Memory Lane

"Memory Lane" a possible new title for my second grad piece (thank you K-Unit for inspiring it!)

I'm down to my last 14 hours or so before we need to start setting up our show.  I'm still down one bed, but no worries, Craiger has a stand-in for me, and then hopefully I'll be able to get what I need on the weekend.

I am furiously sewing away, and thanks to my good friends C-Dubs & K-Unit have the fabric I need to back the piece (something I forgot about until a couple days ago) but alas (how often does one get to use THAT word in a sentence? love it!)  forgot to pick up batting for the inside while I was uptown and so have decided to tear apart a bigger blanket I made last year and use it's insides.  Franken-blanket may be a more fitting name for this piece!

I've been taking pics all the way through the process of this piece, but don't really have time right now to do a bunch of posts.  Will probably do that in the next week or so, once it's done.  For now though, I leave you with some pics of the hand sewing process, which to be honest, is going a lot smoother than I thought I would.  (Now, because I said that, my bed will explode or something taking the piece with it...)

More tea and chocolate will get me through me (lucky for me, David's Tea has many tea with chocolate IN them!).

hope you enjoy the pics!

Also, business plan update: Got it all printed and handed in to Craiger yesterday.  All 40 pages of it.  Have fun reading Craig!

I forgot my pincushions (all 3 of em) in the living room.  Rather than just get up and get one, this is how I roll.  Also - included all these pics cause close up I imagine this is what a forest made of pins would look like.

Forest made of pins gets a stiff breeze?

Seriously, if these pins were huge, and this were a forest, wouldn't you traipse through it? And yes, my brain is an original and scary place to live.  Pray you never have to traipse through it!

Sneak Peak "Ghost of a Memory"

Exciting post (if I do say so myself)!!

After my installation adventure the other day (literally the day before my trip), I had an unbelievable session with my photographer, Jeff Crawford.

In about an hour and a half we set up and shot my installation in studio, and shot after shot that Jeff took just made my skin crawl with how incredible he made my work look!  He is an absolute delight to work with, so professional, so talented, and so much fun (after our shoot we scooted up to our staff bowling party to join the gang for a beer & bowl).  Somehow, with very little helpful input from me, he can make the pictures I see in my head happen as well as some I'd never dream of!  Thank you Jeff! SOO thrilled with these shots!

Here's just a sampler of some of the photos.  This piece is essentially about the innocence of first love; they're just teaser detail shots though.  The grand unveiling will happen Friday, June 17 at the NBCCD gallery in downtown Fredericton when we open our grad show.

(After which I'll post more pics of the whole piece, but you should probably come down and see it in person!)

Work In Progress: Menship & Friendship Part III

Ok, this post I will try to keep short as I have to run off to the studio to do more work!
Last time we left this project, I had finished digitizing and printing and was getting pretty excited about the results!  Next step was no where near as fun, but just as necessary: ironing.  See, these prints on fabric are only set once they've been ironed (kinda like the crease in your pants when you were a little kid and your mom INSISTED you have a crease).  Otherwise the minute they get wet (ie washed) the ink runs and you're left with fabric that looks like a rough watercolour painting (maybe an idea to explore later, but not right now).

 So, I set up an impromtu ironing board at home (put a towel over my coffee table) and spent my afternoon ironing fabrics.

In case you're wondering, the Chicago BlackHawks cap is most definitely NOT mine!

(side note: I realized after bringing my piece to school during the April 1st snowstorm, that I didn't iron it enough.  Words got melty where the snowflakes landed.  Apparently I need to iron 3-5 minutes for every section as big as my iron plate, so I think I have a few more hours ironing ahead of me!)

My next step was to get some sampling done.  Ahh the dirty S word: sampling.  Sampling is essentially testing out your ideas without committing yet to doing it on your finished work.  Sampling is essential because guaranteed, nothing EVER winds up working out the way I saw in my head.  Tedious sometimes, yes, but I embrace sampling: doing lots of it only makes my work stronger, I then have the confidence to work on my finsihed piece, plus I have documentation of the process, AND always wind up discovering something new that I may not use now, but will in the future.

