A dry spell

A dry spell. That's all I can think to call those times when I stop writing. I go through these same cycles with my private journal. Once, after writing almost daily for over a year I just stopped. Sometimes it's because I get too close to something and would rather run away than face it. Other times it's because I just need a break. I tolerate these spells, and yet I'm always painfully aware of them when they're happening.

So, why haven't I written a word for precisely a month and a day? I'm just not sure. This time I think it's mostly because I've been so busy with work and other things. It's been all I can do to sneak in time to sew or print. Writing has taken a backseat. Now I'm starting to get the feeling that the writer in me is tired of sitting in the back of the bus.

For these last few weeks busy has included course work for my last year of a 4-year extension course called EfM--Education for Ministry. It's adult learning at it's best: lots of reading and discussion, but no tests or papers. In 4 years you cover a survey of the core seminary curriculum, without the preaching, field education, and the like. The first year of the program is Old Testament (mostly Torah and the prophets, with a bit of wisdom literature). Year 2 is New Testament. Years 3 & 4 are church history and contemporary theology respectively. It's a nice overview, but how much of Hegel and Kierkegarrd can you really pick up by reading one cursory chapter on each. Anyway, a night of reading and a night of class effectively kills 2 nights out of the week from now until early June.

I also somehow managed to accept the "opportunity" to co-chair the Rector Search Committee at my church. Our Rector left over the summer. Now that we have an interim in place, this Committee is conducting a search for a new permanent Rector. It's sort of like an executive search only many more people are involved, it takes 12-18 months, and it's a lot of volunteer work. And I said yes to this because...?

Just so you don't think life is all work, I must confess that I've been having some fun. Dan and I spend last weekend in New Jersey. Friday/Saturday we were with Dan's brother, our sister-in-law (Omie) and our niece and nephew. It was Omie's birthday so in addition to the family celebration, she and I slipped away for a couple of hours in Clinton. We went to see Kerr Grabowski's show at the Hunterdon Museum. It was fantastic. The show was called "Art To Wear". It should have been called "Art to Die For"--or may dye for. I'm always amazed to see work that I instantly recognize, something that bears the mark of the maker in a way that's unmistakable without being cliche or repetitive. In this case you look at the work and say, "This is Kerr's".

I desperately need a new camera that takes something besides fuzzy pictures, but you can still see even in these mediocre shots that the show was amazing.

The weekend ended on a delightful note. Sunday, on the way home Dan & I stopped to visit Rayna Gillman & Marty and shared a delightful little brunch. "Come by; I'll get some bagels" turned into a banquet. She was such a wonderful host, and we had great fun sharing art and telling stories. I'm smiling as I write this. It really was a great visit.

This weekend is equally full of promise. We leave early tomorrow morning for a whirlwind visit to Philadelphia. Dan is being so indulgent. We going to see the Nancy Crow show at the Snyderman gallery, then heading off to the convention center for the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. It only occurred to me after we'd made the plans to check the lineup of artists and I was thrill to see that we get to visit with our friends Randy Darwall and Brian Murphy. It should be a blast.

Progress on all fronts

All of the computer swapping and rebuilding is finished. I can see great patches of the desktop and I'm cautiously optimistic that by week's end it could actually reach a state that one could honestly call tidy.

I had the day off and it was a great one to spend indoors. It's just not supposed to be 95 degrees in October. It's was lousy weather to be outside, but it was also perfect weather for discharging--HOT. I worked on three pieces with thickened thyox (and a good many drops of sweat). You could practically see the stuff working as I was applying it. Everything is still drying on the clothesline and it's took dark to see outside, so no pictures until later this week.

On a completely different topic, I heard a very interesting sermon yesterday. The two points that remain with me are:

• That we should periodically assess how much our life reflects our values; and
• That our creeds--those doctrinal statements of belief for which people has died for centuries--need to be considered thoughtfully.

For example, the opening words of the Nicene Creed, "We believe" are most recently translated from the Latin word, "Credo," which can be read as "to believe" or to "trust in." We've lost touch with that latter meaning. At least I feel that I have. On some level, "believing" is about acknowledging facts, while "trusting" requires an element of faith. Taking it further, I would even say that in the post-modern sense it's possible to trust in the essential truth of something even in the absence of all facts.

So, in what do I trust, and am I living my life in a way that reflects that value system? I'm not going to answer that question here and now. Suffice to say that I feel that I've still got room for improvement, but I'm working on it.

I have to give credit where it's due, the sermon was by The Rev. Martha Wallace, the new interim rector of St. Andrew's, College Park. So far she seems like a very good addition to our community.

