The Passing Stranger

"Tenzing Dreaming"

2011-06-03T08:44:00.002-06:00

"Tenzing Dreaming" 2010
Cotton, wool
Överhogdal-style Tapestry

Only artist statement necessary on this piece. :)

(except... large blocks of area with soumak-inlay? Don't do it. Bad idea. The piece curls in that part like a ::bleeping bleep::)

Recent work

2010-12-21T23:47:00.003-07:00

Not much art work getting done lately, between moving and deciding I'm going to learn Swedish by translating articles and books on textile history written in it...

But this is WHY I'm learning Swedish. :)

A portrait in Överhogdal tapestry technique, for friends.

"Inga and the Seven Bacon Martyrs"

For my research dealer.

And a random bit of embroidery for a birthday present, left pinned to their bulletin board at work.

UFO- Lotus Rug

2010-07-22T08:52:00.003-06:00

I think it may be time to bring this UnFinished Object back out...

(Lotus Rug and design graph; begun summer of 2004, I think, and untouched since that fall when I started art school.)

...if only to save it from The Nefarious Mr. Longkitten.

Överhogdal Tapestry Technique-Sample 1

2010-06-29T15:17:00.006-06:00

Wasn't posting pictures in progress as I was keeping it a surprise (sort of) until it was done. But here is the first sample piece of the Överhogdal Tapestry Technique, as reconstructed by me.*

These tapestries are part of a Early Medieval Scandinavian tradition of supplemental-weft figurative weaving on narrow bands of cloth (sometimes called friezes), most likely intended to be hung just at or above eye level around the interior of a structure, and part of the wider European tradition that includes such embroidered wall hangings as the Bayeux Tapestry.

June 10: Loom warped, and even managed to do the starting border.

Warp and weft are mercerized cotton, which I find closer in tensile and tactile properties to linen than regular cotton (also, all I had to work with). The sett is 15 epi, with weft slightly thicker than warp, as per common in the Viking age for many weaves (definitely for wool anyway, I'm not as sure about linen having a slightly thicker weft typically). Pattern weft is a commercially dyed wool. Eventually, I'd LOVE to do a piece with wool dyed by me, but my skills at dyeing aren't good enough yet.

June 12: two of three figures for the Tir Righ army done (I forgot to take a picture on June 11)

The heraldry of Tir Righ is blue and white/silver. I had to fudge it a bit as white would not have shown up well even in bright daylight, never mind in a dark-ish longhouse by candle/lamp/firelight, and as far as I can tell, metal thread does not appear to have been used in these tapestries. The outline blue is a brighter and lighter colour than the blue used in the original tapestry, which was a woad/indigo blue close to navy in shade. This blue is closer to the heraldic blue of Tir Righ's colours. The light blue is close to a shade I've gotten with indigo.

The majority of figures do appear like this; as a rectangular outline in a dark colour, with a solid block of a different colour inside for the torso, and with the head differentiated from the torso by being left as just base cloth. There are some figures which have various kinds of lines in them to distinguish the torso from the head (eg. diagonal stripes). If I were to start this piece now, I most likely would have used one of those designs for these guys, so I could stick to blue and white.

June 13

Lines that run parallel or at an angle to the warp are wrapped in a spiral fashion. For those who are more familiar with embroidery, essentially the same thread-path as a satin stitch. Lines that run perpendicular to the warp, or large blocks of colour are soumak wrapped (like stem/outline stitch).

In fact, when the tapestries were found and for decades after, historians and archaeologists thought the tapestries were embroidered, as you could produce the same appearance using satin and stem stitching. They realized that it was actually weaving when someone took a very close look at the cloth and realized the wool pattern thread never pierces either the warp and weft of the base cloth, or itself; something that even the very best embroiderer would find it damn near impossible to do.

It's interesting to note, if you click on the picture to see it larger, that the one small bit on this piece that is embroidered** does not look the same as the identical design element when woven. If you look closely at the feet of the bottom figure, and compare to the feet of the other two, you can see the difference. The only explanation I can come up with is that the needle pushes the base cloth threads aside to make room for it and the following thread, which then sits loose in the space left; whereas when weaving it, the wool thread is compressed between base cloth wefts when the weft over it is beaten down. As a result, it took fewer stitches to make the same length foot embroidered, than it took wraps to make it woven. I don't know if I would get the same result with a finer woven cloth.

June 14

They don't mention it in the sources I did find, but if you follow the path of a specific thread they probably also never cross over a base cloth weft and then cross back down. It would be impossible to cross wefts like that in weaving the pattern since the next weft(s) wouldn't have been put in place until the row was done, but does happen in embroidery, even when trying very hard to avoid it. Nor are there any places where the pattern weft is worked at a diagonal to the warp-weft matrix of the base cloth, judging by looking at close pictures of the front. As well, going back and forth across rows of the base cloth to build an image would be an inefficient way to embroider, though not impossible or especially unlikely.

June 15

Unlike soumak rug weaving which wraps fully around every pair of warp threads, often with every row pairing the warp threads the same (creating columns of wraps), in this tapestry technique the pattern thread is wrapped over six or nine warp threads and back under two or three, essentially wrapping over every other pair or trio of warp threads.

None of the sources I saw specify, but I'm guessing from how the technique works that it would be under-two, if you're wrapping over-six, and three if nine. My reasoning for this is that in the next row as you work the pattern thread back across the warp you are staggering the warp threads you wrap the weft under, using the pairs or trios you didn't wrap the thread under in the previous row. ie. You wrap over threads 1 to 6, back under 5&6, which now become threads 1&2 of the next 6 you're wrapping over. In the next row, threads 5&6/1&2 in your wrapping pattern are the threads that were numbered 3&4 in the previous row --like the way bricks are stacked. Likewise, over 1 to 9, under 7-8-9, which become 1-2-3 of the next over-wrap, and in the next row, your 7-8-9/1-2-3 are the threads that were numbered 4-5-6 in the previous row.

Because I'm pretty sure my sett was lower than the original, and my figures larger, I stuck to going over-six, under-two, as over nine made a rather large weft float. I also, in places where I had to cover seven warp threads or fewer than six, just went over seven, or fewer than six.

June 17 (I must have taken the 16th off)

In the Tir Righ army and the Valkyrie on the same side I actually did something different. When I started the first border, I was staggering the wrap-under as described above. I know I had read this description from Lena Elisabeth Norrman's Viking Women: The Narrative Voice in Woven Tapestry:

"In this technique, the pattern threads are laid over those of the warp and then snared back. The snares are turned around the threads missed in the previous row. The threads in the weft work from right to left, back and then from right again" (Norrman 2008, p. 124-5)

I can't remember if I actually consciously remembered the description when I started weaving, or if I just started weaving that way because it made physical sense to as the thread was being wrapped, because my subconscious was feeding me hints. Either way, when I went back to look at the picture to check something, it looked like the wraps were not staggered, so I started wrapping around the same pairs of warp threads each row, which resulted in the lines running across the figures parallel to the warp. This probably made the areas of soumak weaving even harder to beat down evenly with the base cloth only areas, than it would have been if I had done it right. (See the June 12 picture for the bulging of the weft)

June 18

Just after I finished the first Valkyrie I went back to the book to look for some reference to something, I found back the description of how the wraps are supposed to go, thought "..the hell??!?" and looked again at the picture and went "D'oh!" And switched back to staggering the soumak wraps. It's not very obvious on the loom in the design, but if you look at the Valkyries in the above and below pictures you can see the difference it makes! Especially where the train of the Valkyrie's garment meets the main body; it's far less stark a change and looks less awkward on the second Valkyrie.

Also, yes. Those are severed heads weighting the warp on the loom.... heh heh heh.

June 19

Another difference between the description and how I worked the figures was that to make a straight line at the edges of colour blocks and thick horizontal lines, as they appear to be in the original, rather than staggered edges, I would start sometimes start and/or end a line with a over-four wrap (ie if one row had 5 over-six wraps, the next line would be an over-four wrap, followed by 4 over-six wraps and another over-four, so the same number of warp threads were covered in both rows).

June 20 (Avacal Army in red and yellow)

Despite not having been buried (sealing it from the environment) and not being particularly well-cared for over the centuries (it was discovered kicked into a corner of a shed after being removed from the bottom of the wood-box during a thorough cleaning at the church in Överhogdal) the colours are quite vibrant. The blue is a very bright navy, the reds are truly red (with an orangish hint), rather than browning out, and the greens are equally bright.

My red is a bit more blue-toned than the original colour, and my green a similar tone, but lighter shade; I didn't have anything darker. The blue, as mentioned above, is a brighter, lighter colour of blue. And there's a second shade of blue; something that does not seem to have been done with any of the colours in the original tapestry. Interestingly, yellow does not appear in the original, though my yellow is a colour that would have been possible with weld at the time.

The stripes in two of the figures have two purposes. One was that I didn't actually have any suitable yellow thread. The yellow I used here (as well as the darker blue and the grey used for the swords and warp on the Valkyrie's loom) were pulled from some weaving scraps my friend Brynja gave me for stuffing and such, and I wasn't entirely certain I had enough to do the bodies. The other reason is that in the Norrman book, she discusses the idea that the figures she identifies as being likely representing females, based on her theory of what story the tapestries were meant to tell, may have a wider variety in appearance because their appearance was meant to convey that they were the focus of the story, rather than the more generic 'male' figures. Based on that notion, the Avacalian warriors are varied more than the Tir Righ army to indicate that the viewer should read the Avacalians as the focus of the story, and since history is written by the victors.... (We would have won if we hadn't been outnumbered!!!!)

And the finished piece. A proper documentation will follow when I rewrite the sucky documentation I wrote for the competition.

* "...by me" in this case means other people have researched and written about the technical details and have even done exact reconstructions, but as I was unable to find any of this information in English in the last couple of years while I was researching it off and on in an admittedly desultory fashion, I finally gave up and used a short description of the technique and a really good close-up photo of a design element to figure out how it was done for myself.

