portrait: man with hat

Drawing translated by machine embroidery, placed into a found frame.

elephant in a thistle

I picked up some art from an old show at the city gallery this weekend. I made the elephant with Sam when we were painting together with non-toxic kid paints on newsprint. We cut our pictures out and I stuck mine on some sixty year-old paper I had lying around. And cardboard, because I like to recycle. 

mat

Before Christmas I got it into my head that I would sew coasters. By the time I got through the second or third piece, this idea turned out to be boring in both process and result, and also pretty poor on consistency of execution. But I didn't mind sewing little random squares that ended up looking a lot like homemade pancakes, so the question became, now what to do? I re-classified a few coasters as something I'm calling "vase mats", and that made it more fun. And then with some others, I'm doing some patchwork experimentation. I haven't tried to set a vase on this one yet, I'll try that crazy triple fusion of ideas tomorrow maybe. It would be interesting if I had a lot more of them (i.e. more than one.). Check back in several many months from now...?

my eyes see

Just looking around the studio, there's a lot piled around (truly, piled) so I plucked this out this morning. This little thing been hanging around for a while and is inspired by an ongoing collaborative postcard project that I do with my friend Lynne. I'm not sure where this postcard is going from here, so maybe the next step is to send it to Lynne to work her magic on it.

The book page is salvaged from one of Sam's favorites when he was a baby, The Eye Book. The little sticker inside the tea wrapper flap shows a little monkey that says *don't forget!*. And there's the little peanut himself, peeking out from inside the pocket.

the pixie hat

That's what they called it in the 1970's issue of Sunset's "Gifts You Can Make". Basically it's just two half circles sewn into a cone (one for outside, one for lining). Pretty easy, but I tried to butch it up a bit by sewing down the "pixie" point of the cone and using a tan canvas. Added bonus, I also found out that Sam stays sitting still if you photograph him while sipping OJ!



Here it is again form the back, rotated 90 degrees so the points face a different direction. You can see the basic shape. Easy, right?!! I want to try to make it again, probably a little bigger. I might even try a really big one for me (pixie point intact? Hmmm....)

strip mall signage

I have a big fascination with strip mall signage. I like the pattern the text makes, the density and variety of information packed into repeating uniform rectangles. I first started noticing it a few years ago, one week in summer. I took a million pictures of various locations in San Diego and LA. That's when I was living in Holland and everything in the US suddenly looked really colorful and new and kinda unconsciously wonderfully artless.

This is the one by my house that I see everyday. I want to make a screen print of it? A drawing? I don't know, something!

that and twenty cents

I found these magazines at the library book store. They cost ten cents each, and probably have more useful instruction in them than some of my $$$ classes at art school:


Studying design basics fascinates me, um, but I don't know why. I'm also really interested in theoretical mathematics, and brick laying, and I think that's somehow all related. Building complexity from simplicity. Universal structures and patterns. Men in suits sketching Mickey Mouse.


Oh my goodness, my automatic blog saver reminds me, I'm up way too late for this kind of discussion.