Don't Go In The Water

Claire's class has been studying sharks. Parents were invited to help dissect sharks last week. It was so fun! The specimens were dog sharks, about a foot and a half long.

The school district required the kids to wear goggles. And they were not allowed to use the scalpels. Moms got to do the cutting!

We found several organs quite easily. There were other parts that were harder to identify. One group found tiny shrimp in the shark's stomach. Yum! I've always loved dissection. There really is no substitute for learning about the body. A picture in a text book is just not the same.

The kids (and the parents) learned a lot. Maybe some of these third graders are already planning their applications for veterinary school.

**Thanks for all your suggestions about uploading pictures. You are probably right. My pictures are too big. But I just hate to take the extra step of resizing the pictures. (I know. Lazy.) I've downloaded Windows Live Writer and I'm composing this post in the new software. I can actually drag and drop pictures into the post. We'll see how easy it is to upload.

Photos

I gave Benjamin free range with the camera one afternoon last week. From the looks of this snapshot, he enjoyed himself.

He decided to take a picture of two empty toilet paper rolls sitting on the stairs waiting to be carried upstairs to be given to the gerbils.

He took the picture, but he DID NOT take the toilet paper rolls upstairs. Ahem.

I'm posting these random pictures because I think they are funny, but also to ask for help from blogger experts about uploading pictures. It's taking F.O.R.E.V.E.R! And even then, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

I'm using the "add image" icon within the blogger posting window. I've tried to add more than one image at a time. That NEVER works. Grumble. I've tried using Firefox. It goes faster, but still feels slower than it used to. I've cleared my cache. Is there another way to add pictures to posts? I'm lazy. I want it to be speedy and easy.

I'm eager to hear your advice. In the meantime, here's a picture Benjamin took in the backyard. It's spring in Texas.

It won't last long. Summer will be here very soon!

Claire's Birthday

We had a super fun birthday party for Claire this weekend. It was A LOT of work, but well worth it. Claire is NINE! What a fun age. She had a really good time.

Claire originally wanted to have a Nancy Drew party where she and her friends could solve some mystery. Great idea! Not easy to plan.

I started searching the internet and discovered lots of mystery type parties for kids. I chose one and paid for the pdf download. It was a zoo themed party. (Claire loves animals!) The basic idea is that "Garry Gator" has kidnapped five animals from the zoo and hid them in the cages of five other animals. The kids had three rounds of clues about the animals and had to figure out what animals were kidnapped and with which animals they were hidden.

The girls started by decorating clip boards with stickers. They used these clip boards throughout the party to makes notes about the mystery.

They also played "What Animal Am I?" Zoo Director Jeff put a sticker on each girl's back (plus Benjamin). On the sticker was the name of an animal. They had to go around looking at each other's backs and asking "yes or no" questions about their animal. It was tricky, but they all figured out the animals.

We had sandwiches, mac and cheese and fresh fruit for dinner. Claire said the dinner was her favorite part of the party.

She liked just sitting all together and giggling and putting raspberries on the tips of her fingers!

Look at all the notes Claire made with her tiger-striped pen.After the girls solved the mystery, Garry Gator hid one last surprise!

Can you guess what was under the alligator box?

Cake, of course!

Claire knew exactly what kind of a cake she wanted. She gathered some of her plastic toy animals and drew a diagram. We took the animals and the drawing to Baskin Robbins and ordered an ice cream cake. Emily, the cake decorator, did an amazing job following Claire's instructions. She was thrilled. And it was delicious!

Mmmmmm. Tasty!

Claire is such a delight. She has lovely friends and they all have their own personalities. I hope we can help Claire spend her *ninth* year growing more and more into her own wonderful personality.

Anne Lamott

Several weeks ago, I went to hear Anne Lamott read from her latest book. (It just came out in paperback, so she was on tour.) It's the third in her trilogy of spiritual autobiographies. It's called "Grace Eventually." The first two in the trilogy are "Traveling Mercies" and "Plan B." They are all richly personal, raw, thoughtful, insightful, provoking, wicked funny and wise. I recommend them highly. (Traveling Mercies is my fav.)

