuff is cotton batt…different from quilting batts! and the dark is horsehair, the tan is nearly-disintegrated burlap over the springs.

Winter 2005/06 came and went, and here we are. I wanted to paint the living room. Paul said not until you do that chair. Fair enough. So this is what the chair now looks like, and the above are (obviously!) some photos of the getting from the top photo to this one. I’ll keep you posted with progress….

Oh yeah…I’ll also post some quilt related content! On Monday our mini-group, the Frayed Edges met at Kathy’s house, so have a few photos to share…. hopefully tomorrow (if I wake up!)…

As some of you may have noticed, I have a few pieces with hands on them (mine, since I’m usually the only available subject!). I seem to be developing a “thing” for hands, in addition to words, serpentine shapes and the nautilus / ammonite swirl….. (it’s a Fibonacci thing, and a how-cool-that-these-have-survived-since-the-dinosaurs thing… and ammonites are way more cool than cockroaches, and as visually appealing as the gingko…both of which also are that old…)

Anyway, I was browsing a couple books and saw someone had made a carved stamp that looked like mehndi to me. Mehndi is this cool “temporary” tattoo sort of thing done in India with henna. Here is a site about it, and another, and another. Light bulb goes ON! I’ve been wanting to make a stamp to use on labels on my quilts, so I began doodling around one night in front of the TV. Finally, weeks later, I got around to making a stamp today:

Here’s my first “print” (on paper) using Lumiere textile paint. So-so (and that’s being generous…it’s yucky).

Here’s my second attempt, using stamp pad ink on paper. Better, except for the uneven application of ink in the center.

So, I went to “pigment, acid-free” stamp pad on cloth. This is the first attempt (by the way, my scanner is usually quite good, but for some reason read the cloth as more red and less coral than it actually is):

The image is light, but the background is nearly solid, so I think this is the best of the three efforts on cloth. The second one had too much white in the portion of my hand-dyed cloth, and here’s the third….more white stamp pad ink, but more mottled background. I used this coral hand-dyed for a 2-ish inch wide strip on the back of my Viking entry, so think I’ll use one of these hands for (part of) the label (which MUST be sewn on, and the quilt sent in soon!)…..

Thanks to Discovery TV, many of us have seen some of the incredible performances of Cirque du Soleil without having been able to go to an actual performance. The artistry and combination of phenomenal physical athleticism with music, lights, and unbelievable costumes and make-up are mesmerizing. So when about a month ago I read a review of Cirque du Soleil The Spark: Igniting the Creative Fire that Lives Within Us All (note: hotlink is to the amazon.com link for the book) in USA today which compared it favorably to Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit (ditto–link is to amazon.com–it’s now out in paperback, a good sign!), I sought out the book.

The Spark itself is a short hardback (135 pages, $20); both times I saw it I wasn’t in the right frame of mind (was rushed) to decide if I really wanted to buy the book, so I ordered it up on interlibrary loan. Having read both The Spark and The Creative Habit in the past month, I would have to say: not. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy this book, just that I’m glad I bought The Creative Habit and got The Spark on inter-library loan. The book is “Created by Lyn Heward and written by John U. Bacon” according to the cover; Heward is former President and COO of Cirque’s Creative Content Division and currently an executive producer for a variety of special projects. Bacon is a veteran journalist.

The premise of the book is that a sports agent has begun to work / live in a rut, when he literally walks into the back door of a Cirque performance area in Las Vegas, accidentally meets the Creative Director of Cirque, and eventually ends up spending a month learning how Cirque works by training with the athlete-performers and support staff, and finding once again a creative spark that re-energizes his life. Sigh. It appears from the blurb on the last page that this is just what journalist John Bacon did (though whether he sought out Heward or she sought him out, more likely, is up for grabs), and the fictionalized account in this book appears to be the collaboration between Heward and Bacon.

As a fairly creative person, there wasn’t really much of anything new in here in terms of how to find creativity, how to spark it, and maintain the spark (or break through the doldrums). BUT, it was a fascinating glimpse into how Cirque puts together its shows, keeps them and the artists fresh after umpteen performances, and generally does its thing. For that reason alone, I’m glad I read the book.

I loved the descriptions of the Cirque headquarters in Montreal and wish there were pictures (of course…I’m a visual person!), as well as of the performers in training and working. My question: who is going to do the documentary, and when / where will it be aired? I know that some of these things have been covered in TV shows (on Bravo? Discover? I know I’ve seen them somewhere), but not in the same way as this book. Glad I didn’t spend my scarce $20, but also glad I read the book.