** I decided after finishing the first figure that it looked funny without feet and decided to add some. But since each of them took me a whole day to weave and I'd have had to redo the entire figure to weave in the feet, I wasn't inclined to unweave the figure just to put them in. Those who might like to try this technique and are scared by how slow it is, may be reassured that by the time I got to the Avacal army I was able to weave two figures a day.

Stand provided by the ever-talented Polar Bear, cat hair provided by the Usual Suspects.

Professional sniffestigating by Persephone.

Taste-testing,

snoopervision,

tool inspection,

and thread herding by Tenzing. Jack was off at his day job, Grumpy Old Man-cat.

It's Not the Forest-work in progress

2010-05-08T07:20:00.004-06:00

Progress-Apr 13

"It's not the forest that I fear
These woods with wolves for knives..."

Progress-Apr 14

A new project I'm working on. Open weave wool fabric, unknown man-made fibre thread. I wanted to try aari/tambour embroidery, but this silly little town could not immediately gratify my desire for the appropriate needles. Also, I didn't know at first how small they were, and thought this fabric would be approriate from written description of the base cloth used. Not so much, but that's ok, this is interesting too!

Progress- Apr 15

So I made my own tool to do this in this kind of fabric, and started noodling along...

Progress- Apr 16

(Yay! My birthday! I'm 37! But still not old enough to be treacherous, I'm given to understand!)

Progress up to Apr 27

I had to play with the tool a bit, and my other hand still cramps up after a while holding the thread underneath to loop it around the hook under the frame, but I've started using a kitchen timer to limit my stints at working straight through. Timer goes off, I have to stop and stretch, get a drink or get rid of one if I need to, and bother kittens.

Progress up to May 8

Slower than I hoped, faster than I think. I can't wait to try an actual tambour needle now that I have one. And to think, I used to HATE chain stitch....

The whole piece so far.

And this is my tool! It's a "loop turner". I used it at it's full length the first day, but it was too long and the kitten kept trying to catch it. The second day I cut it in half, but it hurt to hold it long (like crochet cramps, only you're holding it like a pen and twisting your wrist as you bring the hook through -I've barely held a pen for any length of time in YEARS...). So the third day I cut it a little shorter again, drilled a hole in a piece of wood and stuck it in.

Much easier to hold this way, both because the wood is thicker, and you hold it palm down and don't have to twist your wrist as far. Now, if I could just find a tool to make the thread holding easier....

And now....IT'S KITTEN-TIPPING TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Addition to our family!

2010-03-26T02:43:00.000-06:00

We have a new addition! His name is Tenzing, and he's 5 months old!

We think he might be part Maine Coon. He's enormous and floofy in the belly-and-butt region; major between-the-toes tufts, and an enormous puffy tail.

He's also, apparently, slightly cross-eyed.

Occasionally he sleeps. For 10 minutes or so. Once in a while.....

Great taste in magazines though! (FiberARTS)

Or maybe it's just that he knows it's about STRING!!! (I feel a disturbance in the Fibre, as if millions of strings suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has pounced.)

Bored. Just pictures.

2010-02-20T21:12:00.007-07:00

I'm bored. I miss not-cold. I'm about done with winter and am posting pictures of not-winter to cheer me up.

Also; procrastinating. :)

The Summer and Fall series are taken from The 12-Foot Davis monument on the east ridge above the town. As are the winter series.

This spring one is from a small picnic area at the top of Judas Hill, south of town, also on the east ridge. All of them go from East/South clockwise to the North.

May 5, 2007

Aug 4, 2006

Sept 30, 2007

Yeah. What he said.

2010-02-18T20:51:00.002-07:00

Yeah. What he said.

Sneak Peek-Dublin Doll

2010-02-04T21:28:00.003-07:00

Second sneak peek

Changed my mind about the 14thC garb. I know what the dress should look like but was wrong about the specifics of the headwear. Need to do more research and think about what fabrics to use for the pieces.

So I went with 10thC Dublin instead. As usual, linen body, linen tunics. Alpaca wool embroidery in chain stitch, linen hat with scraps from the doll body, unknown man-made fibre hair that looks like silk, cotton cheesecloth hairnet, dyed with indigo.

This was the hairnet originally cut out for the Coptic doll, that was too small to go over the head of that doll. This one was a circle of 8cm. Good for covering just a bun, under a hat. Forgot to take a picture of the side of the head with the hat down though.

Here's both of them together. Now that they're off to a friend to deliver to Estrella War, I'm going to work on the doll body photo tutorial.

But first. I'm taking the day off to read a damn book. Well, not a 'damn' book. I got a copy of "Ice" by Sarah Beth Durst (which I talked about a few posts ago) and it's been sitting on the desk beside me, taunting me for a week!

Sneak Peek-Coptic Doll

2010-01-28T04:31:00.003-07:00

A sneak peek at what I've been working on. Roman era rag doll (Egypt, 4th C. CE), dressed in 4th C. Coptic dress.

Linen doll, linen tunic, pearl cotton and alpaca yarn embroidery, unknown man-made hair.

Hair net is a piece of cheese cloth left over from some indigo dyeing. The circle I had to cut out was surprisingly large at 15cm.

Here's the two dolls together. Doll #2 is going to get 14th C. dress. There will be a photo tutorial in due course.

The Christmas of Endless Cushions

2009-12-29T08:40:00.003-07:00

Now is the winter of our bruised bottoms,
Made comfortable by this fine array of cushions

This is what I did for Christmas!

Ok, to be fair, the portrait cushion was a school project from some years ago, I just made a new cushion to go IN it. Likewise the three IKEA silk cushion covers, and there was one cushion that I made a cover for...

But Bunthulhu and the Stealth Ninja Pirate Bunny (minus the pirate- we really MUST get him a cutlass!) were all me!

Bunny, by Huw Davies

This is actually a second birthday present for the Polar Bear, as he decided no really, Ceiling Cat (see last post) creeped him out too much. I'm getting Ceiling Cat back and putting it over my desk.

Sneak...

Sneak sneak...

Sneak sneak sneak...

Skitter skitter tug...

Swish...

Whoosh...

Woohoo! Second stinky old cushion from a couch we threw out 6 years ago and was fourth-hand when we got it, GONE!!!

Also inspired by Bunny. We are above the moose-line.

This is what I do instead of wrapping things...set out little scenarios. Bunthulhu was left like that for him to find. The Stealth Ninja Pirate Bunny was hiding on his chair with a scroll pinned to him telling the Polar Bear to look in a certain file on the computer, where this series of pictures were waiting to be found.

The kitties got toys again, of course. Persephone got a stuffed pomegranate with a cloth dime-bag of catnip stuffed down inside.

And catnips mousies for my niphead rodent catcher (shhhhh, don't tell her the two brown ones were the same ones from last year, I stashed them away after last Christmas and they've been marinating in catnip all year!)

Jack, the Viking kitty got his very own spear, with a plastic test-tube in the shaft, filled with rice for proper spear-rattling. Also, a...Purple Thing.

He got a new ball and cardboard scratcher too, as both of his were dire. But I didn't make those so moving on... (though I actually want to try making my own cardboard scratchers. They're apparently not hard and we have enough boxes that need to be disposed of to be worth trying on)

They both got a lump of coal as well, stuffed entirely with catnip. PersePHONY (Persephone's "Evil Twin") promptly claimed those as both hers. Well, she IS the Evil Twin!

And my first attempt at cardboard construction, and the final destination of four of the cushions I made. We would like to attempt something similar in wood eventually. Possibly here if we stay much longer. I want to try it with a pegging system so it can be broken down to move flat.

Chocolate! and some recent work

2009-12-24T01:04:00.010-07:00

This is why living with a chef is awesome!

Leftover chocolates from a commission!

Milk Chocolate covered coffee beans (in coffee bean shaped mold!)

Chocolate Stars (plain, orange, peppermint, and some broke-while-removing brandy infused ganache)

Dark Chocolate Brandy Truffles in Milk Chocolate

Dark Chocolate Truffles in Cocoa

Chocolate Dripping Surprise.

So named by me because it's the drippings from the tray under the rack they were hardening on; surprise, because it's a mix of plain, orange and peppermint flavoured chocolate, and you don't know what you're getting until you pop it in your mouth!

Dark Chocolate Speculaas bark

Left over dark chocolate ganache which I suggested we could use to try truffles rolled in speculaas crumbs. The Polar Bear was tired and didn't want to roll more, so it was mixed in the crumbs and rolled it out on a tray.

This stuff? Is f*@&ing AWESOME! (and I do not use that term lightly!)

This is why living with cats is awesome! I was taking the chocolate pictures right beside Persephone's chair, and as soon as the camera starting clicking she started posing for Playkitten Magazine! Belleh snorgling ensued!

As for recent work...sadly, the tapestries have been temporarily abandoned.

Shortly after the last post on them, I wove the face and was entirely unhappy with it. The colours of the shadows were wrong, the colour of the lips was wrong, (actually, funnily enough, the colour I wove the darker shadows in turns out to be the perfect colour for the lips!), and both the eyes and lips were cartoonishly big, despite being woven across only two warp threads. There are no pictures of the face; it was that bad.

Since it would have taken a fair amount of time to unweave, I decided to cut it out. Careful as I thought I was being, I sliced through a warp thread. I wove a new warp in and it's fine, but I was upset and wanted some time to rethink how to do the face. At that scale, I'm thinking I'm going to have to embroider the features. One warp thread is too narrow, two is too large. Or else scale up the cartoon and weave a bigger piece. Which I kinda wanted to do before I started weaving, but since these were supposed to be Christmas presents, I thought small would be faster.

Then I realized I was in fact unhappy with the figure as a whole, which I think would look fine enough at a distance, but the difference between the light and dark areas are too pronounced close up (and since the piece is only 7" tall...), and too definitively separate, instead of blending into each other. I'm thinking I can solve the issue with more colour blends, and with some hatching in transitional zones.

And THEN I realized that what I learned while doing the background wall could make the whole wall better if I started over. Mostly that the grey looks great, but there needs to be more of it. It's supposed to be a bare hint of light off rough stone walls, and it works where there's grey woven in, but it looks strange with only scattered areas with light reflecting off them.

