Is there a name for forward slippage?

Apart from forward slippage? All because I had an unexpected morning off.

We’ve been having problems with our phone line – intermittent broadband and a very crackly line – so when BT wanted to come this morning to fix it I thought for a very long time before agreeing to cancel my gym appointment and wait in. Fridays are Wensleydale’s hydrotherapy days, so I very nobly volunteered to be the one who stayed at home – and yes, it’s better now. So far. [This is the second time we’ve needed a repair since we’ve had Infinity, which is twice more than we ever needed it in the 20 years previously.]

So having an unexpected free day, I decide to face up to a looming cloud on my horizon, and tackle the essay – which, you may remember, was on the timetable for this weekend.

I think because I’d written a fairly complete draft, I really wasn’t looking forward to revisiting it – boring, boring, boring. However I’d had a couple of ideas for  improving the beginning and ending, so I got down to it this morning.

In the end, it wasn’t too bad. I tweaked the bits I wanted to tweak, pruned some other bits [its still too long but I won’t tell anyone] spellchecked it and saved it. I'll look at it again tomorrow, give it to my trusty editor for approval, and do the final draft on Sunday. One weight off my mind, only another three to go.

Unfortunately, there has been backward slippage on SAM. We had a busier week than expected, and I've been too tired in the evenings to do much mark making. I’m a long way short of 50 marks, but I will do what I can this weekend and start PMS’ing and PC’ing on Monday.

We are going to have more time on our hands for the next few months anyway: Babybel’s mummy starts her maternity leave today, so no Babybel sitting for a while. We had a lovely few days with her this week, and we are going to miss the little monkey [though not getting up at silly o’clock].

A decision has been made.

This week will be devoted to SAM, next weekend to the essay [probably with some slippage] – and after that it’s PCs and PMS till September. [With a bit of room tidying if I feel the need to procrastinate get the urge.]

Will I stick to this? Who knows? Now I’ve told you and Wensleydale, it is more likely to happen.

As next week is going to be busy, I’ve been making backgrounds for SAM, so I have stuff prepared for a little bit of mark making in front of the telly. [The only problem with the Tour de France is that I actually have to watch it, rather than merely listening. I can knit and watch young men on bikes at the same time, but not embroider.]

Yesterday was machine embroidery, today was embellishing – with a bit of heat gunning thrown in at the end, which is why some of these look a bit burnt.

The embellishing allowed the recycling of some old failures pieces whose time had not yet come – and the creation of one or two more.

The black smudges are not the result of an inadvertent conflagration, but some of the marks I made at the beginning of the course, printed onto an OHT. Mark? Definitely, Stitch? Maybe not, yet.

I have also managed a bit of mark making in the book. The top one is pretty mundane – sort of Kantha plus appliqué – but I like the way it shows through the hole in the next page – and then through the embroidery on net which started all this.

Is appliqué ‘stitch as mark’? I’m working on the principle that a smudge of paint is a mark, and the simplest way to make smudges in stitch is with appliqué.

 

Some of my other marks are a lot more vestigial – otherwise I'd never finish.

 

 

 

 

And I’ve Photoshopped some of my litter pictures - can you spot the interloper? Found only a hundred yards from the ring pull and the screwed up bit of paper.

These were done with a variety of filters and a bit of additional work – don’t want to make it too simple…

 

Amazing what you can achieve with a couple of freeish days and a bit of motivation.

[We won’t talk about the failed loaf of bread – I’m sure the ducks will enjoy it…]

My first personal cloth.

 

I’m so proud. 

You may think it looks like a collection of rubbish – and you’d be right.

You would also be right if you thought it looked nothing like the photos of litter that I have been collecting for my PCs.

But, inspired by some rag rugs I saw while we were on holiday, I’ve been reading up rug making, and getting quite interested. This led to some ideas:

1. rag rugs go under your feet, like litter, and
2. rag rugs were traditionally made from recycled materials, so
3. try recycling rubbish into rugs – well, rugettes, really, this one is about 15x18 cm.

It is made from shrink wrapping from the post – this little piece took 5 wrappers and isn’t finished so I am not about to make any big ones.

No idea if this will turn into anything, but I feel I’ve got started on the PCs.

Tomorrow – plastic bags?

P.S. Shame about Bradley Wiggins… Go Cav!

If I gave the impression…

that my 50 ‘stitches as marks’ were all going to be made on that piece of hand dye I showed you – I misspoke.

