two week seige

I am so hoping that what has felt like a two-week-seige is lifting.

What fascinates me about illness is that I close in on myself & feel survival mode envelop me. What I don't feel like doing I don't do, & I stop doing things that I perfectly well could but just won't-- don't wanna. I slept & read, did Sudoku's, listened to the radio, watched videos, & squeezed in a few outings.

The heating pad was my friend & comfort.

And my god, George had to pick up slack! Me empty trash, run the washing machines, cook? All that could wait. I didn't mind if anything piled up. I didn't mind even not eating much, wasn't hungry anyway. He was good-natured and at times worried about the roller coaster of now better/now worse. 

I found our medical system wanting: I couldn't get time with my family doctor who is fully booked through January. (Actually she was in Africa!) Ridiculous. And neurological consult was clearly not going to materialize.

I think the cocoon of self-protection, self-isolation, & self-preoccupation is cracking open. It's been a roller-coaster, now better/now worse. And now feeling better.

I became quite fascinated with my own cocooning: what I did & didn't do; what I couldn't & wouldn't do.  Mostly I read, did Sudokus, listened to the radio, watched videos, napped, & took baths. The hot pad was my friend. Mostly I didn't cook, do dishes, or laundry, empty trash or tidy up after myself. There is a zone, clearly marked in the living room where you can see I hung out.

And there were lots of things I could have done but didn't: didn't wanna, wasn't gonna.

George was a brick & took up the slack, & felt unnerved a few times.

 One of my brainstorms was to map out the numb zone on my arm. With it Erica & I found the exact nerve involved by looking in her anatomy book. I have been trying to come up with an image that sums up my cocooning & shutting out the world.  I couldn't find any! I reviewed many. Not even pictured of sleeping babies did I have, that pretty well summarize self-centeredness and being taken care of. 

That's it for today.

Early November doings and undoings

Left knee surgery, neurological complication in my left arm & shoulder [it is getting better], acceptance of Much Depends on This Quilt series with the New England Quilt Museum, listening to & reading the Massey Lectures, by Adam Gopnik on Winter, 5 Windows on a Season, seeing three Ken Burns films (one on the Statue of Liberty, one on the development of the radio, & one on Congress, the building & the institution), trees outside our apartment & all over the city turning lush colors and then....

Yesterday a big rain & windstorm....there must be trees down in the city this morning. We were out driving through a cottonwood leaf blizzard. It was a spectacular show. Even in New England I had never seen the likes.  Thousands of airborne leaves.

      When we got home I rushed outside to get a last shot of the tulip tree    outside our windows. I love the lantern-effects of sun on trees.

Signing off with classic self-portrait shadow. How many times I have felt drawn to do this shot!

That's it for today.

Finish! Much Depends on This Quilt

I thought I'd finish showing my quilts made in the Much Depends project, Much Depends on Cotton. The dowels are finished with real cotton bolls. The quilt surface is cotton batting. The white you see around the images & writing is not cloth. It's cotton batting.

 

This is my artist's statement quilt, spoken from the heart. Maybe sometime I'll write that out for the blog. There are two borders on this piece. The inner border of words lists all the things in my house that support my quilt making, from the coffee pot to CBC radio!

On the outer border is a list of all the things outside the house that support my work from cloth merchants to sewing machine repair people to investors.

I loved making those lists.

Much Depends of Sewing Machines was the only quilt in the series quilted up by machine. At the ends of the dowel for hanging hee quilt are metal sewing machine bobbins. This quilt is intentionally 'hardware grey', as are the quilts for thimbles, scissors, and pins&needles.

This is the quilt about weaving. There are many difference kinds of cloth in it: some loosely woven, some transparent, & so on. The dowels are 'tricked out' with two bobbins of a very different sort-- the ones put in the 'flying shuttles' of early automated factory weaving looms.