I'm going to start over. In the new year.

So I did this instead! :)

The Polar Bear's birthday present! Yes, that IS Ceiling Cat! His head is a bit squished to one side in this picture. I don't know why. The Polar Bear is a bit creeped out by it all, which I didn't expect...

I want to do another with a black cat and put it on the floor! Basement Cat! Hee!

Also working on this. Stem stitched Japanese Pampas Grass, and mokume shibori dyed in indigo.

And that's all I'm saying about this project right now.

Also, while we're not doing Christmas at all this year, (no money, and no family even remotely near enough to care), and therefore have not bothered to decorate or put up a tree, I couldn't resist doing at least this outside my door to amuse my neighbours and the Polar Bear, when I found out Simon Tofield of Simon's Cat had put out a printable cut-out of the cat. (if you haven't seen the Simon's Cat films GO THERE NOW!!!!!)

You can see what the characters are doing better if you click on the picture.

"Ice" by Sarah Beth Durst

2009-12-18T08:17:00.004-07:00

In the spirit of really really wanting to win this book... (I get an extra entry for linking to the contest)

Book (and movie) review blogger (Mrs Magoo Reads) is having a contest to win a copy of "Ice" by Sarah Beth Durst (whose blog is also listed in my links in the side bar).

"When Cassie was a little girl, her grandmother told her a fairy tale about her mother, who made a deal with the Polar Bear King and was swept away to the ends of the earth..."

You can read the rest of the promo blurb here. Awesomely, Ms. Durst has also put a section on her website with retellings of more obscure fairy tales she's come across in her research for her other two books. Which makes me all kinds of happy! (even better, she retells them with snarky running commentary! Hee!)

Mrs Magoo is rather awesome too, I've discovered. Exploring her site, I noticed she reviews a lot of Young Adult Lit (a category which, frankly has some of the best books!) and being the nosy sort wondered if she explained why anywhere. It turns out that Mrs Magoo is herself part of the category's target audience! Now THAT's freaking cool!

New Tapestries in progress

2009-12-14T01:05:00.003-07:00

New tapestries! Two 5-ish" x 7" portrait style miniature tapestries are in progress. I can't show you the cartoons as both the people these are for have the link to this blog, though I don't know if they actually follow it. In fact, I think I may not be able to show any more pictures of this one, after these.

I can get away with a few comments, though...

Weaving black and dark gray together is not as eye-boggling as I thought.

The purple, however, has been a complete pain. Warning: venting ahead. (but it ends with kitties!)

The idea was to create shading by weaving the darker areas with a black cotton perl thread, wound with a single strand of purple sewing thread, and the lighter areas with a purple wool thread wound with a strand of black thread. A quick few lines of the purple suggested it was thin enough to use with an 18 epi warp, so I wove up the the darker bit and began weaving the lighter area, only to discover within a centimetre that the purple wool was definitely too thick and the area of warp was buckling.

Unfortunately I didn't have any thinner yarn in a colour that was close to the sewing thread woven in with the black. I had some thinner plum purple, and a similar sewing thread, but since I had been sewing the larger slits up as I wove, I really really really didn't want to pull it all out.

I ended up using an idea I got from Kathe Todd Hooker's small format landscapes, of winding together a bunch of strands of sewing thread to make up a colour. Which then turned into a whole "Goldilocks" thing, (this one's too thick, this one's too thin, this one's got too much black). Worse, while I did have three cones of purple thread in very similar shades so I could wind more than one strand at a time, I only had one free bobbin, so every time I decided I had to change the thickness I had to wind the bloody things off onto an old thread tube, before carefully separating out the threads I didn't need while trying not to knot it all into a unholy mess, because you know, I'm too obsessive to actually just write the mis-wound thread off as a bad lot and start fresh; no, that would be too simple for me and my "these are Christmas presents" deadline!

(I did finally get it right)

The bright areas were done with a strand of fuchsia added instead of black. And I'm taking the day off from weaving. Dinner at friends, and since the power went out for an hour and the building doesn't want to heat back up because its -37C out there, I'm not going to even try getting anything done today.

Well, except make a catnip baggy to stick in a pomegranate soft toy for Persephone's Gotchaversary present. 3 years, I can't believe I've had the sweet little furface for 3 years already!

First day home; 10 months old approximately, just spayed that morning, skinny as a rail, huge ears slick with a final dose of ear mite goo, and utterly fearless as she explored the new domain she was now going to be queen of (the two boycats a mere inconvenience)

Persephone now. That mousie's getting some AIR!

This has me STEAMED!

2009-11-03T04:29:00.003-07:00

This has me (insert bad word) STEAMED!!!!

An artist, (John T. Unger), a maker of sculptural fire-bowls made from recycled steel, is being sued by an imitator of his work to overturn his registered copyrights. I am using the term imitator specifically, as FirePitArt.Com LLC is not claiming the firepits they are manufacturing are in any way substantially different than John Unger's even in their lawsuit filing, as far as I can tell.

Waves O' Fire, from John Unger's site

Mr. Unger sent them a cease-and-desist letter, which was flatly refused. After several exchanges between legal counsels, Fire Pit Art filed suit claiming Mr. Unger's copyrights were invalid, and that Mr. Unger had damaged their business by informing businesses and arts organizations with which they had dealings of the controversy regarding the copyright of the designs, a practice which (from observation-I have no supporting documentation) seems to be common and legal in cases like this.

Now this upsets me at least in part because it appears to be a case in which a company or individual is trying to use the courts to strong-arm an artist out of their copyright protections, hoping the artist will be too intimidated or financially unable to fight the suit, which would result in a summary judgement against the artist.

This seems to be an all too common occurrence apparently, judging by other cases I have heard of, and ones which numerous bloggers and their commentators are mentioning.

But as I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that what is truly insidious about this case is that they are trying to use the courts to overturn his right to determine if his work is in fact 'art' in the first place!

Specifically, Fire Pit Art is, among other things, suing to have the courts declare that John Unger's work is NOT art, due to the fact that they are functional items.

According to the complaint filed by Rick Wittrig, owner of Fire Pit Art (available on the artist's webpage linked above):

"Defendant has continued to assert his allegations of copyright infringement, further basing them on the registrations of copyright claims made by Defendant...for a number of articles that are in fact outdoor fire pits, but were registered by the Copyright Office as “Sculpture/3-D Design,” on the basis of Defendant’s claims and representations." p. 3-4

and;

"Defendant’s Fire Pits are functional, utilitarian and useful articles that are not
subject to copyright protection under The Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq." p. 5 (the law covering economic and proprietary rights of authors/artists)

The complaint seeks to have the registered copyrights cancelled on the basis that the fire-pits are not art and are therefore improperly registered. But it's more than the cancellation of the copyright registration.

If I have understood American copyright law correctly, an artist is NOT required to register a copyright to a piece of intellectual property in order to retain a legal copyright to it. It's a good idea to do so, as it can provide weighty evidence of that copyright, but it's not mandatory in order to legally own copyright on it.*

*Candid admission: My understanding of US copyright law in these matter is from reading about cases like this, and from online discussions and articles written by artists, writers, publishers, gallery administrators and agents, usually written to inform new writers and artists what copyright protections they have, and what responsibility they have toward retaining them. I'm not American and have not as yet felt the urge to read any official documents on the subject, though it's on my 'to do' list.

This is supposition on my part, but if Fire Pit Art can convince the jury/judge that John Unger's work is not art, then it can contend that he had no automatic copyright to it to begin with. And it sets a precedent in law (in a legal system that works in large part on precedent) that an artist does not have the legal right to determine if their work is, in fact, 'Art'.

(What makes the whole thing hypocritical is that not only does Mr. Wittrig call his company "Fire Pit Art", he publicly represents himself as an artist, and sells his knock-offs of Mr. Unger's work at Art fairs!)

(John Unger) has set up a webpage going into greater detail about this, and has decided to fight the matter in court, but he could use some financial help. There are fundraising details at his site. (Discounted Fire-bowls! Art in exchange for donations!) :)

We don't get the inspiration we want

2009-10-25T06:11:00.002-06:00

Apparently we don't get the inspiration we want, we get the inspiration we need. Much like cats.*

And oh great, look, it's WRITING inspiration. I'm supposed to be doing ART right now.

Good thing the inspiration node in my brain is a cute little mass of grey matter, or I'd kick it in the ankle.

Happily, one rough outline, some details around a couple of bits of action and a few key lines of dialog are done, and I think I understand the purpose of two of the characters.

Also one hell of a case of epiphany whiplash...Oh, good morning world, I'm going to bed!

*Or is that the cats we deserve?

That's an ...interesting... future

2009-10-23T04:18:00.003-06:00

Neil Gaiman has an odd little thing....an online Oracle. (I notice it has one of Lisa Snellings' poppets living in it....)

My future? And I quote- "11."

That's it.

"11."

Sigh.

I tried it again, to see if perhaps it was a bit confused as to what I was asking, and it's response was: "The dog."

I do not have a dog. The cats won't let me. I do not argue with the cats.

Crewel Work

2009-10-21T07:03:00.003-06:00

WHEEEEEEE!!!! I learned crewel embroidery!!!!

I thought, you know, I LOVE embroidery, and I can think of scads of stuff I could do with it in my art, but I never seem to actually use more than a few different stitches; mostly because those are the ones I feel comfortable with. And yet I have several books full of stitches that I KNOW I could do if I tried, I just never bother. I look at the diagrams and say "yeah, I could do that one, that's easy", but when I actually plan out an embroidered piece I go right back to the ones I know, because I KNOW how they would look, and would work on a piece.

So I set myself the task last week of trying out every stitch in Erica Wilson's "Crewel Embroidery", 1962 (except the ones I already knew how to do and do frequently...)

This is all of them.

