Finding a theme... and time.

Boy I've been a bad blogger. I've been pretty busy but just everyday stuff, kids and work- my computer time has been taken up with creating work packages for an Online Teaching and Learning System that I've been learning about but haven't used enough to be very proficient at yet. And crochet.

Mollie Flowers tutorial from Roman Sock

But yesterday I did something a bit different. Months ago I enrolled in a workshop at the Art Gallery of WA run by David Walker. There is an exhibition of his jewellery on at the gallery at the moment. I woke up feeling a bit tired and not really in the mood for it but having paid I went. It was quite interesting and I came away with a couple of bits of important information.
At one stage he was taking us through his exhibition and telling us where his ideas had come from. Now I know you will all probably shake your heads at the obviousness of these revelations but I guess it was just something I needed to hear at this point.

1. Make something that you like...yes it is important that it is something that others might like especially if you want to sell it but make things that you like.

2. Focus on things you are interested in or passionate about- emotionally or intellectually.

The aim of the workshop was more about exploring ideas than creating a piece of jewelery.
Unfortunately one other girl and myself did not get the preliminary workshop notes so we were well and truly behind all the others who came with materials, tools, notes and stimulus pictures as well as some idea of the materials they wanted to explore.
I made a start wrapping yarn around a curly vine. playing with the contrasting textures of the wood and the different types of yarn. I felt a bit embarrassed when David came to talk about "My ideas" and "theme and direction" and I weakly replied "oh, I'm just playing with the textures at the moment....nothing deep and meaningful"
Than I tried melting plastic together with an iron, surprisingly easy and quite effective- something I might do with the kids at school (Sorry no photo, I've lost the piece I made.)

Then I started to think about weaving yarn and came up with these ideas.
(Remember they are an exercise in idea development not finished pieces)



As I worked I thought about my interests, I love fibers and traditional methods of working with textiles things that are predominantly or generally thought of as woman's crafts. I feel passionate about my children and my role as a mother. In my head I played with ideas of how we weave the threads of our lives together, we weave stories and treads of memory and how we bind those memories close - especially now that the kids are growing up I feel a bit sentimental about those memories and those traditional crafts have a link with the women of the past- my own direct past with my grandmother who knitted vests for us and our children and my great grandmother who crocheted, knitted and embroidered but also with the generations of women who sewed their hopes into things they made in the home and wove their memories into quilts, and other things they made for their families. These things in turn become the fabric of the life of the family and serve to provoke memories in the future for the children and grand children.

So I guess these little pieces are about that taking a traditional craft and presenting it in a more contemporary way. I actually enjoyed the different textures but these could be woven in different types of wire.


I also felt better when David found these experiments interesting and wished me well in my jewelery making pursuits.

And this afternoon I finished my crochet (It will be a cushion cover for a round cushion I have hiding somewhere or a trivet for hot pots. I'm not sure which just yet.)
And I managed to post this!

WOW!

Where has the week gone? I've done
a bit of knitting
a bit of sewing
a bit of cooking
a bit of drawing
a lot of running about after my cherubs
visited my dear friend
caught up with a couple more,
saw a movie (Coco Chanel)
watched some DVD's
and have done a very little bit of housework.
And no photography!

I'm trying to decide what to make in order to make money so I can go on my trip.
I think I will do some of my HANDbags as they sold well.



I'm also thinking of tiny mosaic pendents using some of my broken tea cups but I've not yet figured out the best way to do them yet.
I thought of making some crocheted cotton dishcloths with some left over cotton yarn but they take far too long to make and I just wouldn't be able to sell them for a reasonable profit.
Then I thought tea cosies or coffee pot warmers, crocheted and embroidered.
A friend suggested making some felt cone christmas trees like I made her as nearly everyone who saw them on her bench commented on how lovely they were.

Any other suggestions????

Right LOTS of ideas, no direction and one more week of holidays.....

Dreamin'

Phewww!


It's holidays at last. I managed to do report comments for all my art classes, This means that I don't have to do them at the end of the year (although I don't think I should HAVE to do them at all as it is not required by the department) anyway they are done. In the last few weeks I've also managed to crochet a chevron lace cardigan in black.

This is a fantastic pattern. Very easy and very comfortable. The sleeves have bounced up a bit and although I did want them shortish for work they are a bit short!