That's it for this post. The next post will explain what all the fuss is about.

a bit of a haul

For the past 5 days I have been struggling with (at first) stabbing pain in my should blade and then numbness on the underside of my forearm & weakness in my left hand. With my brother-in-law's help help I think I have a diagnosis: brachial neuritus. He's a muscle neurologist & he 'examined' me over the phone. I've been referred to a neurologist here, but that won't happen any time soon. It should go away on its own. The pain level has already diminished, th.g.

Meanwhile I've been doing a long of napping, writing, & listening to the radio.

                                               ***

During this patch of pain I got some really wonderful NEWS:

THE NEW ENGLAND QUILT MUSEUM HAS ACCEPTED MY MUCH DEPENDS ON THIS QUILT SERIES for their permanent collection.

So I'll show you a few of the other quilts in that series. I hope I'm not duplicating what I posted before.

This is Much Depends on Pins & Needles. It had real pin & needle cards sewn onto the quilt, & those crazy strawberry needle sharpeners at each end of the top dowel. They don't show up here.

 Much Depends on Dyeing & Printing.  This one has a mix of commercial & my own textiles with each swatch annotated below. At either end of the top dowel are measuring spoons. Measuring is a big component of dyeing!!

Much Depends on Thread. The quilting threads are left loose on this one. Spool papers & promotional cards make up the imagery. For the dowel ends there are wooden thread spools.

I will be mailing the rest of the series to them next week. They have already 4 of the 10 quilts.

                                                        That's it for today.

a pause

I guess a pause is different from a lull.
I am pausing & shifting gears.  The writing workshop was a lot of fun & I started writing about some patches of my life never touched on before.
I intend to go back there & add more as time moves on.

Today I want to get my proposal for the Number Project assembled for the Richmond Art Gallery. And I want to start the dedication "page" for the Number Project.

Tomorrow I have a knee scope for my troublesome left knee. I hope the debris clearance from that joint helps.

These pictures are from the visit with Jos, Lucy & Timmo a few weekends back.
These were of my special time with Timmo. He is showing me a game he likes to play on the computer. Tender photos!

I figure out that he is intentionally not adhering to the purpose of one of the games. The frog is supposed to land on the lily pads to cross the pond. Timmo likes to make that frog plop into the water! I am beginning to get wise to this. So boy, I think to myself, playing the intended challenge both ways.

                                                                    That's it for today.

Writing workshop

George & I are taking a writing workshop for this weekend. Our teacher is Ellery. He's given us a number of interesting start ideas....

"Tonight I feel....."  "I have brought who or what  to this workshop." The role I played my my family. Tell about how this role carried forward in you life. The captured moment-- I wrote about two.... Write a dialogue, imagined or real, with a person living or dead.

So doing this I get to review my whole life and see myself through many lenses. I only have a few in my computer photo-bank. Here are a few. I see the rise & fall of ambient moods.

I see younger/older too. Many different years.

I see myself in stress.  And below getting older & shockingly wrinkled from THIS angle.

Earned wrinkles! That's the best spin possible. Of course I do not 'like' this image. I have only myself to blame, as I took it.

I've had a terrific two days. I love writing. I'm happy in this place.

That's it for now.

Mosaics

In the past two years I made a number of house numbers in mosaics. This one was for Jennifer Trivett. I love the hen-feather look of the outer framing. There's lots of gold in this one that you can't see in this photo.

This was my first one:
for our house.


I went ape for all the blue/white china available.


Chipped plates were
broken... with a hammer
inside a heavy canvas
bag!









                                     I was on a "blue/white" roll! The Mayflower year!

These two were edged with unfortunate Zimbabwe broken plates... a very sad story.

This one is Boulder. From this one I learned a huge lesson in contrast. 

At night the numbers don't stand out in the sea of grey. Oh sigh!!








I have decided I'm putting my equipment away for now. This way I'll make more space in my studio. I'll come back to it another time, but this spigot got closed off by choice for now.


                                                           That's it for today.