1. Close Buttonhole Stitch
2. Coral Stitch
3. Braid Stitch
4. Rope Stitch (narrow-left, broad-right)
5. Rosette Stitch (right (red)-poorly done, left (peach), better)
6. Roumanian Stitch
7. Cretan Stitch
8. Vandyke Stitch (top (peach)-line, bottom (red)-shape)
9. Knotted Pearl Stitch
10. Fishbone Stitch
11. Raised Stem Stitch
12. Raised Chain Stitch
13. Raised Buttonhole Stitch
14. Slanting Satin Stitch
15. Satin Stitch-Tied with Backstitch
16. Padded Satin Stitch
17. Block Shading
18. Long and Short Stitch-Tapestry Shading
19. Long and Short-Soft Shading
20. Laid Work-Tied with Cross Bars
21. Laid Work-Tied Diagonally
22. Shaded Laid Work (Tied with Split Stitch)

My coral, rosette and knotted pearl stitches not so good. Mind you, I don't like them much either. I can't say I like block shading or the long-and-short tapestry shading much, though I'm surprisingly fond of the soft shading and all the laid work. The fishbone is cool too. I definitely want to try using the fishbone for leaves.

The Van Dyke stitch seems to look better as a shape than as a line, which is a pity, as there's a variant of it that was widely used in many northern European cultures in the Viking Age as seam decoration, and I'd love to use it on a few pieces of Living History costuming, instead of the herringbone I usually use.

23. Burden Stitch (top-wide, bottom-close, right-line)
24. Squared Filling #1
25. Squared Filling #2
26. Squared Filling #3
27. Squared Filling #4 (skipped #5, because it was almost identical)
28. Squared Filling #6

Burden stitch-bleh. Except the closely worked bit with thicker thread (brown and beige). That would make awesome wicker work, or wattle walls. I have to admit I also like #26, even if it's VERY time consuming. Though after all these gridded square fillings, I'm really really REALLY tired of them. #31 (below) is also nice, but I don't think I'm likely to use any of these much.

I do very much still have a problem with both pulling the stitches too tight and tensioning the fabric too much. Several of the grids in this batch are only attached to the cloth at the the edges and as soon as I took the cloth off the frame they lifted right off and puckered. Hmm. The next batch is better.

29. Squared Filling #7
30. Squared Filling #8
31. Squared Filling #9
32. Squared Filling #10
33. Wave Stitch
34. Cloud Filling
35. Seeding
36. Weaving Stitch
37. Turkey Work

More gridded stuff. I swear, I was so sick of it after a while. I think that more than anything will probably keep me from using them much. Cloud and wave stitches are kind of cool. I wonder if I can do the wave stitch with broader loops to look like scales....

I think I like proper french knots better than seeding, though I've never been good at stippling anyway. I think I need to practice it with paper and pencil some.

Turkey work is neat. I still like weaving knotted pile rugs better, but it occurs to me this might be a better way to make miniature rugs. It's much more stable and non-pull-out-able than I thought it would be.

38. Cable Chain Stitch
39. Interlaced Cable Chain Stitch
40. Whipped Stem Stitch
41. Pekinese Stitch
42. Backstitched Chain Stitch
43. Threaded Backstitch
44. Interlaced Running Stitch
45. Interlaced Herringbone Stitch
46. Threaded Herringbone Stitch
47. Tied Herringbone Stitch
48. Spider's Web-Whipped
49. Spider's Web-Woven
50. Raised Spider's Web-Whipped
51. Raised Spider's Web-Woven
52. Raised Needle Weaving
53. Bullion Knots
54. French Knots
55. French Knots (triple wrapped)
56. French Knots (triple wrapped and stitched like Bullion Knots which is how I had learned to do them)

French knots done the way this book diagrams them is certainly easier and neater than doing them like bullion stitches. I might even start using them now that I've learned this way.

Some of these lacing stitches would be interesting to try using for vines, instead of stem stitch, especially for thicker vines. My cable chain stitching definitely needs work.

I don't know how I feel about the spider webs. Fun to do, but very 'crafty' looking. also wonder what they'd be useful for, since they look so much like, well, spider webs. I've done whipped ones before over beads to make later medieval buttons, but embroidery? Dunno.

Now on to planning out a few small projects to try the stitches out on.

"She Will Not Let Her Memories Become Wars"

2009-10-17T04:33:00.002-06:00

"She Will Not Let Her Memories Become Wars"
2009
Embroidery; broken bra, reclaimed embroidery floss
Size: depends*

from "And This Is How She Feels", a loose collection of poetry

"She will not let her memories become wars,
She will not let you pick apart the corpse-bones of her remembering"

(*still trying to figure out how to hang this-the picture was taken with it pinned to the backdrop)

Stem stitch lettering, random stitch filler on ravens.

I need to build a better boob to display it on.

"Alexandria"-Work in progress?

2009-10-10T17:28:00.004-06:00

"Alexandria"
2009 (2010?)
embroidery, ragdoll; old silk shirt, reclaimed silk thread, sewing scraps
81cm x 43cm x 14cm

The rag doll is done the same way as my period rag dolls are, then was placed under the silk shirt and the silk carefully pinned around it and sewn in place. Sleeves were sewn into a cradle (well, hammock, I guess!) for the doll.

on the bottom of the piece is this (partial) poem:

Alexandria

More a bruise than a stab wound
did you think I didn't notice it
feel it
cradle it close like a stolen child
pull it apart and rebuild myself with the pieces
...

Brenda Gerritsma
1994

The poem has a final line not here:
I should know better by now, I was last week's size.

I can't decide if it should be added or not.

This was one of my embroidery projects back in Feb.; though even then I thought it wasn't done despite having done everything I had intended to do with it. I really wanted it to be black and blue, but the lettering doesn't stand out as well as I'd hoped, and overall the piece just seems a bit 'blah' to me.

And yet, anything I've thought of to make the lettering stand out more (which pretty much means embroidering in and around the lettering-which I'm fine with) seems too...well...cheerful. Brighter blue, too cheerful, reds, oranges, yellows, definitely too cheerful, purple-actually I just hate purple with blue. Black's probably no good, gray too dismal. White maybe? Skeletal trees?

Art-ish Stuff-Toys for every medieval kid!

2009-10-03T23:11:00.005-06:00

Not working on art so much since Feb-Mar, sadly. No money for shows or supplies. Sigh. Stupid economy.

Been learning new things though, new tapestry techniques and embroidery stitches, and took up a new hobby, in the context of my old hobby (Living History)-Medieval toy making! And it even tied into my modern artwork! (Though that will have to wait for the next entry).

Sadly, I failed to get pictures of my leather 10th Cen. ball, or my first rag doll, but here's my second!

The doll is based on a Roman Era doll found in Egypt. Doll body and clothing are made of linen, all hand-stitched, and stuffed with sewing scraps.

The costume is meant to represent an early 14th Cen. cotehardie, and shift. The idea of using a later period costume comes from this set of doll clothing found in Russia.

The hair is of an unknown fibre given to me by someone who found it entirely too soft to work with for whatever they had gotten it for. It's VERY soft, and definitely has some real hair (the white fibres), which give an interesting going-grey look, though I don't think I'll use it again, as it's a bit too flyaway looking. I don't remember the inspiration for the hairstyle.

Doll was put into a gift bag for Gleann Abhann at Estrella 2009, from An Tir.

Doll #3 was SUPPOSED to be a 14th Cen. costume based on the then-Queen of Atenveldt's research (as that was the Estrella gift bag it was destined for), but apparently turned out more Viking-looking.

Doll is made of linen, based on the same Roman artifact as the above, and stuffed with sewing scraps. Under-tunic is made of cotton (yellow-it was the only bright yellow fabric I had), and either linen or cotton (white) of a similar weight fabric, I can't remember. Over-tunic is made of linen. Both doll and clothing entirely hand-stitched, with linen thread for the decorative stitching.

Hat is linen, hair is silk dyed with some natural dye, though I don't know which, as it was from my stash of dye-sample leftovers.

I was given to understand the little girl who received it loved it, and that it was named Inga, after the then-Queen of An Tir, (it's the bright yellow braids...). I got a couple of very cute pictures of her with it; however, as she's not my child and I don't have permission I'm not going to post them, though I thank those who passed them on!

Doll #4, again a Roman era doll, though I changed the way I did the arms due to the shape of the linen scraps I had available. The arms are made separately, instead of as a single long tube sewn across the back of the body, and are sewn onto the sides at a single point with multiple stitches, to give them a semi-jointed movement. The linen was natural coloured rather than white this time. Hand-stitched again, and I believe also stuffed with sewing scraps (though it might have been polyfil this time-the horse I made at the same time was).

For a change, I dressed the Roman era doll in a Roman era dress! Chiton (white under-dress) is linen, with yellow stitching to represent the gold fibulae that would have been used to pin it. The stola (red), a garment signifying marriage, is made of cotton turban material. The braided belt is made of...I can't remember... scraps of thread, probably; likely cotton.

Hair is done in pearl cotton embroidery thread, and based on some of the simpler hairstyles worn in the Roman era.

Doll was destined for a gift bag given to Ealdormere at Pennsic 38.

One of these times I'll remember to take a picture of one of the dolls BEFORE I put clothes on it.

Edit to add: Basic doll form pictures here.

A Day Without Cats on the Internet

2009-09-09T00:00:00.001-06:00

A Day Without Cats on the Internet? I don't THINK so!!!!!

Jack (Worship-teh-Belleh!) Sprat

Jack (again), my Mighty Skein-and-Butterfly Hunter

Persephone (But-I'm-CUTE!), Queen of the Universe.

Persephone 'helping' again.

I promise to get back to blogging art soon. I have been working, honest! Just have a hard time photographing anything where I live and no photography studio space to use.

Looms

2009-01-28T02:53:00.006-07:00

These are the looms the Polar Bear built me, plus one jury-rigged from an embroidery frame. I mostly use them for tapestry weaving, though one was built for a pile-rug weaving class I was teaching.

They're basic frame looms, out of 1 and 1/4" x 1 and 1/4". Cheap and easy to build.

The dots on the top are inlaid inch and 1/2 inch marks, because the Polar Bear is an overachiever. And the runes spell out "This loom not of period design", because it was used in a display of medieval tapestry weaving and someone said the loom should be marked as not being a design of the medieval period, and because the Polar Bear thinks he's funny.

Sadly, so do I.

