peephole stones :: work in progress

when i'm at the beach, i love to look for stones with holes in them. i also love felting stones, tho' i do always have a pang of anguish over covering up my carefully-selected stone. so last night i decided to experiment with felting a stone with peepholes, so i could have the felt and still enjoy the stone.

i ran a couple of experiments - wrapping the stones, cutting holes and then felting. that doesn't work too well. you have to wrap the stone (use lisa's great tutorial), felt it a bit, so the felt is tight around the stone, then cut your holes and continue felting.

i got a bit fancy with this one, using two colors. i felted the orange around the stone first, then added the red, felted a bit and carefully trimmed the red layer away from the orange before they got too stuck together. i loved that the stone had a little hole started and i wanted it to show.

a couple of them came off the stones and i ended up with these little felty vessels instead. i'm going to play with them some more to see what they might become.

i'm also going to add some more embellishment (stitching, beads, painting on the stone) to these, so they're still works in progress. but i just had to share them already now. i feel like they're a breakthrough in making the felted stone notion my own. and they're getting me closer to a picture that's in my head. stay tuned.

i played a bit with my new inks yesterday as well, painting a few feather stones and even a bit of driftwood (the inks bleed on it in unexpected ways). i am madly in love with the paynes grey. the sun has gone again and there's a light sprinkling of snow on the ground, so it's a perfect day to stay inside with a cup of tea and play with felt and stones and ink.

a moment of clarity

i had a moment of clarity today. it hit me that despite much of the world i inhabit revolving around blogging and the community surrounding blogging, there are a whole lot of people out there who know nothing about it and have no access to this world that i can only characterize as fantastic, rich, lively and inspiring. they know nothing of the community that it can bring. a community in which someone who only knows you through your blog, can make something truly beautiful and meaningful for you. a symbol of clarity, just for you. and if you're lucky, you then actually meet that person in person, because she happens to live in the same country you do, which is really just a lucky coincidence, because she could live anywhere. but the fact is she lives within blog camping distance and for that, you are grateful. and you are also very grateful for the clarity symbol.

the clarity symbol that elizabeth made for me.

it's a little red heart-shaped pillow with more symbols on it (that i will use later)

and it resides on my side of the bed during the day.

hopefully, infusing my pillow with clarity for when i sleep.

...and a community in which someone who lives halfway around the world from you, sends you a little bag of stones. stones she collected for you as she scattered her mother's ashes on a canadian beach. stones that are worn smooth and shiny by the pacific ocean. and the fact that she actually thought of you and gathered stones for you (because she knows, from your blog, that you love them) on that day that was undoubtedly full of other thoughts and emotions for her, touches you deeply. and you feel really grateful for the blogosphere and the friendships you have found here. friendships and connections which are just are real (if not more so at times) than those you find in the everyday world which you inhabit. 

photo of the stones VEG sent on the sweet tapas plate BB gave me when we met in december.

and here VEG's stones join all of the other wonderful stones that people sent me from all corners of the world over the past year in my little stone bowl.

i so love that stone in trinsch of et lille øjeblik's handwriting. (and how cool is her handwriting?)

and the blue one is one i felted myself.

oh, and check out the little eyeball stone on the top left - that's from lynne.

have i mentioned that i love the blogosphere?

thank you all for connecting my world.

birds of a feather

i took a little walk out in the yard this morning. it was foggy out there and very still, but the balmy (it's supposed to reach 10°C today!) air was filled with joyous bird song of all sorts and the odd call of some geese from down on our lake. i stood there, breathing in the fresh air and all of that bird song and i pondered the controversy i stirred up yesterday.

i had a few pangs because in some sense it wasn't actually any of my business. it wasn't my art being copied, so why should i care? but the fact of it is that i did care. and i found as the day progressed yesterday, that i cared a lot. i couldn't get it off my mind. and it's not only because copies devalue the original and i felt it affected the stones i'd purchased from margie. in fact, that was actually the least of it.

i think what bothered me most was that margie seems to me to be one of the biggest-hearted, most giving, down-to-earth creative souls out there...the way she shares her process, her thinking, her insights, her life and her craft are all acts of a giving and kind person who is engaged in what she does. for this to happen to her seemed so unfair. to someone so truly an artist and a craftsperson. you could accept it more easily if it happened to someone whose work didn't seem so unique or who didn't share it in the same giving, warm spirit. in fact, i saw some bloggy controversy a couple of years ago over those wooden mustaches on a stick that i didn't feel badly about in the same way because it didn't seem to be THAT special of an object. but what margie makes is special - her missing pieces stones and her merfish - they're really unique. so to copy them for sale so blatantly and unapologetically (as it turns out), is simply so disheartening.