Admittedly that was my intention – but in the big sort-out I came across a little book I made in my ‘splosh ink all over a big piece of white paper, chop it up, make it into a book and cut holes in the pages’ period.

It also had black and brown paper pages, and, as an experiment, starched poly sheer pages. And a couple of bits of embroidery I’d clearly put in there for safe keeping and forgotten about.

Ready made marks.

so for the past couple of days, when not watching men in Lycra zooming around the French countryside on bikes, I’ve been mark making in or for the book.

I am particularly fond of the sloppy black stitches on a sheer page in the top two images.

The cloth has not been entirely neglected – although as all these marks overlap I cannot decide how many marks it actually comprises. I am very reluctant to admit accept that it is only one, as far too much effort went into it!

The plan for this weekend was

1. Saturday: take down exhibition, relax.
2. Sunday: a little drawing, some SAM, some photoshopping, perhaps a bit of Tour-de-France watching - relax.

The second part of number 1 was scuppered by a welcome but unexpected visit from Babybel, on her way home from Peppa Pig World. I think she was quite tired after all the excitement, but she hasn’t grasped the concept of relaxation, and after a drink and a spell brushing her toy dog, it was back to garden running, football kicking, drawing, being read to [‘Again!’], and, of course, non-stop talking. Fun, but not quite what we’d planned.

This morning, I went to look for a scrap of Aida because I had the idea of adding a cross stitch monogram to the mark cloth.

Could I find my embroidery fabric? Course not.

So I started at the bottom of the stash cupboard, pulling out boxes, bags and baskets, vaccing the floor when I found it, looking through everything.

Before long it had turned into a full-scale sort out. I had been telling myself [and Wensleydale] that I was going to sort out the workroom this summer, but it was more of an aspiration than a commitment. I certainly didn’t intend to do any of it quite yet.

But – the dustbin has been filled, two boxes are empty, things have been put away that have been un-put away for months, the nastiest bits of hand-dye are in the washing machine getting a blue overdye in the hope that will make them less nasty -and I feel very virtuous.

Plus I found the Aida. In fact I remembered where it was before I finished sorting what was on the floor [on the top shelf in a bag], but decided to carry on and finish the job.

Of course the Aida needs ironing, and that is a task too far, so I’ll have to find a different mark to make tonight.

I have come to the conclusion that I do have  a very great deal of – far too much fabric. Does anyone have any good ideas about how to use up a lot of fabric you once thought would come in useful but it hasn't? Apart from giving it away, which I can’t yet bring myself to do.

Yesterday was ‘close up’ -

here’s the same Jaume Plensa sculpture ‘from a distance’.

To give you some idea of scale, the red blob is a person inside the sculpture. The effect is ‘Seurat’ from PFAEC.

I am fascinated by this piece – does the fact that it is made of letters make it a book? Probably not – but it inspires some interesting ideas.

 

Knowing that today would be Babybel and gym day, I worked on the image yesterday – and I’m glad I did because today has been so hot and humid, I have little energy for anything challenging.

I will probably manage some more work on SAM tonight – I made 2,3,4,or 5 marks yesterday, depending on how you count them.

Is this one or two marks? I’m counting it as two, even though they overlap, because they are not conceptually related to each other - [‘ark at ‘er!]– apart from both being inspired by the dye marks on the cloth.

 

I have decided  that this is also two. The little blue blobs were worked over splatter marks, and I’m counting them as one mark. The others were an exploration of related ideas, so also count as one mark.

The block on the right, which reminds me of rhubarb, was inspired by the colour exploration I did yesterday – using embroidery floss and changing the proportion of red to green by one strand each time. Then I tried a similar idea but changing the number of strands in the needle each time. I’m tempted to have another go with machine embroidery thread, which I hope is even finer than floss – how minimal can a mark be before it ceases to be a mark? 

I did look up the word in a dictionary yesterday: lots of interesting ideas came out of that, including holes and symbols. But I can’t make up my mind how 3D a ‘mark’ is – and what about texture? I tried thinking about art media marks – the difference between pencil marks and paint marks, for example – and of course paint can be textured and 2.5D if not 3…

Is it just me who wastes spends time thinking deep thoughts about questions like this? Does everyone else just get on with it? It’s interesting, though, and looks like being a good cure for insomnia.

One decision I have made is that somewhere there will be a big red ‘X’ …

A sunny day…

a good night’s sleep, Wensleydale out and chores done meant that for the first time for ages I felt like doing some college work!