Preparing to resurface (I hope)

I'm scandalized when I look at the date of my last post in mid-September. Where has the better part of a month gone? I'd love to say that I've been on some exotic vacation, but no such luck. I've just been buried in the details of work and daily life and having a crazy-busy time at work.

In the midst of that we bought a new computer--a Macintosh, thank you God. This has been an anxiously anticipated switch from our previous Windows machines. As much as I love the thing, getting all photos, music, and Quicken stuff transferred over has been a little less straightforward than I hoped. At this point the end is clearly in sight. As if in protest, the Windows computer off of which I've been moving data seems to have just "shit the bed" as they say in the industry. It looks like a virus. I'm going to scavenge as much as I can then rebuilt the thing.

As I tell this story I realize that this might be an opportune moment to come clean about something. One of my alter-egos is that of digital toy geek. As I write this, I'm sitting in our home office / sewing room. So, it would stand to reason that the room contains a computer and a sewing machine. And that's true, but it's also the tip of a somewhat larger iceberg that includes:

• The embroidery module for the sewing machine
• A serger
• My old embroidery machine that I'm planning to sell
• My second sewing machine, with which I can't bear to part
• Our oldest computer, which is headed for the recycle bid
• The second oldest computer, which is also on the way out
• And finally, the computer that I'm about to rebuilt, which will be the new embroidery computer.

I swear, a month from now the place is going to be so much better. It's got to be, because the clutter is starting to drive me crazy.

I took a couple of hours today to work on a three pieces of fabric. I'm collecting for a quilt and have almost reached critical mass. Here's the most recent stuff.

Well, it's different.

I continue to work on the "unsatisfying" piece with the red square. Since I last wrote I've done three things to it:

• I applied soy wax in a concentric square pattern over a lot of the surface using a tool that I made from copper wire. Then, I screened the whole thing with varying intensities of dark green. This had real potential until it all washed out. The screened dye had no activator in it, so I heavily misted the entire piece with a soda ash solution, wrapped it up, and kept is warmish for about 10 hours. I've done this successfully in the past, so I expected good results. I'm guessing my problem was some combination not enough soda ash, not enough time, and not enough heat. It would probably have been OK if I'd steamed.
• On my second time around I applied more wax with the same tool (all of the first application was gone). This time I opted for a low water immersion dye bath use a recipe of "olive", which for some reason produced a deep blue-green. Unplanned, but OK. After a few hours I was rinsing it out the backyard and got a little frustrated that it looked too dark, so I decided to attack it with Soft Scrub with Bleach. I spread the wet fabric on the driveway and painted on some square and a few drips. Sometimes a little frustration can be productive!
• After a good washing and pressing I began doing some work with fabric paint last night to try to bring the focus back to the red square.

Here it is before the fabric paint.

Next steps? I'm considering some applique or reverse applique of a couple of squares of other fabric to reinforce the square shape, which seems to be what this piece is all about.

Dye mixing experiment

In my Sept 10 posting I said that I was having some problems mixing print paste using ProChem MX 108 (Sun Yellow) but no other color. I called ProChem tech support and explained that every time I mix this particular dye with a thickener (ProChem Print Paste or Dharma Sodium Alginate) the thickener curdles like tapioca and is virtually unusable. I got the impression from their rather candid response that they were really stumped. The bottom line from ProChem was:

• The age of the dye powder (18 months) shouldn't cause this sort of behavior.
• They've never heard of anyone else with this problem.
• Mixing the dye powder with chemical water versus tap water shouldn't cause or prevent this problem.
• The thickener shouldn't be an issue either.

We discussed some possible experiments and agreed to stay in touch if either I or they came up with any conclusions. So, tonight I went to the basement to "play mad scientist," as Dan put it. Here's what I did.

I wanted to try several different thickened dye mixing procedures with controls for temperature of the thickener (which I store in the refrigerator), and the solution used to dissolve the dye. First I mixed a batch of Urea Water using the receipt on the ProChem website. Then I mixed two dye solutions:

• 3/4 tsp dye powder + 2 Tbls TAP WATER
• 3/4 tsp dye powder + 2 Tbls UREA WATER

I then measured out approximately equal amounts of sodium alginate thickener (about 10 days old):

• 2 bowls with cold alginate right out of the refrigerator
• 2 bowls with alginate that I had warmed to slightly above room temperature

I mixed the 4 possible combinations and discovered the following.

Dye really does dissolve better in urea water.
In the pictures below equal amounts of dye were dissolved in equal amounts of solution. On the left, the urea water produce a clear, well-dissolved mix. On the right, the tap water solution never fully dissolved and had bits of undissolved dye at the bottom of the cup.

