Textile Center is giving me an award called the “Spun Gold”, which is a kind of a lifetime achievement award for contributions to the fiber art community and to the field.  It is a an amazing honor and so very cool to be recognized and I feel more than a little weird about getting a lifetime achievement award when I haven’t yet reached 40, but I digress. What I really want to talk about is the photo.  I designed this for the invitation for the award presentation.  They wanted a photo of my work and I wanted something with a little personality.  This photo itself is a piece of art.

First, the skirt is called “Strut” and it is digitally printed linen-cotton (printed by my dear friends at Spoonflower) and trimmed with vintage velvet ribbon and hand-stitched sequins.  You only see a tiny bit of the ribbon in this shot, there are more stripes down the back.  The pattern is just a classic pencil skirt.  The peacock is a detail of a bobbin lace fan that is in the collection at the V&A museum in London.  We photographed it when we were there a few years ago and I played with it in Photoshop and made this skirt.  Here’s what the fan looks like.  It is breathtaking in person.  That little peacock is about 2 inches high.

Here’s also a detail of the skirt and the sequins.

I wanted to keep the focus of this photo on the skirt so that your eye was drawn right to that and not to my face because I wanted the “message” to be about my work and not about whatever dorky expression was on my face.  I have no aspirations to be a model.   So I started thinking about a way to make that change of focus happen.  The obvious solution was to just crop my face out of the photo, which would certainly work but it seemed a little too obvious.   But then I thought of this painting:  The Son of Man by Rene Magritte.

Son of Man by Rene Magritte, courtesy of Wikipedia

You might recognize it as it has been featured in a bunch of movies and the like.  It is supposed to be a self portrait of Magritte and he is said to have said the following about it (and a series of similar works that he did.)

 It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

I like this idea, that the “visible that is hidden” makes you fill in the blank about what you know about me and there is a little story going on in your mind.  You will notice I have an apple in my portrait too.

My husband and very best and most favorite collaborator actually took the photo; I just “art directed”.  The desk is a piece of plexiglass propped between two sawhorses.  The computer is suspended from a steel cable (photoshopped out) because it bent the plexi too much and we wanted that high tech looking desk illusion.  The glow around the computer was from a really big light behind me and I am standing on a big sheet of white paper which I tip-toed over to on a towel so I wouldn’t leave dirty footprints that we would have to Photoshop out.  The computer was the actual machine that sat on my desk at work for many years until the fan died and it wheezed its last breath.  But it is cool and I have kept it as a photo prop (although we gutted it so it was lighter).  We would snap a few shots, he would show them to me on the screen on the back of the camera and I would step a 1/2 inch this way or that and move my shoulders up or down until we got it just right.

Hello there blog.  It’s been a while.  I have been reading all kinds of inspirational posts on all of the blogs I follow all about the year in review and all of the things everyone talked about and most popular posts and all of the goals for all of the things that they want to do.  I saw one whole post that was 12 different projects for the holidays that were all carefully color coordinated with tutorials and downloads and printables.  And while I actually enjoy reading it from everyone else, it just makes me wonder how some people have time to do that kind reminiscing and collecting of old posts and analyzing.  I would much rather spend my Christmas break cooking and reading and spending some time with my darling husband and elderly hound who I haven’t seen enough of this fall.

So none of that here.  I am sorry that I haven’t been posting much.  Not so much sorry for you, although I enormously appreciate all of you that read and lurk and comment, but really for myself.  This blog over the years has become a journal (hence the name) of all of my projects and I look back and reference things here all the time.  I love the idea of keeping a beautiful journal but the reality is, I am not a journal kind of girl.  But this blog works for me and I love it.  The last few months have been a challenge.  It’s been nothing earth shattering.  The people I love are safe and well.  I am safe and well, but I have been creatively and professionally challenged in ways that have squeezed a lot of what I am willing or able to share here in to a trickle.  It’s been stressful in good and bad ways and it has made me re-prioritize some things and totally drop the ball on a few things (which makes me crazy) and just plain let some things go.

But, I think we are heading towards the end of the drought and in that spirit, I have some Christmas presents that I am really proud of to share with you.  The handmade gifts were very carefully planned this year and although they didn’t arrive quite on time, they turned out beautifully and I am happy with them (and I believe the recipients were too.)

Mom got a handwoven camera strap (or maybe it is for binoculars).  She is a major birdwatcher and wildlife photographer, so she will use this, I think.  It is a pick up pattern on an inkle loom, made with 5/2 perle cotton, a few scraps of ultra suede, and some webbing/buckles I found on Etsy.  A pick up pattern is similar to brocade fabric, you choose threads out of the pattern and pick them up to float on top of the regular weave.  That is what is making the zig-zag/diamond pattern you can see.

Next, my youngest niece and nephew (ages 2 and 4) got a “Map to Uncle Andy & Auntie Becky’s House”.  I took a google map of our neighborhood, traced/simplified it in Illustrator and printed a fabric “map” of our neighborhood. (Thank you Spoonflower!)  I didn’t think it was too smart to post a map to my house for the whole internet to see, so you get a section of it so you get the idea.  We added all of the best parts of our neighborhood, like the pool down the street and the very important location of the coffee shop and the pizza place.  I filled in between the streets with photos of textures – grass, gravel, sand.  I found the little tiny cars and was really thrilled to get a set with a police car, fire truck, garbage truck and parking enforcement.  Then finally three big dice with different locations on each face so you can roll the dice and drive to each location, making a very simple game for them to play.  Mommy has to read the words right now, but I think after not too long they will start to recognize the words on their own.  This niece and nephew live out in very rural farm country and so the city is a pretty fun thing to play pretend about.

My youngest sister got the (hopefully) ultra cool accessory of the season.  A giant cowl made from baby alpaca with a tiny bit of sparkle.  This thing is seriously decadent.  Seed stitch with a half twist before I seamed it up, so it has a little mobius shape happening.

Mom got the poker chip silk scarf.  I hosted a “dye day” just before Christmas for my new co-workers to make gifts for their family members and I did this one and knew that my mom had to have it.  It is a technique called itajime shibori and is folded and then clamped with poker chips (top and bottom of the folded scarf) held in place with clothespins.  Then you add the dye and the poker chips mostly keep the dye out and leave polkadots.  (You can get fancier tighter clamps and make the resist shapes very distinct, but I like this more organic look better.)

Finally, it was the year of the bat for my dad.  He is an architect and one of his projects this year involved some renovation on some historic buildings.  Historic buildings that happen to be home to an endangered species of bat.  (Which means you have to remove the bats before you can renovate and you just can’t even imagine what that involves.)  So the bat jokes and puns have been a thing this year.  I found a great collection of other batty items for him on Etsy (which I will show off tomorrow), but this ornament was my contribution.  A snoozing bat for the Christmas tree.  (He’s about 3 inches long.)

Hoping you all had a creative and peaceful holiday with your loved ones.  Cheers to the new year!