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nice surprise came in the mail yesterday – a dragon!
2012 being the year of the Dragon, our Japanese friends Kazuko and Takehiko sent us a beautiful new year’s card and calendar. I love this guy because he’s friendly, comical, happy, fierce, and a little goofy all wrapped into one swirly mist. I’m sure K+T had fun picking him out, and they did a great job.
I’m wondering what the dragon is holding. Seems I faintly remember some folk tale about a pearl. Or maybe it’s the moon? I’ll email Japan to ask, but if you know the story let me know.
After a quick assessment of the dragon’s personality, I was totally shocked when I turned the calendar over. It’s all custom woven textile art, even the numbers. The back is another completely different work of art – a different mood, subject, creating a whole different thought process.
I often turn my own work over and study the back, intrigued at how different the two sides can be.
There’s a lot to relish about mail from another country. Here’s the beautiful postmark from Isesaki, Japan.
This past year I did pretty well on my goal to give handmade things for Christmas. I’ve sort of lost count but think I knitted about 10 hats, three scarves and a couple of cowls. And of course there were a few hats I knitted more than once or twice because I had to unravel them to correct mistakes.
I started out having trouble with gauge and making the hats way too big or too small and also have made a good selection of things that I wouldn’t been seen leaving the house wearing.
But after lots of re-knitting, came up with enough things that were passable as gifts. And it was a whole lot nicer to sit home thinking about people I care about as I knitted, rather than stressing and rushing around in December trying to shop for the perfect gift.
It was also great to receive a handmade gift — my friend Mary gave me this beautiful eye pillow made from scraps from her old vintage Hawaiian blouse.
and Carla sent me the best handmade thank you collage book.
Here’s to a great start for a handmade year in 2012. Happy New Year everyone!
We were fortunate to have one of Russ’s friends from the ISC board come to Springfield as a consultant to aid in visioning as part of the search for a new director for the Springfield Art Museum. George has worked at great museums for over 40 years, but he’s also an artist and loves talking to artists.
His current passion is creating a national folk art museum and library in Nebraska and probably enjoyed the drive down here because he got the chance to explore the countryside.
Russ gave him a Ralph Lanning stone sculpture called Mountain Goat for the Flatwater Folk Art Museum, so that was probably another incentive to drive a car with a big trunk. Ralph Lanning was retired dam-builder from Republic, Missouri and mentioned towards the end of this New York Times article about outsider artists.
After Lanning’s death last year, his entire estate of concrete animals (including a two-headed dog), figures, small churches, and other carved stone went up for auction, and Missouri State University bought many of them through a grant and rep of the Kohler Foundation.
However Russ was also there and bought about 20 of the smaller stone carvings, and also this curious lady mermaid. She has fins for hands, but also the raised hand looks sort of like a heart, and a small mirror is embedded on the other side — so you could wonder if she’s looking at herself. Also I swear that, depending on which direction I approach, her mysterious smile/grimace seems to change at times.
Sound familiar?
Another large Lanning sculpture at our studio we call Adam, although I’m not sure why since he’s holding a baseball instead of an apple. I happened to find this Photo of a Naked Concrete Man and His Message on panoramio.com. Apparently it was taken on location long before Russ acquired the sculpture, because it has some parts that are now missing due to a public dispute between Lanning, a chemical waste dump across the street from his house, the Republic City Council, and kid with a baseball bat.
Adam and the Mermaid make a great pair, and with many other smaller stone carvings, we have quite a collection.
I’ve been reading and writing a lot lately about public art and museums and had been thinking how art connects people through time and space.
But I could never put it so nicely as George did in his Visual Literary Statement that he shared with us:
“A work of art serves as a linkage of the human continuum — past to present, present to future. Cultural artifacts must be experienced and understood as both a physical object and an event in time. As an event in time, they carry numerous complex attributes implying intellectual, spiritual, social, philosophical and scientific records of experience and speculation that are unique to the time and place of creation.”
– George Neubert, Flatwater Folk Art Foundation
Now whenever I look at these primitive stone carvings in our studio, I feel like something is looking back at me from a different time and place.
Last November the First Friday Art Walk was cold and we were planning on documenting the outdoor Nest-rolling Parade, so I bought a hand-knit cap at Good Girl Art Gallery. I like wearing it so much, it’s inspired me to start knitting again.
