The next awareness, however, is that now I can pay a bit more attention to art forms that have not sold well / at all in the local markets, given that I am presenting my art to a global audience. People around here see the shell flowers and the baskets and think, "I can do that," and then they never do, but they don't buy my art either. I am hoping I can reach a market that might have a place for my art but no means of finding the material--apartment dwellers with balconies, for example, or people who don't ever get to beaches with shells. The same holds true for the rugs. I have given over an entire room to the processing and storage necessary to stockpile the inventory it takes to knit an interesting rug. Anyone can make one rug from a pile of old t-shirts, but not everyone can collect 10 pounds of teal and turquoise fabric and make my latest log cabin creation.
Anyway, I can't get to the spring shows because of the knee surgery, and the annual cost of a basic eBay store is still less than a weekend at the Sanford Pottery Festival. A worthwhile experiment. And it will get easier, and I'll learn to write better copy, in time.
Sat down this morning and wrote up the story of the Ironing Board Fence, as far as I know it. I've been telling myself parts of it in my head all week and the best answer for talking to myself is to write it down. Maybe now that I have the first half documented, I'll figure out what to do next! The cannas are about to sprout and once they get going, I won't be able to get to the chain link fence to install anything, so maybe it's going to be a 2008 garden project anyway. It'll hold. 23 ironing boards aren't going anywhere without my help. See the Garden Art page for the link to the rest of the story, about half-way down.
When I see some of the somewhat uninspiring pictures of knitted rugs in recent knitting books, I am inspired to write my own how-to book, and I started making notes this week. It seems the words come more easily when I am actually doing rug processing, such as sorting clothes to be sliced, or thinking about how various colors will go together, so I work, dash to the PC and type for a bit, and go work, and back to make notes. The amount of lint in my sewing room makes me hesitate to take my PC in there for on-the-spot note taking; maybe if I knew I was on the list for an upgrade? But I think I'm only 1.5 years into a three-year upgrade cycle...
I wonder if I will ever find an art form that doesn't involve dust and respiratory protection?
Off to finish mowing the back yard in the hopes that my neighbors are not having a double service today.
He has a point.
On the other hand, I have a target. Not long after I started this little project, I decided I was going to plow ahead and knit 100 rugs and see what happened, knowing that I would learn something along the way and that it was impossible to predict what it was that I would learn. I'm at 25-started today, 17 completed, 7 placed. Progress. Now that I'm approaching able-bodied, I don't know whether I will be knitting more, or less, as I am able to go back to carving and the garden beckons, but I didn't set a target date for completion--just the final count.
My stash, and approach to managing same, has completely changed since I started. The first few rugs were knit from a selection of fibers that fit in one file cabinet drawer. Now I have the equivalent of six drawers, mostly one color each (green and yellow share, and "pastels" are all grouped together. That amount of stash alone promises more interesting options. The quilts that I find attractive are made from hundreds of fabrics, not eight or ten matching, deliberately-coordinated prints purchased on one trip to the quilting fabric store.
My first rugs were carefully color-matched, and I'd select the "next" color individually from the yarns pulled for a particular project. Now, I pull the colors and tie up huge balls of the various colors needed; the knitting flies but the color shifts are somewhat random. A bit of fineturning is lost to the speed; it's a choice. It's easier to knit in public, or in the car, when I'm knitting from one ball rather than rooting through a selection of yarns trying to match a shifting shade.
My first rugs were also hit and miss on the total yardage needed, and when I was done, I had no idea of how much fiber I'd used. I was well into my Total count before I learned I needed to measure the input for each and every project, and then record how much I had used, and whether I needed to add more along the way. I'm learning that it takes a bit less than 60 yards of fiber to knit a square foot of rug; it's handy to know when planning projects that require the rarer colors (good yellows, some pinks, oranges, and actually, browns). Blues and reds are always available, and I seem to be able to keep up with all the black my rugs call for. I do design somewhat to available stash; when the particular drawer gets too full to hold any more incoming, it's time to knit a rug based on that color. I should always have something in blue on the needles...
I keep a print out of tiny pictures of all the rugs I've completed on the door in front of my PC where I can see it while I work. One of my design goals is that the rug should look good in miniature; I'm not partial to work that disappears completely when reduced. It's easier to see values and color shifts from a distance, too, and printing at 1/8"=1' is as good as using a reducing glass from across the room.