but what is heartening is the way that margie's community rallied around her. i can't actually find any community rallying about renee (or shall we call her pell?) (and i spent quite some time looking before i wrote this). so although one could become disillusioned in all this and feel hesitant about sharing one's process and creativity online, it is also very powerful to think of how many people support margie in this - and her right to defend her creative, intellectual property. and although there are many people out there crocheting stones, these designs are so distinctively hers and they're very clearly being copied.

when i first saw one of the impostor stones on the etsy front page, i actually thought that someone was reselling margie's stones. they are so distinctive, they call her immediately to mind. and then when i looked closer and realized it wasn't margie's stones at all and further found that there were also merfish in the shop, i was shocked!  and what's strange is that it would seem to be totally unnecessary. renee is obviously very talented at crochet and has some sweet little animals and such in her shop. so why steal margie's ideas?

so while i still don't understand it, nor her refusal to admit copying and just stop it (please see the comments on the post below for proof of this), i am heartened to see the crafting community rally together around an artist and a person like margie. that is another testament to the way in which she has shared her creativity and built her reputation via her blog and flickr and her etsy shop. it seems that birds of a feather do flock together. and if that makes us followers, so be it. there's a big difference between support and bullying and between what's right and what's wrong.

"i" is for inspiration

 eyeball "i"

michelle boettcher 

1990

a couple of weeks ago, i asked willow to give me a letter so i could be part of her letter-related meme. she assigned me the letter "i" and i immediately thought of the artwork above, which was done by my friend michelle, who we affectionately call michellea, who i worked with twenty years ago during college at a daily newspaper. well, michellea managed to locate her brilliant eyeball "i" collage and photograph it for me, so now i can write this post.

the letter "i" built entirely out of eyeballs cut from magazines is, to me, totally inspired. the alliterative marriage of "i" and "eye" in the form of a lower-case "i" speaks far beyond the simple letter and all those  disembodied eyeballs. the very notion of self, of "I" is there as well. the hundreds of eyeballs speak to a self constructed by how we see and are seen. i always thought it was such a powerful work of art. i felt michellea had captured some essence that was at once comforting and disturbing and in which i could almost literally feel it looking directly into my soul. i always wished that she had made it for me.

that christmas, michellea gave me a different collage artwork, the "i" was her own. it was a collage made of magazine clippings as well--and it captures perfectly who i was at the beginning of the 90s. it's made up of repeated versions of my name, one colored in purple, because i was crazy for purple then. and the rest made up of all of the pop culture references and news items of the time--madonna, the first president bush, things russian, things pageanty, television shows. i put it away when we packed up the house for our remodeling project and i can't find it at the moment, but i'll stumble onto it one day and scan it and share it, because i still have it, a sort of snapshot of who i was during a given era.

but, back to the letter "i." as i say in my title, "i" is for inspiration. it's also for innovation--a word that's been overused in a business context and lost some of its meaning. but innovation, as in "introducing novelties, making changes in anything established, introducing something new," that innovation is powerful. and as i scour the wonderland of inspiration that is the internet for things which provoke my artistic imagination and my muse, i find that i most often try to innovate rather than imitate to make those sources of inspiration my own when they end up in my art.

this week, i've been inspired by resurrection fern. i first visited when margie did an interview of melissa  from tiny happy, one of my other sources of inspiration and where i go when i want/need a feeling of peaceful calm. but, i started going back again and again and basically just lurking, never leaving a comment (i felt a little unworthy for some reason). margie often interviews other artists as well as sharing her own work and sources of inspiration. well, this week, i decided that i had to check out her etsy shop  and i was lucky enough to be there at the right time to score one of her lovely covered stones, as well as one of her sweet merfish. i couldn't believe how quickly they came to denmark from canada--i think i ordered on tuesday and wednesday and they arrived already saturday--so this is my very stone and my very merfish, photographed by me on the cobblestones in front of my house.

i've long had a thing about stones and we have many of them around the house, gathered on beaches all over the world. i even have a couple from a beach in oregon that my grandmother gathered thirty some years ago. so you can imagine i've had my share of overweight luggage fees because of schlepping stones back home from my travels.  i really love what margie has done with these stones. it's like she sees something in them and it's called forth by her crocheting. i get the feeling that the little flat stone WAS a merfish and margie saw that and just gave him his tail. these are THAT wonderful. and i don't know how to crochet, but i feel that having them near me on the shelf in my studio will spur some creativity in me in some way that i don't yet see. i think it will be something to do with combining natural and manmade materials, but i guess time will tell. but already, i made it a couple of friends--i felted some of the many stones that are lying around the house:

i saw felted stones last year on etsy and i can't locate the shop again, it was too long ago, i guess, tho' i vaguely recall it was based in the netherlands. i had ordered some beautiful rovings to use for felting, also nearly a year ago, but it took having this little resurrection fern merfish to push me to do it. for the inspiration to come forth. sometimes you just have to wait for these things to happen. i'm learning that.

