color pop :: a dialogue with two talented women

i mentioned some months ago, a treasure trove of hand-dyed fabrics that i got from a artistic friend who has terminal cancer. when our local creative group chose color pop as our theme, i knew i needed to make something with the fabric scraps that she gave me. i also realized that the color palette also went with the other treasure trove of samples that another friend gave me last year. it was time to start a creative dialogue with these women. as you can see, olga (the cat formerly known as paws mcgraw) was eager to help.

i got out the scraps and ironed them and just began sewing them together - doing it in a very intuitive way without thinking too much about how it would end up. just selecting colors and sizes that fit together and just sewing and holding them up and sewing some more. as you can see, the color palette is indeed bright and fits perfectly with the theme of color pop. 

once i had enough bits and pieces, i sewed them into mini quilt rectangles, wanting them to be around the same size, so they could hang in a group of three. since we are three women, three dialogues seemed right.

dialogue 1

dialogue 2

dialogue 3

then it was time to quilt. in my stash, i found a spool of rainbow-colored thread and i knew it was perfect for this color pop project. on the back side of the quilts, i used some shibori indigo cotton that i had dyed last fall. 

i had a small fight with my sewing machine, but we worked it out in the end. 

i had a lot of trimming to do, but it felt like part of the process. i quilted in a very intuitive way as well, following the lines as i saw fit in the moment. then switching. it felt like it was indeed a dialogue with the fabrics, as they whispered to me what they wanted.

dialogue 1 - finished with binding and quilting. this was the first one i made and is my favorite. probably because i'm also a firstborn. :-) this one features only fabrics from the friend who has cancer. that wasn't actually intentional, it just happened that way. the intuitive way i sewed the bits and pieces together just happened to come together like that. 

dialogue 2 - i love the block-printed pieces at the bottom and top left - they are from the friend who gave me all the samples and works from her education at what eventually became kolding design school. 

dialogue 3 - this one is another dialogue between the three of us. i hung them on these hangers with the cute colorful clothes pins just to photograph them, but decided that it was also how i wanted to display them at the exhibition. 

the night we hung the exhibition, we got these cute little coronita beers. it took hours to find the right placement for everything. i loved how my works looked together. i had also recovered the chair i've been sitting on throughout corona with some hand-woven fabric that we acquired together with one of the looms we got for the little museum where i weave. 

i bought the beautiful hot pink fleece at a wonderful leather shop in aarhus, thinking i'd make a festive color pop pillow of it. in the end, i couldn't bring myself to cut it up, so i just draped it over the recovered chair. it looked perfect with my mini quilts and the colorful knitted hugging pillows one of the other members made. now my chair is back at my desk and the hot pink fleece and the new recovered look give me a new perspective when working at home. 

dialogues 1-2-3 and my recovered chair, which i called "working from home.”

and the beautiful skirt that my friend lent to me - it's what she made with the dyed fabrics back in the 80s. and it was FABULOUS. what a privilege to wear it. i felt absolutely amazing. i positively embodied color pop. what a beautiful day that was. i'll always be grateful for the opportunity and the dialogue.

paradox :: soft, cuddly guns

our annual spring exhibition is fast approaching and this year's theme is paradox. i was collecting ideas on pinterest (of course) and then i came across natalie baxter's work somehow or other and suddenly felt very inspired. 

so this weekend, i dug out the sewing machine and loads of scraps from various quilts and other projects and i got down to work. making soft, cuddly guns.

i think in these politically charged times, i was drawn to creating something political. each gun will have a stick in the top (to make them easier to hang), with a flag hanging from it - kind of like those toy guns with a flag that pops out and says "pow." the flags will have words on them that are at odds with the violence of guns. words like love and peace and happy.

i made a dozen of them, but i'm not sure that i'm finished as of yet. i was discussing it with husband and he had some good ideas. perhaps a sort of soft, plush jesus icon in the middle, since the mantra of certain subsets of the land of my birth these days is "more guns, more jesus." you don't get much more paradoxical than that. and it just might be the final title of my work.

it was very good to be making something again. i had missed it. i love that i had some scraps of gold and silver from long-ago making some pants for sabin, those shiny bits are just the right touch for my soft, cuddly guns.

* * *

norwegian state broadcaster nrk implements quiz before comment policy to ensure that those leaving comments read and understood the article.

all news sites should do this.

norway for the win.

100 happy days :: day 70

light. art. and new life in the long-unused rooms of our local train station station building. 

today, the rooms will be filled with art and music and laughter and voices.

as we were setting up, i had the feeling that the building itself liked being used again.

