what art says when it speaks to us

in recent days, i've come across several artists on flickr whose work just totally blows me away. and what's a bit strange is that when you see the three i'm talking about, you'll wonder about me, because they're nothing like one another. but i'll try to explain what it is that thrills me about their work...all pictures are their own from flickr, so please follow the links and look at the rest of their photostreams if you're interested.

first, is UK artist sophie callaghan's amazing embroidered blanket. i can see on sophie's blog that she's about to move to the US and has a free shipping offer in her etsy shop, so be sure to check it out, she's got the cutest art dolls that i'm currently restraining myself from buying.

i love so much about this, the mix of fabrics and stitching and found objects and techniques. looking at it makes me feel decidedly restrained, prim and proper in the embroidery i've been doing and makes me want to open up and be much more wild and free and imaginative. i need to loosen up!

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next up, intricate and detailed totems by south african artist robyn gordon - art propelled. i saw on her blog that her home and studio are filled with books, so it was an instant follow for me.

what speaks to me here is both the wood and the typecase drawer quality they have. i am utterly charmed by the fact that they are filled with small objects. that appeals to my inner collector. here's a closer view of that typecase quality.

it feels like the kind of art you could go on looking and looking at and keep discovering something new.

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lastly, i stumbled onto the most whimsical little stools by wood and wool stool that are made of recycled wood and topped with little handmade crochet tops that are both old fashioned and extremely fresh and modern in equal measure. the artist is dutch and she blogs here.

these appeal to me on so many levels. i love their simplicity. i love that they're made of recycled materials. i love that they have an old-fashioned handmade element that makes me think of my grandmother's piano bench. the entire look and feel of them is fresh and inviting and comforting and like a fresh breeze through a summer house. i'd love to capture such a feel in an entire room. but i suppose it means i'll have to have white walls.

why do you love the art you love?

inspiration from flickr through the haze of a flu

after a very productive monday yesterday, i'm stricken down by the flu that hit sabin and husband at christmas. i had been so smug about escaping it, but apparently i didn't escape it after all. so all i can do is lie in bed surrounded by stitching, books and my laptop and feel a bit sorry for myself. so, rather than depressing all of us, i thought i'd show you what's sparking my creativity at the moment on flickr.

1. pink angel, 2. kitty cat garland, 3. TOTEMS, 4. heart tree, 5. krukje ingrid, 6. pleats or tucks in progress, 7. Pinks and Greens embellisher play, 8. This is Finland postcard, 9. My house collection for Fall & Christmas 09!, 10. Silakka notebook, 11. a few hearts, 12. Work Quilt, 13. five blocks, 14. never flitting, still are sitting, 15. SAORI Weaving, 16. fiber fish, 17. november painted journal, 18. 'Pop Up', 19. flannel.chickies, 20. lots of turquoise beads... now I need greens!!, 21. Some of my Granda's tweed, 22. Untitled, 23. Color Study: Redwedge, 24. have you noticed how colorful the acorns are this year, 25. Quilted Colour Study Art Quilt

flickr is a truly brilliant place to find inspiration, even if i think they have serious usability issues. like why on earth should we have to download greasemonkey scripts to do basic things, like have proper links and be able to reply to comments? shouldn't that stuff be standard in flickr? i guess google is just way better at usability than yahoo is (just my transparent attempt to keep the google gods happy).

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i have 18 posts (17 after this one) to go before i hit 1000. and i keep thinking that #1000 should be something special.  but i can't think for the life of me what that something special should be.  this flu has rendered me listless and unimaginative, so i thought i'd enlist your help. i'm sure that you are all healthy and your imaginations are intact, so i'd love to hear your suggestions for that milestone post.

the shoes have it

i think the blogger gods know that i have been invited to contribute to a wordpress blog and they have intervened to make me completely unable to upload any pictures to wordpress. i don't have the tab or the lefthand menu item when i sign in, so for me, wordpress is photo-free, which kinda defeats the whole purpose, since the blog i've been roped in invited to is in fact, a tumblr-style photo blog, wherein we - wait, you're gonna love this, heidikins -  document the shoes we're wearing every day. it's called shoe per diem and it's by the fabulous stacey of discounderworld fame (speaking of which, have you checked out the vice issue?). much easier for me in light of wordpress hating me is the fact that there's also a flickr group. so if you want to share your shoes, i'm sure stacey would be happy to hook you up (just click that flickr link, ask to be invited and start shooting your shoes).

so far so good

granted, it's only day four, but my daily art in my moleskine calendars is going very well. i'm motivated and when i sit down to work, i clear my mind and just see what comes out. and i'm finding myself drawn to watercolors. and oddly enough, the lines aren't bothering me at all. i'm able to just ignore them.

musings stamped into the journal yesterday resulted in an experiment involving my beloved helleristninger or petroglyphs, my gocco printer and some natural linen cloth. what could be better than ancient ships, natural fabrics and ink?

i'm really pleased with how they came out. next, i need to use them.

