Rain, rain, rain…

It’s been raining for four days with some interruptions and a few hours of sunny skies. It rained so much that i baked a giant batch of oatmeal raisin cookies. It is cozy and warm at home, we drink cups after cups of lovely tea, eat lots of soup,watch the rain and get through our projects…more or less.

This is the view from out living room, in both pictures.

It’s raining so hard, in the second one, that we can’t see downtown at all.

The big news for me is finally having dyed some fiber. I used food coloring, because someone mentioned that you don’t really have to cook it ( i still have to buy a few things for canner dyeing, namely the canner itself). It did work, but i want to see what would happen if i steamed it. There are many variations on how i can do it, i just hope the color will stay in my first batch. I did love using the food coloring, it is very easy , i just have to perfect my system on getting ranges of color AND heating at the same time. I made a hot/ warm dye solution in glass jars, jammed in wet wool, silk noil and fake cashmere and then in a little while put a few drops of a different color so it swirled through.  When i took the fiber out the next day some color variations were quite baffling, but all of them interesting. I used short, coarsish wool in hopes to felt with it later. I used the fake cashmere (nylon) as a dye sopper, and the colors were super bright. Dog fur worked beautifully too, nice and even.

Saturday, I went to the Pasadena Bead and Design Show with the intent on picking up some supplies from Nancy, and ended up with a huge and rather expensive load of gems and beads. Wasn’t in my plans or budget…but while navigating through to the fiber room, i was suddenly consumed by visions of the wonders i can create with the said beads and gems. Which compelled me to look for a jewelry class…only i just missed the registration, and all the classes were full. Well, perhaps it’s better that way and i can focus my time on fiber work. Speaking of which, I systematized my projects and it felt great. I have deadlines and notes on most of them, so it feels like real work.

Happy New Year

Yeah. It is January! It is a brand new decade! I am actually working on new pieces, and wanted to share the pictures of the very first one.

This is a picture before felting. I have to admit, i love the fluffiness and the sweeping feeling of the unfelted wool and was sad to see it go.

This is after much editing, felting and blocking. I will have to use the elements of both stages in the future.

Also, I didn’t use any thread or yarn here, and will have to try that as well to keep the lines steady.

After having completed-or somewhat completed-this little piece, I decided to bite off a bigger chunk and started on a piece 2′X4” (almost) large. After a day of being sick and a day of being nothing at all and looking at work of some kickass fiber artists in one of my big books, and visiting a website of Magdalena Abakanowicz, and waking up in horror and anger in the middle of the night, etc., i got up in the morning and went back to my work fully inspired and loving the process. I ripped open all the bags of colorful batts i had sitting in my fiber shelves, dove into them and …and they worked just right, i didn’t have enough colors! So now i am ready and fully justified to go make big beautiful batts!

More pictures soon, the big new new piece is very close to getting felted!

All the new…and a rune of the day.

I meant to write, honest. Yesterday, and the day before. Every time i’d be done with a book. And a couple of weeks ago, and every time that NEW feeling would come. Sometimes it happens on a particularly special day in autumn, when the clarity and the colors make you buzz and daydream as if drunk with a new love. And sometimes, it is a reminder that the world renews itself, always, in sillly little things, leaving us in ticklish wonder and a timeless high on the moment. Presently, i am torn between the fun memories of things like a tea room, happy ladies at every table, a pastry shop with every imaginable sweet, dirt cheap, and a  rune that i just pulled trying to draw inspiration for some art piece. And somewhere else, a backdrop to it all, is a CHANGE. Change exciting as a gift, as something you always wanted, but new beyond expectations. The fairy tale goes, we found a perfect place to live. I keep waiting for it to change, but so far it is still dreamy wonderful. I will write more about that, but now want to get back to the rune. I stuck my hand in the bag and pulled Dagaz. The relevance of it really struck me, and again it spoke of liminality, of recognition of everything in its opposite, of a complete turn…i can’t help but hold on to it. The truth is, the books i have read in the past month or so also had this inside out dimension to them, big and small being each other. I am going through a strange time, now, and can’t quite elaborate at the moment. Nothing fascinating, reallly…was stunned to see that rune. Among other things, it is a rune of light, of seeing , of becoming invisible. I want the light!

A little more of Abiquiu

Liminal states

Mornings are brisk, and the sun is low throughout the day. Late fall always fills me with this strange sadness I try sometimes to take apart and understand. New Mexico was saturated with it, big land and subtle beautiful colors. Days are so short, and maybe that alone is a reminder of some limitation, mortality, liminal states, something…

Work slowed down, which is a good thing, i guess, but i am too overwhelmed with all and everything that has to happen, and so can’t quite get it rolling.

I got intrigued by the idea of liminality, and so looked it up to refresh my memory of what it included. As before, the concept appeared as utterly magical, and very powerful. Even the incomplete entry in Wikipedia immediately led me there, to the Strange Familiar Place. And, in a funny way, i think that being able to create is passing through a series of these liminal gates, each defining the skin to be lost, and the powers to keep.

