Good new that I forgot to share

I got a note from Darcy Love (ArtCloth Network) that she added me to the group's membership page on the website (http://www.artclothnetwork.com/members.html). It's not a big deal. It's just a thumbnail that links to my personal website. And yet, it is a bit of a big deal. It's a little piece of me out there in the great wide world, and in excellent company to boot. I was tickled when I got Darcy's e-mail, but sharing the news got lost in all of the vacation preparations.

So what next? Well, having been back in the office of just one week, I'm now thinking ahead to May 18th when I'll be driving to Ohio to spend a week with Kerr Grabowski at Nancy Crow. I've been looking forward to this workshop for a year. It's going to be great. I just wish that all of my travel wasn't happening back-to-back. I was away for a week in March, another in April, and now this thing in May. I feel like I'm packing suitcase every time a turn around.

Vacation pics

You probably don't need to see these, but just in case...

The view from the beach. This is what we spent most of the week looking at.

By contract, this is what a lot of the rest of the island looks like, at least on the French side. Yes that's livestock in the front yard.

Happy, rested, and well fed on our last night.

Back in the saddle

Vacation was lovely. As expected, we spent a great deal of time at the beach on cushy chaise lounges under a big umbrella staring at the water. That was interrupted by occasional swimming, eating, drinking, and reading. It was just what we both needed. We had lovely weather except for a little bit of rain near the end of the week. We ate very well, if very expensively. Perhaps we can just accept it as a given that where people are speaking French they are probably also preparing good food.

The trip back was rather bad--American Airlines, delays, long lines, missed connections, etc. We left the hotel at 1 PM Saturday and my head it the pillow (in my own bed, thank God) at 330 AM on Sunday. Total frying time was 4.5 hours; you do the math. Even after all that, I was tremendously grateful that we did not get stuck in San Juan as most of our fellow travelers did.

Would I go back? Yes. The resort was lovely, situated high on a hill overlooking Anse Marcel. We had free beach privileges at the resort down below.

Lessons learned? Avoid American Airlines. In the Caribbean: travel on weekdays; avoid flying through San Juan; expect all flights (especially on the weekend) to be intentionally oversold and delayed; arrive at the airport not one minute less than 2 hours before your flight; allow 1-2 hours for immigration, baggage claim, and customs. Never go to any airport without food in your carry-on luggage. The sandwiches that I made before we left the hotel saved us.

So, I'll post a couple of pictures over the weekend. It wasn't a very good photo vacation for some reason. For now, I'm back a work and very grateful to have had some time away. I think I was a lot more burnt out than I thought given how much better I feel now (even after 3+ days of work).

I survived

...but it wasn't pretty. Actually, the work was a huge success--all the servers successfully upgraded, more than 130 happy users, and no impact on the publishing schedule. Now, the upgrade team may be a different story. I think we're all pretty much wrung out and, quite frankly, fed up with management bureaucracy. It's kind of ironic that if you do your job well then a VP or Director will tell you it's because he/she rode your you-know-what beforehand. If we hadn't done the job as well as we did then we'd be getting miserably abused now. Either way there seems to be abuse; the only difference is before or after. I don't know. This is just more complaining. I've got a really bad case of bad attitude right now.

St. Martin will cure that. No, I'm not building a shrine in the back yard. (Off the top of my head I can't even recall who St. Martin was). What I mean is that Dan and I are going to the Caribbean for a week. Much needed, much appreciated, and much anticipated. Packing starts at the end of the week and we fly out early Sunday morning. We're staying in a smallish boutique resort east of Grand Case on the French side of the island. I'm going to laze in the sun, practice my so-so high school French, eat, shop, and try to ignore how painfully low the dollar is against the euro.

St. Martin is about 200 km ESE of St. Thomas. The weather should be delightful this time of year. I don't know if there'll be another posting between now and the trip. If not, you can at least expect vacation pictures when we return!

This is not my idea of fun

It's Friday night about 9 PM. I should be having a martini with Dan in some nice outdoor cafe, but I'm not. I should be at home sprawled on the sofa with a cat sleeping on my chest, but I'm not. Instead, I'm at work supervising a big computer system upgrade (software spread across several servers and about 150 workstations).

I got home at 10:30 last night and I'd love to be home that early tonight. I don't know if that's going to happen. Regardless of when we finish tonight, we'll be back here by 9 AM tomorrow morning to finish whatever doesn't get done tonight and do several hours of testing.

Not much chance that there'll be any art cloth created this weekend. If it sounds like I'm pouting that's because I am. This is just not soul-feeding work.

Work in progress from last weekend

I got some work done last weekend. This one's three overprinted layers of monoprinting. I'm not sure that the picture does it justice. I think it's more interesting in person. It's certainly not done, but seems to have the potential to turn into something.

The photos below show a piece that I started a couple of weeks ago and cast aside because it was too ugly to deal with. I decided that this would be a good test subject for Carol Soderland's overprinting formula. In a nutshell, if you can find a reasonable approximation of the color that you are overdying, then you can easily determine which colors you can produce by overdying AND the correct dye formula to produce the selected target color.

And here it is on the print table with freezer paper resist in place. Once I got the big white spirals in place I actually liked it a little better.

