- Thar she blows! The newest folk art whale

The great white whale has taken its place on the breezeway wall, along with the fish detailed in a previous post.

As with the other folk art pieces Don has made, the whale has imaginative details:

Detail: Metal washers for the eye,
driftwood glazed with milk paint for the pectoral fin

Detail: Fluke cut from a rusted
pressed metal sheet found at By the Bridge Antiques, Wimberley

But what I like best about this latest addition to the breezeway is the way he "saw" the whale in the peeling white paint and the shape of the board.

Ahab would be impressed.

- Repurposed placemats

Originally posted 6/9/2013 in On The Trail

Problem: our 1990s placemats were a little too big for the table, and the scalloped edges really dated them style-wise. But they always washed up well and they were a gift from my Mom. What to do?

I poked around in my closet until I found a light weight skirt that I never wore since it didn't really fit right. After trimming the scalloped edges off of the placemats, I proceeded to cut the skirt fabric into strips ...

... then machine sewed the strips onto the placemats and "quilted" them down with wavy lines.

Problem solved!

- Gone fishing: Mixed media assemblages

We spend a fair bit of time on the back breezeway: taking water breaks between cactus-whacking stints, sipping decaf after dinner as the sun sets, or just sitting in the sun watching the birds fly by.

Anyway, two years ago when Don started creating whales for Jackson's nursery and fish for Griffin's crib mobile, he made a small shark (totally cool and absolutely inappropriate for child's play):

Part of an old screen door wood forms the body of the shark

Driftwood and rusted wire tail

Button eye, shell teeth, and rusted metal fins ...
notice how the wood color naturally flows from the eye

Seeing an opportunity, I requested more fish for the breezeway walls, but a whole lotta not much happened. Then I found the perfect inspiration piece when Meliss took me birthday shopping at the Seagreen Gallery last year:

It was just what Don needed to prime the  pump and soon there was a companion fish on the wall:

After carving scales into the wood, Don painted the fish with layers of milk paint. The tail spots were
applied with daubers and the mouth was masked off with painters tape before daubing, making for a very sharp line.

A bent metal washer and rusted nut eye with
a pretty cool paint job using products from realmilkpaint.com

But the three small fish looked lonely on the breezeway wall. Off we went to Junkology, where Don found some potential fish eyes and a couple of old pitchforks. 

 "Great tails!"

And then, after Don explained what he was up to, the owner threw in some interesting old boards, one of which inspired the following:

Pitchfork tail, hex wrench dorsal fin, repurposed metal eye

The formerly black hex wrenches in the dorsal fin were rusted on a vinegar and salt soaked sponge,
but the pitchfork tines were already rusted to a perfect turn.

Hex wrench mouth with rusted nails, a who-knows-what eye,
rusted screen door handle gills, and a light wash of blue milk paint

Now, with the white whale in progress, the breezeway may soon look more like Sea World in San Antonio than the Hill Country in San Marcos ... which, come to think of it, is exactly what I hoped would happen.

- Try ... try again and again: Needlework lettering (updated 2/8/2015)

Note: To see all posts with letters of some kind, use the new Index term: Lettering.

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In getting ready to start the next linen towel, I wanted to see whether I could make use of some rubber stamps for lettering.

I tried the black fabric ink pad on "Blue Stem" and the brown fabric marker on "Grass" ... then using a single strand of DMC black floss, I backstitched "Blue" and "Gras," leaving "Stem" and the last "s" in "Grass" unstitched.

Note how the ink pad left shadows around the letters in "Blue Stem" ... and how the letters in all the words are far from level. Still, the whole point of the exercise was to see what did and did not work. So the final step was to wash and press the piece to see which inking method worked best.

And it's pretty much a tie. I was pleased that the ink washed out on both (although they're not supposed to wash out, I was hoping they would). However, it was much easier to see my stitching in progress doing black on brown, so that's what I'll be using.

Onward.

Addendum: I have since found that using a water-erasable fabric marking pen on the rubber stamps is an even better strategy. Live and learn.

Addendum 2: Best yet ... writing in my own hand using water erasable marking pen

Addendum 3: And even better ... writing in my own hand using a Pitt pen.

- Have you seen the white whale? Folk art assemblage in progress

Me: "Wait, wait ... slow down! I want to take pictures."

Don: "I can put it back together."

Of course, I ended up taking the pictures in terrible light with the iPhone (never mind that there's a perfectly good dslr in the house). But when Don starts doing a fish (or in this case, a whale), things happen fast.

Carpe diem (aka seize the sperm whale).

Be watching for the big reveal on the breezeway wall in a hopefully-not-too-distant-future post.