waiting

"A needle creates an intersection each time it pierces fabric," i read on the bee creative blog last evening. and it's been haunting me all day in a lightly different version which was the product of faulty memory on my part: "a needle creates an intersection in time when it pierces fabric."

i've been thinking again about memory and quilts and whether cloth can hold memories. i've got most of sabin's baby clothes washed up and sorted now. i gave two boxes of them (including some, but not all of the shoes) to the local version of the good will just before christmas. i hope someone was able to get good use of those little silver nikes in their original box. the rest of the freshly laundered little clothes are waiting and ready for me to dive in and begin cutting them up to make a memory quilt for sabin. but i fear that's going to be difficult as well. every time i even imagine cutting into those sweet little shirts and pants and dresses, my breathing gets shallow and my heart pounds.

so, while i work up my courage, i'm turning again to embroidery and applique. yesterday, i spent hours (far too many hours), perusing inspiring blogs and flickr photostreams. i am drawn again and again to jude hill's beautiful spirit cloth creations and from her, i found an inspiring window piece on emergence, some beautiful little woven pieces on wake robin, arlee barr's inspiring stitching on albedo, thoughtful stitching on mnemosyne's threads, and the aforementioned bee creative. so much goodness that i was completely overloaded with inspiration.

so i took a scrap of fleece from my latest baby quilt, cut it into a heart and began to satin stitch it to a scrap of nearly black wool with hand-dyed thread i bought here while we watched midsomer murders last evening. a whole day of soaking in inspiration and all that came out of it was a simple little plain heart. i chose the imperfectly focused shot of it above because i think it underlines nicely where i'm at with this one. and where that is is that i'm not sure where i'm at - things are a bit fuzzy. i don't know what it will become. or even if it will become.  it's sort of a waiting piece. waiting while i find courage to create what i really want to create. waiting while i find the courage to do what i really want to do.

decisions, decisions

last week, i went to a fabric store with a friend. she's making a new bedspread for her bed and i've been helping her design it. she had bought some lengths of beautiful cream-colored silk and we had settled upon a strip of colored silk for down the middle of it. we went to the fabric store and she quickly found the bolts of silk and grouped them into two possibilities - one with bright jewel tones and one with more muted autumny colors. we talked about both possibilities for a bit. then, she took off her necklace, which has an interesting silver symbol on it that i didn't recognize. she held the chain between her thumb and forefinger and asked, out loud, whether the bright colors were the right decision. the necklace hung still for a moment and then began to move in a counterclockwise circle above the brilliant blues and greens. then, she stilled the necklace and put it above the bolts of autumn tones and asked the same question. again, the necklace was still for a second and then began to swing back and forth, as if on a pendulum. she smiled and said the circle was a "yes" and the pendulum swing was a "no." so the necklace thereby confirmed her own leaning towards the bright colors. and she bought them.

sabin was along and has said several times since that she wished she had such a necklace. and we've talked about what decisions it would help her make. she apparently wants most to be confirmed in the order of her favorite lesson horses at the riding school, which right now is zidan, lizette, felix. whereas my order of them is lizette, felix, zidan. and i suppose that's what makes her doubt her own order. so we also talked about how it was her who rides them and who knows best and how she really didn't need a necklace to tell her that.

and it got me thinking about how i make decisions. because we make decisions all the time, having no idea of what the ultimate outcome might be. if you think about it too much, you could actually become quite paralyzed by the whole thing.  and i find that i am a very quick decision-maker, especially on big decisions - divorce, marriage, houses, jobs. and once i decide, it's quite a short distance from decision to action. on the other hand, i can be pretty indecisive - especially about little things like what to make for dinner.

husband is a more considered decision-maker than i am. we went out driving past the two farm places we've been looking at yesterday. when we started out, husband was pretty sure which one he prefers, but after our outing and our ensuing conversation, it's now switched. me, i'd be ok with either one, but since we're not ready to make an offer right now (we MUST sell our own house first, we are NOT sitting with two mortgages), i don't feel any strong need to make a decision about it right now. i have this confidence in the back of my mind that the right decision will be crystal clear when the time comes. so i'm quite content to endlessly discuss the possibilities of both properties and even flirt with other properties (like one with a big riding hall and stalls you could rent out or one with a vineyard - mmm, wine).

of course, all of these discussions and husband's endless drawing of plans of the properties and where he'd build and change this and that (his father was an architect, so he has an inner draftsman), are surely part of our decision-making process. but how do you know when you've reached the right decision?  maybe in the end, it's no different or more scientific than swinging a necklace above printouts of the two properties and seeing whether it goes back and forth or round and round.

how do you make decisions in life? both little and big?

we're off to an icy start

ice. -10°C. cold, crisp air. it seems cleansing. fresh. and along with clear skies in which the full moon and eclipse were visible last evening, it was the perfect start to 2010. and to kick off my blog camp 365 project, i took 140 pictures today. pretty good start, i say. happy 2010 to all of you!!