I've learned not to knit with sweatshirt fabric, and I don't like knitting denim. I don't bring clothes home if the color doesn't go all the way through the fabric. The good side rarely makes it to the top of a knitting stitch, and never if the fabric is itself knit (stockinette rolls, right? Knitters know this. T-shirts are stockinette...)
I don't know what else I'm going to see before I even get to 50 finished rugs. I am learning more and more about color, and when I have completed a few rugs in a given pattern, I become more interested in pushing that pattern. Four spirals done, and now I'm thinking about multi-centered spirals and what happens when you move color around the spiral more. How do I tie up a self-shading ball?
Stay tuned. The worst that will happen is that I'll have an attic filled with area rugs. My recycle stream started sending me old suitcases just as I was filling the last of huge storage tubs I'd collected. Suitcases can hold rugs just as easily, and they're at least cheap, if not completely free. (Not unlike ironing boards, but that's another story (see Garden Art). Set a load of incoming to wash--I don't like it to pile up too high and it's better for the drains if I space laundry loads around the week instead of doing them all on one day. Something new will come before I'm done.
I think I had five or six rugs on display for the Studio Tour in December; this time, I had a dozen, and some in much brighter colors than I had in the winter. What a difference!! Sold two, lots of interest, and Sue Szary of the Against His Will textiles gallery in Siler City asked me if she could represent the rugs! Yippee!!
So now I'm knitting up a real storm, with six rugs out to a gallery and a need for more in my booth at the May First Sunday. Had to take a break from finishing my 2006 taxes this morning and lay out colors for a spring rug, inspired by the same energy that drove October. Still working on what Dierdre Amsden calls "Colourwash," not sure that I can tie up blended colors but it's time to try. And the worst that happens is that I get another rug from the attempt. My first rug in the Meditation colorway is not displaying the pattern that looked so good on paper, but someone may yet fall in love with it. If I ever finish, that is: no more rugs full of 100% short rows! It matters that I estimate finished size before I start, and now I know how much yardage I'll need (60 yds/sq ft, should you care). 5/8 of one more row to go (out of eight), and then sew the remaining seams, and be done with it!! (This paragraph will not make much sense to any one who doesn't knit; sorry. I've been reading a lot of Stephanie Pearl-McGhee and I've lost a bit of perspective.)
So I applied the question to a bolt of fabric I saw at the thrift shop last week: Open mesh with a ribbon of rainbow-sparkly gold mylar. Beautiful. But not for rugs, or hoops, or hooping costumes, and what would I do with it? Somewhat reluctantly but feeling secure in my stash/packrat frugality and resistance (even though I spent $52 on other items that trip, including ironing board #24 and a goldfish pond liner), I left it at the store.
The very next night, John and I went to hear Dr. Lonnie Smith at the Triangle Jazz Society's first concert of the year, a benefit to raise funds for their music scholarship program. (John had been asked to make balloon animals for the children attending; I carried hoops.) The woman who met us at the gate was wearing a fabulous yellow hat made out of the same fabric I had just seen at the Chatham PTA, in yellow, without the sparkly bits. Pow! THAT'S what that fabric was made for!
Turned out, the lady was modelling hats; she wore several others over the course of the evening. Part of the fund-raising was a silent auction; someone had brought five similarly-fabulous hats made by a small business millinary workshop in Nigeria. The minumum bid on each of the hats was $325. John was working for tips and parents in Cary are generous when someone can entertain young children who don't appreciate jazz, but even Cary parents aren't THAT generous. Bidding on any of the hats was out of the question, and besides, they didn't quite fit me.
I'm not an artist for nothing. I studied the hat and took notes. The brim was easy enough; a big doughnut shape with wire around the outside edge for shape, stiffened with matching braid that conceals the wire. Check. Crown sides, easy--loosely pleated fabric sewn to an internal hat band; seam concealed with a flower. It took me a bit of thinking to realize I hadn't noted how they did the crown itself. Back to the hat table: shaped over a head model (is there a word for this tool?), sewn into a band which was in turn concealed by the pleated crown sides. OK. I can do this.