I started with a little painting for the PMS. Somebody recommended this book, and when it came I saw why, but I hadn’t got round to doing anything with it. But on a sunny day, what could be nicer than sitting in the conservatory with some paint and a sketch book?

 

The first two exercises are  ‘wet into wet’ [the circles] and ‘wet into dry’ [the squares]. They are simple enough not to deter the least confident watercolour user [i.e. me], and, once I got going, fun. Because I was using these two little sketchbooks, in which I’d collaged some bit of paper, I ended up using the techniques as colour exercises, based on the papers, and I could have gone on all morning. But it got very hot in the conservatory, so I drifted out into the garden to look for ‘marks’ – as in ‘stitch as mark x 50’, aka SAM.

This made me wonder what a mark is, anyway [according to W. it’s a stain], but I did end up with a collection of photos of lichen, bark, planks and peeling paint – which tells you a lot about our house and garden, really…  These are the edited highlights. I love that daisy-like shape in the top row, which is knot marks in the fence.

After lunch I went out and tried to draw some of them, before deciding that a pen wasn’t a good idea and I’d have been better off with my favourite oil pastels.

So I fired up Photoshop for today’s challenge –’close-up’. This is a photo I took of a Jaume Plensa sculpture at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last month – I’ll show you the whole thing tomorrow, which is ‘from a distance’. The effect, from PFAEC as usual, is ‘intaglio’ – and was much easier than it looks. Yes, the letters are back to front, but that is not because I reversed it, it’s because I was inside the sculpture when I took the picture. Obviously.

When I’ve finished writing this, I'm going to sit down outside, if it’s cooled off enough, and sew a stitched mark or two while W. sands down the window sills. Mmm – wonder who’s got the best bargain there? I will make him a cup of tea to keep him going first…

Three for the price of one.

A combination of college, Babybel and a stomach bug you don’t want to read about has made me get a bit behind with the photo challenge.

College was busy, but more productive for me personally than it has been for a while. I got my draft essay back [no problems, go away and write it], had my photos taken and, in a very positive peer review session, got some good suggestions about my 3D piece and about how I should present it in the exhibition. I don’t know whether I’ll have time/motivation to make changes to the piece itself, but the suggestion about display was easy to follow up, involving only a trip to Staples, which is conveniently close to Babybel’s nursery. All I need to do now is remember to take some scissors and our long arm stapler next week for construction purposes. The great advantage of making something deliberately grungy is that you can make the presentation grungy too…

The down side was that we were unexpectedly given more homework – the  obscurely phrased ‘Mark as stitch x 50’ – which I take to mean 50 examples of stitch used to make marks. This is on top of the [non-draft] version of the essay, and the open-ended Personally Managed Sketchbook and Personal Cloths. The up side of that is that I feel quite enthused about stitch as mark [SAM?] – perhaps because it will be nice to get back to doing some proper stitch.

I did think of stitching on used colour catchers, assuming I’ve got 50, but in the middle of an insomniac morning, decided a better idea would be to find one of my large pieces of too-multicoloured-to-use-in-a-proper-piece hand dye, and work into that, rather as I might doodle on a randomly painted piece of paper. Of course finding a suitable piece was more difficult than I anticipated – too small, too big, too dominating a pattern, too good to use for that – but I did find this, and a selection of threads which may or may not match, because I picked them out in artificial light.

So have I got started on all this homework? Of course not. After mucking around with PSE, I spent the afternoon sitting in the conservatory [pleasantly warm if not sunlit] and working on the beaded bag, which I feel I ought to finish before starting anything else. And drinking tea and listening to Radio 3’s ‘Light Music Weekend’, which is a delight for anyone brought up with the Light Programme in the 50s.

But I digress – back to the photo challenge.

Wednesday's was ‘Hands’. This started off with the Surreal photomontage effect from PFAEC, but got simplified and filtered.

 

 

 

Thursday was ‘Sunflare’, but not much sun, so I used a holiday photo which needed a bit of sun added to it.

 

And today’s is ‘Animal’, for which there was really only one choice.

Quality Control meets the Cubists – or rather the Cubism effect from PFAEC, with afterthought sepia/glow in Picasa. She really needed more cubes and more distortion, but I think I was up to 25ish layers before I got bored and gave up.

 

 

 

 

These will probably be the last photos for which I use PSE, as my student’s version of CS5 arrived today [very prompt service from Adobe, Germany to Hampshire in 2 days!] so I’m looking forward to playing with that while continuing to enjoy a nostalgic weekend on Radio 3.