See You in Two Weeks!

Leaving tonight for South Korea, on an art exhibition/fibers symposium/vacation. I'll be back soon, with lots of pictures!

Sketches an Progress


Trying to get back into drawing/painting a little bit--never would have thought art-school would have left me out of practice. It's nice to have a metric ton of reference photos too.


The cathedral window skirt plods on, this is an all-summer sort of project, I can see.


Sketch of what (I hope) it looks like on completion.


I also found a pair of shoes at the thrift store today that have a really interesting, lastless construction that I definitely want to explore.

Color Lovers

All the work I do with black gray and whites makes me greedy for color. I hoard tiny scraps of silk and bright crewel yarn. I have boxes of embellishments and little dye samples made, stolen and gifted. Putting the color on the insides of my garments somehow makes me feel much more free about using it strongly. My own closet is taken over by brown, grey, olive and navy blue, so clearly I'm not a huge fan of ostentatious color for myself. The fact that it's there for the enjoyment of the wearer, and those closest to them means that I don't really need to worry about the colors in terms of anything other than just that.


Okay, my diatribe is over, suffice to say, I've been enjoying a temporary reprieve from black and am relishing in making things as bright as possible.

There's been a really fantastically ugly sweater at Philly Aids Thrift for several months now, and since it dropped to $3, I bought it and unraveled it. It'll be a good source of wool for fair isle knitting.


You can see the sleeve right behind there. I was sneezing and snuffling the whole time I was taking it apart. Apparently I can work with wool in fabric form okay (though sometimes it gives a rash near my wrists?) but the wool is a little rough.


All that remains. In this case, I think the parts are much nicer than their original sum. I'm thinking of doing some sort of gradated fair isle with it, just don't know what to make it into.

At the very end of the school year, as we frantically tried to clean out our studios, I was incredibly grateful to be gifted a chunk of dyed silk and cotton from my studio-mate Astrid. If any one loves a gradation as much as me, it's Astrid.


The cotton gradation.


The silk gradation--the colors are really amazing in this, kind iridescent.


As a little thank you for the gift, I made a pillow out of some of it to give back to her, so she can at least keep a little bit of it around.


I also made my self a little belt-bag (let's not call it a fanny pack, even though it basically is) for my trip to South Korea. Which I am just now realizing I never really mentioned on here. Well I'm leaving in 10 days on a two-week trip to South Korea with a few of my teachers and classmates. YEP!


It's made of the remnents of the giant pile of army bags I have lying around. I bought 8 of them to get enough nice looking D-Rings for Leoh's arm-pieces, and now I need to come up with a use for the rest of the bags! Hand sewn with jean thread, ostensibly because it was too heavy for the little sewing machine donated to me, but mostly because I'm more comfortable doing it that way. Which is dangerous....


Back, that loop on the back hooks into an optional Han-Solo style leg strap.


Velcro fastening, used as much of the original strap's structure as I could.


Inside, with pocket. It's a perfect size, and pretty comfortable, I'm happy with the effort. Pictures of it on to follow.

After all that

Well, the senior show is over, school's over. All that's left is to show up and get my diploma on Thursday, which means I no longer have any excuse for not updating. I'm going to do the best I can to get back into an every-other-day schedule.

The show went well, in all honesty it was a bit of an anti-climax for me. I had to be finished with the whole outfit almost two weeks prior to get it photographed, so much of my time leading up to the show was spent working on the website and doing liberal arts work. I wasn't actually working on anything, so I just felt weird the whole time.

My baby the senior show website, can be seen HERE


The whole show--I'm behind one of the white dividing walls. The walls were designed and set up really fantastically, I have to give great credit to our exhibition design crew. It made the space look so, so much better.



My little corner, I tried to set up the space so that people would be able to see back and front of the mannequins, and I think it worked out pretty well. I'm also so pleased I did the photography, people were really investigating them, and I got a lot of interesting feedback on them. The format and formality of the shots really both helped relay information about what you're looking at, and made the work seem a little less nostalgic.






And happily, me and Don Miller were able to figure out how to drill into the ceiling securely enough to suspend my work.



My dummy/doll/squishy people were completely trashed by the end though. Apparently news-paper stuffed plastic wrap is not great under stress.

Anyway, it was lovely, but it's all over, taken down, dummies were tossed and clothes packed away in rubbermaid bins. And then I had to bring home my studio. I'll definately miss having a nice, open space just to work in. I've now taken up under the bed, most of one closet, and half of the living room with material and tools that I've accumulated. When you work with reclaimed materials, you tend to just sort of pick up appropriate materials as you go, and hope they come in handy. And I keep all my little bits and pieces too.


There's another grid on the other wall, plus a three-drawer thingy in the corner.


Before I left school for good, I shelled out some dough to work on something I've wanted to do for a while--a cathedral window skirt, in cotton organdy, in a gradated gray. So I bought ten yards (which is way more than you think!) and dyed it up on my last day of school.


The gradient--more subtle than I thought it would be, and still just a *touch* purpley. I might put the whole skirt in a light yellowy bath when I'm done, but I was running out of studio time.


One of the benefits of cotton organdy over organza is that it rips easily and evenly.


Cut into squares, then ironed into the little fortune-teller shapes that will make the cathedrals.