Then I had to hope that the fabric was still at the thrift shop, always risky. (Somehow, the idea of going to a fabric store and paying retail just isn't the same at all, even if I might find a color that's better for me. I'll play with an idea for free or thrift-shop-prices, but not if I have to pay retail.) Check my schedule; I can make a run late Monday afternoon along with some other "in town" errands, esp. as my Mondays start very early with a global conference call. Put "thrift shop" on my schedule, and make sure I arrange the late afternoon to get there before it closes.
Monday 4:45 pm finds me pulling into the PTA parking lot; walk in, look to the fabric racks in the opposite corner. The roll had been on top of the racks and now it's gone. Dash it!! That's the lesson for not acting on the original impulse... But be thorough, maybe it was moved; go look at the actual racks. And yes, there it is!! Someone has moved it onto a lower shelf, where people shorter than me might have be able to see it. Snag, up to the register as they give the "store is closing in 15 minutes warning," and away. Mine!
Whether, or when, I will actually make this hat is an entirely different story. I don't have a hat form to do the crown shaping or size the band, and those steps are critical. I need to go to the fabric store and see about braid, or at least check my own inventory of gold trims and fabrics. (Retail is ok when it's for "parts," just not for the main component.) I'll be near JoAnne fabrics later this week. Nigel needs a new chew toy. Even the softest-mouth Labrador mix will destroy a fuzzy toy eventually (18 months on this one, and one squeaker still squeaks).
So I don't know what the answer's going to be on the fabric: toilet or tile? (Let alone the goldfish pond liner...) The fabric sits on the living room bookcase, on top of my library books-on-tape, reminding me to take some kind of action. Will advise on any progress.
I have heard more than one person say, "Wow, you have so many ideas!" after walking around my booth at a street fair, or my front yard on the Studio Tour. I don't really know how to reply. I am only able to give life to perhaps 1/50th of the ideas that cross my mind. As it is, people often suggest I try to focus and not do quite so many different kinds of art; I find this an unfathomable concept. It would easier to become short and blonde than to "focus on one thing."
I have, admittedly, developed enough understanding to accept the fact that there are some art forms I will probably never pursue. I gave a story idea to a screenwriter once, and he took it as far as a "treatment" (I think that's the word for it) and shopped it at a studio and it didn't fly and we lost touch. I'm not up for screenwriting. I am holding out about welding; it would be a very useful skill. I do not like the feeling of clay on my hands; pottery is out. I am not currently quilting and weaving takes up too much room. Etc.
But there are still these ideas! What do I do with them?
The world can be divided into two groups of people: those that think ideas are valuable in and of themselves, and those that know the real value is in the development, not the idea itself, because ideas are cheap, easy, and abundant. I am in the latter camp. I also believe that ideas have lives of their own.
At last count, I had 52 different notebooks to catch ideas and history. I have ideas, I write them down or somehow illustrate and document them, and I develop some of them to a finished product. I have no good understanding of how to determine which ideas are going to take form; it simply happens. In general, I let ideas ripen in the notebooks, rather than talking about them in the world. Talking before I'm ready to act has always felt a bit risky to me. Am I someone who knits rugs, or someone who merely collects old clothes and talks about the rugs I could knit? Someone who makes art, or someone who talks about all the art she could make if she didn't have to work, shop, do the rest of her life? Etc. (The ironing board fence is an exception; it is taking a long time to acquire the material, it's hard to check out of the Habitat store with four ironing boards without giving some explanation to the baffled ladies working the register; it's a good story, and I AM doing it, rather than talking about it. I am hoping a little that people will give me ironing boards if they know I am collecting them. So far, that last part hasn't happened.)
The concept that ideas may be independent of their thinker comes from the talking. It seems to me that talking about an idea (or writing for the public; same thing) "births" it. The idea is then in the public domain. It has life, just like a seed contains life, and the idea wants to grow. I no more control what happens next than I can control the destination and outcome of the millions of dandelion seeds about to be launched into the wind. I can plant and feed and water that idea-seed myself and trust that it will flower into something appropriate to its origin, or I can step away and see what happens. What I cannot do is expect the idea to hover over MY sphere, waiting for me to take action. It no more does this than an unfed, unfenced dog will stay at home. It WILL wander and float about the universe until it finds a place to grow.
