You know life is crazy when.....

...you only get to post once a week..

Here's why: in the past week I have

• read 2 books
• read 4 articles
• interviewed 3 teaching artists
• observed a teaching artist in the classroom
• attended a lecture by renowned arts education researcher Dr Judith Burton
• finished 2 embroideries
• started 3 more
• taught 2 classes
• registered for next Spring's classes
• attended my opening at Art in City Hall! (more on that later)

I thought I'd share the 2 embroideries I've worked on, sort of in progress...

For this one I did 2 layers of stitch-resist dyeing, mounted all the bits and pieces I've culled from the streets, stitched, etc. I was trying to use the found objects more as mark than as a collection. As it progressed little bits and pieces of imagery from around the studio creeped in- the ME tag, the fence, telephone wires. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet. Below, see it in mounted form:After completing that one I immediately jumped to a new piece of fabric. This time a rust-dyed and shibori dyed cotton. You can see some of my play with color and composition below:It progressed a bit as you can see below. The objects are roughly in their places here, but there's a lot more of the textured stitching in the bottom area, some more circles and swirls at the top, and even some text that says "just drop it". The fabric and round objects were calling out for a watery theme, and I was thinking of how the people in my neighborhood think the sewer drains are trash cans- they actually pick up trash off the sidewalk and lean over into the gutter to stuff it down the storm drains! So the text refers both to people's comments to their children about what to do with their trash, but also a reminder to myself not to interfere with the crazies around here.Here's the rest of my stitch-resist experiments. I thought it would be interesting to do some housetop/log cabin-like piecing with them to start some new backgrounds for embroideries. I didn't like how one of the purple slow-cloths were progressing, so it's now cut into four pieces and pieced with the other fabrics. I'll get some photos of it in the future.Oh, yeah- I also did 2 more nazar tags. This one found it's way in front of a SAFE AUTO billboard- excellent!This one landed next to Finnegan's Wake- did you notice the Bud Lite bottle cap echoing the Bud Lite sign on the bar? Note to self- early morning in the sun is the worst time for photos!