Sodium alginate thickener is much easier to mix at room temperature.
The dye solution incorporated faster and the mixture returned to a smooth paste quickly in room temperature alginate. The cold alginate was gloppy (that's a technical term).

At the end of mixing the 4 batches I had failed to recreate the disastrous tapioca effect, so I just dumped everything together into one bowl and started mixing. I figured it was perfectly good dye; why waste it? And what happened!? It didn't curdle completely, but somewhat. My theory is that when I dumped the incompletely dissolved dye/tap water solution into the whole mix I also dumped in all of the undissolved bits at the bottom of the cup. In the controlled experiment I measured spoonfuls from the surface of the mixture and probably got few if any grainy bits.

So, while I don't have the time or patience to delve further into the science of what's happening here, my general conclusion regarding how to mix print paste with this particular color of dye powder (which should probably be applied to all colors) is:

• Bring the thickener to room temperature before mixing in the dye solution.
• Dissolve dye in urea water instead of tap water.

I almost wish I was back in high school so I could squeeze a science project out of this little exercise. Who knew that art could be so fussy?

New work, none of it finished, some of it scary

I did a bunch of errands Saturday morning, then managed to carve out the entire afternoon for printing. I ended up with a lot of red, blue, and orange, which certainly aren't a bad family of colors, but I was really in more of a green mood. Unfortunately I think there's something wrong with my year-old jar of sun yellow dye powder (ProChem MX 108). When does this stuff go bad? Every time I mix it into sodium alginate paste it curdles the alginate. It's very weird. Other colors of about the same age behave normally. I'm mixing the dye powder with straight water (i.e., no urea) then stirring it into the alginate paste. The result is like scrambled eggs. Would a little urea or metaphos made a difference in this case. We don't have hard water here so I'm thinking the answer is no. This might be a question for Vicki Jensen.

Anyway, here's Saturdays work. I don't know if these are going to get more work or just get set aside for piecing.

And, in the interest of semi-full disclosure, here are before and after shots of a yard of rayon that I tried to "improve." You be the judge. I think it might look a little bit better in person. Ironically, I was trying to deemphasize the small red squares, which I didn't like. I screened brown squares over almost all of it and it seemed too dark. I did a little discharging and now it looks sort of distressed--or maybe I mean distressing. This might be a foundation for some heavy applique.

On the passing of an artist

I learned today that the author Madeleine L'Engle died or September 6 at age 88. She is perhaps best known for her award-winning children's book, "A Wrinkle in Time," which won the John Newbery Award in 1963 and has since sold millions of copies. She also wrote many books for adults, some of which deal with her spiritual life. She was an Episcopalian (my team) who was devoted to both her faith and her craft. She was at one time Writer-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Last year I read, "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art," and found it more than just interesting--it was eye-opening. It's from her that I first heard the idea that art, made in a spiritually open way, has the ability to place the artist into the role of "co-creator" with God. Amazing stuff, and just what I needed to read at the time, as I struggled to find balance in my own life.

Eighty-eight years is a good long run. Can I mourn the passing of someone I didn't know, who lived a thoughtful and productive life, and died peacefully? Perhaps not, but I think I harbored some small idea that someday I might meet her, even though she was no longer making public appearances. I suppose that meeting will have to wait.

Labor Day weekend in Rehoboth

Dan & I are spending Labor Day weekend in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware with our friends Howard & Patrick and a whole cast of other close friends and dogs. The weather's been beautiful enough to make me almost forget rest of the scorching summer. It's been temperate, breezy, and sunny since we arrived Saturday morning. After three days at the beach my freckles are starting to coalesce.

Time here is pleasantly unstructured, but it's always anchored by morning coffee and newspapers on the front porch. The newspapers don't seem to get a thorough read until later in the day because this initial perusal is always accompanied by politically astute, extremely liberal, terribly erudite, and witheringly witty conversation. It's 4-8 gay men in their 40s and 50s holding forth on politics (local, national, and international) Washington gossip, theatre, film, literature, food, and of course the lives, wardrobes, and foibles of friends. It can be a bit intimidating at times, but always interesting. I've heard a lot of ideas expressed on this porch over the years: love, happiness, frustration, anger, but never hate. I think that says something about the shared values of my family of friends.

It's been a nice time to catch up with friends, eat and drink a descent amount, and do not too much of anything else. I always bring things to read and they almost always go untouched. I've done a few overdue e-mails to friends. Now I'm writing this from the front porch, enjoying a few moments of late afternoon solitude. By sunset they'll be 4 of us left from the group of 10 yesterday. It's the beginning of a quiet end to a quiet weekend before we return to work on Wednesday. Not bad. Not too bad at all.