other bits of inspiration i spotted this week (on etsy or flickr, or design for mankind, among others) are as follows. i'll be very interested to see where they take me:

tiny little houses seen at little red door on etsy

and these cards:

seen at morris & essex on etsy

these fabulous hand-carved stamps by geninne spotted on flickr:

check her blog for even more beauty and inspiration!

and she sells gorgeous things on etsy.

and this, which amanda pointed me to at sundance :

string theory quilt 

i'm so gonna be making something like this

and andrew moore's fantastic photos of russia which the lovely and talented and very inspiring tangobaby pointed me to not long ago:

and i'm finding inspiration in words as well, words like these:

• this hilarious list of 25 random things at the grass is sort of greener.

and that pretty much does it for the letter "i," because it's taken forever to put all those i's in bold.

sunday morning theories

we sit on sunday mornings at the dining table with the fat sunday newspaper, steaming cups of tea and the morgenbrød that husband always goes and gets at the bakery. it was during one of these times that the whole blog camp idea was born. what we're reading always provokes discussion, this morning it was of trading schemes to offset CO2, how this government hasn't devoted enough money or attention to research into alternative fuel technology and on to how difficult it must be to write a feature story about someone who won't speak to the reporter.

on the table were the stones i gathered on that beach in norway last week.  husband was teasing me about bringing half of norway home in my suitcase and i was assuring him i'd left quite a lot of it behind.  since he loves to dig, i said he should have more understanding for my need to commune with the rocks as he does with the soil in all that digging. i philosophized some lofty thoughts about how the stones put you back in touch with something ancient and basic and make you feel some kind of connection to a continuous line stretching through time.

and i was only half-kidding, tho' i said it all off the top of my head. i told husband that it gives me a palpable sense of calm to find a stone that fits perfectly in my hand and hold it, feeling its coolness in my hand and transferring my own warmth to it (sabin just picked up this stone which i had been holding and it was still warm after lying on the table for half an hour). husband suggested that i start a new -ism.  rockism. (we need to work on that name.) i'm aware that there are already theories like this involving crystals, but i'm much more drawn to simple stones.

rockism would advocate the gathering and collecting of stones and of sitting around holding them in order to get in tuned into that line of continuity with the earth. because i swear that if the stone is right, you can feel the ur-energy humming and flowing into you through the stone. i think we're searching for centres of calm in this fast-paced life and that one way i find it is in my love of stones.

that's my -ism and i'm sticking to it.

stoned. in a good way.

a few weeks ago, trinsch of the lovely, carefree hairstyle fame (which i am too uncoordinated to duplicate, by the way, tho' i tried), had a corner view: the beach post which had some really beautiful stones in it. there was a picture of them lying in their natural state in the sand and then in a beautiful little stack. i asked her to upload that little stack to flickr so i could favorite it, because you know i have a totally minor and not at all requiring meds or excess baggage fees thing about stones. happily, she obliged and i was content.

and then, today, a little envelope arrived in my mailbox.

fabulous handwriting! cool stone with a hole in it! could it get any better? why yes, it could!

inside the pretty little bag were those very stones trinsch gathered on the beach in israel! how awesome is that? but wait, it gets even better.

that little white stone at the bottom (at 5:30) is a little piece of marble. trinsch says that it's from the historical site of caesarea--the ruins of a roman city--2000 years old. italian marble, washed and rounded and smoothed in the sea for hundreds of years, washes up on the beaches in israel, near the historical site. but my very favorite one is the little round grey one right beside it (at 7:30)--it's smooth and perfect.

trinsch's beautiful picture of them in their natural habitat

from trinsch's picture, i imagined that the stones were larger (tho' husband made fun of me for that, asking how large i imagined the bits of sand were), but i am madly in love with them and not the least bit disappointed that they are small--they're absolutely perfect! than you so much, trinsch, for making my monday! in fact, i'm sure it will actually make my whole week! 

today, trinsch has a lovely post featuring a typecase from her childhood where she displays stones and shells found on beaches around the world. you should go have a look at it, it will make your monday less weird, i promise.

hol(e)y stones

while watching the oprah + lance armstrong interview (more about that in another post), i began stitching on my hol(e)y stones. i can't decide what to call them - peephole stones or hol(e)y stones, so i'm trying out both.