I don't know that I have ever had an original idea in my artistic life. Perhaps it's my medium; chainsaw carvers publish step-by-step books and videos so we can copy each others' work; every beginner learns "how to carve a bear." Before long, everyone's bear has his or her individual stamp, but mostly, we don't worry too much about "idea purity." Bears, and eagles, and cigar-store Indians sell, and if you want to make a full-time living from your carving, you're carving bears.
I am an adapter. (Marcus Buckingham calls this trait "maximizer" in his book, Now, Discover Your Strengths.) I look at something, and I get an idea of how I can do that myself, differently, my way, whatever, and I follow up, and it's a different work of art. The "idea" for knitting rag rugs was first triggered with last year's trip to the Endless Possibilities gift shop in Manteo, NC, where women weave rugs from clothing rejected by the local thrift-shop. As noted in my Rugs page, various knitting books added design elements.
Should I not be knitting rugs because I did not come up with the pure idea in a vacuum? Should no one else work with recycled clothing as raw material because I got there first?
Obviously, I favor the mixed-breed.
I can only wonder what it would be like to have "pure" ideas that aren't generated from on-going immersion in my own slice of the culture and all the other ideas that float around me as thick as pine pollen. It's probably as different as being short and blonde, which I'm not likely to know in this life. For now, I'll keep knitting rugs.
Back to ideas. I'm feeling a bit knit-out... two on needles and one around the edges of being ready. Tons of wound-up fiber waiting and nothing I really wanted to knit. This is a dangerous situation. I kept looking at my "completed" page and thinking, "but I've don't that already... I don't want to do another one of those..." Nothing appealed.
There's a bit of a panic in the rug room, too, since the last post; had a mad fit in the stash drawers when I couldn't fit any more blue into its legal-sized, lateral file drawer. Yanked it all out; realized the drawer was half-full of navy and a lot of the less fabulous blues and decided a) to get rid of what I had on hand and b) to not bring any more home. As it is, I have a load in the dryer I don't have room for in the rug room; three laundry baskets waiting to be sliced, and two black trash bags full waiting to go into the pre-slice laundry baskets. Incoming is gaining on me. I'm about to move some to the attic, where the heat will prevent any of that nasty thrift-shop odor. Why then would I want to be bringing home anything that isn't either fabulous, or at least interesting?
I'll allow that there are some colorways I don't fancy myself; that haven't been in my personal wardrobe for more than 20 years. However, there's a case to be made for earth tones, and October was fun to knit (and a quick sale, besides!). I can always work with anything on the red side of the color wheel. But I've been having trouble with blue. Not all blues--royal/turquoise/teal anything blue-green is fine. It's the dusty blues down to navy that stymie me. I don't like them and they don't go with anything easily. (IMO, the only color that really goes well with denim is black, or maybe white if it's a starched cotton dress shirt.) (This is coming from a woman with teal streaks in her hair, BTW.)
So: face facts. I don't like mid-blues and the stash is gaining, so leave it alone.
This is a scary decision. What if people suddenly stop leaving clothes at the swap shed and I run out of stuff to knit?
Stephanie Pearl-McGhee would be rolling around on the floor in hysterics. Real knitters never run out of stash. It is impossible. If we could somehow transmute our stash into energy, there would be no oil crisis and "fuel" would be a dollar a gallon.
But I worry a little. And yet I leave the blue alone, and promise I'll knit out what I have and no more.
But what WAS I going to knit? Pulled fiber for something fabulous in purple and teal and olive; a basket full to the brim of hot reds, a pile of odd bits of red-and-white which didn't quite want to be the same spiral that has turned out so well in Black and White and Black and Gray. Was I out of ideas already, and not even 30 down on my way to 100? did I have to knit the whole list all over again?
Of course not. I wouldn't be writing if that were the case. John and I visited the National Textile Museum in Washington, DC, over Easter weekend. Through a bit of miscalculation and a Beltline traffic jelly (it didn't quite rate "jam,"), we arrived at the museum at 4 PM, when it closed at 5. Fly-by. Look at the main exhibits; check out the gift shop; John bought me a fabulous ribbon-embroidered bag that works for some of my knitting; look at the books; go. I had enough time to realize I really wanted to know more about Bogolanfini Mud Cloth, by Sam Hilu and Irwin Hershey (Shiffer, 2005), but I have learned not to buy $50 books in museum gift shops until I've checked abe.com and amazon.
