In which I feel like a slacker

Captain Kirk, in beads. WOW. I'd do Red Dwarf, of course...

Over the weekend I sorted through over 900 pieces of fabric, not including bits smaller than a fat eighth (which went immediately into the scrap bucket). There's one box left.

I started a new sequined coffee mug with fabrics from stash. I'd like to finish by the first week of April to give to my friend Andy for his birthday, so I won't fill in the background.

Note sleeping assistant on cutting board.

Don't know what I'm paying him for.

These pieces aren't going to sew themselves.

That's odd.

Quilt National sent me an entry form.

Yeah, like I'm going to have anything worthy by August.


Haven't been making much of anything; I've decided two years is too long for the spare bedroom to be unworkable piles of boxes and I'm trying to organize. I've even given away synthetic fabrics and I'm making a pile of 100% cotton to donate and/or sell cheap on eBay (not sure brown 19th century reproductions make the best donations to groups who make quilts for babies or teach inner-city girls to sew, you know?). Bryan was here this past weekend so no progress was made, but I have big hopes for the coming weekend.

Oh, I won $100 in a Scrabble tournament in Indiana in February. Saturday I scrupulously spent every last penny in a local quilt shop having a 29% off Leap Year sale. I know this sounds odd coming after a paragraph about clearing out fabrics I know I will never use--all those 19th century repros, what was I thinking??--but it's mostly thread, backings for unfinished objects, and three yards of black and white fabric patterned with printed circuit boards. I will never grow out of my fascination with PCBs.

Work in Progress?

Yesterday I made some additional pieces of paper fabric (same novel, no paint, looks exactly like this) before deciding what the first unpainted piece needed was a modified Carolina Lily.

It's fused down--the PVA gets smooth when you melt it--and I might be able to peel off the fused pieces if I decide I hate it. I might hate the green triangles, they're too big...

I have no idea how or why I embarked on this--maybe because the crappy novel was about people from South Carolina? I don't like primitives or faux folk art, why did I start making some?


Less perplexing is a new sequined piece featuring coffee. The scale doesn't seem right; there's a lot of empty space. I said I wanted to make things bigger than the things I finished last year...

Finished: "Indiana, October 2004."

One of my goals for 2008 is to finish three objects. The first was painted in Susan Shie's week-long class in Indianapolis in 2004. At the time, I was on vacation from a job programming automatic-steering software for green tractors--the yellow bump on the roof received GPS information from a satellite (shown in the upper right-hand corner) and this information was used to send commands to the hydraulic steering to keep the tractor in a straight line while the operator watches the implement gages (or, let's be real, the TV mounted on the corner post).

I hated the work environment, but I loved being out on the tractors driving around to collect and analyze data.

The piece hangs in my hallway, next to the other pieces I painted that week and finished at home.

Details of my cat, who was a teenager at the time, and myself.

One down, two to go.

Paper Fabric I

The PVA was fine! Experiment was a success!

Papers used: a 20-year-old crappy historical "romance" novel, shown here unpainted, and a road map of Vermont, painted blue. I skipped the tissue paper step on the blue and unpainted pieces because the tissue paper shredded into little balls when I painted the reddish piece.

I'm not sure if the pages of the novel will continue to yellow, and they're very readable. The tissue paper didn't blur the text of the red, but the acrylic sure did.

The pages are very flexible, too. If I crumpled them into a ball they might stay crumpled, and I might have to poke a few needle holes to attach sequins, but they're about as slick and plastic as polyester satin.

I need some more paint colors.

And some more sources of free paper with appropriate lines and text. I don't get any disposable magazines, waste paper at work might have confidential info on it...if only I'd saved all that algebra homework 20 years ago!!


I don't know what I'll do with these. Maybe nothing

Eeeew.

James Lileks is one of my favorite writers, and he also maintains a collection of digitized historical pop culture artifacts. Lately he's putting up the 1973 Sears Catalog for our viewing...pleasure isn't really the right word.

Truly luxurious nylon satin!

I'd rather go naked than wrap myself in that plastic.

Sigh.

I ordered some polyvinyl adhesive (PVA) two weeks ago when it was 40 degrees. They finally shipped it Tuesday, and it spent 10 hours in my mailbox today, at approximately 15 degrees F. I hope it's not ruined. I thought they were going to send it UPS, so it would sit in my apt. complex office while I was at work.

I was going to do the ClothPaperScissors Making Fabric Paper thingy. I tried it a couple of years ago with white glue, and it was awful--stiff and plasticky. Like sewing through a milk carton. But PVA is supposed to dry flexible.

Nothing else new. I'm putting Susan Shie-style "chicken scratch" stitching into a piece I painted in a class I took with her in Indianapolis in 2004, and I bought a sketchbook but I don't know where to start.

Goals for 2008

1. Finish three objects larger than the three objects I finished in 2007.
2. Finish three objects that have been sitting in boxes for a few years. These do not have to be art quilts.
   
3. Finish all small objects begun before December.
4. Drink more beer. This sets me up for a goal in 2009: make quilt with beer bottle labels.
   

Why I haven't posted in six weeks

I thought I'd make a quick Christmas sock for Bryan from one of those felt kits. Quick my fat white ass...took six weeks, including several days of nothing-but-sock at the end of December.


Looks good, at least.

On to something marginally more interesting.