Here is one of Anne's professional pictures. You can tell she's wise, right?
Here is the picture I took at the event. You get the idea.
The event was originally scheduled to be at the auditorium at the Dallas Museum of Art. Since Anne Lamott is so brilliant, the demand for tickets quickly exceeded the space in the auditorium and they moved the event to a big downtown church. (The fact that the tickets were free may have also had an effect. Yeah for free tickets!)

There were lovely stained glass windows.

And lots of people. I posted this picture because the guy in the foreground looks like my Uncle Tim and the gal turning around a few pews ahead looks like my Aunt Diane. Right, Joanna? They are both free spirits, I think they would have liked to hear Anne read.

It's taken me a long time to write about this event and my thoughts about it. I have never lived in a place where people talk so often and so freely about their thoughts on faith. I generally assume that they think that I agree with what they believe. It might not be fair for me to make that assumption about them. I could be wrong. Or maybe they are wrong.

But, that's ok. I've generally decided that my faith is personal and private. At this point in my life, I don't feel called to defend myself or more importantly, to waste energy getting into judgements or debates. That energy will be better spent in my own personal growth, study and development.

That said... I'll share some things that Anne said that really stuck with me.

Here's how she wraps up her thoughts on Jesus. I'm paraphrasing... "Jesus came and said, 'You are loved and chosen and if you see someone who is thirsty, could you help me out and give them some water.'"

She also said that the opposite of faith is not doubt, it's certainty.

She told stories about several super brave things she did last year including getting a tattoo. She chose words from the gospel of "The West Wing." In a scene where President Bartlett is talking with military leaders about how to save a submarine that was in trouble, he said, "Trust the Captain. Trust the Crew." So, that's what Anne had inked on her leg.

Trust the Captain. Trust the Crew.

She also said that sometimes it's really important to LET GO. And then she said, "Everything I ever let go of has claw marks on it." Hmmm.

What do I have my claws stuck in?

Check your local library, I'd love to hear what you think of Anne's books.

Frustrated

I've been trying for days to upload lots of pictures to blogger. And it's just not happening. Sometimes one will load. Sometimes two... and then it crashes. Grumble. I've got lots of wonderful pictures from our Spring Break trip to San Antonio. I know the grandparents would really like to see them. I guess I'll keep trying.

In the mean time, I did get these to upload.

Here is Benjamin at the Mirror Maze. The Mirror Maze is one of many many many tourist traps across the street from the Alamo. (We DID NOT visit the wax museum or the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum.) But, the Mirror Maze seemed like an interesting diversion on a hot afternoon.

It was just a big room with carefully placed walls of mirrors. Can you see that Claire and Benjamin are wearing plastic gloves? That's so the mirrors don't get all finger-printy when you run into them because you think it's a clear passage way, but actually it's just a reflection of a clear passage way.

The experience brought about tons of giggles and lots of camaraderie with the other giggling tourists trying to find their way to the "end" of the maze.

Of course, we did also see the Alamo. I really enjoyed it. We sat in the courtyard and listened to one of the guides give an excellent re-telling of the battle of the Alamo. Benjamin wasn't really interested. So he napped in my lap. All that fun in the mirror maze was exhausting.

a bit more info

Well, thank you for all your comments on my rejected 12x12 piece. Sarah was begging me not to throw it away. Of course, I didn't throw it away. But, I did cut it up.I didn't include that in yesterday's post because I was too lazy to go take an additional picture of the cut up pieces. Another thing I didn't tell you about yesterday... I didn't like the batting I had used in this piece. I used a stiff fusible batting which really is designed to provide structure, but not really act as a traditional batting. So that was irritating me. And I had already stitched through it, so I couldn't just replace the batting.

Ultimately, all these factors made me abandon the piece. I just don't have time to work on things that are not inspiring to me. (And neither do you.) I do like that little strip of free motion quilted grass. That could be added to some future collage piece.

Speaking of inspiring, this is what I did yesterday.
All the kids in my son's class painted "quilt squares" with the theme of nature. (That's Ben's square on the top in the middle.) His art teacher sewed them together and I quilted it. She had lots of home dec fabric donated to her. She used that for the pieced borders. I had fun free motion quilting around the kids' designs. Lots of rainbows, suns, flowers and butterflies.

I'll be quilting one more quilt from one of the other kindergarten classes. This one is a sports theme.

Hmmm, I don't have a very large repertoire of sports images in my personal fmq catalog.