Sometimes. :)

The sides have slots drilled part of the way through the wood on the inside (about 1/2 an inch) near the bottom, with a 1" diameter dowel resting in them. The slots are about 3 inches long, so the dowel can be used to tension the warp.

There are grooves on the front and back of the bottom horizontal piece, where tie-downs to hold the dowel under tension can go, without rubbing on the slot in the removable base the loom sits in.

The advantage of this design is that the dowel can be raised enough to allow even a new, thick spool of my favourite warp thread to pass under it, and the tensioning dowel is stable and pretty tight in the slots (it's not removable), so the loom can be turned on its side to warp up without needing a hand to hold the rod in place, which I find easier.

This is the loom made for a rug weaving class. I needed it quick so it wasn't finished as fancily as the previous. I wanted a heddle rod to speed up the rug weaving, which I don't use in tapestry weaving since my weft is rarely passing under more than a dozen thread in a pick, so the Polar Bear built a basic frame loom, with rests for the heddle rod.

This loom fits in the same removable base. Unlike the previous loom, the upper horizontal at the bottom is fixed. I wouldn't have bothered with it at all except I didn't want the warp threads to pass around the horizontal piece that fit into the base. Especially the way it was warped up for the rug class (see picture two below).

For tension, there's a loose dowel that can be hung from the top of the loom. This is a whole lot easier to make than the loom with the slots in the sides. But I find it a pain to warp up, because you have to hang the tensioning rod first, and it has to be warped up standing upright unless you have extra hands to help you.

Also, you have to leave room at both the top and the bottom of the frame for the spool of warp thread to pass, which means that while these are both the same overall size, I have several inches less usable warp on this second frame, if I warp up this way.

It was designed to warp up this way for the class (this is one of the student's looms, with a permanent base and better heddle rests), and I discovered after I got it home that the space between the two bottom horizontal pieces on mine isn't big enough for a newer spool of my usual warp thread to fit through. Works fine for this other kind of warp up though, if you warp up on the two warp sticks first then wrap the whole warp onto the loom.

The removable base. 2" x 8" (or maybe 10") with 2" x 2" mounted on it. Two holes drilled through both 2" x 2"s, with matching holes in all the frame loom bottoms, and a couple of pegs to hold the frame in place. The base is quite heavy and the loom doesn't rock.

Making the base removable means we can pack the loom flat, as space is often at a premium on our road trips. Flying, I would just take the frame, which fits in our largest suitcase, and not bother with the base.

This is the jury-rigged loom, from a small scrolling embroidery frame, a couple of pegs from my spool rack, and a couple of shoelaces, for a miniature tapestry. Just to show you can make a loom out of anything! :)

The stand, for those who are interested, is a couple of pieces of wood, 3/4" x 3", about 2 and 1/2 feet tall, with cross-pieces for feet. there's three holes at the top for adjustable height and the bolts can go through the holes already in the scrolling frame side pieces. You'd want heavier feet than I have (mine are just made with the same wood as the verticals), because the whole thing rocks when I'm using it, unless I put my feet on the stand's feet.

A break from serious stuff 2

2009-01-11T08:03:00.002-07:00

My second project was birds. I like birds.

I didn't bother finishing my first attempt as it was clearly misshapen, this was my second. Felted wool, stuffed with sewing scraps. The wool is coat-weight, so I just butted the fabric edges up against each other. Two identical pieces for the sides and head, and a bullet shaped piece for the bottom. The point of the bullet only came just up the front of the bird. The body was too slender and it didn't stand up at all.

I lengthened the bullet shaped piece to come up to just under the chin. The body looks right now, but the head is too small, at least for a corvid, which was what I was going for.

I also changed the stitch. I had been using herringbone, but since the thread only crossed the seam on top of the fabric the seams kept collasping inward if I pulled them too tight, making it hard to get the edges of the cloth to butt up against each other closely. I used the same stitch as used on baseballs here, not sure what it's called, other than 'baseball stitch'.

Expanded the head, tail's too short, and I didn't bother closing it. Melton wool, with baseball stitch. The green thread is tapestry wool. Stuffed with some indigo dyed unspun wool that got felted in a too-hot indigo dye bath.

A comparison shot which reminds me WAY too much of an old picture I have of dead corvidae laid out in a tray together.

This was my first attempt at a sewing it in a thinner cloth with an internal seam. I wanted to do a bunch of them as gifts and for my own Christmas tree, but ran out of time. Next year.

Black cotton twill, wood bead eyes, stuffed with warp thrums that were too short to use for tapestry weaving. I didn't add any seam allowance to the pattern (same as for the purple raven), to see how much I would lose in appearance. Looks more like a jackdaw than a raven. When it was nearly done I realized I was losing so much in the tail it almost disappeared, so I added on a piece on the bottom of the bullet shaped piece and made the top piece with a long wedge to be inserted into the seam that runs down the middle of the back. I'm not sure about the shape on the end itself, but I like the wedge bit. Would also mean being able to make tail feathers of a different colour than the body if I wanted.

A comparison between the two methods using the same pattern.

A break from serious stuff

2009-01-11T05:38:00.005-07:00

After spending the better part of my time for 3 1/2 months trying to get pieces done for various gallery show submissions, I decided to spend December on less serious work (also proto-types and experiments for a possible Etsy shop in the new year!)

My first project was personalized cat toys for several cat friends. KC and Faith-Boo are two tortie cats, sisters of different mothers. Faith-Boo's has a draw-string on the bottom, and is filled with a draw-string baggie with catnip (for easier washing). KC is stuffed with mylar ribbons from a child's cheerleading pompom, for crinklies.

Linen, scrap embroidery floss, embroidery based on markings and eye colours of the original cats. Faith is rather diffused in her colouring, and since it's a catnip filled toy and she's called the Tiny Texas Tortie Tornado for a reason, I went easy on the embroidery on her. :) I couldn't resist going overboard on KC, though.

Missy's is also a draw-string-closed catnip toy. The tube is made of several sandwiched layers of cotton twill covered with beige striped linen, with a catnip baggie inside. The head is stuffed with sewing scraps. Her nose really looks like that, pink outlined in black. It's adorable!

Smokey and BJ are two grey littermates, who, frankly, I can't tell apart in pictures. So they could tell who was who, Smokey has his beloved Mr Snail appliqued on, and I replaced BJ's tail with his Snakie toy. Both are made of linen, and the snail and snake are cotton and embroidery floss. BJ and Smokey's head are stuffed with sewing scraps, and there's a jingly ball in the bottom part of BJ.

Sol is Smokey and BJ's litter-brother, pure black with a white 'milk-moustache'. I put a spring in his tail, 'cause he apparently likes them. Cotton twill, embroidery floss, stuffed with sewing scraps.

Batman is another black kitty (no relation). Cotton twill, and like the KC doll from the same pattern, stuffed with mylar ribbons.

Abigail is Batman's littermate (as are Reggie and Riley below). She's a calico, with a mostly black back and hood and white belly and paws. Cotton twill, embroidery floss, based on the same design as the Faith-Boo toy, without the giant floofy tail.

Reggie's a brown tabby, linen, embroidery floss, stuffed with sewing scraps, an extra long tail, I'm hoping he and BJ will like grabbing the long limbs and tails and drag the toys around.

Riley's also a brown tabby, but with a white belly, which you can sort of see here. Linen, cotton twill, with a jingly ball and sewing scraps inside. He's a bigger cube-cat than Sol, because I needed to get the ball inside.

Jack is actually my own cat. I have an idea for a Persephone toy as well, but didn't think of it in time to alter the toy I had already made her before I thought of personalized toys.

Cotton twill, embroidery floss, feathers, jingly ball. He's actually the same size as Sol, as I had figured out how to get the ball in with two sides open (mostly I sewed him as six separate pieces of cloth with the legs moved to the side, instead of front and back, which left me with two seams that met that I could leave open, that didn't need a limb or ears sewn in). The feathers are an experiment in how to secure them firmly in a toy, before I'm willing to make cat toys for sale that have feathers.

Or it would be, if I could get either of the little rotters to actually play with it!

The nice thing is, all these toys were made with nothing more than some small scraps of fabric I keep a bin of (most pieces are irregular and under 30cm square and are left over from other projects), some scrap bits of embroidery floss that were too small to wind on a bobbin, but too long to throw out, and the scraps from cutting out the toys themselves (plus a three-pack of jingly balls).

Several of these were reverse engineered from things I saw elsewhere. A few are so close to the original that I won't make them as anything but gifts, unless I find out they weren't original designs, others are changed so much I don't think they're even recognizable to their original inspiration.

"Mother"

2008-12-16T01:51:00.005-07:00

"Mother"
2008
tapestry (pulled warp), found object-wool, chenille, linen, rock
24 cm x 14 cm x 14 cm

The rock is four shades of unspun wools in what appear to natural grey colours that I got secondhand somewhere. It usually comes in 3 to 12 ply of pencil rovings, I used 2 plys (plies? they both look wrong!), and it packs down really well at 12 epi, with a thick warp that should probably not be warped at higher than 10 epi, (I like using more epi for 3D pieces as it gives a thicker, sturdier body to the work).

The moss is chenille, left over from a classmate's project. I think Bronwyn, dyed by her too, I believe. The grass is just some of my usual tapestry wool stash, tied in a sehna (pile weave) knot.

The walls inside the figure are scrap beige linen, and the sand is wool sewn around thick cardboard. The wool is scrap too. I think cinnamon-dyed, left over from dye class experiments.

The rocks are from my stash.

I'm a little unhappy with the edges of the cave opening, but I haven't figured out how to change it without changing the appearance of the piece in a major way. I didn't want the edge of the interior fabric or the seam to show, but the whip stitch with a piece of the wool the body is made from causes the edges to curl. I photographed it with interior pins to straighten it, but I can't send it off like that, and don't really like the look of the edge so much either (it's more noticeable in person). Blergh. I'm really happy with this piece otherwise.

I just wish my cat would stop trying to steal it.

