status migrainious

four graduate classes and a migraine meltdown later, I am arrived on the other side of the summer! Day 14 with the migraine, but we're working on that.

looking back at what I want this blog to be about, and what I've actually been doing with my life, I see things being very disperate. In the first place, there simply hasn't been time. For much of anything. Except graduate school, and navigating the ins-and-outs of trying to get out of graduate school with a good transcript, a diploma in hand and my sanity in tact. So my blog, I thought, should have been about graduate school, the financial hardships I encountered, and the ways I found to aleviate some of those problems. The graduate student advocate.

I have two semesters left. I'm not sure if this summer caused me to loose focus yet or not. My body is physically revolting; my weightloss and fitness goals, any hopes for a [brief] on-the-cheap roadtrip and a gangbusters quilt-a-thon have been waylaid by my mutinous brain, and the tension effected muscles in my back. The spirit is willing, the flesh is saying "Nope. And you can't make me." With that in mind, I've been culling the blogsphere for projects that I'd like to tackle, but feel like they're more of a pipedream given present circumstances, and others than sound like they might be do-able in my present circumstances. Now, if I could only get over the sudden and irrational fear of the sewing machine...

the day I traded in my Sherman for a ballerina

It was one of those weeks where the truth is stranger than fiction, though I could easily substitute month for week.

Least of concerns was that my beloved ThinkPad, Brick-olage, was diagnosed as being little more than an over-glorified portable DVD player. So in exchange for prepping my brother's room to be painted, my parents bought me a replacement laptop so I could finish my graduate school experience. It's an HP, it has a wide screen, and on-board webcam, microphone and SD card reader [really glad i didn't run out and but one of those]. Brick-olage had none of these things going for it except that it was the Sherman tank of laptops. The only thing tougher is a Tough book, the kind cops haul around. The ones build to withstand bullets. I will miss my tank. 


And I have an after market mouse now, too.


One of the things I was working on finishing while I was up here is a tee-shirt example for the kids I will be working with this summer. Last year I semi-copied an elephant reading a book at the library as my design. Working more wet-on-wet this time, especially with the background, I was trying to get a feel for the project if I only gave the students two colours. (dear spell checker, have you decided to go Brit?)

I had started this project last year, and misplaced my paint in the move, and then misplaced the project. It's really very simple.

batik with white glue

Time considerations: 24 hours dry time each for glue and paint

You need:
a. fabric (a child's 12/14 teeshirt)
b. acrylic (permanent) paint, or tempra (washable) with fixative medium
c. paint brushes
d. trash bag, or other large-ish, water impermeable thing to lay under fabric or between shirt layers.
e. White water soluble glue

optional: spray bottle with clean water.

The first part of the process is to lay out the design with white glue. Easier said than done, given a certain lack of control with the glue coming out of a squirt bottle. A stencil might work, if the glue was pounced on with stencil sponges/brushes. Since this project had been misplaced for about a year, I didn't have to worry about the glue drying.

To get the colours to blend, I first sprayed down the tee-shirt with water from a spray bottle, and began layering coat after coat of mixed cobalt blue and teal acrylic. I was worried that the glue would dissolve and I would loose my white glue lines lines, but that wasn't a problem. Working outdoors under direct sunlight, my paint dried relatively quickly, so I was able to quickly layer different colour concentrations on with less bleeding. Once I got the colour looking the way I wanted it to, I let it sit in direct summer sunlight for about three hours.In a classroom setting, the pieces would likely have to dry overnight, depending on humidity and indoor temperature. If using tempra paint plus a fixative medium, the project has to go for a spin in the dryer before being washed. 

Last summer, what this looked like with K-6th graders was a myriad of white plastic bag stuffed tee-shirts laid on the school's cement walk, drying in the sun, then collected at the very end of the day by the art staffers. It should be obvious why the paint needs to dry before going into the dryer, unless you don't mind cleaning the dryer drum. The tees were dry enough that we were able to peel out the bags, stack the shirts in a laundry basket and haul them home for a spin in the dryer [three people had access to their own washer/dryers, so we split up the shirts for washing amongst us]. Since we wanted the kids to wear them before the summer program was over, we included a complete wash cycle after the spin in the dryer, to wash off the white glue. 