12x12 in progress

I don't think I ever shared my failed 12x12 attempt. Remember, we were working on "community?" The quilts were revealed on April 1. I was thinking about city blocks, and layers and asymmetry. I had this laid out on my small ironing surface.Um. Bleck. The background looked citrusy. Is that a word? You know, like lemons and limes. And then the square pieces tried to pull it into an earth tone range. And they failed. And yet, I kept going.

I did some free motion quilting -- grass-like lines along the top. Not bad, I suppose.
And then I did a bunch of embroidery. I was thinking about the concept of connected vs disconnected. I connected some squares with various stitches and isolated others. I shared it with some friends. They all said they liked it. I still didn't. The deadline was looming. As I look at this photo above, the things I find most interesting are the orange scissors and the orange paint chip peeking out from under the quilt. That certainly says something, doesn't it?

Claire drew some suggestions for me.Finally, I started over. I went back to my favorite color palette and a safer symmetrical layout.It still wasn't really working for me, but after I stamped some big circle across the whole piece, it seemed to gain some depth. Quilting the circle lines also helped. I had the idea of using embellishments from the very beginning. I don't know why I didn't explore that from the start.

I think they are simple and yet dramatic. And they beg to be touched. Speaking of community, I've got to go chaparone the kindergarten lunch. This involves opening milk cartons and ketchup packets, reminding the kids to keep their hands to themselves and lots of smiles. I am always happy to see all those small people, even the pesky ones.

Gerbils

I don't think I have ever reported on the new little furries we have in our house. Gerbils! Actually, they were Christmas gifts for the kids. We gave them the cage, wheel and a few accessories on Christmas morning and we all went to the pet shop to pick out the gerbils a few days later.

Introducing: Henry and Lucky!They are pretty cute, don't you think? (If you think they look like rats and are smelly and messy, you'd be partially correct, but let's try to have a positive outlook.)

Here is their home when we first got them.Then every time we'd stop by the pet shop, the kids would see this monstrosity and begin drooling.

In fact, Jeff thought it looked pretty cool too. They hatched a plan to get this new habitat for the gerbils as Dad's birthday gift. (They know they should choose gifts for me more carefully.) I tried to warn them. I said I thought it would be super messy because the gerbils would be burrowing and kicking all their bedding out of this cage.

My warnings were ignored. And yet, I was totally correct.

We got that ridiculous amusement park of a cage and the gerbils seemed to like it just fine, but they made a mess tossing the bedding all over the place. And you can't really see them in the cage because all that plastic is tinted (and filled with glitter!). They have a spot right in our tv room and we like to just watch them chew and burrow and run on the wheel. In the new cage, we had to get face to face with them to see what was going on. And you can imagine how hard it was to clean. After only a few days, Jeff took it all apart, cleaned it all up, re-packaged it and returned it. I resisted saying, "I told you so." Ok, maybe I didn't resist.

Since then, we've found a decent compromise.

We call it the loft. It fits on top of the original cage (aquarium) and there are two tubes that hang down into the cage that Henry and Lucky can climb up to the shelves on the top. Super fun. Still a bit of a hassle to clean, though.

I had gerbils when I was a kid. They were called Thomas and Chrissy. They had lots of babies. Henry and Lucky will not be having babies.

Composition

I took an excellent workshop from Katie Pasquini Masopust on Friday. The workshop was called "Composition." Well, that's pretty basic. Who doesn't need bit of study about such an important principle? I did! I was especially drawn to the workshop since the only things on the supply list were paper, pencil and scissors.

It was excellent. We started by picking a picture from a huge pile of interesting images from magazines. Then we picked a ziploc bag full of pre-fused fabric in a specific color scheme. I chose this picture of two little soup bowls and an analogous bag of fabric.We looked carefully at the picture and tried to define the basis of its composition. This is a diagonal composition. Then we re-created the image in fabric paying special attention to composition.

I was really pleased with how it turned out. I think the spoon lacks a bit of contrast, but that could be fixed with some kind of outline or other surface treatment.

Then we picked another picture and made several thumbnail sketches of the photos converting the composition into all circles, or rectangles or triangles. I picked this landscape. After sketching tons of thumbnails, I cropped the photo to just the lower left corner which has a bridge and a small covered landing, plus trees and shoreline. That allowed me to emphasize the horizontal composition.Then we picked another bag of fabrics and created our "two-steps from reality" composition in the cloth. I think this is a split complimentary color scheme. I think the house shape is based too much in reality to really qualify as an abstract, but I like it. If I were actually going to finish this piece it would need some surface design. It's too flat in this state.