For this work, I'm doing an overlay of quilt blocks that will have cut-outs where you can read small pieces of the letters.  I want the letters to still be semi-private and secretive.

I'm a person who needs to see things, and squint at them in order to decide what I like.  So, another good chunk of my day was spent cutting out some tester fabric in different size (6", 5", 4.5", 4", 3.5", 3") and laying them on my fabric to see what I like.  I think I'm going with 4 or 4.5 inches, but realized I wanted a fabric with more translucency.  I tried silk, but it was too "rah-sha-sha" for this quilt about a country adolescence.  So, back to the drawing board.

What did I decide to go with? Well, be prepared for more sampling exploration next time!

Also - I laid out my quilt base for the first time and decided I wanted it bigger, so more printing.

Work in Progress - Menship & Friendship

I've spent many an hour the last few days going through old letters sent clandestinely during highschool class, scanning them, straightening them, and will soon be printing them... on fabric!
Why all the care for old highschool letters? Well, I'm a hoarder.  5 years ago I would have just been consider a "packrat" but apparently the language has changed and feels a lot more shameful.  But, it doesn't bother me.  I'm not dirty about it, I just hang on to things - I'm a very sentimental person, and always have a feeling something will be used, if not now then later on.  I've had these jars stuffed with folded old letters from highschool hanging around my childhood bedroom for 10+ years, and always look on them when I'm home.  Sometimes I'm terrified someone's going to go through them (ridiculous I know, cause no one would, and even if they did, why would it matter?  It's not exactly nuclear secrets squirreled away), sometimes afraid myself to go though them, and sometimes needing a little shot of the past.  But finally, my pack ratting has paid off and these old letters are getting used in my new body of work.
This is just a little sneak peek, but the jist of the work is about how as women, we glorify the idea of manship (maybe men glorified ladyship too, but I don't know I was never a highschool boy) but really it's our friendships that get us through and no where is this idea more prevalent than in highschool.  We killed so much time having crushes, have newer crushes, going back to old crushes, talking about boys, wondering about boys, dreaming about boys, but we did all this together, cementing (and sometimes breaking) our friendships over it.  Always wanting to be in love, and thinking love was an oasis in an otherwise hormonally crazy world, but the it was the boys who made us crazy and our friendships (lady friendships and boy friendships) that made us strong, and got us through those insane years.
Here are some sneak peek pictures from my digitizing, and yes these are all excerpts from old letters, wrote over 10 years ago, folded up, and passed conspiratorily from one to another in the halls, across the lunch table, or in class.
Not just a few of them ask whether or not I'm keeping the letters, threaten that I'd better, and ask what I do with them.  No way did I, or anyone else, think they'd wind up digitized and on display over a decade later.  Also, not a one of them forsaw what any of our lives had in store.  What a wonderful, mysterious thing this life is.

For more pics, check out the jump.
(apparently I can't make the jump work, so just look below)

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Work In Progress

So this is a week of First Evers.  I'm going to start sharing my creative process and pieces I'm working on.  If you have any questions please leave me comments, and I'll do my best to be prompt in answering.
So... without further adieu, Welcome to the inside of my brain!

I'm currently working on a body of work which will encompas most of the processes I love to work with.  When it's done, there will be a dress, quilt, sweater, vessel series, and soft sculpture - all relating to the same theme but illustrating different experiences within it.

Pieces have FINALLY started coming together, but I'm going to go back in time and start off by showing the beginning of my process. 

Those of you who know me, know I'm not the strongest sketcher, so ideas usually start forming as words in my mind.  When these words start taking shape as form I find it really useful to write down their descriptions, with small sketches that probably only I can understand, in order to work out the kinks.  Mind mapping (starting with the idea and then taking 10 minutes or so to write down any words that come to mind regarding it, without judgement) is also a huge aid for me, as well as writing down journal entries.  It's only in writing these journal entries and mind maps that I figure out how I really feel about a subject, and then what direction I want it to take - what I want it to be saying.  It's like having a conversation with the hidden parts of my brain.

This sketch and mind map are the beginning stages of my first piece this semester.  It will be a sweater in progress which combines many symbolic fibers to create a metaphor.