Collagia

I finished a collage last night. It's 18 x 24, and I've been working on it for about a month (a very short time, according to my mom, but an eternity for my ADHD aesthetic sensibility). The photos aren't great, of course, because the camera's flash obliterated some of the details, but here's the gist of the picture: the main figures are from sewing pattern covers from the 1920s and 1930s. Their dresses are composed of tiny bits of magazine and book covers from the period--particularly early Soviet children's books and U.S. pop culture magazines like Photoplay, College Humor, and Detective Story (I think that's the name). There's a big profile of a woman in a cloche hat (done with acrylic paint and light modeling paste) and a black and white collar (a mosaic of words and images from "race record" advertisements). Some cool things that don't show up in these pictures: the belt of one figure's dress is made up of the faces of Sacco and Vanzetti, while the skirt of another figure's dress is made up of photos of cafeteria workers from Milwaukee in the 1930s. It will take me a while to decide whether I'm happy with the finished product; right now I'm mostly aware of how much work it took. (And of how much fun I had planning it and carrying it out, of course.)

I'm already starting to think about collages to come--first, though, I have to get Elliot's ambitious space alien costume finished for Halloween.

Can a social avoidance phobia apply to blogs?

Sometimes when I'm depressed (and I know I'm not alone here) I get so that I don't want to answer the phone or talk to neighbors, even though I know the human contact will perk me up a bit.

My last blog entry was at the beginning of May. Now, I haven't been depressed (well, not very), but a series of unfortunate technological events in May and June threw me so off my blogging routine that I've had a devil of a time getting back to it....even though I know how much I enjoy this kind of writing.

I won't go into all my little setbacks, but here were the clinchers: my laptop died, just as I was starting to teach my summer session online class. The new laptop (yes, I'm using it now) has MS Vista, which I still find infuriatingly slow---but over the summer, when we had just changed to what was supposed to be a much faster DSL connection, it took me *forever* to do anything. Responding to my students' work each week took so long that I had absolutely no desire to blog. The speed of our connection has improved, but I haven't been willing to set myself up for the frustration of testing whether I can upload pictures to the blog. Soon, soon.

Because it's been so hard to get photos onto the Kodak site, I haven't bothered to take pictures of my work since May, or of the kids since July (when we took a real vacation to Michigan City. Ahhh. It was great). And my gunshyness is a shame, because I've done so much good work in the past few months: another major collage, even more ambitious than the one of Astrid, a crib-sized quilt that's going to go to my brother for his 35th birthday (eeek.....hearing how old he is makes me feel *really* old), lots of peasant blouses for Astrid and me. And both Elliot and Astrid have done lovely work, too--cool t-shirts, collages, sock puppets.

Well, I've stuck my toe back into the water.

The Jim Dine Experience

When I was in college, my friend Lisa (an art history major) told my friend Debbie and me about the painter Jim Dine, a guy who got so into the act of artistic creation that he was driven to drink the paint he was using. (Incidentally, I have no idea how accurate this story was--I just know that we thought it was hysterical and wanted Lisa to tell it over and over again.)

This weekend, Elliot and Astrid and I had our own version of The Jim Dine experience. After hearing a lecture by the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman--whose beautiful grey hair was french-braided and streaked purple down the middle of the braid--I got it into my head (almost literally) that I needed some obviously non-natural color in my own quickly greying mop. All in all, I think I spent two hours (over two trips) at Sally Beauty Supply (an art supply store like no other....), and probably four hours doing the actual bleaching and dyeing. Elliot was characteristically stoic--we did him twice over two nights--hardly any complaints at all. Astrid, of course, was the opposite: head over the edge of the tub, screaming that her neck was being broken. Needless to say, I didn't rinse her hair "until the water r[an] perfectly clear." I vowed that under no circumstances would I ever, ever color her hair again, no matter how much she begged. Under his voice, Elliot said, "You don't really mean that, do you? I know you don't....it's okay, Mom."

So now all three of us have at least a bit of blue (in my case, blue and violet) hair. We didn't drink the dye, but it sort of feels like we did.

The littlest bits

I'm way, way tired today---it's been an incredibly long week, and I'm getting a cold--but I wanted to post pictures from the work I've done over the past seven days or so. Saturday and Sunday I worked on a collage I've been planning for a long time; it's all Astrid, and I'm very happy with how it came out. Elliot wants one now.

Last night before bed I embellished a nightshirt for my sister's birthday (I don't think she reads this, so I'm not ruining the surprise.)