And I've made a couple of neck warmers one for me then one for a friend because she admired mine so much.

(She also wants a cardigan!)

So far this holiday we have had a 'gathering' of teens here - 20 or less people is a gathering not strictly a party I've been informed. Although I think loud music and sneaky alcohol, loud singing pizza and then sausage sizzle later in the night and me being evicted from my lounge room at 12ish and not being able to get to sleep properly is a party. A gathering evokes a much more civilized kind of affair. It must be a generational thing. Bantam Boy still has to clean up after it. Saturday was out as there was another 'gathering' (on a much smaller scale) at another friends place and then he had work on Sunday. Now it's Monday 10:30 and he's still in bed. Never fear I'll wake him in a bit, but right now I'm enjoying the quiet of being on my own.

I had to get up bright and early- well early at least. Chicky Babe is off to Rottnest Island for 3days and 2 nights. It is cold and rainy this morning so the half hour ferry ride won't be too pleasant, but she will be with all her mates so she will be oblivious to the adverse conditions. I'm sure she will be fine they are staying with the parents of one of her friends from drama. There will be 18 people in all. Apparently the family own a holiday house on the island and so the kids don't have to pay for accommodation. I spoke to the mother (much to Chicky Babes horror - she could see no reason why I would have to do that, see how unreasonable and embarrassing I am to her!) The mother said she would feed them all too. How generous are they? So I went and bought a whole lot of treats and snacks for her to share.

After dropping her off at the ferry I went to the Fremantle art centre and wandered about looking at the exhibition and had a coffee and a lovely chat with a complete stranger.

Now because it is so grey and dreary outside, I'm going to wrap my feet in my finished Babette rug and put on a DVD and a pot of tea and sit and knit my next project a lovely chunky circular vest. And think about what I am going to do to sell at George Street Festival this year so I can make lots of money so that I can go elephant trekking in Thailand!

One of my friends had planned to travel with another friend when they turned 40 this was put off and off until now that she will be 50 next year they decided to go elephant trekking . Then her friend said no again...So I've decided that I would go with her instead. (much to Chicky Babes surprise! She doesn't know that I do have a mildly adventurous side although if you check out the link you will see that it is camping but only in name they have bathrooms attached to the tents. And it is quite civilized really.)

lady bird and bumble bee....

After dropping Bantam boy off at work I had a couple of hours to myself so I thought I'd have a little lie down. As I lay there I started to drift off not to sleep but to that other place- you know the place and as I did all the things I'd been looking at and reading about (I've had a thing for old embroidery of late) anyway as I lay there my head started to clear and finally it became empty- in a good way! All the clutter left and I knew what I wanted to make. I have been thinking of miniature embroidery brooches on linen. And finally today I knew what and how I wanted to do them.

So I raced off to "Art Mart" fortunately they are open 7 days a week and I got some unprimed linen. It has such a lovely coarse weave and it has nice body too.

Chicky babe finally made me understand how to find the micro focus function on my camera so I was able to take a couple of close ups, with thumb to illustrate the scale.

Here it is almost finished, I don't have a brooch back to finish it off with. (Oh and this is a short scarf I'm working on at the moment, I've also almost finished a Chevron cardigan I started a couple of weeks ago, I've finished it enough to wear it I just want to make it a bit longer, I forgot to take a photo of it!)


Close, close up!

The most important thing I realised today was that to relax is not enough. To create properly and connect with your ideas and what you want to do you need to be able to clear your mind to allow space for the ideas to flow into. And this makes timetabling 'creative time' a bit tricky.
Obviously for me I need to find a way to clear my mind of the day to day rubble to allow my imagination space to "percolate' (It is a bit like a coffee dripper, my imagination has to flow through all the things in my head until it forms a creative puddle, hopefully into some sort of "cup" and not a messy puddle!)

Oh gosh! I just realised it's not sunday anymore no wonder I'm a bit tired it's after 1am!

Tea in blogland

Ok this is not doing my work but I just felt like spending a morning in 'blogland' drinking tea and eating crumpets- they were gone before I got to the camera!

I'm having a lovely morning browsing beautiful things and listening to Creative thursday podcasts...(I'm sure she's listening to some of the things in my head sometimes.)

and dreaming of embroidered miniatures for brooches.

P.S some time later-

I'm now enjoying croissants and green tea for lunch while still browsing.
although I will have to stop soon to take Bantam Boy to work and pick up Chicky Babe from a sleep over party.