Memento Mori (Ilex II)

2008-12-10T23:44:00.003-07:00

Memento Mori (Ilex II)
2008
14cm x 14cm
Tapestry, collage

"Memento Mori" is a Latin phrase meaning "Remember you are mortal". It's also the name a genre of art covering art created in any artistic technique which serves to remind the viewer of their mortality.

Ilex is the genus Holly.

The holly leaf piece is 9 1/2cm x 5cm, 20 epi, wool and cotton embroidery floss.

The holly branch piece is 5 1/4cm x 4 1/2cm, 24 epi, wool, silk.

The background is a blown up detail of the holly tree in the fifth tapestry in the Hunt Of the Unicorn Tapestries, a portion of which is the basis of the holly branch piece.

The holly leaf skeleton was collected from the yard of my old home in Vancouver. The leaves fall and over the course of a few months the skin dries out and peels away. I love these things, they're so cool. I'd never seen a leaf do that before. The other trees in the yard didn't do that.

Something a little different-embroidery

2008-11-25T22:19:00.005-07:00

An embroidered piece I submitted to Stitch Spectacular, for their show in Jan.

"She Tosses Her Soul After Every Passing Feathered Thing"
2008
silk (damaged shirt), silk and cotton thread (salvaged from sweaters and scrap floss)

from "And This Is How She Feels", a loose collection of poetry

And this is how she feels
Tossing her soul after every passing feathered thing

Words were first embroidered in stem stitch, and the thicker parts of the font were then done in satin stitch over the stem stitch line.

Magpie feathers, stem stitched shaft, shadow satin stitch for the barbs.

I really shouldn't have used satin for such long stitches. It's been a long time since I did much embroidery and I had forgotten the messiness it can become. They're pretty neat right now, but I think I may need to couch them to stabilize them.

I'm not as happy with the sleeve holes as I'd hoped. They're done in a deliberately messy satin-like stitch, and were supposed to look a little like wings had been ripped off, but don't really. I'm not sure how I could fix that.

ED. This piece will be appearing in Stitch Spectacular, at Dimensions Gallery.com/, in Savannah, Georgia; Jan 9-Feb 4, 2009.

For Dea

2008-08-17T00:00:00.002-06:00

Dea (Dianne) Heron 1948-2008

Dea appeared to have passed away in her sleep, with a book in her hand, on Aug 11, 2008.

She was a lovely person; intelligent, kind, with a wicked sense of humour, and even though I hadn't had the chance to know her well, I thought of her often. While she wasn't the first to introduce me to the world of textile arts, she was one of the people who first encouraged me to take it up again, which eventually led me into being a textile artist professionally. She was also the one to introduce me to the scaryscary world of fibre and needlework shows. Ten+ years later I still haven't used all the yarn I got that day....

Well, THAT didn't work

2008-08-09T18:38:00.000-06:00

Remember this?

Not so much with the working. So I stopped halfway through, since I was under a deadline, and needed the other half of the warp for another piece.

I was using silk, single strand for the ghostly face. I think it would have worked if I had been planning on only doing the vague shape of a head, but even looking at it closely in person, you can barely tell the difference between the yellow hair and the flesh coloured skin. I can kind of see where the nose and mouth are, but the eye is completely lost.

I think I'm going to try it again with thicker thread for the face (or doubling-quadrupling the thread).

The various black threads for the raven look really good though. Better in person, the flash exaggerates the differences.

Sing Your Dead to Sleep

2008-08-09T13:36:00.003-06:00

“Sing Your Dead To Sleep”
2008
Tapestry (pulled warp) - wool, linen, beads
18 cm x 12 cm x 10 1/2 cm

The War Queen III

are we lost
and widow-damned
...sing the dead to sleep
who no more raise the sun among us
who no more lay the stars to rest

Brenda Gerritsma, 2003

“Sing Your Dead to Sleep” is one of a collection of roughly figural pieces I am working on; a kind of fetish doll, meant to house a strong emotional concept, rather than to impose energy. This piece is one of mourning an overwhelming loss, portraying a personal ritual of farewell.

Linen warp, wool weft. One of my few pieces not made predominantly with recycled/reclaimed/secondhand materials, the linen and wool were purchased, though for another project. The beads are woven in, the white discs coming from an old necklace no one wanted, and the seed beads were also purchased for another project. The green branching plant was embroidered on after shaping, with long and short bullion stitches.

The body was woven with large slits, with the weft on either side being pulled deliberately too tight to cause the slits to gape. It was also woven with curling patterns in the warp, which are really only visible when seeing it closely in person (you can see it a little between the head and the stitching and beads on the first picture).

I Will Give you Only Winter

2008-08-08T13:20:00.005-06:00

“I Will Give you Only Winter”
2008
Tapestry - various fibre (recycled), beads
15 cm x 11 cm

I walk in a shadow wood
where you will not find me
I turn to shadow
to pass there within
do not love me
for I will give you only winter
to turn your tears to ice

Brenda Gerritsma, 2006

This piece is almost entirely recycled, including the warp. I think the white silk in the face and the cream silk used for the lips were the only thing threads I purchased new. Crochet cotton, rayon embroidery floss, cotton twine (same as warp), multi-strand silver (flat strands twined with thread) were used for the background, and the small iridescent beads were woven in on white sewing thread. The body was done with white and black silk floss, cream silk embroidery thread, thrums of unknown fibre and off-white cotton floss. The hair is boucle of unknown fibre, with pearl seed beads woven in. The pearls were definitely second hand. I can't remember if I bought the iridescent beads or not. I've have them lying around a long time.

The warp was some kind of cotton twine-like thread I had lying around. Bad for warp, I lost two warp strands and a couple looked in danger of fraying apart when I had to stop because I was getting too close to the top of the loom a touch shy of the original design. I think I may just stick to linen warp in the future for anything over a couple inches wide. It's the only thing I haven't had grief with.

It was originally supposed to be 15 cm x 15 cm, but after a slight design change in the hair, I think it actually looks better this way. It would have been nice to get the entire piece in stark white and silver, but even the white silk isn't truly white, and all of my linen, silk and wool threads are actually off-white through cream coloured. Looked very 70's.

Also, this piece sucked to weave. I think I took out at least 90% of it at least once, as one thing after another just didn't work right.

Unusual wefts

2008-05-25T05:39:00.006-06:00

A few days ago, I asked the Tapestry list I'm on what unusual wefts they've tried. I thought I should post the ones I've tried.

1/ Cotton chenille: nice to work with, nice furry visual, kept together perfectly. I really want to try silk chenille.

2/ Metal thread: don't know what kind, ok to work with. The metal strip seems to be twined with thin filaments of some sort, then plied. Nice, because you can be a bit rougher beating it in than I would be with metal wrapped around a silk or rayon core.

3/ Rayon chenille: it was multicoloured and came out a nice speckly furry look, but either it didn't pack down well, or the core thread is showing because I have 'lice'. Lots of tufts pulled out. Could be a function of rayon chenille in general, or of this brand in particular.

4/ Moda Dea 'Dream': scraps from another project, long tufts sticking out all over.

5/ Handspun: (by someone clearing not practiced at it-possibly me!), wouldn't pack down at all, though it would probably be fine if it were evenly done.

6/ Boucle:weaves well, would make a great tapestry sheep!

7/ Mohair: weaves well, very 'hairy' looking

8/ I don't even know what this is: looks like a strand of unspun/soft-spun cotton that alternates between thick and thin, and it's stitched into a squiggle with a couple of fine strands of thread (in this case, popcorn-butter yellow -the class referred to it as the "popcorn yarn" which it does look like when woven.

9/Long eyelash yarn. A nuisance to weave, as you have to pull the tufts out as you weave if you want them loose, but it packs down well. Tufts are kind of long though. Not sure what it would be useful for.

10/ Beldings Artsyl for Crochet and Knitting. Apparently vintage thread. I'm having trouble finding out much about it. The Company was well known for silk production, and was founded some time in the later 19th century. They had mills in various locations in the US and in Montreal Canada (which is where this thread was apparently made). I can't find any info on this particular thread itself, though. "Artsyl" suggests artificial silk to me. Feels like it as well.

I HATE this thread with a burning passion. A few of the spools still had their paper strips on, but any one that the strip is off, the thread practically springs off the spool, like wire. Doesn't help that I only have it in pastel pink, pastel green and pastel purple. Bleh. Beats down without any fuzziness, with almost creepy perfection.

11/ Metallic plastic strip from a child's cheerleading pom-pom. Lots of lice. Can only be beaten down in a closed shed (it just springs back up if you beat it in the natural shed).

12/ Short eyelash yarn. I like this one a lot. Looks like funfur.

13/ Very odd yarn. A thick strand of unspun fibres (feels like acrylic), with a thin strand of tightly spun (single) of same, wrapped with a very fine strand, that spirals around the other two. My camera died before I could get a good picture, but some ares look like slightly fuzzy regular tapestry weaving, with scattered areas of fluffiness. Kind of like clouds, if clouds were woven. :)

Not much progress

2008-05-19T04:59:00.002-06:00

Not much progress on this piece. I realized after the last post on it that the needle I was using was one of my sharp large needles and I was stabbing myself with it too often. I wasn't stabbing myself hard or anything, so not a big deal, really...except for being allergic to my needles! And since I'm not willing to destroy one of my lovely, expensive, gold-plated, I'm-not-allergic-to-these-at-least needles by using it to weave through wire, I had to switch to one of my blunt tapestry needles which I had thought I HAD been using.

Only, the tips are too thick to fit between the warps without pushing them aside far enough they don't spring back, so I had to pack down with my fingertips, which doesn't work very well when the warps are too close, and I'm not very good at doing that without pulling my wefts too tight. So now I have some warp-drift going on where the background meets the raven's head.

Also, several wires are crooked just above where I'm working and I can't straighten them out without making the ones beside them crooked in the process.

I really want to at least do one sample with an all-wire warp, just to see, even though I think in the end I'd be better off just inserting a single wire warp every so many warp threads. But I think, regretfully, I will have to write this one off, and try again with a lower warp sett. Especially since I keep procrastinating working on it, and designing other tapestries instead. Anything not to work on it really.

I've even done DISHES to avoid it! Blech!