100 happy days :: day 61

i'll admit, 40 days of happy still stretch ahead of me and that seems like a lot. like really a lot. but then, tucked away in a box, when i was looking for something else, i ran across the film from my film swap with the lovely shokoofeh. so i put it on the scanner and scanned at higher dpi rate (that takes a long time, by the way) so that i could have this photo printed in a larger format for our upcoming spring exhibition. our theme is reflections and although this is an alternative interpretation of that, i think the double exposure of denmark layered on iran is beautiful and deep and ponderable. the light, the objects, the dreamy quality, all give pause for reflection. and for a moment of happiness.

100 happy days :: day 29

playing some more with reflections for the upcoming spring exhibition in our local creative group. the sun peeked out for a very few minutes today, so i ran out with robots on bicycles in my pocket and took advantage of the puddles. i think the middle one is my favorite.

scenes from the spring exhibition

the view from sunday night

the view from sunday night is of one of those dinners that i love best. it's when i rummage around in the refrigerator and throw together something that will probably never be repeated, not because it doesn't taste good, but because i'll never have that particular combination of ingredients lying around at the same time again. this was marinated turkey breast, cauliflower, onions, sweet potatoes and half a bag of fresh spinach, stir-fried together and then i added a jar of apricot-coriander tagine sauce (store-bought). i served it with my new favorite starch - bulgur with vermicelli. it was pretty delicious.

my minfigure collection had a bath today. this house is very dusty - the soil out here is very sandy and we almost always have a west wind blowing - so they definitely needed a good spring cleaning. it took me over an hour. i've got to find a better way to display them, either that or get a cleaning person. tho' that project motivated me to do a lot of other dusting and tidying and vacuuming getting down to the business of pairing up the socks in the sock basket. it has turned a bit cold and grey, so it was a good day to stay inside and do such things. i also baked a banana bread since we had some old black bananas. i always feel both virtuous and in touch with my grandmother when i make banana bread, as it's her recipe i always use.

our local art group had our spring exhibition this weekend - this was how our pieces ended up. i say our because they were pretty equally husband and me, tho' the talisman one hanging on the wall was mine and if i'm honest, the driftwood man in front was mostly husband. i laid out all of the pieces, but he's a genius at putting them together. there was a slightly funny story with the talisman one - i was turning it in and there was a woman writing it into an excel sheet on her computer. i said it was called "talismans" and she actually questioned my english, suggesting that the plural should be talismen. not exactly a dumb idea, but still. and even when i said i was sure it was correct with an "s," she and her boyfriend tried to argue further with me, informing me of how the plural of man is men. and i'm the one who is a native speaker. i wasn't sure whether to laugh or slap them, but you have to admire their cheek. it was a very interesting and well-attended exhibition. i'll share some more photos tomorrow. my internet is quite slow this evening. that happens on sunday evening when everyone down the road must get online as well. it's just one of the "perks" of living out in the country.

i told myself i wasn't going to go for the simpson's minifigs, but always, i couldn't stay away. i didn't get any of the ones i really wanted (marge, lisa) in the first round, so i went back to the employee store on the way home. despite carefully picking a bunch of different bump codes, to try to avoid duplicates, i got several more scratchy and ned flanders. grrr. still no marge and lisa. i think they're onto us with those bump codes and they just don't work anymore. the figures are really pretty cool and i did used to watch the simpson's quite regularly. i think in the states, there's a special lego episode on this evening. i've only seen the trailer, but it looks quite cleverly done. i'm looking forward to seeing that, tho' i don't know when it's going to surface here in denmark.

and that's about it...nothing big or major, just an ordinary weekend.

spring exhibition - works in progress

our local art group's yearly exhibition is on the horizon. which means that we've stepped up the creativity around here. i'm putting together some rusty bits and pieces with driftwood, to fit the "skrot" (scrap) theme.

these are going to hang from something or other in a way that's still but a vague and blurry (partially due to my eyes being very affected by the birch pollen in air) picture in my mind.

i like that this one ended up having a kind of talisman feel.  it has slightly less rusty bits, but that's just the direction it went in.

tho' i'm still composing in my head, i know that the pressure of the deadline and an otherwise rather busy week will work together to make it happen. that's how it always is. i'm a girl in need of a deadline.

this old bottle of ink i got in a box of goodies at the autumn flea market a couple of years ago. rather fun to put it to use .

this broken pot is a piece that our drink & draw group worked on together on friday evening. the hostess of the last drink & draw dropped it and thought it would be a good idea to paint the shards and try to reassemble it. so that's precisely what we did.

i love how it turned out, even if it did take me 2 days to glue it together. we've got plans for it as well, involving some old shoes, a horse hoof with the shoe still one (the rest of the horse was long ago fed to the lions at a nearby zoo - that's how we roll in denmark, after all, we do like to keep our lions fed). due to all of us using the same inks, it harmonizes but bears the style of each of us. i like that. i'll be sure to share the final version once it's finished. i've passed it along to another from the group now.