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.

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!

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.

We invited a few friends over the weekend to brainstorm at the studio and start making some really big candy for a Halloween installation. The idea is sort of big candy combined with road construction, with maybe a few zombies thrown in. And it may involve a back hoe if the weather’s nice.

Shopping the warehouse, as I call it, is walking around piles of old stuff that’s accumulated over the years and trying to think of something to do with it. We had some old vinyl banners that were so big they were rolled up and sort of forgotten. Laying them out on the floor inspired Stephanie, Carla, and Holly to start cutting and pruning.

They were pretty wrinkly from being stored, but Holly had experience drying leather and had me cut a hole in a box that would hold a hair dryer and focus the heat to make the vinyl wrinkles relax. The box method was also good because you don’t have to hold a hot hair dryer for a long time – actually I could sort of use my foot to move it around, leaving my hands free to take photos and text

After a little sewing, we thought we had a big Chiclet-shaped piece of candy to stuff, but it so happens, it might also work as a costume and bears a little resemblance to this old 70′s ad for “Hey Koolaide!”

As Julie said in a previous comment on my blog post about hosting PechaKucha Night – it sounds a bit like speed-dating for artists. I love that description.

The format of 20 images with 20 seconds to talk about each one puts you in the range of 6 minutes 40 seconds to present your work. That’s a lot of time compared to the oft-promoted elevator talk  — the 30 second spiel you can introduce and explain yourself to a stranger in the time between the elevator door closing and re-opening. At the his reception at the Art Museum last week, Roger Shimomura told us he often juries NEA grants where artists are permitted 10 images with 10 seconds per image. So PKN is looking like a good first date.

PeshuKucha Night vol. 4 at our studio was great fun. We had over  a hundred people — maybe more with some people coming early, some late. Although the format of presenting sounds rigid and the presenters do have to do their share of prep, the actual event is pretty casual atmosphere. Our doors opened a half hour early, there was a half hour intermission, and we invited folks to hang around afterwards — so there was lots of informal time to network, ask questions, explore the studio or just try out the vintage submarine game.

We had the big screen for the presentations strapped to scaffolding in the middle part of the warehouse with a lot of mis-matched chairs from various sources.

Russ also added some creative ambient lighting using old slide projectors and slides of Mesopotamian and other historical art (courtesy of the MSU art department who last spring auctioned off all their Art History slides and projection equipment at a surplus auction for, uhm, $5)

He also did a special installation of neon that spelled out PechaKucha on our framing table that added atmosphere and a great place for group photos.

But getting back to talking about art. One of the most interesting things I learned was how my friend Stephanie Cramer talks about her vibrant and evocative paintings. She likes to say, “You go first, then I’ll share” which is a terrific idea that I never thought of, because then she has the opportunity to learn what people see her paintings before she gives them her ideas. Another thing she handles quite well is the issue of time. This is a often-discussed to death topic I see on artist email lists and forums. Some artists and some people who create incredibly complex hand-crafted items seem to hate being asked, “how long did it take?”

Stephanie just says, “this painting took me three years” and then moves on. Nevermind that she was also working on about 20-40 other paintings during that time. Art takes time to gestate, transform, evolve, to become what it is.

You can hear more of how artists talk about their work in these videos of Stephanie Cramer, Russ RuBert, and Kat Allie’s presentations on our studio PKN page.

The other thing that was great about the event was the opportunity to work with such a great team of creative people. Amanda Taylor organized all the volunteers and presenters, ran the projector, and still had time to take an awesome set of photos during the evening. It’s the first time that I’ve really been able to put together a good photo gallery of a studio event that included all the setup and weird stuff that seems to happen whenever we’re setting up for a big event.

At PKN-4, we got to see 9 presentations, including Brandon Dake, AIA, president of the Springfield chapter of The American Institute of Architects present on the efforts to rebuild Joplin after a devastating tornado, and raised $360 for the AIA efforts to help in re-masterplaning there. So it was a good evening of art speed-dating.

Related links:

• Global PechaKucha Night website
• AIA Springfield website
• PechaKucha Night vol. 4 photo gallery
• PechaKucha Night vol. 4 video gallery

I’ve often though about doing more abstract work or big simple shapes because I love to stitch with loopy patterns. It’s not that big, but here’s a simple shapes quilt that I delivered to a friend this week using this stitch in the background.

The simple shapes came from quick pen drawings that I later refined to use in the invitation to this show, then I enlarged them to make a food-inspired quilt. To make the background stitching show up, I used a course variegated blue thread, and then doodled around the kitchen objects. This is a lot of fun, so I hope to do some more of these.

The other day, I happened to run across an article about creating special touches for packaging your handmade items -it said there were a lot of Flickr photos tagged “handmade packaging.” So inspired, before I delivered the quilt to the collector, I hand-wrote a card thanking them for the purchase and wrapped it up with a fabric bow.

This is how a usually wrap my quilts for transport. I used to use white cloth to wrap them, but batiks with colors are just so much more fun.

Over the years we’ve hosted many events at our studio, but this is the first one that most people I meet have trouble pronouncing. I started saying it just like it looks and am slowly working up to Peh-Chuk-Cha.

The name PechaKucha comes from the Japanese term for the sound of “chit chat.” PechaKucha Night started in Tokyo as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public and now has similar events happening in cities around the world. Presenters are allowed to show 20 images, with 20 seconds per image. This totals 6 minutes and 40 seconds per person, which makes for an upbeat tempo and allows the audience the chance to see wide variety of creative presentations in one evening.

PechaKucha Springfield was organized in Spring 2011 by Amanda Taylor of Dake Wells Architecture, meets quarterly, and previous events have been hosted at Lindbergs, Lemondrop, and Historic Firehouse #2.

The one I attended at Lemondrop was a lot of fun and touched on topics of art, history, architecture, film-making, the irony of yearbook signing, with an occasional cow thrown in.

Friday, September 23 from 7-9 p.m. at RuBert Studios

PechaKucha #4 we are hosting is open to art and design fans, and we have several artists scheduled including Stephanie Cramer, Kat Allie, Carla Stine, Brandon Dake, and some surprise guests. Doors will open at 6:30 if you’d like to walk around the studio, or have a glass of wine at the Tiki bar. If you’d be interested in presenting, Amanda may have a couple of slots left.

The event is a fund-raiser for the AIA Springfield to help with master-planning to rebuild Joplin, MO after a terrible tornado destroyed its center city last June, so we are asking for a minimum $5 to help with Joplin’s rebuilding process.

Some Past studio events

Although our studio is not normally open to the public, usually about once or twice a year we host events for non-profits with an art or art education emphasis. One of the more intensive but fun projects was a series that I call the Monster Foam workshops for Drury University art foundation students with art professors Todd Lowery and Tom Parker, using mountains of foam collected by Russ RuBert.

Another was a series of First Thursday artist discussion forums with featured speakers. But most have been one-night receptions for the Mid-America Art Alliance or group tours for Kansas City Art Institute students or the Missouri Art Education Association. Here’s some photos from past events. It was especially fun to dig out the old Monster Foam photo album.