Interlibrary loan is another option when books are too rare and too new to be on abe.com. The book arrived Thursday and by 11 PM, my idea well was overflowing again. Didn't hurt that I snagged yet another fabulous book by Jinny Beyer (Patchwork Patterns) on a quick dash down the 745.5 shelves in the Cary Public Library on my way out. That makes Jinny 3/3 on great textile books, albeit only one (Tessellations) that I had to own.
Flip pages, mark patterns with sticky notes, and come back before work this morning to start harvesting. Bogolanfini comes with a CD of the fabrics; the same ones make me gasp this evening as much as they did last night. Mud cloth, somewhat obviously, comes in the colors of ... mud. Counterintuitively, used clothing is rarely brown--that's the hardest color of the ones I collect. Literalness has never been a limitation for me. I can see these patterns in bright red and black just fine.
The immediate future will be filled with a quick dog walk--they've been neglected in my chasing around after expensive books and new pickup trucks (in which they have not yet ridden). Sometime soon, I have to find and learn a graphics program that will let me test laying out quilt squares and other repetitive patterns. It just takes too long to draw all the variations out by hand every time. Stay tuned.
The backstory: Last week, I found myself across the street from the Streets of Southpoint mall with some unscheduled time on my hands. In a related story, I went to the mall to see The Body Exhibit, which I knew John couldn't stomach (he concurs) and I thought might be interesting (it was). Leaving the exhibit, I was all stirred up and didn't want to drop south into the quiet of the countryside just then, so I wandered over to the Barnes and Noble on the outskirts of the mall proper to see what might be new on the crafts racks.
I thought at the time that this might be a major time waster, given that I had looked over the crafts section of the store at Triangle Town Center just a week before while waiting for my new truck to get its key fobs installed, but I'm a sucker for books and I'd already burned the gas. Any maybe the one I needed, that book that would change my life and make everything clear, was calling me...
It was.
The book I needed to find was Celtic Pieced Illusions, a quilting book by Karen Combs, published in 2006 by the American Quilting Society. Ms. Combs shows how to build a fabulous interlaced quilt design using only two basic squares, both of which can be easily knitted in the garter stitch I'm using for rugs. (Most quilting books about Celtic design use applique, not piecing.) The possibilities exploded in my mind while I paged through the book. Given the current spend on health care and that I had just laid out $24.50 to see The Body Exhibit, I decided not to buy the book at that moment and to see if I could develop my own patterns from the basic idea.It has taken not quite two weeks yet, and I'm losing my breath already to the possibilities ahead. 29 rugs completed or on needles and now an entirely new series appears. Just when you think you'd exhausted the possibilities (which isn't even close to true because there are several variations of existing patterns I have plans to try).
I started playing on graph paper--first, building squares with 4x4 blocks and then moving to 1-block units because they could be drawn more quickly and took less graph paper. Interesting, and then I recalled that some of the patterns were reflected / flipped / glided (the various operations of symmetry). Reflecting by hand (pencil on paper) is slow (relatively); it was time for software.
Graphics software has been a sticking point as long as I've been on a PC; I grudgingly use a photo processing program and have taken a PhotoShop class but can hardly be called "graphics literate," to any of the same extent I can hack around in MS Word or Excel. I'm not sure that's going to change any time soon, but I found a free program that let me draw four different squares (two each of the two basic squares shown in the quilting book, crossing vertically and horizontally for one pair and angling in both directions for the other)(a more literate user would know how to do this using the software's capabilities, but brute force also works much of the time) and then start pasting them into rug patterns.
Group / copy / paste / transform / group again / adjust size. Oh. My. Lord.
Earth to knitter: The largest rug to date was built on an 8x8 grid; designing for 16 units square is pushing the limits of the technology the darn thing will be too heavy to hold itself together.... But a knitter's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a heaven for? (Isn't that the way it goes?)