Bamboo update

I can't remember the day for sure (it's been an extremely long and tiring week....), but the bamboo jersey I ordered from Wazoodle finally arrived on Thursday. It's beautiful---but I'm not delighted with how long it took to get here, or with the very vague tracking information I got from Wazoodle (on the same day I got the box, their website still said that my order was "in process").

Now I have to figure out the best way to wash it (it's a ten-yard jersey tube). I thought about cutting it into smaller pieces, but I don't know which patterns I'll ultimately use it for--and I don't want to waste any. I also have a feeling that washing a ten-yard tube could wreck our washing machine....I think Threads had a tip a couple of years ago about good ways to wash major yardage. It'll be fun to look through my old issues (maybe tomorrow morning, when I'm home with Astrid--she has a cold and tummy virus).

Somehow I managed to sew three skirts (and about six quilt blocks) this week. I have no idea how I did this. I am a lunatic. (But the skirts look great!)

I know when to say when---I do!

I finally got to some *way* overdue spring cleaning this afternoon. Back in January, I bought an exercise bike and put it in the dining room; almost a month ago, I bought a sideboard and china cabinet from IKEA, but, of course, I ran out of spring break assembly time before I was finished with the sideboard. In the meantime, my overstuffed backback got emptied onto a corner of the dining room so I could use it as a carry-on when we went to Boston. (Really, it's more like my bingeing backback threw up in the corner....what *wasn't* in there? Some highlights: five tubes of lipgloss and lipstick [neither of which I wear more than a few times a year--I'm a Carmex devotee], two pairs of black socks [one clean, one dirty], a sympathy card I never mailed to a mourning colleague, four different kinds of cough drops, unlabeled CD-ROMS for my office computer, two little tubes of toothpaste [one was probably five years old]....).

By Friday (my birthday), even our dining room table was covered with junk mail, birthday cards, baseball cards, toys, dishes. When I got up this morning, I knew it all had to go.

I spent probably six hours cleaning one room. (About 90 minutes of that involved finishing the IKEA sideboard so that I could load it up with game and photo boxes--I'm so happy with how it came out! All the drawers and cabinet doors are solid and smooth-running.) Here's the big news: I threw away all of my rug-braiding stuff. I haven't worked on it in a long time (I suppose I could go back through my blog archives to figure out when I left off, but why?), and I realized that, in spite of my initial success, it wasn't coming out so well. It looked like a polarfleece canoe--not a bit flat, and, unlike cotton or wool, it couldn't be blocked when it was finished (I didn't think of that when I started it). So I tossed both the rug and the polarfleece strips I'd already cut. I was in total tossing mode; I recycled whatever I could today, but if I had to think for too long about what to do with something, in most cases, I just got rid of it.

I didn't feel great when I tossed the stuff, but when I told my husband, the first thing he said was "You'll definitely get a blog entry out of this!" And I have.

Pieced or strip-pieced....doesn't make a big difference!

We're back from the Popular Culture Association convention in Boston--we had a very good time with our kids and with my sister Lora's two sweeties, Sam and Lilly--and now I'm semi-overwhelmed with all the work I have to do this week. Being Easter Sunday, however, I'm trying to honor the spirit of the day by not doing a ton of work. I also made a point of sewing for a while (and I hope to sew some more tonight). I'm almost through with the fourth block in the crib quilt I'm making. The design I chose alternates 16-patch blocks and pinwheel-shaped blocks; I've started with the 16-patch ones. They seem to be going pretty fast (ask me again next week, and the week after that, and.....). As careful as I've been to make keep my seam allowances identical, though, there are still places where the corners don't line up. This makes me mad. And, given the way I work (as fast as possible, mistakes be damned), it's not like I'm likely to get a lot more precise as I go along. I suppose I can say that these quilts are an honest reflection of my true personality.....

Before we left for Boston, I ordered a *lot* of black bamboo jersey from Wazoodle, and it hasn't arrived yet. I've never ordered from Wazoodle before; I expected them to be as fast as Fabric.com. At least this time, they're definitely not. (I was a bit worried that the package had disappeared from our porch, but their website says my order is "in process.") I want to make myself a bunch of cool summer shirts, and possibly some pajama shorts for Elliot. It's not like I am ready to sew any of this stuff, but the space between the impulse purchase and the gratification of holding the cloth in my hands is a bit wide for me. (Actually, this wasn't an impulse purchase, as I've been web-shopping for bamboo jersey for a couple of months--I just didn't plan to buy as much as I ended up buying--but I got a considerably lower price for buying ten yards at once.)