I have been waiting for this time, yet within this suspended reality (am i working tomorrow, or can i disappear?) it is very hard to force the transition.There’s too much ground, too much unfinished business…Thought of Alice and her mutations. Thought of some paintings/ artworks that are difficult for me to finish. Thought of the coming New Year. I have almost a month and a half.

We are going to Sonoma county for the Thanksgiving. Something i have been wanting to do for a long time.

Goodbye, Abiquiu

I am writing this post after the fact. Pretending that now is yesterday just didn’t seem right.

So, Abiquiu…is so insanely beautiful and full of sky, and i have to seriously sort out my thoughts and feelings about it.

To my dismay, it’s impossible to capture the colors once out of their environment. I will spend some time editing and…trying to match to my watercolors, but now it makes even more sense to go there with the sole purpose of creating art.

I bought a small bag of  naturally dyed wool at Espanola Fiber Art Center. Wish I got a bigger one, more colors. Those colors, the sages and the madder and the onion skins, are New Mexico. There’s this delicate silvery green, and a whole bouquet of ochres, and browns and grays, that i’m trying to still carry in my head.

Home in L.A.

We’re back! What a strange beautiful place New Mexico is! I feel dizzy with all the imagery, colors and the vastness of the past week. A lot of work to be done, both in and out of the studio. Being home is really good, though, and both of us feel a renewed love for Los Angeles and our perch on the hill in Echo Park. Somehow, next year, we will have to make a long trip out there, with the art supplies and the camping gear. The day is slow and overcast today, i felt i had to take Mashka’s sweater to the end of the ball of yarn. Pictures coming soon. Small(ish) accomplishments like that help me gain momentum, or create the friction needed to start with the list of chores.

There are many pictures to post, and I actually even painted a couple of watercolors. That’s for the evening time, though…now off to trim bouganvilleas!

happy happy happy!

My birthday is over… What a lovely day it was. Sunny got me a WordPress website! That is, it’s a .org spot, and has my name on it, and i can move this blog there when it’s ready! He made us a Birthday Breakfast, the one from the olden days, an egg bake with chard from the garden and cheese and coffee in big mugs…I am not sure what happened next. I think we started cleaning. I worked on my fiber room and it wasn’t as hard as I expected. There’s always more, of course, and i barely finished sweeping by the time Mom and Dad pulled up. I got to talk to my whole family today, because of the occasion, received beautiful orange and red flowers from Auntie, many facebook wishes…Made sweet potato gnocchi with brown butter sage sauce. They were good, but i still think the best company for gnocchi is a spicy creamy, or spicy sour creamy sauce. Just is. Sunny went out and bought big trash cans, where we deposited all of the unwashed llama and alpaca. It’s super nice to be in a clean house, to see and feed the parents.

Now it is late, and i am still too revved up to sleep, even though my head is telling me to go to bed. I want to get all the colors for the website!

OK. I’ll go.

This is a very unofficial post, and a rambler central. I know. But that’s all right.

 

Halloween and all of the Saints.

And me, tucked in somewhere in between. Tomorrow’s my birthday! We went out for a pre-Birthday lunch today to try out the new yummy place in San Marino, Julienne, because they are closed tomorrow. The hostess wore a beautiful purple witch hat that matched her skirt. The food was delicious, we’ll have to come for breakfast some day. Took the streets home, past all the pumpkins and the skeletons.Halloween seemed very mild this year, for some reason…maybe because our house is completely out of the way and we stayed home all evening.

The big job is over, just have to wrap on Monday. My parents come tomorrow and leave on Monday. Tuesday,we are going to New Mexico for a week! I am still neither here nor there. Frantically carding, spinning, washing fiber instead of cleaning the absurdly multiple mess around the house. I am fueled by fear that somehow all this fiber will just SIT there. That i will lose momentum. So far, though, my work resulted in three more skeins for my sister’s sweater, for whose all of the fiber had to be picked, carded and spun. I will need them, no doubt, if i am ever to finish that sweater. Also picked and carded one batt of that strange coarse blackface wool. it feels really cool, though clearly not to be worn next to one’s skin. I will try to felt a sample, and maybe make some coatish thing out of that… I also somehow have to make a scarf for the trip, so felting is a fastest option. i have some cool ideas, but when is all of this going to happen?

woolpicker

My birthday present has arrived! I finally have a woolpicker. I opted for the Kaydessa woolpicker, and my family gave it to me for my birthday! At first, i felt a little disappointed, it looked homemade and i wondered for a second if i had to have it, after all. Then i took a bag of brown alpaca that was sitting and waiting for it for a while, and got to work. At the end of the evening, i had a carded batt and a bag of picked fiber ready to go . i also realized how much better my stuff from Coyote Lookout was, minus all the junk in it. i still think i need to get or build a raffle drum like thing to shake out the VM. My original plan was to add nails on the inside, so it picks as well…which of course is more work.