What I learned about white glue.. after the wash cycle, I pulled my tee shirt out of our top loader and was astonished to discover a gummy white substance on the shirt... the white glue I had applied last year. Apparently, leaving white glue to dry for an entire year increases the difficulty of washability. I soaked the tee-shirt overnight in a mild detergent solution, then laid it over the upturned side of a dish pan in the kitchen sink, turned the hot water on used the sprayer attachment to help remove the last of the glue.

star struck

well, that's another finished. I decided to save myself some hassle and do a self binding. I also opted, instead of stitching just this side of the folded over backing that I'd do a zigzag instead with variegated thread. I'm just happy that it is finished.

up on the roof

Tar Beach, Faith Ringgold
(New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1991) 

1992 Caldecott Honor Book

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration

Reading Rainbow Feature Selection

A New York Times Best Illustrated Book

Parents' Choice Gold Award
The children's book, Tar Beach, was taken from [seen on right] Tar Beach (Part I from the Woman on a Bridge series), 1988. Acrylic on canvas, bordered with printed, painted, quilted, and pieced cloth, 74 5/8 x 68 1/2 inches (189.5 x 174 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,Gift, Mr. and Mrs. Gus and Judith Lieber  88.3620. © Faith Ringgold 
This information came from the website of the Guggenheim's online collection, here is a link to the page about Tar Beach

Tar Beach is another favorite book. My mother, who was born in Brooklyn, New York (Bensonhurst) brought this book home to show my brother what life in 1950's New York looked like. These, she said, were her memories of that time, just in an Italian Jewish neighborhood, where the apartments were too hot for sleeping, so they'd go up on the roof. I used to envy my mother having lived in the city. And then I moved to a city, where, among other things, you have to pay for parking, there's no drive through anything, except for ATM's, there's not a tree in sight, so the temperature in the summer skyrockets, and to go anywhere to do something is a major production. Bleh. 

I see now why she says of the town I was ultimately born and raised in that she smelled the cow manure and knew she'd come home. It's a totally different world.  

Tar Beach 2 (deluxe), 1990 /2000
printed in 1990 / quilted in 2000
quilt edition, silkscreen on silk
75 x 75

Tar Beach 2, 1990
quilt edition, silkscreen on silk
The Fabric Workshop
quilter: Gail Liebig
68 x 64

I guess someone has been screen printing Ms. Ringgold's paintings onto silk and then quilting them, so instead of a poster, you have a quilt.  I'd hate to think what that costs. Not something I'd have in my classroom. 

new life

a one-seater chair at my desk is so not going work...

 Moved the dresser back into the house. Initially, there was a skinny wrought iron stand behind the chair, a '20ish pole lamp and a nightstand with a drawer. The area looked cluttered, and I was never really happy with the way it looked, but I felt ambivalent about changing it. The lamp moved to the to the other side of the window next to the desk, and the stand into the bathroom under the sink. I realized after moving the dresser inside again that part of what I hadn't liked about the prior arrangement was that it had been a cluster of dark things, and that I really didn't like looking at the brown back of this dresser.

 one of my more brilliant ideas: screw in cup hooks and hang a tea towel of the Paris Metro with clips.




Two of the four drawers are still serviceable, so I put knobs back on them. For now, the larger drawer holds a few pair of flat shoes and my bicycle helmet. I don't remember what's in the top most drawer... probably sunscreen and bug spray. For the most part, the dresser is still in good shape after having sat outside in several rainstorms under a PVC shower curtain. There is an area of warping along the side in the plywood,  visible in the picture below, but it's not terrible. The only thing that needs to be done is the cutting of the MDF for the shelves, and I can store shoes in the bottom and other accessories in the top, like my bike helmet, winter hats and et ceteras. I had no compunction painting this piece, since it was lower-quality in the first place.

flower fun

I was home over memorial day weekend, and my mom and I had a little too much fun putting together planters. We drove around looking for shade plants with flowers that would grow under the dense foliage covering my patio. And we went nuts with packets of pansy and coleus. I purchassed the Astilbe from Scotland Yards Greenhouse in Edinboro, PA. (We got dad a really neat hosta while we were at it). They have a pretty sweet gift shop in their barn, too, with nice gardening and outdoor accessories. Mom sent me home with dicentra from her own garden. The hosta was a rescued volunteer from the carport at the last house I lived at.

When I first moved to the Big City, I bought a bedframe off a friend who lived semi-locally. It was the top of a bunkbed, but since it got my matress and boxspring off the floor, that's really all I cared about. My bed lived in storage for a year while I was living in the Queen Ann in the East End, and it was set up in my new place, where it's lack of height irked me no end. I got a KURA loft bed from some friends for free, but not having a car with a hatchback, I wouldn't effectivey get rid of the bunkyboard. So I hauled it outside and it sat on my patio until that EUREKA moment when I turned it on it's end, leaned it against a half wall for support and have been using it for hanging baskets.
 

and I thought I had killed this, but it's still hanging on by it's teeth.

hiatus

I left my camera at my mom's place memorial day weekend, and I didn't realize how often I use that thing until the third time I called asking if they'd found it yet. Hmm...