I'm still here!

monument hill fremantle

It's been a pretty hectic few weeks. And just this minute I have finished drafting the last of my 250 art comments that my school admin has insisted that I do even though the union and the department signed off on an agreement that comments were only required for English maths and general comments. So not only do I have those to do for my classroom of year threes I have 10 art classes to do also. well at least the drafting is done and now its just a matter of entering them and the grade allocations into the computer system. I can't do anymore at the moment because the system closes down at 12o'clock. I found this out on Thursday night as I had just finished typing in a whole class worth of undrafted directly typed comments into the computer system. I pressed save and a page error sign came up. It was 12.03 and the system had shut down and I lost all my work that had taken ages! (I should have saved as I went along...I may have said a few naughty words at that point!)

Last weekend I caught up with a friend of mine who I've known literally all my life. Her parents lives in the house behind my grandmother and we more or less grew up together. To call her my friend is an inadequate term- she's more like a sister to me. She was here for a while from Kalgoorlie because her brother was very unwell with a brain tumor. We had made plans to catch up over the weekend but she was unable to do so until Sunday morning. So we went into freo for breakfast. We had a lovely time catching up but underneath the laughter there was the ever present sadness at the immanent loss of her brother. We left the cafe with her feeling a little lighter after having laughed about things that otherwise would make us cry. Then as I drove her back to her dad's place we got the call to say that her brother had just a few minutes earlier passed away. She grasped my hand and my eyes filled with tears....it does not make driving easy! Thank god I was with you she said. Then the poor thing had to go and break the news to her dad.

I had to go into school and try and get some of my class reports finished off but I made the decision to take the Monday off to support her if she needed me or wanted me. I'm glad I did because she rang me in the morning after a terrible night and asked me to come and get her and take her out for a coffee. She had been trying to be a support for her dad who is quite old and sick himself and she needed someone to lean on herself. So I went to pick her up and ended up taking her to a lovely little local cafe (after a detour to Monument Hill so we could both cry and she could hold my hand without me having to fear I would cause a traffic accident.) It is amazing though her capacity to laugh in adversity...although I think we were both being somewhat manic in our laughter.

We talked about what made someone successful. Her brother was a good man, a loving father and brother. He was not well known in his field of work, he did not have an 'important' job, he was not rich. Yet he was well loved and we agreed that that was in the end the most important thing.

To live a simple life well, to love and be loved, the little acts of kindness that touch peoples lives. Here is a quote from Emerson that says it better than I can...



To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch…to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!

My town

Last weekend Bantam Boy needed to take some photos of an urban setting for an art project. So we spent the afternoon dashing about town taking photos. Some are taken from the car as we dash about. Others we stopped and I kept the motor running and knitted as he walked about taking snaps here and there. At one stage where parking was readily available (Freo is impossible on sunny sunday afternoons!) I parked and hopped out and played photographer too.

But I must give credit to Bantam Boy as the main creative force behind these shots.

I thought seeing as I now have hundreds of photos of my home town on the computer I'd take you on a tour of my place. I was born here, grew up here- wandered a little and returned.

This is 'the old bridge' it separates the river and the harbour.

harbour....
...river.
I lived just up from here when I went to high school between the old and the new bridge(You can see it here Bantam boy is standing on a wooden plank under the old bridge, people fish from it). I spent many hours along here. One time we were in a rubber dingy Just near 'the new bridge' when we spied a shark fin. we paddled in frantically only to realise that we could have been playing with a pod of friendly dolphins. I also had an epic unrequited crush on a most quirky fellow who lived beyond the new bridge. So I took to walking my poor little Australian silky terrier on the long walk past his house. Sometimes I'd be brave and pop in to say hi because although he did not return my feelings we did 'hang out in the same group of friends.' Poor dog she had such short little legs and it was quite a walk. No wonder I was very thin in those days.

(Arty Shot)

"The old bridge" is made of wood it was the 'old bridge' when I was very young and they started to build the 'new bridge' only about 1km up. As little kids my sister and I logically reasoned that they needed to build a new one because the old one was old and therefore not good. We held our breath every time we had to drive across it!

That will do for now I'll do some more later, I really should go into work while there are other people there this morning. (After being threatened with being stabbed I don't fancy going in on my own!)