Blue Pool Potholder

Today's delicious lil artsy potholder looks like a black and white striped air mattress on a cool pool.  Visit my Etsy store:  Island Retreat to see more.

Cherokee Syllabary Cherry Silk Scarf

Here's an interesting new design.  I made this silk scarf using syllables from the Cherokee language.  I won a benefit auction for a used working Nacho Cheese heater, and converted it to a soy wax heater.  I keep the was there all of the time, and when I am planning to do soy wax resist batiking, I flip the switch.  Like a double-boiler the water heats the wax to a low melt, and I don't have to fiddle with the dangerous microwave in my utility room-slash-art studio.  I rarely work in reds, but was making a peppermint swirl tiedye tee for a custom order and had prepared the soy wax resist lettering in advance.  This is made using analine dyes of 3 blended shades of red, so it has shading and is not just a solid vat red.

Most of the clothes in stores is made from cloth which was vat-dyed.   The cloth goes thru a batch of dye and is highly agitated (although not mad ) in order to achieve a consistent monotone of color.  If you've a friend who tells the same joke over and over, you can appreciate how I feel about solid monotone colors.  It is just boring.  It is done because vat dyeing looks better when fabric is dyed before the clothing is constructed.  Or, only after clothing is constructed does nonvat dyeing "look right."  Basically, its easy, quick and cheap to vat dye... if you're doing millions of, ie, yards.

Much more time-consuming and thus expensive is anything ombred (ohm-burred) where the colors shift like watercolor, or tied and dyed as in tiedye and mudme.  This scarf was time-consuming because of making each syllable and its pronunciation.  (Not all Cherokee Syllables are there.  My chart shows 13 rows of 6 columns and some columns have 2 syllables as in Ga Ka and Dla Tla.).  The dyeing itself was rather simple compared to some dyes I use which are prepared with exotic stuff like inner bark, heartwood, fungus, bugs and the like.

This sweet cherry scarf is being listed at Island Retreat on etsy.  You will find a link on the right, perhaps to this very scarf if it is listed.

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Tribute to Robert Frost

Tribute to Robert Frost

I spent many hours on this gorgeous steampunk mirror frame.  It started out as a tacky junk store find, all tired and icky.  But I gave it a new perspective, new paint, and encrusted it with a wealth of interesting texture bits-- copper enamel beads and keys, stamped brass and... yes, a reptile eye.  It is a masculine piece.  The bottom part is a mirror, but I happened to angle it to capture some chandalier danglies and lace curtains that were just hanging in the background.  The more you look at it, the more you see.

A Little Steampunk Bird House

Here's a sweet little birdhouse, in my steampunk style.  To me, birdhouses are symbolic 'nests' like homes or comfy spots.  And I love birds.  We got our first hummingbird nipping at the hanging basket this week, and strong winds on Friday may have blown the little fellow up North.  This birdhouse is an art piece that is listed for sale at Oklahoma Food Cooperative.

Depression Era Wall Quilt, Framed

I made this textile piece for Salina Clinic, and it is framed by NDN Art Gallery in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.  Remember those wonderful aprons you might have seen your grandmother wearing when she was haning out clothes on the clothesline?  My grandmother, Lizzie Carter, had one that had big pickets and contrasting piping, and it had a bib front with a button or sash in the back.  Some of those were made from flour sacks.  Back then, in the days before carry-out food, women cooked every meal at home and men would sometimes carry a lunch pail or come home for lunch.  People mostly lived on garden goods which they grew themselves.  My grandmother lived near the peddler man whose house was on Lee Street.  He would come around in a cart drawn by a horse or horses, with a load of produce on the back in a cart, and right there at your home you could pick out some great food grown fresh, to fix for the next few meals.  My memories are from the 1960s in Tahlequah Oklahoma, but my father Gene Carter remembers earlier days.  Women would buy bulk flour and sugar in big sacks about the size of a pillowcase, and they'd rip the seam open, to make a yard of material.  At the store you could choose which fabric sack you wanted, and women would save them up for sewing a dress, apron, shirt or quilt.  Flour sack quilts and yard goods in the 1930s were bright and colorful--- social historians say that folks wanted bright colors because the economy made their lives drab.  But I don't think life was that drab.  Earlier colors were, though--- the dark and sad shades of the nineteen twenties and teens gave way to these bright colors, about when new dyestuffs and chemistry were being innovated.  An earlier blog featured "Trip Around The World" variation quilt--- one in my collection of antique quilts.  This little quilt is a miniature abstract variation on that vintage quilt, and it features authentic reproduction fabrics documented for that same time period.  Not all of these designs were flour or feed sack or cornmeal sacks.  Some were yard goods of the time.  Back then, bolts were usually 28 inches wide in cotton, and printed using a roller method on one side of the fabric.

This mini was made by stripping reproduction fabrics then turning the "stripes" sideways and making each one into a square... or often a rectangle.  Then I used black to pair the postagestamp blocks into one-inch blocks (approximately) and pieced them like a log cabin, only in reverse.  The resulting optical effect is a spiral moving from the center, outward, clockwise like the passage of time.  In the middle is a Cherokee Star.  That's a golf ball at the bottom.  It was phtographed behind a golf ball, sort of by accident.