I spent some time in the oversized book section at the CLPGH main branch, checking out all seven of the available Kaffee Fassett books on shelf. The sewing machines have covers over them until classes are over, but that doesn't mean I can't figure out what to do with the fabric I've got laying around. And there's a lot of that. Kaffee has his own version of Jane Austin's famous lozenge quilt, and I discovered photocopied patterns I've been looking for, tucked into a binder I forgot about. And I found out the name of the book they came from, 101 nine patch quits, by Marti Michell. Which, if I ever find a copy that's not going for $80 on Amazon, I'll probably buy.

in the meantime, before class started, I got some things finished.

 like this goofy flowerpot. I've seen similar ones that have little birds or dogs or houses or whatever, but there was nothing anywhere else on the mold to suggest that there was anything to put there. So I'm going to leave it.













and the granny square is done! it looks a little awkward with two different sashing fabrics, but i wasn't planning on giving it away anyhow.

also finished is the cheerful child and the sampler!

I took a long arm lesson at the end of May, and can't wait to try it out on an actual quilt, but my summer course work is a little prohibitive in terms of working on anything. Bleh.

Upcoming is a children's book, based on a cat who moves to the city, and has to deal with keys and locks. it's due next week.

ikea hack

It started with a dresser I bought little over a year ago that I repainted. A move and a year later, the drawers on the dresser were finally giving up the proverbial ghost, though the cabinet was still in great shape (damn crying shame I don't have space for it, it would make GREAT shelves with some custom cut MDF)

To keep the morning rolling smoothly instead of peppered with explicatives everytime a drawer came apart, I ambled over to IKEA and purchased a GORM (as mentioned previously in terrarium 2.ohnoes)

I did some browsing on Ikea hackers for some ideas, and settled on simply cutting down the framing materials to height. Since the square footage in my apartment is pretty small, I didn't waste floor space on the dresser; it lived inside one half of one of my closets. I'd never been pleased with it living there, as there still seemed to be a lot of wasted space involved

GORM, as I hacked it

GORM, as IKEA intended it

Now the inside of my closet looks like an over glorified clothes press - back around the American Revolution, people folded their clothes in piles instead of hanging them up. Which is partly why so many old homes don't have closets - they used a wardrobe (clothes press) instead. Less monkeying with building materials and what not when building a house, I guess. I know they had WAY less clothing and accessories than we do, because keeping those clothes clean was a time consuming pain.

I have several knobs left over from other projects, so I decided to take advantage of the many pre-drilled holes in the GORM unit, giving me space to hang up anything from hand bags to my pain clothes.

Looking at it, I realized I could really use the left over scrap from the pieces I cut off, so I pulled out a few more knobs and created a hook rack for incidentals like umbrellas, my day pack, or anything else I've otherwise had to fish for in the bottom of the closet. The only thing I had to do was sink a few nails into it.

terrarium 2.0K

terrarium 2.ohnoes

Discovered a gaping hole in the bottom of my terrarium the other day. Bad, bad bad since the terrarium was a re-purposed glass vase. No idea when the chunk decided to fall out, but it did. Thus began the search for a suitable replacement and I almost bought this beautiful terrarium from IKEA -

so... when did IKEA climb on the Shabby-Chic bandwagen?

And there's more where that came from. I wouldn't have said S/C went with Scandinavian Minimalism, but there is something appealing about accenting the spartan with a little frill. The plant stand makes me think of made over Mission/Arts and Crafts, which painted white does go with the whole cottage thing more than the traditional dark, oxidized oak hallmark of the A/C movement.

Did I mention I'm ADD? Sorry. Terrarium. Found a $5 goldfish bowl at a thrift shop. Twice the real estate as the vase, so I added a little more plant life to it, and some other umm... decor. 

While at IKEA, I purchased a GORM for the reduced price of $30 (the website lied and quoted me $40). This to replace the dresser that I guess I never posted about... I gave the dresser a face lift, and then discovered that the glue holding the drawers together was failing... again, and again, and again I got tired of running to the hardware store and purchasing brackets to keep it together. I can't install a ClosetMaid so I went with the next closest thing I could think of. I chose a GORM simply because it was wood, and I would be able to cut it down to the height requirements of the closet, unlike the other metal shelving options avalible. Since GORM has all these handy pre-drilled holes for positioning shelves, I was able to put my knob and drawer pull collection to work, installing them as decorative hooks for holding purses and other accessories. If I were going all out, this puppy would be framed in bead board, whitewashed, have a pretty paper on the back, and have pretty matching bins corralling my socks, tee-shirts and the like. Hackers gotta hack. When they have the money to do it :). Baby steps.