Moving Forward Inch By Inch

End of the week greetings!  I do have some new things to share and want to report that I am slowly inching myself toward working with cloth and I think I see it in this new work...maybe you will too.  I haven't actually made anything yet with the sewing machine, but I do have ideas and am getting closer to the actual creating stage.  My friend Joni, who makes beautiful quilts, is coming over Sunday to help me get more comfortable with the sewing machine...we'll do some playing around to make sure I'm ready to get the most of out of my class on Monday evening at the Heirloom Creations in Sioux Falls where I bought my sewing machine.  A free four hour class....Sewing 101, I imagine!  Fun!

So, now for a bit of show and tell.  I imagine most of you know that I make found text poems and post them on my other blog, Missouri Bend Paperworks once a week.  Since the beginning of the year, I've also been making them so they are actual works that can be for sale in shop, rather than just cut words laying on the desk that are photographed for the blog, which is what I did daily for the first year of the blog.  So, this week, the poem became a scroll....

On Such A Day

The poem reads:

To investigate is to
search
depart 
wonder 
run frantically
excited
solemn
exploring
saunter backward
forward 
scamper walk run climb
stop 
To wallow means to
wail
Calico is
a kind of mirror

The scroll is posted in my shop here with a further description and a couple of other views.  It's fun to turn the poems into scrolls....I'm sure there's more to come!

As I was feeling a little muddled this week in the in-between worlds of paper/hand sewing and paper/cloth/machine sewing, I just started to doodle on tiny squares cut from a teabag.  I have had this vision of the spareness and power of one tiny image in the middle of a vast field of nothing else, except surface texture....sort of a way to echo the fragility and the delicacy of life itself...small floating moments.  I didn't think I was ready to make that happen, but it turns out that's what I was doing as I drew with my ArtPen on these tiny teabag bits.  I had a few surprises along the way, once I thought to adhere them onto larger sheets of blank Japanese paper and then dip them in beeswax.  I knew the ink was water soluble, but I thought perhaps it could be fooled into thinking that acrylic gel medium wasn't water....which it's not, but the ink bled and ran anyway....however, turns out it was one of those happy accidents and it changed the feeling entirely...for the better!  They look fuzzy and aged and almost "found".  Oh, better show you what I'm talking about instead of rambling on incessantly!

After I had some distance from these, I realized what was happening....not only was I actully making the things I was thinking about (which doesn't usually work out for me), but I was beginning to think "cloth"....even though these are still paper, I feel as if I'm moving toward cloth.  Exciting!

Hope you have a great weekend and have a few happy surprises along the way!  See you Monday...