Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Stitching Tea and Roots

 

Stitched roots on tea-dyed paper


The title of these two pieces says it all: "The feeling I think you're supposed to get when drinking tea...but I don't." 

For some reason, for decades people seem to assume that I love tea. As a result, whenever a gift-giving occasion comes along I usually end up with at least one gift pack of specialty teas and have even scored a teapot or two along the way. The tea always goes into a large brown shopping bag labeled "tea" that is stored in the dark recesses of my walk-in art closet. I have herbal teas, smoky English teas, gift packs of tea from Taiwan, and curative teas.  In one of those 2 a.m. idle moments the thought occurred that it might be interesting to see if they could be used as dyes. 

Experimenting with tea dyeing

After kicking off a round of experimental dyeing using strips of paper towels and an endless variety of teas, I turned to the other key ingredient in this project: bamboo and wild grass roots. (See Roots Project for earlier experiments with roots.)

Bamboo and native grass roots

A first step was separating and organizing the roots in preparation for stitching.


Organized roots!


Close-up of roots

Thence ensued a blissful interlude of stitching. The results are below and perfectly capture the original theme — that elusive, zen-like feeling I uneasily suspect you are supposed to experience while drinking tea.

Panel One (11" x 11")

Panel One detail

Panel One detail

Panel Two (11" x 11")

Panel Two detail

Panel Two detail

As a beverage, the point of tea continues to elude me. As a dye, however, it holds enough possibilities that my battered old bag of teas will remain in the art closet. And in future, when gifted with yet another gift pack of teas, my enthusiasm may be marginally less false.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Embroidering Blind Contour Drawings: The Sister Shirt

Blind contour drawings

Blind contour drawings are a fun, relaxing art exercise that supposedly improve your observation skills and hand-eye coordination. They can also make for some hilarious sessions with fellow artists. We've done several rounds of blind contour drawings on Zoom over the past few years since my sister and I formed a weekly maker group with her granddaughters during the pandemic. 

In our sessions, each of us chooses another person on the Zoom screen without telling anyone who we've chosen. We then start our drawing with the following rules: Don't lift your pen off the paper from start to finish; don't look down at what you are doing, just keep your eyes on the screen. After a set time period (about two minutes) we each show our drawings and the others guess the identity of the portrait subject.

The sister shirt (front)

During a gloomy interlude this winter featuring dark skies, damp chill, and atmospheric rivers, I searched through my closet for likely upcycling candidates and found this bright green linen thrift store find. Originally a long and frankly blah tunic with no pockets, the shirt was first transformed by cutting off a sizable portion of the bottom and converting those scraps into generous pockets. Vintage buttons from my collection embellished the piece.

Vintage buttons

Shirt back

The next step was to get my sometimes-hopelessly-spaced-out grandnieces and sister to send me their blind contour drawings. Once in hand I sorted through, picked out four, and transferred the drawings onto the shirt using carbon paper. The final step was stitching over the transferred drawings, adding "tethers" that extend to the bottom of the shirt so the heads look life floating balloons.

Blind drawing of Aleida by Nana

Blind drawing of Cici by Nana

Blind drawing of me by Nana

Blind drawing of Nana by Nana

You will note that all of the blind drawings used for the shirt were by the artist known as "Nana," my sister Judy, who has firmly and repeatedly identified herself as a non-artist. Blind contour drawing eliminates judgments and labels and allows everyone, no matter how they identify, to have big time fun. Nana's drawings were selected for this project because they simply suited the design best. The shirt is called the Sister Shirt because it depicts two sets of sisters, two generations apart.

A fun project from beginning to end.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Eco-Dyeing: A Lake Merritt Quilt

Lake Merritt Eco-dyed Quilt
 

When in doubt or the the throws of depression: eco-dye! This project, a hand-stitched, eco-dyed quilt, involved days of foraging along the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. The fabric is flour-sack Lito linen towels that I order in bulk from Amazon for both the quality and affordability. The leaves include eucalyptus, Japanese Maple, and rose.

 

Leaf journal

But first, a word about tools and techniques. I have been using a blank journal — one of many given to me over the years by people who felt the need to proffer a gift but had no idea what to give. I am sure that you, too, have one lying around the house unused. This one has the advantage of a strong elastic cord attached to the journal that keeps it firmly closed when not in use. As I was starting this project I noticed just how unlovely the commercially-designed cover of the journal was. I used Modgepodge, a brown paper bag, and gold paint to transform the unlovely object. It turns out that if you generously slather on the Modgepodge, you can decoupage a leaf collage onto the surface that will endure rough handling.

Journal innards

By keeping a leaf journal, you are able to forage at random all year long, press the leaves, and tap this rich resource whenever the mood for eco-dyeing strikes you.

Now back to the quilt:



The quilt is comprised of two layers of linen. While the top layer features eco-dyed panels, the flip side employs a variety of patterns using bits of raw turmeric root tied or stitched into the cloth, boiled, and removed.

