ing ing ing

I’m working on a cross-stitch piece right now, and I’m pretty happy with it.  I’ll show pictures once it’s closer to finished and I can get a good shot (I’m moving a good camera with a macro lens closer to the top of the “to buy” list for us, perhaps I’ll get it with the tax rebate if indeed it shows up).  I think the reason that I’m happy with it is because I decided, a while ago, that instead of trying to make art that looked like something else I’d seen, I’d try instead to work with the kinds of shapes and patterns that come to me naturally.

I always doodle big, interconnected masses of swirly shapes and spirals.  I don’t know what led to this epiphany, because it’s not like I was really drawing on a regular basis or even making art of any kind.  But suddenly I thought, oh.  My visual artwork would be much more authentically me if I used my own “voice,” as it were.  And then it seemed logical that the swirls would be the basic vocabulary I should use.

I guess I thought of art as something that I needed to get a lot better at before I could really do anything I would be happy with.  But now that I’ve had this realization I’ve felt a lot more free and natural when I’ve created things.

And since I’ve started embroidering, again, I have had this sort of freeing of ideas.  It’s like I’ve found a medium I can really think in.  Suddenly I can think of ten million things that would work as cross-stitch, or regular embroidery, and I already have a queue of projects in mind.  I think of ideas all the time and that’s like going from zero to sixty; I wasn’t thinking visual art at all a few months ago.  I credit Amanda with getting me started on the path, actually.  Reading about her book made me open the drawer where I’d stashed my yarn and crochet hook, which led to me poking around my mom’s house for more crochet hooks, which led to me opening the box with all the embroidery stuff, which led to me making a little monogrammed cute cross-stitch thing for Miri’s birthday, which led to my idea to make a swirly free-form cross-stitch piece with the leftover floss, which led to me having ten billion other ideas.

I’m trying to hold it in until I get my thesis and these other two (!!) papers written over the next few weeks.  But at least stitching is something you can do in the interstices.

Here is a list of great crafty ideas I came up with during the hour or so I was laying in bed with Miri trying to get her to go to sleep.  AKA: pretending to sleep (so she’d get bored and settle down) while she poked me in the face.

• something with red, pink, and blue - I don’t know what but that color combo really makes sense to me right now.  not girly pink and powder blue but sort of a strong pink and medium blue.
• a quilt or some kind of patchwork using a white with red polka dots fabric with natural or gray linen
• a color sampler in cross stitch - squares - could do several of these with both rainbow palette colors and different “color stories” (I ran across that term on a design blog and suddenly fell in love with that idea, a color story)
• making something with binding tape, I watched Amy’s tutorial today
• using either crossstitch or satin stitch to create a “white space” figure/silhouette
• embroidering Miri’s artwork onto something for her
• embroidering Avery’s alien picture that my mom has on a bulletin board onto a bag or something for him
• pillowcase dresses for Miri, from vintage pillowcases and grosgrain ribbon, I bet I could even handstitch these and embellish them with a little embroidery
• looking back through my sketchbooks and finding old artwork to embroider.  Especially pictures of the cats.

Bedtime is very creative.  I have to really concentrate in order to continue to pretend to be asleep while M says and does hilarious things…I have to make up stories (tonight: a not-so faithful retelling of the Princess and the Pea, and a story about a commuter train who gets turned into a person for a day by her fairy train godmother so she can go see the city and eat croissants in the park, and a story about a butterfly who flies in circles around a farm so many times she gets bored and…flies off to see another part of the farm)…and I have to often make up songs (which surprises me with my on-the-fly composing skills; all those years of teaching preschool music are lodged somewhere in my subconscious I guess).

PS - I love this fabric, especially in this colorway/color story.

PPS - I also love these two ribbons!!  I need to find a use for them.

Something in me has been wanting to take a break from academic work and just spend some time making. That can’t happen quite yet (ummmm, not till the semester’s over) and I’m trying to concentrate on my thesis and papers… but I am also cross-stitching and I finished a wonky crochet blanket for Miri’s dolls. I want to spend some leisurely time building my skills because I’m not super good at needlework but I would like to be. And the thing is, I was always so impatient to finish something that I didn’t want to take the time to work on skills before (I learned to knit, crochet, cross-stitch and sew when I was pretty young - 8, 9, 10 years old - and although I worked on bazillions of projects they probably all were puckered, misshapen, gapping, etc because I didn’t take time to go back and fix mistakes). But now I am a mama and the patience it requires to rip out a row of crochet or stitches is like nothing compared to the patience it takes to raise a kiddo. And I am a scholar and writer now, and see much more the value in skilled craftsmanship, a job well done, an argument well-constructed, a thought logically pursued to its completion.

I want to be the kind of mama who makes things for the kid(s), and I want to be good at repurposing old things, and I want to honor the legacy of my foremothers, and all that. But I also just want to make beautiful things and have the satisfaction of knowing I did it. I want something to busy my hands while I visit with my mom and sister. I want my daughter to see that making things by hand is a part of life, that things aren’t all mass-produced, and that it takes a bit of care and effort to produce truly wonderful, unique, long-lasting things.

Thank god for the internet and the crafty community it’s nurtured, because without it I might have disowned this very important part of myself forever because it was too “dorky” and not “artistic” enough, and cut off an avenue of creativity that’s been important to me since I was small.

I have just gotten into listening to podcasts, and one of my new favorites is the Creative Mom Podcast.  The opening almost makes me cry, all those little voices, “what’cha makin?”  “help me” etc, and the song about wanting just a little peace and quiet… and the stories are inspiring and touching.

Oh no.  I’ve discovered Etsy.  How will I ever get my thesis written?!?!?