This is a drawing from my sketchbook that I did a while back, and now I’m making it into a quilt. It’s kind of like the two sides of me. Right now I’m feeling like the left side:) I’ll trace the drawing to make a pattern and then blow it up, probably to about 50″ wide.
Drawings from Tlaquepaque
This is a drawing from the rooftop of a little coffee cafe on the center plaza of Tlaquepaque, Mexico. A great place to grab a matcha Frappuccino and sit on the second floor or rooftop where you can see the cathedral tops of the plaza.
Poem for Today
A Place Without Words
I am there now, a place without words. In between white socks spread across the laundry room counter. There are too many to count. Brown toe with stretched heel. Green stripe and yellow toes. Who belongs to these socks? They do not belong to me. So I move from one place without words to another. Like Sylvia Plath without a typewriter or Kurt Schwitters hiding under a table in a concentration camp. Waiting for scraps of food or paper to fall. Waiting to make art out of nothing. To make art out of something that someone else has thrown away. Is there an end to the poem? I don’t know. I am in a place without words. by Pam RuBert aka PaMdora
Open Air Art Gallery at Inspiration Arbor
The LAWN Art with Neighbors project came at an opportune time. I had been thinking about the old 1908 arbor in our side yard ever since the COVID-19 Stay At Home orders came down — how nice it would be turn it into an open air art gallery. Featured artists are Dana Neuenschwander, Jo Van Arkel, Christie Snelson, Meganne Rosen, Russ RuBert, Keith Ekstam, Cherri Jones, Paula Rosen, and Ralph Lanning.
LAWN Art with Neighbors is a community public art project May 1-10, 2020. Anyone could apply to participate if they followed stay-at-home order, social distancing rules, and used materials that they already had to create art on their lawn.
I got some help replacing the rafters, so the wood was the only thing we bought. Next we pruned the vines and pulled weeds, uncovering Ralph Lanning sculptures that we had placed there years ago – a little concrete church and carved stone bear.
I had photos our local historian Richard Crabtree had sent of the arbor with Johnson and his children and a drawing of the arbor before it was built. We printed those large and framed them in old windows
The reason I thought that our arbor would be perfect, it’s already perceived by our neighborhood as a community site. I often see walkers in the Rountree/Meadowmere Place area stopping to go inside. Or families with small children exploring the little hideaway.
LAWN Art with Neighbors ends today, but we will keep our Windows, Wind Chimes, & Whimsy exhibition up through May. It’s already weathered some pretty windy rainstorms, and the neighbors approve. I’ve even had one neighbor tell me it’s almost like date night to go there after dark!
Sewing Video – Face Masks for Hospitals
A Facebook group called Ozark Face Masks for Cox and Mercy Hospitals is organizing volunteers to sew masks for our local hospitals using kits with materials they provide and that the hospitals know can go through their sterilization process. They organize curbside pick-up of kits and drop-off of the finished masks at churches in Springfield and Branson Missouri.
You can also make this type of mask with you own non-woven fabric. One type is called OLY FUN fabric, and it’s the same type of fabric that a lot of cheap tote bags are made from.
When I got my first kit, I was pretty frustrated trying to sew the polypropylene material because I am so used to sewing cotton fabric that I can iron and pin. Luckily my friend Emmie sent me a video that helped me get started, and then I developed a few techniques on my own.
Now I’m trying to help other volunteers to learn, some of whom haven’t sew in a while because, it’s all hands on deck!
So I made this video showing how I make the masks, with a few basic sewing tips added.
Important update: I made a mistake at the end of the video when I said the finished mask should be 4 1/2″ – it should be 3 1/2″.
The main part of the mask is a 7” x 8” rectangle and the two tie-on strips are each 1/2” x 36”. The finished mask should be 7″ x 3 1/2″.
Cutting the sections is a little tricky because the fabric came to use in big sheets, blue and white, joined together at the sides. We separate the two sheets for single layers, and then it doesn’t matter which color you use for either sections. But the blue sometimes has a lot of tape on it, which can’t be removed without tearing the fabric.
We can cut around the tape, but I prefer to cut the strips from the blue, leaving the tape in place and discarding any strips that would have tape near the face. The material can also be wrinkled, so it helps to have sewing tools like a cutting board, ruler, rotary cutter, and clips to hold the fabric together while cutting.
Here are the kit instructions and the template to mark the pleats.
I’m also a part of another Facebook group started by art quilter, photographer, and web designer Gloria Hansen called Sew to Stop COVID-19. The group has been exchanging mask patterns, sewing and material tips, and call of need from hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities across the county.