Turmeric panels


In the past I have used long rows of vertical stitching to hold the two sides of a quilt like this together. This time I experimented with stitching around some of the eco-dyed leaves on the top side of the quilt, which produces stitched ghost outlines of leaves on the turmeric-dyed side.

Stitched leaf silhouette

Look closely to see stitched border on leaves

Making a quilt like this — from the ambling walks to forage for leaves to the slow, mesmerizing practice of hand-stitching — is one of the best ways I know to tune in to the universe and be here now.

Saturday, November 25, 2023

Peace, Love and Understanding: Papier Mâché Beads


 A week after the Hamas attack on Israel with tensions running high, global tension rising, and people finding even more reasons to fight the multi-front reality wars, I was in a Lyft car on my way to an 8-day Krishnamurti Retreat in Ojai. My Lyft driver, Abdulcadir, was friendly and curious and after questioning me about my destination and about Krishnamurti, he shared that he had his own daily spiritual practice. Every day he would write down a spiritual thought or principle, carry it with him, and periodically meditate on the principle throughout the day. We agreed that the basic ideas of kindness, gratitude and acceptance are common to all religions and spiritual belief systems, and were mutually baffled why the human species keeps turning on itself.

He reached for an old envelope on the front passenger seat that he used to record spiritual principles for his daily practice and handed it back to me, I asked if I could photograph it and he happily agreed.

Original envelope front


Envelope back

I have worked with paper mâché beads in the past to process life events, and have found it to be a deeply satisfying, slow meditative process over a period of days or weeks. The process of making these beads is outlined in an earlier post, Funerary Art: Souvenirs from the Bardo. When I returned home after the retreat, I reproduced scaled printouts of Abducadir's envelope to produce this beaded strand while the conflict in Gaza escalated.




It is hard to make sense of the world and of humanity itself in these troubled times. I do it with my hands. It helps. Talk to strangers. Be kind. Make stuff. 

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Advent 2023: Let There be Magic

 

A very Wiccan holiday

Coming up with a spectacular advent calendar every year is challenging, but when your recipients enter their teens the challenge becomes formidable. This year's version of the advent calendar features Wicca, and reflects an abiding fondness for all things magic, pagan, and nature-based. The perfect antidote to the doomsday mood that is daily becoming more prevalent on the planet and having a palpable affect on teenage angst.

The fun starts with a forest-green hoodie that lends a kind of - "Pssst...hey lady, want to see some magic?" - air to the proceedings. Upon arrival the hoodie is mysteriously closed, building anticipation towards the grand opening on December 1.


Psssst...hey lady


Close-up of outer label

When opened, the hoodie reveals a wealth of spell-casting supplies.

Magic!

Those supplies include: 14 different herbs, 14 different crystals, 12 different colored candles, and a custom-made "Welcome to Wicca" booklet. And of course, a chocolate every day.



Spell-casting supplies

The magic book

Book front

Back of book




Additional supplies were tucked in to help make the spell bottles and spell sachets.

Spell casting containers: bottles and sachets

Hopefully this healthy dose of magic will help the young recipients combat the stress, doom and gloom of modern times and reintroduce a little hope and wonder in their worlds. 

* I don't usually mention any commercial products of any sort, but should you choose to make your own version of a Wiccan advent calendar, this witchcraft supply kit from Amazon priced at under $25 sure made the whole project a lot easier to pull off. Just strip away all packaging (saving lists of contents and their magic properties for your magic book) and use the individual components in your calendar. A blank book is included in the supplies. I pasted on a new cover and converted it into a spell cookbook, offering information about the magic properties of all supplies in the front, some minimal advice and instructions, and leaving the remainder blank for the recording of spell recipes they come up with.




Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Skipping through a Mind Yomp: Graphic Thinking

 This is part two of an ongoing series of attempts to explore what happens to the mind when you explore unfiltered graphic representation of abstract thoughts. This round was conducted at an 8-day retreat of intense dialogue at the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai, California. Serendipitously, I was housed in the Annie Besant room. Besant was one of the founders of the Theosophical Society and a pioneer in the whimsical world of thought forms, and this virtual proximity with Besant across time seemed too ripe with possibilities to pass up.

A Conversation with the Self


Internal dialogue

A Conversation with Another



An underlying issue with both of the above attempts is that they were, in themselves, a conscious projection of the conscious, linear mind. I hit the jackpot on day 7 when, after switching out the toilet paper roll in the bathroom, I glanced at the now-empty cardboard roll, jumped up, went to the desk, and produced the object below. An initial urge to enclose a scrap of paper stating an "answer" or "conclusion" was mighty strong until I realized the box itself posed a perfect spiritual riddle on its own.

How to Get Out of the Box


Toilet paper tube as spiritual artifact

The riddle solved

And now I turn back to more practical matters like eco dyeing and stitching, though come to think of it they too produce mindless moments of wonder. And as always, you are encouraged to experiment with nonverbal expression of the mind at work on your own. Peruse Annie Besant's "Thought Forms" to give yourself a nudge.
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