Daily art on the cruise 2

I wrote in my last post about a large piece of stitching that I did on my cruise, and said that I was not pleased with the result.  

The next piece I worked on made me much happier.

stitching, July 31

It was fun to be working on color after two weeks of beige, and I started out making little stars in the corner for a sky, but after only one day of stars I shifted to blanket stitch across the bottom for the earth in a landscape.  And after only one day of that, I realized that the sashiko thread wasn't playing well with blanket stitch.  

stitching, August 1

I don't have a lot of experience with sashiko thread, despite having admired its use by many other artists.  A friend gave me a package of it some time ago, but I only started using it earlier this year.  I love it for straight stitches, but apparently the blanket stitch causes the thread to twist and I found that after four or five inches, the two strands of the thread would start to separate, and I didn't like the looks of the stitches with the two distinct strands.  I compensated by twirling the thread in the opposite direction between finger and thumb every few stitches, but this was tedious and imperfect.

Before too long I was planning my exit strategy from blanket stitch, plus an exit strategy from the six-pointed stars, which I realized would be boring if they filled the whole sky.  There had been a supermoon earlier that week, with lots of nice pictures on TV, so I decided to put a supermoon in my landscape.  I wanted it to be perfectly round, so I made a template and filled the circle with tightly packed coral stitch.

stitching, August 6

The moon went slowly, and on August 10 I had a disaster, taking a classic face-plant fall when we were ashore in Ireland.  I smashed my glasses and ended up with a beautiful black eye.  That left me coping for the rest of the trip with my $2 glasses that I had luckily stuck in my cosmetic case just in case.  They focused about 24 inches from my eye, perfect for computer work and acceptable for reading on my phone, but not well suited for precise embroidery. 

I could see well enough  to finish the moon and start a new density of sky, in which I picked up only one thread in a tiny dot of a stitch.  But I couldn't see well enough to actually do the tiny stitches accurately.  So in a snit, I switched to another piece of fabric and started a new stitching.  It was not well planned, and it looked terrible.  So I slunk back to my blue landscape and resolved that I would figure out how to soldier through for the ten days left in the cruise.

Turns out that sometimes you can overcome adversity with a good attitude and a willingness to try what seems impossible.  I found that I could reliably make stitches over a single thread of background fabric by feel, if not by sight.  The hefty homespun-type fabric had fat enough threads that I could place the tip of the needle at the hole where the thread emerged, then carefully move it up and over one thread and stick the needle in where it came down over the hump.  This worked for probably nine stitches out of every ten, and on the tenth, I was willing to pull the thread out for a do-over.  

stitching, August 23

At home, of course, I wouldn't dream of being so picky and patient, but what else was there to do while listening to lawyers talk about the fine points of mugshots?  It was surprisingly calming to slowly stitch a Milky Way across the blue, and I finished the piece a couple of days before we came home.

Daily art on the cruise 1

I do daily art, you know, and I gave some thought to how to do this while traveling.  Most of the time this year I have been doing a separate small piece of stitching each day, working from my huge inherited stash of my friend Joanne's leftover fabrics.  But I didn't want to have to prepare 35 pieces of fabric to take along.  So I found four large pieces, packed a couple of skeins of white sashiko thread and worked a little bit each day. 

The routine on a cruise ship varies depending on whether you're at sea or making a port stop for the day.  On sea days there are more activities such as concerts and lectures, and I did a lot of stitching during those events.  But where I really went to town was while watching the news.

There's a very limited repertoire of TV stations available on a ship, and our news choices were slim: Fox, MSNBC and BBC.  For much of our cruise there wasn't much to look at, but then we struck news gold -- the former president was indicted twice and mugshotted once.  For once there was actual news to be watched and discussed, and we were impressed by the legal experts assembled to explain the niceties of criminal procedure.  Many of them were former federal prosecutors themselves, and I learned a great deal from them.  And while I learned, I stitched.

As it turned out, I finished two of the four pieces I had brought along. 

I was reminded that seed stitch -- the bulk of the top half of this composition, where the stitches go in every direction -- is surprisingly hard to do.  If you want your little lines to look random, you have to think several stitches ahead to avoid a lot of parallel pairs.  Not so much thinking as to take your mind totally off your music or news, but enough to slow you down considerably compared to running stitches.