they're definitely going in the direction that i had hoped.

i'm learning a lot about different types of wool - this one got all stretched out as i stitched it, making the holes even bigger and becoming very loose on the stone. i had to felt it again to make it tight on the stone. i like the effect it made, with uneven, wobbly holes.

this one, which molly suggested looked like a ski mask (she called it a gimp, which was a new word for me).  i went with that and now it's a bit of a sugar skull.

one of the little bowls got an edging of beads i once bought in manila, plus a few little paper beads with a poem on them that i got ages ago from field & sea on etsy.

it's itty bitty and i'm quite enamored of it. and pleased to finally use some of these sweet little wooden beads gathered on my travels.

this one feels a little like a talisman of sorts now. i got the beads at some point from numinosity. i, of course, have been saving them for a good use. this seemed like it.

i loved working with these bright colors on these cold, grey-toned winter days.

the color combination on the red/orange stone is my favorite. the colors sort of jumped out of the bowl where i keep the clothespins of embroidery thread and i had to use them together. they feel warm and happy to me.

these are getting close and i'm working on more. i'll be putting some in my long-neglected shop sometime this week.

update: the first five stones are in my shop now.

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?

it's hard to be original

with all of the amazing goodness that's out there online - on blogs, on flickr - and now gathered in one spot on pinterest, i guess it's no wonder that you come across people who are copying good ideas and passing them off as their own. it's hard to be original and it's hard to know where one's influences come from.

for example, i know there are loads of people making birds that are similar to my clarity birds. i practiced by making the spool bird pattern and then, once i knew it well (including its shortcomings), modified it and made an improved version. but i realize i'm not alone in this. i'm also not alone in making quilts and i haven't come with any designs (yet) that are my own. i'd like to think that what i make is unique because it comes from my own particular hands and with all the quilts and all the fabric in the world, there's room for everyone's interpretation of quilting.

even the feather stones i paint were inspired by the work of others - we see things, they inspire us, but the ones produced by my hand on stones i carefully selected on a beach walk are an expression of my creativity. even if i was inspired by someone else. and i've always been careful to give credit where credit is due.

stones which i purchased from margie's resurrection fern etsy shop

but sometimes, you come across something that is so blatantly a copy of something truly unique and lovely that an artist is making and you shake your head. because there's no defending such blatant disregard for the creativity of others. i'm talking about the lovely, unique and amazing stones created by margie of resurrection fern. they are real one-of-a-kind originals. something completely uniquely margie. and which should not, like a fabric bird or a quilt, be copied. however, they are being copied, for profit. blatantly and without credit - down to the styling in the photos and the whole stated philosophy of loving nature behind them. and you can see it for yourself here. but be warned, if you know margie's work, you will find it just disgusting.

i think it is really sad. the internet has given us all such a forum for sharing our creativity and enjoying the creativity of others, but it also apparently has opened the doors to such copycats. next thing you know, someone will be copying kit lane's fabulous little jacabunnies. and the thought of that really makes me sick.

felt + the beach

i want to share a couple of things that i'm working on at the moment. our last trip to the beach yielded the usual assortment of shells and stones and bits of beach glass. as ever, i am attracted to stones and shells with holes in them and so a few of those always make their way home with me.

sitting in the living room and sorting the new finds next to the basket of wool, it occurred to me that it would be fun to try to combine the two. from my feather stones, you know how much i love contrasts, so to experiment with the warmth and softness and colors of wool along with the hardness and the grey of shell and stone seemed very appealing.

those of you on instagram and flickr with me, may have see a bit of the one above, as i took a couple of iPhone snapshots when i was asking lisa's advice about whether i needed to glue (as it turned out, i did not). i was able to use a hole that had worn in this old oyster shell and the felt is securely and tightly in place. i'm not sure yet what it is, nor do i think i'm done with it, but i love what's happening so far.

i love how this stone got much more heart-shaped after i added some black felt with a bit of red sparkle.

i'm letting these pieces tell me what's next, as an exercise in listening. this one says it's done, but i'm going to let it sit for a day or so and see if it still thinks so.

this one came out today. i am loving these colors and did a bit of twisting of the wool to make it curl onto itself before felting it with the fine needle. this one has told me that it needs a few french knots, so i guess i'm off to work on that.

*  *  *

this is amusing (and made by my cousin).  

and you can vote for it.

that is, if you think it's a good tutorial on how to make a bacon potholder.

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oh, and the Pinterest app is here. 

tho' only for iPhone and not for iPad.

so i'm still not completely satisfied.