Tonight, fewer words and more pictures

A piece that's nearing completion

I don't know if I have a good picture of an earlier stage of this piece, but it's a bit of printed cloth I brought back from Peters Valley. When I started working on it again the yellow and green areas were printed. I did some hand stitching with black embroidery thread to add a little detail in a few areas, but that wasn't giving me what I wanted. So, I used a free-motion couching foot on my sewing machine to add the back yarn outlines. You can probably see that better in the detailed picture below, or by clicking on this one to enlarge it. The black lines helped a lot, but then I was troubled by the white background, so I scribbled in some color with a few caran d'ache water soluble crayons then blended with diluted ProFab extender and a bit of brown paint. Very fun and a good effect.

In this shot you can see circles of couched yarn that I used to fill in some of the open circles. I started out as a kind of weak green--nothing that I little dye wasn't able to fix. I think I might be dying some more cotton yarn soon. A this point I just need to do the final trimming and binding. Right now I'm letting it rest for a while to see if in needs anything else.

Other pieces in work

Here's somethings else that came from Peters Valley. I like the big red square, and there's something good, but perhaps a bit weak going on with the other colors. The small red squares are a awful. This is the before shot. Since then I've screen blocks of brown over the whole thing and now I think I'm ready to start discharging. I've very hopeful.

This one's a batik from a few weeks ago that I pleated, clamped, and over-dyed with turquise to reduce the contrast. I'm tempted to cut it up, but I really like the overall linear pattern and think that I can make something out of it as the background for whole composition. There needs to be more dye and I'm thinking that some applique might be in this one's future.

After a busy weekend, at the start of a busy week

Yes, busy is the name of the game these days, but it beats the hell out of bored. Let's see...where to begin. Well for starters Dan's Mom, Cynthia, rang up last week and said she figured that our calendars appeared to be in one of their rare states of alignment, and shouldn't she come of a visit over the weekend. Of course Dan and I were both delighted and set about the task of clearing piles of my junk out of the guest room. We picked her up at BWI on Saturday morning and spent the lovely 100-degree day museum-hopping in Baltimore. Cynthia's a quilter, and as luck would have it, we were able to assemble a very nice fiber-focused itinerary.

We started off at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) to see the NUNO exhibit. I read about NUMO (a Japanese textile manufacturer) in the last issue of Surface Design and was delighted to find an exhibit practically in my back yard. It's cool stuff, and the thought and design process behind it is fascinating: things like wrapping up rayon with wet rusted iron plates for a couple of weeks, sandwiching feathers between layers of dyed silk, and reproducing the look of rubber bands scattered on a windowsill. The presentation was beautiful. It was a small room in a quiet part of the museum and each piece was presented as a hanging 2-3 yard length of plain cloth. No fuss with binding or the like. It was very much an "art cloth" style of presentation. I came away with a few ideas: rusty nails for one.

For me no visit to BMA is complete without stopping to see the fantastic collection of Matisse in the Cone collection. I'm utterly convinced that if Henri were with us today he would be a fiber artist. We talk about artists who do surface design having a "painterly" style. Well, I look at some (not all, but enough) of his work and I see painted/printed cloth. Yes, of course he painted on canvas, but I mean some of it I want to cut out of the frame and curl up with it. He even include textiles in his paintings--detailed rugs and wallpaper. I'm right about this. He's one of us.

After a little nosh at a greasy-spoonish sort of diner along Howard Avenue we were off to the Walters Art Museum. Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm ashamed to say that I never knew this place existed and it's right in the heart of the city (even in a good neighborhood!). We only left because they threw us out when the place closed at 5. It's a beautiful small-to medium sized museum with a lovely and well-curated collection of paintings and an impressive collection of a Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Etruscan, etc. objects. Cynthia managed to find a mummified cat! (Hillary's sitting on the table as I write this and I just can imagine wrapping her up like a buritto and keeping her around for all eternity). So, the fiber connection: it was the second-to-last day of the show "Gee's Bend" the Architecture of the Quilt." This is the second Gee's Bend show and I enjoyed it as much as the first. Just as with the first show, which I saw at the Corcoran a couple of years ago, I was struck by the fact that these women, by their own admission, were trying to keep their families from freezing. They needed to cover their beds. But, even in the midst of that intensely practical concern, even after a day of hard work, their God-given spirit and creative vision found expression in these quilts.

It's late. I'll write more tomorrow if I can manage. I've got pictures of evolving work to share. In the meantime here's a teaser. This one's of you Rayna. I screened that deconstructed blue and chino piece (see July 31) with thyox. There was a stem an a few leaves of wisteria stuck to the screen. I'm really pleased with the result. Not sure what comes next, but I feel that this piece needs to stay together as a whole cloth. Time will tell.