- Kitchen Towel planning: The Homestead

Do you remember having to show your work in school? And how frustrating it could be to show each and every step when the answer was abundantly clear? Besides, how do you show a mental leap on paper? Or, in the case of a blog, how do you know when to take a picture?

Still, Austin Kleon has a point: sometimes it can be a good thing to show the process by which you arrived at a final product or conclusion. It's especially interesting when the dead-end ideas are thrown aside ... who knows what fertile ground they may land on and what may spring from them in the future?

As I finished hemstitching a new kitchen towel, I started thinking out loud, wondering what to stitch. The lines of running stitch on the napkin and kitchen towel in the previous post had reminded me of the lines of latitude and longitude on topographic maps. Pulling out a map of the USGS Wimberley Quadrangle from my Texas State University days, I discovered that the towel was almost, not quite as large. Certainly do-able.

At which point Don said, "Didn't you say something once about doing a map of the property?"

"I dunno," I mused, "the proportions aren't right. Our lot is 200' by 800' and the towel is about one-and-a-half by two feet. Of course, I could cut off the flood plain at the back ... just stop at the fire pit."

Then I went down the rabbit hole.

Three hours, several maps from Google and a plat from our house closing folder later, I had sketched in a towel-sized version of the front two-thirds of the property on a piece of baking parchment paper. After coming up for air, I spent the rest of the afternoon working in the yard, and with only a glance or two at the sketch over the course of the evening, went to bed and slept on it (figuratively speaking).

[Note: this would be a really great place for a picture, wouldn't it?]

The next morning I dug out some watercolor pencils purchased several years ago. They were a fanciful indulgence considering I discovered many, many years ago (when I mistakenly talked my way into a third-year art major's drawing class) that I don't draw very well. But rough sketching is something I can do and hey, you just never know when you might need some watercolor pencils, right? The time had arrived and as I've been wont to say, it's all about the pantry: whether you are cooking or creating, you just have to have the right ingredients on hand when you need them.

So I started coloring in my sketch, finessing some of the lines from the previous day, peering out the windows every so often to get a reality check on where the little blue stem grasses had taken hold, stepping back to take in the bigger picture, imagining what stitches would work best for roof lines and paths, trees and grasses. I vaguely recall Don saying he was going to the store, and at one point I thought it might be past the normal time to brush my teeth, although upon so doing I managed to deposit a fair bit of pencil dust from my hands to the towel in the bathroom.

Finally, I realized the sketch was good enough for its intended purpose and I stopped, took a quick picture, then cleared the counter so Don could unload the groceries.

The morning gone, it was time for lunch: an Asian-inspired salad of greens, red pepper, red cabbage, scallions, mint, Thai basil, cilantro, grilled pork, and wontons dressed with pickled ginger juice, lime juice, rice wine vinegar, peanut oil, sesame oil, and white soy sauce.

Yep, it's all about the pantry.
Now if I can just figure out where
that fabric marking pencil got to ...

- Kitchen Towel photography: Trying to capture subtle stitches (updated 2/8/2015)

Note: Click here for all of the Kitchen Towel index links.

I've been watching the sun climb into the sky all morning ... every half hour going out and taking yet another round of pictures, trying to capture the subtlety of the stitches on my kitchen towel as well as a napkin. It's time to stop trying and go with the best I've got for now.

What I didn't mention in yesterday's post was that before there was a towel, there was a napkin ...

Running stitch on cotton/linen napkin detail. Note how the lower horizontal line of stitching is "off track"

It was a test piece, worked on a West Elm cotton/linen blend napkin with DMC cotton floss. As each DMC strand ran out I began a new color, all in soft earth tones of course (and therefore equally difficult to photograph). The problems I encountered were two-fold: the machine-made hemstitching on the napkin did not parallel the warp and woof of the fabric (see the right side of the napkin) and the warp and woof were not evenly sized, making it harder to "follow the line," particularly when stitching at night.

Still, I learned a lot from practicing on this piece. Mostly that it was fun to do plain old running stitch, particularly with no real plan, end product, or deadline. I had nothing to lose except for a few hours of my time ... and since much of that time was spent sitting in the sun, that in itself was sufficient. But I also found a stitch size and rhythm that suited me, I tried out some different knots for starting and ending, and I realized that doing my own hemstitching on an evenly woven linen would be a good idea the next time around.

Upon completing the napkin (which has since become a kitchen towel), I set my sights on a pale green linen tablecloth that had been cut into before. The quality of the linen was middling, the tablecloth having been purchased for about $30 at Target many years ago (when it was used for a smaller dining table than we have now). However, it seemed to have a good hand  (what Merriam Webster defines as the "the feel of or tactile reaction to something") for its intended purpose, so I cut a piece about one inch larger all around than my favorite kitchen towel, following the weave of the linen by eye. I turned under a 3/8" hem (which is what "felt right" for the weight of the linen) and hemstitched it at about four threads per stitch (note to those who have hemstitched: I did not pull a thread because the linen quality was too poor, so I took the lazy way out and just followed the weave of the linen).