All of a sudden, many of the patterns generally known as "Oriental" are within my grasp, and in the lightly shaded grey of my on-line designs, I can see how the color manipulation can work. (I don't yet know how to put the color in on-line and am planning to print grey-scale and use colored pencil.) Furthermore, I see a distinction in ease-of-knitting. While the Celtic interlaced patterns are fascinating and deserve attention, knitting a two-colored cross square is either intarsia, or seaming (three stripes, two vertical and one horizontal (this needs pictures and non-knitters will have to take it on faith or wait for the book)). OTOH, knitting stripes on the diagonals is speed-demon knitting. Changing colors on the whole row is a no-brainer. And the patterns that can be developed with careful color management are magnificent. (That is, I know this to be true in my knitter's soul. I have not yet drawn them out, or knitted it up. But given that I knew Green and Yellow Shaded Stripes would be magnificent, when people who saw the work in progress could only say, "that's nice," I have faith in this new direction.)
When I posted last about finding a way into Celtic knitting, I was chock full of ideas that were bursting everywhere. I was also, unknown to self at the time, full of rickettsiae doing exactly the same thing. Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, probably from a tick carried in by one of the two stray dogs I picked up at the end of May. Nothing like a potentially fatal illness to put a ding in one's energy level. Waiting now on the results of blood tests to confirm that doxycycline did its thing and I'm "over it," but the nurse did say that the fatigue takes a long time to clear. (12/9/2007: as it turns out from the datestamp on my next entry, the doxy had not completely worked at the time of this post and I had to go back on it for a whole month. Difficult year, health-wise.)
There's the fatigue of just being tired, and not wanting to do much that requires physical effort (chainsaw carving, for example) but there's also a fatigue of ideas and follow-through. The follow-through is really the more critical element, because it's turning out that's the crux of making art, at least in this studio. Ideas are easy. Taking an idea through the hundreds if not thousands of decisions that have to be made between concept and final product takes a lot more energy than I've had to spare, some days. And so I stumble.
The nice part of stumbling is that if you have a decent enough road and a general direction, you can still make progress. Not pretty, but progress. I have some designs in B&W that could probably be interesting rugs. They need color. And after the first draft, they need refinements. Today, I can draft. I don't need to commit to a colorway yet, or even pull the yarn, or think about tying up. Color a few designs, don't like much of what I have, and the truth is, I HAVE made art. It just doesn't look like much to the general public. Or maybe I have made NOT-art, using the same logic that T. A. Edison used to say, "I haven't failed 999 times. I have learned 999 ways that it won't work."
It's all art. Sometimes it turns into a product I can display at First Sunday, and sometimes it's just colors on paper that I couldn't sell for a dime.
With the Tour done for another year and the house pretty much de-Toured, it's time to move on to the next problem in my list. Rugs are becoming a volume problem: Where to store the finished product. I have scheduled a show at the Brewery in Pittsboro and will be able to display some 10-12 rugs, mounted on framed-up pegboard. I have three done already, and sold one rug to be mounted that's in process now. Where am I going to keep these rugs while they're being mounted; between then and the show, and then after, presuming they don't all sell? They can't fit in the attic; the basement is always damp and then only "not wet" because we're in a nasty drought. I hate to think I need to rent a u-store-it unit but it may come to that. Contemplating grabbing some of the storage from my rental property but I don't think that's good landlord karma. But it's tempting... Heck, I could keep the whole property as storage, although that would mean carrying the mortgage myself.
Earl the cat proved that my current system--sit the framed rugs on a table, leaning against the wall, has no future. He tried to squeeze his plump little cat body in between two of the rugs, which sent the front one to the floor. As it fell, he bolted, and managed to arrive at the floor microseconds before the rug, with an unexpected Bernouli effect, floated down on top of him. He panicked; the dogs panicked, and I had a pile of disrupted knitting on the floor where they knocked everything sideways running away from the flying carpet.
These are some of the tangible problems that keep artists grounded. I had to calculate how many cable ties I needed to buy to have enough to mount 10 rugs--6.5 per square foot of rug, on average, which comes to +-600, which means the bag of 1000 is not at all extravagant.