Look at all the interesting work! We had a very thoughtful critique period at the end of the class. Each person briefly explained their exercises and commented about what they liked or didn't like in each.

In another exercise, Katie challenged us to look at our first composition (my soup bowls) and crop it way way down to one strong composition and make it again in another color scheme. I chose the rainbow color scheme. Bleck. It's tough to use all those colors and not make it look juvenile. Obviously it's not impossible. See here. But, it takes much more careful planning, I think.

I had time to do one more exercise. I chose another photo and simply copied it using a monochromatic color scheme this time. I love the way this one turned out -- the asymmetry, the subject matter, the colors.

These were excellent excersizes. My "one nugget" from the class is learning to spend more time sketching and planning before cutting into the fabric. Of course, I think there is a place for improvisational design. I guess I need to continue to learn when I can be successsful spontaneously and when I need to plan ahead.

We also talked a bit about creating work directly from magazine pictures. Being inspired by a photo is ok... copying isn't. These are for my own personal study and enjoyment, so that's fine. But I don't feel like I can really say that the soup bowls or the vases on the mantle are really "mine."

And after class, we went out for sushi. Yum.

I'd Rather Be in the Studio

... except, I'm not even there right now. I'm here in *blogworld.* (And I'm spending more time reading all of YOURS than I am posting on MINE.)

I went to a nice book-signing event last weekend. Alyson Stanfield was signing and talking about her new book, "I'd Rather Be in the Studio." Alyson has really made a name for herself in the field of artists' self-promotion.

Here is Alyson signing a book for my friend Connie.I bought a copy of the book and I will continue to put her suggestions into action as I grow into more opportunities as an artist.

The event was at Deanna Wood's studio. What a perfect setting! A real artist's real studio. Complete with paint splattered floor. Deanna Wood is speaking at our next Dallas Area Fiber Artists meeting. Her program will be on artists books. I loved looking at her work on the walls of her studio. These are from her "waxy buildup" series.

In fact, as I was listening to the discussion about promoting our own work, I thought to myself, "I don't even have my own work hanging on the walls in my own studio." Duh. I don't have visitors in my studio very often, but still!

So, since then I've hung some work! Better than sitting a pile in the closet.

You saw the Construction quilt in the previous post, but I added the Twelvex12 pieces too. (I didn't have to stand a chair to hang them. Phew!)

Process

I did a bunch of cleaning in my studio last week, including getting all these bins organized. That's all the stuff I use most often. In fact, the open box on the shelf second from the bottom is the stuff I use MOST often, so it doesn't even have a lid. (scissors, measuring tape, chalk pencil) Everything has it's place. (Well, not everything, but at least the stuff on these shelves.) On the top is the guardian angel that Kathy made me. So special.

And I hung up "Construction: Concrete and Stone."

Um, yes, I put the chair on top of the desk and stood on it in order to reach high enough. Don't tell my kids. I would not be happy to find them doing the same thing.

Getting everything really straightened up allowed me to finish the 12x12 project and get my fabric jewelry submitted for the upcoming Lark book.

Of course, it's already messy again. Sigh.

Mixed Media Book

Remember that I said I've been thinking about book making and paper lately? I made this book a couple of weeks ago.


It. Was. So. Fun. To. Make!


Here is the cover. Just cardboard with some stamped circles.Here is an inside page. I'm not showing you all the pages. Some are more interesting than others. I used all kinds of papers in all kinds of shapes and sizes.Here is a page made from a paper bag as in my "interactive journal." This book is similar to the journal in lots of ways, but messier -- in a good way.I guess I should find something to tuck into that pocket.I collaged a few magazine words and images here and there. I was sticking to a loose blue and green pallette. I just love how some pages peek out from behind other pages.There is fabric mixed in with the paper. More circles. I was totally inspired by DJ Pettit's books. I learned a lot of the construction and the order in which to complete each step. I would do some things differently next time. And there will be a next time.


Of course, it's just sitting on my studio table now. What will I do with it? I don't really do the whole "art journal" thing. I mean, as far as actually writing in it. I just enjoyed making it.