After hemming the towel, I chose eight DMC cotton flosses in colors that reminded me of the ocean, all with very soft, gray tones: light green, medium green, light blue, light blue-green, medium blue, cream, taupe, and charcoal gray. I made lines of running stitch following the weave of the fabric from the bottom to the top of the towel, choosing a new starting point and a new color for each row. Knowing the towel would get much more handling and laundering than most needlework, I chose to do a double running stitch when beginning or ending a thread.

Sadly, the pale green floss looks more like amber
and the pale green linen ground looks more gray than green.

I also drew some random circles on the linen using a compass and pencil, having seen something similar on Pinterest that appealed to me. The pencil faded away after a couple of washes ... one unanticipated advantage of making a quotidian piece that will get a lot of laundering. As with the beginning and end of each row, I used a double running stitch at the beginning and end of each encounter with the circle, which also made it more visible.

Note the bits of floss furling out at the top of the circle ...
a failed attempt at a different knotting technique.

As I worked, I decided I didn't really want to do the whole towel one way, so I free-styled. In the end, one half of the towel was dominated by closely worked vertical rows with small stitches and blank circles (which have inspired me to do a phases of the moon piece in the future), while the other half focused more on the intersections created by working horizontally in varying widths.

The happy result was not only did I get to try out different techniques, I now have a different "look" depending on how the towel is folded and hung over my oven door handle.

 

Someday soon I'll go to the camera store in Austin to get the camera checked out and then ask them how best to capture the details of color and stitching with my DSLR. But for now it's enough to show my work in progress (both the needlework and the photographic work) and move on.

- Quotidian cloth: Kitchen Towel mending and making

My frustration level is rising as I try repeatedly to get decent photography of my running stitch kitchen towel. The main problem seems to be that the colors of the needlework and ground linen are too subtle by half to be captured by the camera (which is why I like them, of course). Less subtle colors photographs just fine, as this patched repair on a worn towel shows. The patch is 1 1/8" high by 7/8" wide, indigo dyed cotton on a linen-cotton ground photographed in indirect sunlight, and the colors are true.

By way of contrast, here is one of the "better" shots of the cotton on linen towel details which almost gets the color right, but still leaves much to be desired. There are dozens more shots taken over the past few days that aren't even close to usable and the photo editing programs just make a bad situation worse.

I suppose there could be some sort of contemplative lesson to be learned from the photographic challenge, but it escapes me at the moment. In any case, also to be answered is the question Don asked when I first began the project:

"Why a kitchen towel?"

After all, what gets less respect, more abuse? Why spend the time and effort to hemstitch a towel, then add to it the creative energy of choosing stitch patterns and colors, deciding on stitch length and the width between rows of running stitch? Why bother with something that will ultimately disintegrate? Indeed, once the towel was finished, I had to keep reassuring Don that it was okay to use it. But from the start, the answer was obvious to me:

"Because of all the things I could make, this will be a a day-to-day presence during the meals that are such an important part of our lives. We will be able to touch it and enjoy it up close, not just peer at it imprisoned behind glass on a wall." 

In other words, because it is quotidian.

Now if I could just take the pictures to make that manifest ...

- J and G at the beach (2013)

For whatever we lost (a you or a me)

It's always ourselves we find in the sea

                                                        e e cummings

 (From The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, p.112)

- Carolina Dreaming: Flannel photo album

When we got back from the Outer Banks last June, I was already dreaming about returning 51 weeks later. But since our little ones would hardly remember the beach, let alone who was there, I decided to give them a tangible way to look forward to seeing each other again.

The text was created on Word ...

and printed along with the pictures on a commercial color photocopier.

All the photocopies were coated front and back with Mod Podge to make them reasonably water-resistant (but certainly not water-proof).

The pictures and text were cut out and arranged on flannel pieces cut approximately 5.5" x 11" for the interior pages and 6" x 12" for the covers.

The carefully collated pictures and text were attached using the zig-zag stitch on the sewing machine (after some testing to determine the best stitch length and width).

Then the individual interior and cover pages were stitched together with two runs of zig-zag stitch. Cover stock was slipped into the gap between the pages to give them some body, after which they were trimmed to size with pinking shears.

The last step was sewing the interior pages onto the cover pages.

The books were completed in September and have held up to the tender mercies of the toddlers depicted therein. 

Now all we have to do is count the days until we get back together in June. I can't wait!