Madder Dyeing

2008-05-13T18:22:00.003-06:00

Madder dyeing experiments. Mostly for Viking Age Re-enactment (my hobby on weekends). These were just sample bits tossed in with a friend's very very organized dye sampling to achieve a specific shade of red made by the Dutch and/or Flemish people in the Late Medieval period. A couple of the dyes/mordant combinations can't be traced back far enough for me to use for Viking Age clothing and textiles, but I'm completely in love with the Brazilwood/Madder combination, especially on the wool. Sadly, I'm a little leery of using it over-much as Brazilwood is an endangered species of tree, even though Maiwa, my main source for dyes, uses only reclaimed wood for their brazilwood dye.

I think I need to try cochineal/madder, see what that does.

Unfortunately, I hadn't really thought through how things were going to be dyed. Normally, at home when sampling, I use a large canning pot with the rack in upside down, and put each of the dye liquors in separate mason jars* with all the wee pieces of sample fabric floating freely inside, and fill the pot until it covers the jars up to about 2/3. I can do 6 sample lots at a time, 9 if I don't mind putting 3 in the centre where they could get hotter than the other 6.

*Leave the lids off.

But since the dyeing was being done in large pots (which was kind of the point, seeing as how we were sampling how a couple different pots affect the dyes) I couldn't really do that. Some of the samples were only about 2 inches square and gauzy, and I was afraid they'd get lost, so they got stuffed in stockings my friend was kind enough to give me, which really isn't the best idea. My samples are kinda spotty. Next time, I sew a cord through the corners and spread them out like charms on a bracelet, if I'm sampling in larger pots.

Most of the samples are still useful. There's only one I didn't bother putting in; it had gotten rolled up inside a couple other samples and didn't really get any dye at all. And one skein of silk was also rolled in with it and only got dye in patches. Oh well.

I learned a bunch and got some cool samples, so I'm happy. My handwoven wool came out beautifully. The silk is definitely more finicky about being free-floating than the wool. Brazilwood seems to discharge indigo. Seriously! When I untied the knot holding the wool thread samples together, the only reason I knew which was which was from the way I'd tied them in. If I'd had to guess, I would have guessed wrong, the straight madder/brazilwood was DARKER than the overdyed thread, and the pale bit where the overdyed piece had been tied in showed no sign of blue!

Cottons. Yes I know, if I want reds on cellulose fibres I need to use tannins. I have, though, in the past, and still got pinks. I'm trying to find out what tannin sources (that don't dye the fibres themselves) were used in the Viking Age, but haven't stumbled across that info yet. Not that I've been looking hard either!

Linen. I love the pinks from the Madder/Brazilwood. Tin makes the linen too orange for my tastes, though my friend thinks the tinning in the pot dissolved and the orange may be a reaction from the metal the pot is made of, possibly cheap aluminium. The Madder and Madder in Copper are both quite pretty.

Silk is spotty. Madder and madder-in-copper are actually pretty much the same colour. The madder-in-tin is definitively orange. The madder/brazilwood is strangely weak on the silk.

The madder-in-tin was less orange on the wool than the silk, though still definitely orange leaning red. The madder and madder-in-copper were similar again. On the fabrics the madder-in-copper was slightly bluer-tinged, but the madder dyed the threads darker than madder-in-copper.I'm tempted to try some of my left-over sample packets in a cool madder vat, and one with pieces of copper in it, see if it turns out any redder.

The madder/brazilwood is just gorgeous. The picture doesn't do it justice.

The Madder/Indigo overdyes. The threads were dyed with indigo first, mostly because it's leftovers from another project, but dyeing first with indigo is apparently recommended anyway, especially with a chemical vat, since at least one of the chemicals is a bleaching agent.

Next in queue- "Notwithstanding, my heart to eat"

2008-05-09T17:20:00.006-06:00

Next flat, square-ish miniature tapestry in queue. The Cartoon process (for my non-tapestry weaving friends being directed here from elsewhere in the web).

This is a fairly typical process for me, as I currently have no light-table or any better image manipulation program than MSPaint (we're working on that too).

The original rough sketch in my "Inspiration book", roughly done, just enough to remember the image I had in my head.

Since I kind of suck at sketching, and really, realistic birds are beyond my limited abilities, I went searching on-line for images of ravens in more or less the pose I wanted. I'm not going to post the original photo here, as it is someone's copyrighted image.

This what it looked like after I spent a few days "cartoon-izing" it. Colour gradations were simplified, colours in each section of the cartoon are all one of the colours that pixels in that section really were. Some manipulations of lines were also done, in places where I could see following the actual lines would cause problems in weaving the piece.

The hand is the same one I used in "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine". It was cartoon-ized from the hand in panel 5 of The Hunt of the Unicorn series of tapestries (c 1500 CE), "The Unicorn is Tamed by the Maiden".

This is the cartoon with colour, as I had originally conceived the piece. I was never able to get the blood drops in the rough sketch to look right.

This is the working cartoon.

However, after looking at it a couple days, I decided first, it was kind of boring, and second, the raven might be a bit too complicated and finicky for a miniature, at my current skill and patience level.

Then I was inspired, primarily by a number of contacts in Flickr who do beautiful image layering in their photographs (McNeney, Daniel Colvin, Teodoratan, Anke Merzbach), with an idea. So I simplified the cartoon...

took the head from "A mon seul désir", in The Lady and the Unicorn series of tapestries (c. 1500 CE)...

cartoonized it...

simplified it...

and layered it under the image of the raven.

Sadly, MSPaint doesn't have a function that would allow me to colour it to show what the final piece is supposed to look like. The raven and hand will be solid images, as in the above colour cartoon, though simplified. The face will be done using the transparency technique I used with the ghost images in As Demented Spectres Dance.

This...this is a PIA.

2008-05-04T20:07:00.004-06:00

Sample piece for an idea I'm working on. Copper wire warp, 16 epi. Weft, randomly selected from my stash of thread bits, cotton I think. First attempt at using wire as warp.

I've used wire as weft before, in pattern weaving, but due to the nature of metal wire, I haven't had much success with it in tapestry. In order to get the wire to bend around the warp, instead of the warp bending around the wire I needed to pass it under only one warp at a time and I ended up using wire so fine it takes forever. And it still didn't cover the warp.

Not really what I was going for. Sigh. But I need something to create solid structure in a 3D piece, without using something chemical.

Not surprisingly, it's a pain in the butt weaving with a wire warp. Surprisingly, not as big a pain as I feared.

I always use needles for weaving in the weft with my miniature tapestry pieces, at least so far, so I'm already used to it. And my warp is usually under the highest tension I can manage, so I'm not used to a flexible warp anyway. The biggest difference is that I don't want to bend the wires as I pass the weft under, so I have to go a lot slower and pass it under fewer warps at a time. Still, less of a pain than using it as weft!

The biggest two annoyances are the fact that the warps are shiny, and not very straight. No matter what I do, I can't get them straight, and with the light glinting off the wires, it's often difficult to see when two have gotten crossed or to get them uncrossed, sometimes until after I've pulled the weft through.

Since it is only a 2" x 2" sample, I'm doing it precisely the way I was told not to, by people with better knowledge of the properies of metal than I. Fixed at both ends, I have to bend the warps a little to get the needle between.
But if you warp up the wire with a little give (which actually makes it easier to weave anyway, I've noticed [one side is tighter than the other]), and you're careful to keep the needle as perpendicular to the warp as possible, it shouldn't be a problem for a smaller piece. Copper, at least, has just enough elasticity to when not pulled tight to bounce back from the amount of bending needed for the needle to go under it. On a larger piece I can see how what I was told about bending them too often and risking snapping the wire might be a problem. Though really, I think a lot of the problem there would be a problem of impatience and not wanting to take that much time when the piece was larger.

The other option would be to pass the needle from front to back, and back to front between each warp pair, which really would take forever.

I wonder if leaving the top of the warp loose would work?

Also, 16 epi was too high. I need to try this again at 12.

This....this is not helping either.

The Marriage of Sir Gawaine

2008-03-24T06:10:00.002-06:00

The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, 2008
4" x 4"
Cotton, wool/rayon, silk.

For the American Tapestry Alliance Small Format show "Woven Gems"
(TECO Plaza Art Gallery, 702 No. Franklin St., Tampa, Florida June 1 to July 31, 2008)

No detail photos, it's only 4" x 4" after all! But here's the cartoon (I worked it up on the computer and printed it).

I used cotton crochet thread for the warp. I understand it's not really a good warp for tapestry, since it frays (I did notice it going fuzzy), but I didn't have any linen or wool thin enough for 20 epi, and since it was such a small tapestry, with little loom waste at the top, I thought I'd risk it. Besides, I've been making a conscious effort to make as much as possible of my art out of salvaged, scrap and secondhand materials, and as little purchased new as possible.

The warp was purchased secondhand at a thrift store. The silk thread in the hand and face was left over silk thread from a project, dyed in a madder exhaust bath (basically, the leftover dye in a dyebath after whatever was being dyed in it is done to the colour desired). The brown silk for the hair was weaving scraps from a silk weaving studio. The cotton weft is leftover bits from my embroidery thread scrap bin, and the black wool/rayon is secondhand, but I don't remember where I got it anymore. Only the red silk in the holly berries, the green in the holly leaves and the white of his eye was bought new by me.

I'm still having problems with the edges drawing in, though despite the fact that I can SEE the difference, my ruler assures me it really is only 1/8 of an inch from top to bottom. I measured several times!

I really like this tapestry. Enough that I'm tempted to weave it again larger. But I'd have been much happier if I hadn't already been having trouble with my wrists, which only got worse under in the short amount of time I had left to finish it after meeting deadlines on other work. I need to find a better way to do this. With such a high warp sett, I've been weaving with small tapestry needles (for the non-weavers/embroiderers-tapestry needles are blunt, often thicker needles, meant for canvas embroidery work and not for weaving tapestries despite the name).

I've been eyeing some thin scrap wooden dowels I have lying around, wondering if I could carve them into miniature tapestry bobbins.....