This peice is spoken-for and will be acquired by Cherokee Nation Entertainment.  Cherokee Nation passed a law allocating a percentage of each building's construction budget for the purchase of original Cherokee art for the building decor.  That's a wonderful law because it keeps artists fed, and keeps the arts communital in vitality.  Thanks to Cherokee Nation and CNE for buying this textile art.

Gracie Discovers Mudme

 

It makes a world of difference to be able to create hand-dyed fabrics during the day, when natural light helps with color decisions.  Last week I was preparing  fat quarters for a custom order, and found that I had stockpiled some white cotton squares.  It was news to me.  I'd forgotten that I was prepping them for the dyebath.

When I had leftover chemicals that I didn't want to waste, I made up these great cheery color squares.  They are not sewn together... they are just laid out in a possible pattern for a quilt top.  Buy all 9 for $40 and sew them together yourself as a weekend project.  Or pick out which one you'd like for a quilt focal point, just $4 and mailing costs of $1.75.  Note that these are not fat quarters... they are squares, about 21 inches.

My cute lil model is Gracie Piddlewhiskers, our Selkirk Rex female teenager cat and art muse.  She's always nearby to help with art projects.  Your squares will be again prewashed before mailing, so you don't have to worry about allergies.

Look for these squares at Island Retreat or via Oklahoma Food Cooperative, or email me about purchasing.

Steampunk Fiddle

 

Here's a steampunk fiddle I created into a collage.  It started out as a fiddle that had been last mended by Sam Mouse (how Cherokee is that surname?)   in 1982, but which would not hold tuning.  It had been just hanging on Friedrick's wall five years ago when I moved here.  People would take it down and try to play it.  The sprockets are sort of a nonverbal sign saying, "Um, I don't think this fiddle is a serious musical instrument any longer." 

Anyway, it is featured among the 1,000 in an art book about 1,000 ways to recycle.  Some day I will post a a link and review of that book.  It is chock full of great art.

Mad Hatter Bandana, Inspired by Alice in Wonderland

 

Here's a quarter-section of detail from another Alice In Wonderland-inspired fun piece of wearable art.  It is a soy wax batik resist cotton bandana in a dreamy kaleidoscope of colors.  Everyone should have a bandana.  tie it on your backpack or day sack and you'll always have something to carry pretty rocks in.  Stop by a mountain stream and wet it down for a neckerchief cooler that is good as an air conditioner in the backwoods.  Gather radishes and baby greens in it.  Clean a geocache with it.  Summon a helicopter when lost.  Wave it at a Saints game.  Wear it to Alice in Wonderland.  Pull your hair back.  Or, if you don't have hair, then the curls on this bandana are a colorful suitable alternative.

One only.  $15 includes shipping.  Artisan original.  Look for more items of this nature at Fluffy's Compleat Boutique in the Oklahoma Food Co-op.  Or visit some of the 3 etsy shops by clicking one of my items for sale in the righthand margin of this blog.

Geocaching

Here I am, spilling the beans.  See, there's a secret hobby.  It is called "geocaching."  Here's how you do it:
1.  Get a GPS receiver.  (That's a global positioning satellite receiver.)  Best is a Garmin.  But you could use the Tom-Tom in your vehicle that you use for finding addresses, if it is portable.  Check your cellphone.  If it is like my Droid Eris, it has GPS built-in and you can download a cool little application used to input latitude and longitude coordinates.
2.  Visit www.geocaching.com and register.  Answer some questions (such as your address), and you can search for geocaches in your town, or some place you plan to visit on vacation.  There you will find that on Earth, there are over 800,000 hidden geocaches.  Some will be tiny little microcapsules hidden in hollowed-out tree-knots, and others will be huge geological features, such as a certain geological uplift around Tahlequah.

Voila!  Usually, a geocache will be a hidden ammo box containing a jumble of fun souvenirs ranging from carabiners to compasses, Happy Meal toys to school supplies.  Always, (except, ie geological uplifts) you'll find a log to sign, proving you found it.  Put it back exactly as you found it, and make note of what you take-- always leaving something of equal or greater value in the cache for the next adventurer.

Why do we like to geocache?  Its an adenturous way to get exercise, visit some place interesting, and log a "smiley".  At geocaching. com you can log your find and it will keep track of your game.  Some people program their phone or computer to alert them at the first posting of a new cache, and make it a game to speed around being the first person to visit the cache.  That way, they get the best "first to find" prize.  Just different people create and hide the caches.  Friedrick and I have hidden a few.

That's the background for this cartoon which Friedrick made for me.  To get it, let me add that our Tom-Tom has a feature where the driver can set different voices, such as Homer Simpson or Mr. T, for giving the verbal directions to a location.  Ours happens to be Wardley, a Jamaican voice.  And when you pass up your turn, he alerts you by saying, "What kind of idiot business is this?  Jah no say he want me to tell you again.  Turn round the vehicle."

What's secret about it?
The reason you have probably never heard of geocaching is that it is a secret hobby.  It is secret, so "muggles" or those who don't know about geocaching, won't pilfer the caches and take the treasures.  Occasionally a muggle will happen upon a cache and take it or just the contents.  There are caretakers for each cache, and sometimes trusted muggles are clued-in about a cache so as to help protect it.