Looking up at the entry above, I realize I'm still stumbling into art. The rugs have been big this year in part because of their accomodation to a part-time effort. Chainsaw carving has time "wrappers"--I have to get set up, get dressed, carve, and then undo the effort on the other side, and I need three or four hours of open time in order to make any progress. I can do something furthering with a rug in 5 minutes. I can knit a square foot in an hour in the car if John's driving. Right now, this is the shape of my art time. I am envious of artists who have bigger blocks of time to create; Bob Burridge's email talks about finishing a 38-painting series and I'm pretty sure he works on several at a time, in big blocks of studio time. OK. Not me, not today. Today, the phone rings and I sit down to tie up more on a colorway. Or I'll go to my slicing station and generate a few t-shirts worth of raw material.
Every now and then, I need to snatch a block of time to make design decisions and calculate yardages and pull colors, but I'm not dead in the water the rest of the time.
Today's immediate problem is to figure out how much tie-up I need, and then to set that up, for a drive to Orlando and back next weekend for my cousin's wedding... A bit of a pity this stuff is so bulky, because we're taking the Mustang, and John will be unhappy about the lint. I can't let that much production time go, though... esp. not with a housewarming rug to finish and a show coming up in the spring. Stay tuned.
Anyway, I have this time, and I have an idea, and now I'm noticing just how hard it is to bring a new idea to life. I've been wanting to play with polymer clay (PC to the trade) for a while, and I hover, and buy the books and read the magazines and get my stuff out every now and then and muck about, and never really get anywhere. It all seems too overwhelming, and I don't have a vision of what I really want to make anyway, which makes it harder. But then I got a new idea.
I visited my sister in her new house at Thanksgiving, and I noticed that her house came with the exact same chandelier as every other new subdivision house I'd seen, based on the number of these lamps that have been donated to the Raleigh and Pittsboro Habitat Home Stores. Because her house is on the generous side, her chandelier was a bit bigger (15 arms), but it's the same design. We counted eight of them the last time we went to Habitat in Pittsboro.
Joel Haas will readily point out that it's important to select readily available raw material when you're in the art trade. No point in making something that turns out to be popular, and then discovering you can't get any more of what it takes to make the piece. He uses freon cans in some of his work. I've found the same to be true about the rugs--never ending source of old clothes in this county. These lamps appear to be the same. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. And they're a fine enough design; it's just that people have their own taste and want "something different," so they change them out just as soon as they have the cash to do so.
More to the point of the PC problem, they are big enough to warrant some real effort and attention, and they provide a substantial "canvas" to work on. One of my problems with PC is that most of the stuff I see in the books is small. I do not work small. I'm not into miniatures. I want to be able to SEE what I've done.
Those lights became an opportunity. We bought one the other week, the first Saturday after the Tour when I had some time to wander, and John and I disassembled it. We thought perhaps we could bake the clay and NOT hurt the insulation and wiring, but I thought it would be safer to bake only the brass, and then rewire when it was done. Step One out of the way.
Then, there was nothing between me and a PC chandelier but me. Ideas all over the place, but ideas are squat when it comes to art production. The only thing that matters is art, finished product. Not ideas and what coulda woulda mighta been I thought about doing that I coulda done that my kid could do that. We hear it all on our side of the craft show booth. Sure, lady. So there I was, with my "I want to make a PC chandelier," and all my clay, and a bit of time, and a raw chandelier. Go.
First, I had to design the thing, and then, I had to make a space to work, and both were bigger-than-a-breadbox problems, with different approaches.
A few weeks back, I had the house energy-audited. The house scored a 25 on a scale that runs from 0 = totally airtight to 50 = you are outside. 25 = compares favorably with a tent. I spent Thanksgiving week addressing the leaks the auditor found in the closets, and since then, I've been sealing up ductwork. The last duct vent was behind an 8' bookcase that was all but built in, and the bookcase needed to be moved. Which meant the books had to come out, onto the table I wanted to use for the clay, and I had to get the whole thing done before I could start on the clay. One I was behind the bookcase, I observed that the shower-plumbing access panel was essentially a square-foot hole straight to the basement, leaking cold air back into the house. Sigh. Eventually, that all got sealed up and insulated as best as possible, and the bookcase moved back, and reloaded, and the books I decided to let go of piled up to donate to the library sale.
In between moving books and bookcases, I took study breaks in my design notebook. I traced out the parts of the lamp and started thinking about what I wanted to do with their PC veneer. I knew I wanted black and white stripes on the arms, but that's not a whole lot of design decisioning. I knew one thing from my prior experience with PC, and that is that you can't design with the clay in your hands. I can't, at least, and I've seen hints in the books that the people whose work I like don't design on the clay, either. Sarah Shriver spends up to a month considering and building a cane. (I don't know if PC is a full-time or part-time gig for her.) Judith Belcher, ditto, I suspect.