A Sneaking Doubt

2007-12-27T01:21:00.000-07:00

"Sneaking Doubt"
10cm x 11cm x 11cm, 2007
linen warp; wool, cotton, linen, silk, rayon weft

Inspired by a conversation with the Unimommer. She is one of those sneaking doubts you get that tell you you can't do something, can't be something, have no talent, no originality, no skill. The Sneaking Doubt that is, not the Unimommer. The Unimommer is very supportive!

Sneaky little thing... I tried photographing her several times since I finished her a few months ago, and she just would not stop casting weird shadows.

Pulled warp tapestry, first attempt at figural shape. Still need some work on keeping my edges even on non-rectangular tapestries. And I think making them taller would make it easier to pull the warps and tie them off.

I also need to get some hatpins to stick in her. Or maybe stuff her and turn her into a pin-cushion.

Dona Nobis Pacem

2007-11-07T07:18:00.001-07:00

Would it suffice you
were I to offer my heart
bleeding and raw
precisely removed
in the surgery
you have created
in this cage
of our lives
Would it suffice you
were I to lay down my life
in the battles
you deem worthy
to gain what you seek
Or would you require my soul
burning within
caught between the walls
you build and build and build
of your banalities
and your endless reasons
and your demigods
of logic and theology

As Demented Spectres Dance

2007-10-02T03:03:00.001-06:00

As Demented Spectres Dance, 2007
14" x 6 1/2"
linen, wool, unknown fibre
pulled warp tapestry

A test piece I recently finished.

I was experimenting with flat, shaped tapestry and with creating transparency in tapestry (like the sleeve in "A mon seul désir" from The Lady and The Unicorn tapestry series

Part of the experimentation with transparency was to see what different thicknesses of white yarn would look like. I knew thinner thread would make a more transparent figure, but wanted to SEE it. This white thread was the same thread as most of the background threads, a 2-ply Quebecois.

This thread was the thinner wool yarn I usually do my finer tapestry pieces in.

Some fine, scrap yarn. Finer than the tapestry yarn, and I think it was rayon, so shiny too, to see if the shininess shows (not really).

And for the curious, this is a picture of the piece on the loom, nearly done, to show how it's done. I worked from the other side.

The title of the piece (or rather the later piece this was a test for) comes from one of my poems.

Forsaken

and perhaps you only linger here in dreams
as demented spectres dance
what other songs would you sing now
forsaken one
you are the child of an unspoken longing
your feet tap through the shadows
and you raise your arms to the cold
and distant blessings of the stars

Dona Nobis Pacem

2007-06-06T03:57:00.001-06:00

The War Queen III

are we lost
and widow-damned
...sing the dead to sleep
who no more raise the sun among us
who no more lay the stars to rest

Brenda Gerritsma

New photos of "Irrational"

2007-05-28T18:09:00.000-06:00

New photos of Irrational

As it looks now.

What my valley looks like now

2007-03-14T02:44:00.000-06:00

Pictures were taken Feb 12, from the monument to 12-Foot Davis, overlooking the Peace and Heart (Hart? I'm a little unclear on that-it's the river no one ever talks about...) Rivers.

It was cold.

And there are bears.

Just saying, is all. We didn't see one or anything.

But they're there. I could feel their beady little eyes, wondering if we'd brought cake.

Irrational

2007-01-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

"Irrational"
size indeterminate and changing, work in progress and still attached to ball
white crochet cotton, 2006

I learned to crochet in the spring of '06, and as I was sitting in my livingroom, randomly hooking string, I started thinking about the stories my mother had told me of when she was young, and the emphasis even the schools placed on teaching women to do fancy work like crochet and embroidery. My mother and her mother did very precise, mathematical work, much like a lot of my own work.

I started thinking about how for centuries women were believed to be more illogical and irrational than men, and how this was completely refuted by the precision of my mother's work. So I decided to see what would happen if I deliberately tried to crochet in an unplanned, and completely irrational way. This piece is the result. I plan to comtinue it until the entire ball is done.

This piece was shown in the Capilano College Grad Student Art Show at the Seymour Art Gallery in Deep Cove, North Vancouver, BC, May 9-June 4, 2006.

Living vicariously

2006-11-21T00:59:00.000-07:00

For those of you snow lovers who wish to live vicariously, this is the view from my balcony a week ago. Jack even decided to be brave and check it out. As you can see, he got about as far I would before he decided he'd had enough. Most of it is gone now, we had a couple warm days, though we should be getting some in fresh tomorrow. The Pictures below are from a week earlier.

This is How She Feels- a series of small shrines

2006-11-11T23:40:00.000-07:00

Damned by Psyche's Wisdom
17cm x 16cm x 18cm, 2006
kozo, cat hair, crow feathers, ceramic incense holder

"..damned by Psyche's wisdom..." is a line from a poem of mine. This piece is about a personal search for wisdom. The cat hair represents peace, comfort and home, the feathers, freedom, all contained in an egg shaped ball.

The War Queen
16cm x 15 1/2cm x 17cm, 2006
kozo, madder, teeth, wool, holly leaf skeletons, gold wire, pottery

'The War Queen' is the title of a poem cycle I have been writing. The edge of the ball is tinged red, and a red handprint is on the back, an image of blood on one's hands. The teeth signify an all-consuming hunger, and the prickly holly leaf skeletons inside are pain and ruin. This piece is about the sometimes painful and bloody cost of wisdom and doing what one thinks is right.

When Sophia Wakes

23cm x 20cm x 11cm, 2006

kozo, silk, shells, gold wire, pearl beads, water-eroded coin, indigo, pottery

'When Sophia Wakes' is a line from a poem of mine about the waking of wisdom. The various elements signify the ocean, salt water, tears, and the forms of wisdom and how we pay for them.

Miniature Coptic Tapestry

2006-11-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

Miniature Coptic Tapestry

2 1/2" x 1 1/2", 2006

wool, linen, metal wire, indigo, madder

Based on a fragment of 2nd-3rd century CE Coptic tapestry from Antinoé.

Warp was linen embroidery floss. All weft threads are wool mill ends. Blue, and dark blue-grey threads are dyed with indigo (on white and natural grey wool). Salmon threads are dyed in madder afterbath. Purple and dark green threads are commercially dyed.

My loom was juri-rigged from an embroidery scroll frame (on a stand), a couple pegs from my spool rack, and a pair of shoelaces.

Work was woven with cut lengths of thread, on a blunt needle, which was also used to beat down the weft.

Weft ends were sewn in after the tapestry was finished.

The rod from which it hangs is made of twisted gold-coloured wire.

This piece was shown in the group show "Small Talk" at the Ontario College of Art and Design Student Gallery Oct 11-Nov. 4, 2006.

Dona Nobis Pacem

2006-11-07T02:15:00.000-07:00

I believe we all have a purpose for our existence, that that purpose is unknown, often even to ourselves, but that each person’s purpose is has its place in the wider picture, and therefore that we all owe each other a certain basic respect.

I believe that a person who is given no respect will not feel a need to treat others with respect, so we should give a certain level of respect to even those one might argue have forfeited it, if only to encourage them to improve their behaviour.

I believe that if we wish to survive as a species, we owe it to each other to care about each other and to encourage each other to be better than we already are.

I believe ignorance may be bliss, (though I doubt it) but a person who refuses to learn and to think for themselves cannot understand what they are doing and why. If they do not understand, they cannot correct themselves when they go wrong, and they cannot hope to go beyond the mere obedient repetition of what they were told to do.

I believe that sometimes someone does something so heinous that it necessary to stand up to them, to stop them, but that retaliation is a hammer used to kill a housefly, violence aimed at another is the quickest road to ruin for ourselves, and that bombs don’t solve ANYTHING.

I believe anger, fear, and hatred of another tend to allow the one who causes those emotions in us to have power over us. By refusing to hold on to anger or hatred, refusing to let fear stop us, we take that power back to ourselves. We become hard to intimidate, difficult to exert control over, and almost impossible to tempt or force into doing something we think is wrong.

I believe that one way or another, in the end we will all be held accountable for our actions.

I believe that many people think war is an acceptable answer in certain circumstances, and that they have many valid reasons for believing this, even though I disagree with their conclusions.

But I also believe that Peace is not a luxury. It is a necessity. We will not survive without it.

Oh, and I also believe you should go out and adopt a homeless kitty. It will make you a happier person.

Ok, or maybe a dog, or a ferret, or even a turtle.

Axis Mundi

2006-11-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

"Axis Mundi"

2006

Pile rug technique

96cm x 51cm

Linen, wool, bamboo, bone

“ In many cases the center is conceived as an axis (axis mundi) extending vertically to the pole star and downward to some pivotal point in the abyss. Iconographically, it may be represented as a mountain, a stairway or ladder, a pole or very commonly a tree…” Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image p. 190.

Axis Mundi is a work of personal mythology. While the concept of a tree as the pivotal point around which the universe turns is common among many cultures, like most archetypes, what one sees in it depends upon the person who is doing the looking. For me, it is the oak that stands steadfast and strong, the hazel from which the seeds of inspiration fall, the ash that forms the World Tree on which Odin hung to gain the wisdom of the runes.

Above and below, the roots and branches tangle, many paths to the Celestial realms and to the Underworld, which cross and re-cross each other, too convoluted to follow clearly along their entire length. In the middle is a hazy, indistinct tree, dream-like and perhaps ominous, but just as possibly calming. It is a place of mystery and refuge, a doorway to other worlds.

This piece was shown in the Capilano College Grad Student Art Show at the Seymour Art Gallery in Deep Cove, North Vancouver, BC, May 9-June 4, 2006.

Bright Face of the Moon

2006-11-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

"Bright Face of the Moon"
2006
10 cm x 9 1/2 cm
Tapestry
wool, linen, metallic thread

My eyes
fragment reflections of the sea
on the white pebble you tossed
into the waves

tossed
aside, as casually as shrugging
as a matter of small import
I have never seen
such blank eyes
that do not remember my face
as more than fragment reflections

I am no less than the bright face of the moon
you would obscure with your dead branches

Brenda Gerritsma, 1995

2006-11-05T23:35:00.000-07:00