Gloria has done a wonderful job of organizing all the information on a website that went live just this week. It’s a great resource and there is an interactive US map showing Calls of Need, and anyone can submit facilities that they know are asking for help.
Now I’ll go back to my sewing machine to make some masks for my friends and family using my own fabrics.
Tulips in the Garden
I planted a lot of tulips last fall. Well actually, a few in the fall and a lot in the winter. For a while I was driving around with boxes of bulbs in my car and kept meaning to plant them, just never seemed to find the time. So I guess it worked, the freezing thing that tulip bulbs need to do over the winter so they can bloom in the spring. They just did it in my car. Transient bulbs I guess.
And it did work pretty well until a gang of deer showed up for brunch. They ate a lot of the newly sprouted leaves, and then dug up and stomped on a whole bed of specialty tulips that I had ordered from from some catalog. Those probably would have been really nice, sigh.
I tried putting some of the car-frozen bulbs into pots to see if I could force them. They did sort of grow, but weakly. I guess I should have talked nicely, instead of trying to force them. Then I tried digging up some of the blooms and put them into pots. They were all floppy so I used wrapping paper and ribbon to hold them up. Too much work!
So tomorrow I’ll just cut a bunch, stick them in jars, and deliver to quarantined neighbors like I usually do. But TULIPS! 🙂
Harter House MisHaps
So I went to Harter House today to get a few things…and noticed the checkout guy didn’t seem to know what he was doing. He would sort of act like he was scanning stuff, then stand around and pass the item to the bag boy. For the produce, he didn’t even try to act. Just sort of stood there and mumbled about stuff, then passed it to the bag boy. So you can imagine my bill was pretty low. Until he accidentally hit the button for 162 filets.
Beer Sampler at Mother’s
Thursday night I went to hang out with my friend at Mothers Brewery, a Springfield Brewery that makes lots of popular beers that all have custom names and labels. For instance in the 1950’s there was an exotic pet store that 9 cobras escaped from, and the resulting scare was legendary. So they have a beer call Cobra Scare.
But Thursday I drank Mr. Pumpkin, one of the seasonal beers, and we sat and listened to John Paul play the guitar with two other people because that’s why Stacie was there, and I was there to keep her company. John Paul is her husband, and we ate the pistachios I had in my car. Because Mothers doesn’t serve food but they let you bring your own.
Changing the World, One Letter at a Time
I blame it on pancakes. It changed my world when I discovered at an early age that pancakes weren’t PaMcakes and named after me. At least that’s to what I attribute my fascination with changing ‘pan’ things to PaM things.
I suppose there are lots of pan things. Pandemics, pancreas, pandemonium… But I really only have a couple of things under my belt. The PaMcakes (literally, under my belt, get it) and PaMdora I made up some years ago when I first started making quilts. She’s had lot of adventures, from Christmas aerobatics to banana split yoga.
She always finds herself in unexpected or ironic circumstances and has always looked at the world with some sort of permanent angst. Sometimes that doesn’t seem like enough these days. So I’m working on a new quilt called “It’s Dark Out There – Keep the Light On,” and this new character I’m thinking about calling PaMic, as in PaMic Attack. But maybe her hair should be red.
Working on the stack of books now. I think I’ll put titles on them of stuff that keeps me up at night, things like Alligators. Plastic in the Ocean. That Guy in Colorado. Is My Sunscreen Expired. And, That Awful Noise Down in the Basement.
I might make some pictures for the wall behind the bed too. King Kong on the Empire State Building. A Mushroom Cloud. A Weird Alien and Scary Lizard. What keeps you up at night?
Getting Back in My Groove
It’s been a long time since I laughed while making art, but it feels good to do it again. I’ve done a lot of things over the few years past years, but not much blogging. I won’t go into it all but everything feeds into now, and I’m in the mood to write again.
I’m listening to Rolling Blackouts Costal Fever while working and it’s so good, it will definitely rank up there with the music that get me in a working mood like the Kinks, B-52’s, U2, or Talking Heads so that I listen to the same album over and over for a whole quilt.
I’ve finally got a pretty good little mini studio set up in on the first floor of our art retreat house at Tablerock Lake. I’ve mounted design boards on the wall and found these wonderful LED track lights at Home Depot. They can be hard wired, but you can also buy an adaptor to add a plug with a 15 foot cord and on/off switch so the strip can be mounted temporarily anywhere that needed.
When I created PaMdora ten years ago, her expression was one of permanent angst. But now she seems dated. My newest character I’m working on is somewhere between high alert and total panic. Trying to think of a good name for her.