The design work was almost as exhausting as moving all those books. I don't have a vocabulary of PC canes and structures in my head, not the way I know how to put together a rug in any one of 10 or so patterns, so that when it comes time to do a new rug, I only have to pick colors and go. (Actually, I had much more trouble in the first 10 rugs than I do now, and the parallel is not lost on me.)
So I'd sketch something. And be happy. And realize I'd addressed the first of three rings on the cups under the light bulbs, and I still two more rings and the entire center structure to go. Rest. Back to the PC-idea books. What are they doing to make THAT item? How are they making their canes? Sketch another ring. Will it fit? How will I fill in the background? Through it all, I'm also thinking a bit about some of the PC work I've seen and what it is that makes me not like it. Mostly, there's not enough light and dark, and the whole work winds up looking incredibly detailed but still boring. So I'm thinking about managing my values, and colors, and what colors might actually sell, and knowing all the while that I have to try my best on this but it's still not going to be great as a finished product. Should I start smaller? maybe cover a cigarette lighter, instead of a chandelier? but who smokes that buys art? (Not to mention, the shape of a cigarette lighter is infinitely easy to manage, compared to the shapes of a chandelier's parts.)
All the while I'm designing, I'm thinking of "more," other lamps I could build / cover, highly influenced by 15 minutes in the Cirque du Soleil store at Downtown Disney in Orlando. Some people shouldn't be allowed to go anywhere near Cirque; they're the biggest factor in the my current German Wheel problem. And while I'm designing and dreaming, I'm also meditating on the difference between the vague and glorious image I have in my mind of something amazing and wonderful and glittery and all covered in crystals and color, like most of Cirque, and the actual tangible reality of making decisions by the square inch, or less, about how to make that happen in the real world.
(Yes, I have read Art and Fear by David Bayles. Probably need to read it again. Might want to make notes for a book called I Can Do That, which is what we all hear in booths across the craft world. "Bet you won't," is what we all answer, at least silently, because of this very problem. The gulf, sometimes infinite, between the perfect work of art in our mind, and the thousands of decisions that need to be made, and acted on, to make the idea tangible.)
Yesterday, it came time to get out the clay and start, only the cupboard where I keep my clay supplies was a wreck. Clean, or clay? (The PC community uses "to clay" as a verb.) Clean. Lots of stuff in that cupboard that didn't need to stay in my life, including a dead phone, old message books, astrology readings I won't listen to again, and more dust and dirt than I wanted to acknowledge. Sigh. Clear. Toss. Vacuum. Decide that the spare floor tiles from my rental property can best be stored in the rental property, and not under my bookshelf, just as soon as the tenant who's leaving tomorrow gives me the keys.
Finally, I was out of excuses / alternatives, and I had to clay or quit. Sit down. Set up the table and supplies and tools. Start.
There is a huge gap between my ideas, and what I know how to and am able to make with skill. I do not know how to draw canes that I can make. That is, I do not know how to translate sketches into actual clay, with correct value shifts and light and dark and shaping. I do not know how much clay to condition to yield a cane of sufficient size to do what I had in mind. These equivalent decisions in chainsaw carving or knitting come to me automatically, after several years of practice; they are all new and difficult in a medium I have yet to master. And they will come, and I will get better, and I will look at the books and their instructions with different eyes, and I will watch the DVDs again and get more out of them this time.
Meanwhile, I'm out of dogfood heading into a long weekend, and I have to take care of that. Hungry dogs can't eat clay. Not sure how I'm going to document the process of putting the lamp together. I am happy that it's set up now. I probably will need to move the operation to a different table, and I need a better attachment and ergonomics for the pasta machine because I can see already it's going to mess with my back if I keep it the way it is. All of these are additional art decisions. Easy once they've been made and are taken care of, but most painful and exhausting in the making, especially if you don't even know that they are part of the process.
It is so tempting to take that house off the rental market and turn it into studio space... Huge shift in my finances, though, and not one I'm willing to make at this time. Off to town. Later.