I have lots of yarn sitting around from past undone projects, and also inherited bags of knitting equipment and supplies from my grandmother. So part of the adventure is remembering how to use all this stuff. I had planned on making some hand-made presents this year for Christmas, but Russ is laughing at all the sort of semi-starts that are strewn around in house in little baskets.
It is fun to experiment, try out all the different colors and textures, so I do keep jumping from one thing to another. Guess that’s just inevitable with my patchwork personality.
Some fun yarns I bought recently at A New Yarn are a luscious variegated turquoise Madelinetosh merino wool, and I’m also liking their Plymouth Yarn baby alpacas.
I’ve also been trying to sort out all the needles that have lost their mates and recently bought a set of birch needles that are very nice. But my favorites will always be these colored plastic needles that I found a long time ago in a vintage store in Australia. I love the way they feel and sound, so I’ve been looking for more. I guess they are British because the only ones I see on Ebay are from the UK, and they have this weird size numbering system that I don’t understand.
The funny thing is that with all this exotic stuff to pick from, my favorite so far is BambooSpun natural bamboo yarn that I found at Hobby Lobby. It’s so light, elastic, and soft. Sometimes simple is good.
I’m planning on making several short ribbed scarves with a buttonhole opening to pass the tail through, because both guys and girls seem to like the short simple style. But maybe I’ll take it up notch with a big chunky button for the girls’ version.
p.s. For a great idea of something to do with your odd bits of yarn, check out Emmie’s blog about making Yoga Socks in this post called Scraps of Yarn.
p.p.s. Here’s the knitting needle size conversion chart that Emmie told me about. Pretty handy — especially when look at vintage needles on Ebay!
Of the many things I’m thankful for today, one is getting my blog back. I’m sorry to all you that have tried to visit in the last couple of weeks and gotten the scary Google warnings. And thanks to everyone who contacted me about them. It’s funny how you can take things for granted, but someone tries to take it away, it gets really precious again!
Lesson learned – and hopefully my experience will remind all you bloggers out there to keep your WordPress installation and plugins up-to-date. Now I know why there are frequent updates to WordPress and will pay more attention to them. I think one of my plugins needed a security update, and before I realized it, some fishy stuff got installed into my blog. Google safe browsing diagnostics says the site didn’t infect any others, and I sure hope that’s true.
Sometimes I like to open up the hood and poke around, but I’m not really very good at the backend stuff, so when my blog got blacklisted, I had Sucuri.net clean it up and get it delisted. Thanks @dremeda! If you want to watch a good video about WordPress web security, check out their blog post here. Also Google has some webmaster tools to help.
PaMdora often has less than heroic adventures with technology, as in the early PaMdora’s Box and more recently, the deep sea Tango with a Technopus. So this little journal sketch came pretty easily and sincerely. On the bright side of things – I have been wanting to draw a rolling desk chair into a story.
Regardless of what most people thing, Halloween is not just about ghouls and goblins — it’s all about spontaneous creativity. It’s the one time of year that most people think it’s perfectly acceptable to dress up in costumes and become someone or something else and walk around on public streets.
Just think about it. Most of people don’t ask what you’re going to “do” on on Halloween, they ask you what you are going to “be” ?
There are no rules about what you can become, and the idea that you can totally transform yourself through mask, costumes, makeup, wigs, cardboard, foam, or spray paint is very empowering.
When we first moved here, we were completely unprepared for the amount of Trick or Treaters that come to this neighborhood.We get hundreds of kids dressed creatively as superheros, food, animals, rock stars… some people dress their dogs too.
Maybe it’s something about the old neighborhood, old stone gates, narrow streets, friendly neighborhoods — I don’t know but it seems to draw a lot of kids. That first year, I think we had to make about 5 emergency trips to the neighborhood Smillie’s grocery store for more candy.
Since then we’ve started to doing concept installations for the one night on our lawn and driveway. There has been a Haunted Sushi Bar, Domestic Nightmares, Beastro Market… like Brigadoon, these places appear for one night only, then disappear.
This year we’ve gotten a lot help from our fabulous “Candy Construction Crew!” Here’s a few photos from the candy making party yesterday. We’re making big candy for “I Dig Candy” — a big candy road construction theme, complete with a zombie crossing.