I was not thrilled with how this piece turned out.  The blanket stitch "railroad tracks" through the middle drew too much attention without being particularly beautiful, and the spirals didn't stand out all that much from their backgrounds.  I think the drab neutral background would have been better with a colored thread or at least some colored accents, but I had nothing with me to do that.  I was glad when I finished it.

I'll show you the other pieces in the next post.

Some beads and a nostalgia trip

daily stitching July 14

A couple of days ago I wanted to add some beads to my daily stitching, and had the idea to make them stand up in a tower instead of just lie there on the fabric.  And as I started sewing them on, I thought of Sandy Snowden.  Sandy was one of my good internet friends whom I never got the pleasure of meeting in person, although other in-person friends of mine were also in-person friends of hers.  

Sandy lived in England and was an avid garment sewist as well as a lover of quilts and hand stitching and an enthusiastic blogger.  Sadly, she died in 2020 but her husband has thoughtfully left her blog online, and that allowed me to indulge in an hour of nostalgia.

In 2019 Sandy did a daily art project involving beads, 24,000 of them, to commemorate 24,000 Christians in India who were physically attacked in the previous year because of their faith.  She wrote, "I wanted to see just how many 24,000 was." 

Each day for 300 days she sewed on 80 beads, sometimes in towers (standing straight up from the fabric, attached at only one end of the queue) and sometimes in loops (attached at both ends, standing up like an inchworm).  She finished the year by adding words around the edges of the composition.

Sandy's finished project

Sandy put a small sequin underneath each bead tower, for a bit more structural stability, but unless I happen to find my stash of sequins in the very near future, I'm going to do my own beads without that step.

Sandy's project in mid-July 2019

As an aficionada of daily art, I have always enjoyed it when one of my internet friends embarks on a daily project, and I follow along closely during the year. Going back through Sandy's old posts that year, I came across my own comments many times, which made me happy that I had been able to stay in such close touch with her.

I don't know how long I will keep stitching bead towers in my own daily project this year, but I'll be thinking about Sandy while I do it, and about how the internet has allowed us to make connections and friends across the continents whom we would have probably never met in real life.

daily stitching July 15

daily stitching July 16

daily stitching July 18

More daily Joanne

I wrote last week about my daily art project for this year, and showed you several collages that depended on the prints in my friend Joanne's leftovers.  My task in working with these strong patterns is mainly to find a few that want to play together, then put them together and stand back.  On the other end of the spectrum are the pieces that I make on solid color fabrics, or those with minimal patterning.  Those generally serve as the base for more elaborate stitching or applique.

mostly blanket stitch, plus an appliqued moon

cretan stitch and a few beads

machine appliqued tiny trees, about 3/4" from ground to tip

stacked running stitches make mandalas

more stacked running stitches

Daily Joanne update

I told you several weeks ago about my daily art project for this year: to make a small stitched collage using fabrics that I scored from my long-time art pal Joanne Weis.  She cleaned out her huge stash of fabrics that she had dyed and surface-designed over two decades of making fiber art, and I brought home two huge garbage bags full.  I have been reveling in the huge array of different fibers, colors, patterns and techniques that she used to create wonderful fabrics.

Most of her fabrics have some kind of design printed or painted on top of a dyed base.  My challenge is to add enough of my own work on top so that it stops being Joanne's work and starts being Kathy's.  Usually that has been stitching, mostly by hand but occasionally by machine.  Sometimes I meld bits from several different fabrics and try to put them together into a single cohesive composition, unified by stitching.

This collage started with two different pieces from the Joanne bags: the red-white-brown print on top, and the coral-blue on the bottom.  Joanne had laminated the green paper on top of the red print.  I added two strips of off-white to cover the join between the two prints, and two more to provide interest in boring parts of the red print.  Then I added lots of cross stitch in a few different threads.  I was particularly enamored of the messy torn edge on the bottom of the coral, and took pains to keep it intact.

This one started with a small bit cut from a sample that Joanne had already collaged onto the gold fabric at left, adding the green and white papers and a lot of yellow machine stitching.  I added a piece of the same coral-blue print that I used in the composition above, and tied it together with a strip of painted white paper.  I added machine stitching in a dark teal to pick up the blue of the coral print, and more stitching in yellow (which doesn't exactly match the original, but I think I'm the only one who will ever notice that).

This one started with a bit of fabric painted in yellow, pale turquoise and white.  I found some bits of blue that were left over from previous daily collages (I am scrupulously throwing away nothing of Joanne's stuff, because ever the tiniest piece may find a place in a subsequent collage).  I had torn 1/4 inch strips of the green sateen a couple of weeks ago, but didn't use all of it, so they got stitched on top.  I mounted the little collage on black (I was delighted to find about a half yard of plain black in the garbage bags, because sometimes you just need a plain fabric as a background or support).  Then I machine stitched curvy leaf shapes to hold the whole thing together.

I'll show you more of my daily collages in another post or two!

Too much excitement -- parts 3 and 4

When I last posted, I was recovering from the double whammy of my husband's near-death cardiac event and the mysterious failure of the big mirror in our front hall.  I was hopeful that the worst was behind us. 

Of course, the worst was behind us -- it's hard to top a near-death event when it comes to comparing hardships.  But the hits just keep on coming.  Later that day we had a terrible storm come through, with wind gusts of almost 80 mph.  Our neighborhood was hard hit, with trees down all over the place, including on the power lines.  

We were without power for 76 hours, during which it was dark and cold much of the time, dark and somewhat warmer the rest of the time.  Outside of one afternoon when we camped out at a son's house, we stayed home and contemplated how boring it is to have no music, no internet, no sewing machine, no fridge, no TV.  We slept a lot, because it was nice and warm in bed even when the temperature in the house got pretty low.  Two afternoons I sat in the car in the driveway, which was nice and warm in the sun, and took naps.  

two blocks from our house

The power returned and to our delight, we didn't even lose the contents of the freezer, which were still covered in ice crystals and thus savable.  We had a couple of days of happiness just to be back in our home with everything working.

But little did we know.

Yesterday morning, prior to a grocery run, we went downstairs to see if we needed toilet paper in the seldom-used guest bathroom.  Well, needing toilet paper was an understatement, because it turns out that sewage was backing up into the toilet, the bathtub, the shower.  Apparently the entire sewer line leading out of our house has clogged up.  Every drop of water that goes down a drain will only raise the water table (or should we say the sewage table) so the house is effectively unlivable.

The plumber said he couldn't do anything without a helper, and that couldn't occur till Monday morning.  He also called the sewer district, just in case the clog is in the area of their responsibility.  They have been out twice and haven't been able to get their sewer-cam in position to inspect.  They're also coming back Monday morning.

So we're holed up in a nice cozy motel for at least another night, feeling sorry for ourselves.  My daily stitching has turned very dark.

This year's daily art

In November I usually start thinking about daily art, and what I'm going to choose for my project in the coming year.  I had pretty much narrowed it down to some kind of collage, whether paper or fabric, but didn't have any details in mind.  Then when I went to the December retreat from my fiber art group, I was delighted to find that Santa Claus also came.

Santa aka Joanne Weis, who has been one of my closest art pals for more than two decades.  She has experimented with every conceivable method of surface design (dyeing, screenprinting, laminating,  painting, etc.) and every conceivable fiber (silk, hemp, linen, cotton, nylon, etc.).  She always does considerable testing to develop a palette before embarking on a new project, and often prepares a lot more fabric than she actually uses.  And for years, she stashed her unused fabrics in drawers.

Then last year she decided she needed the drawers, stuffed all the fabrics into big bags, and brought them to the retreat. 

I let others in the group go through the bags for more than an hour, cherry-picking pieces that called out to them, and when everybody else had enough, I packed up everything that was left.

Two huge bags worth.  And realized that clearly Santa wanted me to do fabric collage as my 2023 daily art.

I have defined the project as follows:  All fabric must come from Joanne's leftovers.  I can add hand- or machine-stitching of any kind, plus notions like beads, buttons or found objects.  Most days I will finish a collage, but occasionally I can hold it over to another day (or two) as long as it's documented at the end of each day.

This one took several days to finish (Day 1 here)

I haven't felt this exhilarated in a long time.  I find myself getting up in the morning and thinking about what I will do in the studio, and the daily stitching is usually the first thing I tackle when I get there.  (By contrast, toward the end of the year, my daily painting got to be a chore, done after dinner with the same enthusiasm as kids have for the last bit of homework before bed.)  Often I spend some time preparing fabrics for future days, cutting them into small pieces, maybe putting the pieces through the wash to fray the edges, maybe auditioning possible combinations. 

I haven't posted any of the collages on my daily art blog yet, but that's on my to-do list.  Meanwhile, here are a few of my favorites.  Obviously I'll be telling you a lot more about this project as the year goes on.