And here's the next stage after overdying and adding some linear detail with dye in a syringe. I think I came pretty close to what I wanted. Since I took this picture I've started stitching around the spirals. We'll just have to see what this turns into.

Newsy update

I'm a bit behind with the blog, but it's just the same old excuse: too busy. Last week I was getting over my killer cold and then there was church Thursday - Sunday. Somewhere in there--I think it was Saturday afternoon--I managed to finish assembling my color sample book. And of course there's always work and EfM to keep me occupied. This week's reading was about process theology, which is fascinating stuff, but not something that I can really explain (and probably not something that your really want to hear about).

I'm a little confounded that I haven't been able to find any studio time, but at least I've got some good ideas rattling around in my head. There's one piece that I started a couple of weeks ago that is currently too ugly to show. I'm hoping to begin working back into this weekend using Carol's color formulas to try to get it closer to where I wanted it to be in the first place. I'll have to see how things go. I'm already booked to spend Saturday morning with some folks from the church search committee analyzing survey results.

I got two wonderful packages in the mail today. The first was slides of my "Teach Us to Pray" quilt that I need for a juried show submission. I used a website called iprintfromhome.com. You upload your images and a couple of days later they send you mounted slides for a very reasonable price. I got 2 copies of 2 images shipped for about $10. Something worth considering if you find yourself needing slides made from your digital images.

The second package was a complete surprise from Candy, a woman who was in the color workshop with me. She works in a lab and sent me some great surplus equipment for measuring dye concentrate. The studio is really starting to look a little like a high school chem lab. Thanks Candy!!

Color Mixing: Day 5

It's Monday and I'm back home. I took the day off from work to try to nurse myself back to health, and I promise that I'll rest after I finish this post, but I do want to finish the story of the workshop.

The last day was a whirlwind: color play, evaluation of dyed cloth from Saturday, and taping up color gradation samples.

I'm 1/3 of the way through assembling my sample book. This is what the pages look like. I think I've got 42 more pages to go. Each one of those squares is 1" x 1".

The next three shots are sample yardage that I dyed during class. They are all low water immersion with wet soda-soaked cotton (Test 400M). The two purple pieces are part of an exercise in manipulating dye concentration. The multicolored piece is a "scrunch and pour" in which you apply dye concentrate directly to the fabric as it's being scrunched into a bucket. I love all of these pieces, but they need to sit for a while before I decide what to do with them or to them.

Finally, here's a picture of the whole class. I think this is the first time that I've gotten one of these. After a workshop I always regret not taking more pictures, but especially not having pictures of the group. I'm in the back row, 2nd from the left. You can't really tell that I'm high on cold medicine, can you?

And...my last words about Carol's workshop. If you are a dyer and you are interested in having better control over the colors that you produce or just want to understand how primaries can be mixed to produce a gamut beyond what you thought possible, then TAKE THIS WORKSHOP. You'll work hard, but you'll go home with valuable tools and information.

Color Mixing: Day 4

This has to be a short post. It was a great workshop day, but I'm not feeling much better than I was this morning--still sick, maybe sicker. I did everything that I could think of to avoid giving this to anyone else. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's activities, but I'm also looking forward to getting home to my own bed.

I continue to be amazed by the color tools that Carol has developed. Today we had several hours of lecture, evaluated some things that we dyed yesterday, worked on our sample books, started a new dye bath, and dyed a value progression of an individual hue.

Here's a picture of my progression drying on the table. The light values are pretty amazing. The darkest values are toned using the complementary color. Carol's numerical system allows you to find the complement of any color. Pretty amazing.

Here's Carol holding up a sample of her hand-dyed cloth.

Color Mixing: Day 3

Actually, as I write this it's about 630 AM on Day 4 (Saturday). I've slept all I can, such as it was. So, here I am in Fall River for this much-anticipated workshop and I'm sick, sick, sick. I think it's just a really bad cold, but I feel like complete poo. To put it in perspective, if I was at home and this was a week day, I would be calling in sick without a moment's hesitation. But, I'm not at home and I can't blow off 20% of a workshop--not this one, that's for sure. Besides, spending a day in bed at the lovely Hampton Inn Westport might just make me feel worse. Yesterday I popped DayQuil gel caps every 4 hours and soldiered on. I'm afraid today might be a little uglier.

OK, enough of my sob story. Yesterday was a 12-hour day with two short breaks for meals. I continue to be amazed with the system that Carol has put together and with her level of organization. When I finish assembling this sample book I'm going to have a terrific resource--one that I never would have taken the time to figure out and compile all on my own. Yesterday we had several hours of lecture and demo, cut up our dyed fabric into strips and organized them, then began assembling the first the pages of our sample books. We also did one low-water immersion dye bath with 1 yard of cotton. I've made the most beautiful mottled purple. Pics tonight I hope.

Here's a picture of some of the pressed and sorted cloth at 830 AM yesterday.

Here's a picture of the my first sample book page, which I think I finished around 830 PM last night.

By the time that I finish this book, I will have stuck down 3,087 little 1" squares. Between this first page and several other pages that contain portions of this series made from duplicate squares, I have so far stuck down 147 squares--that's about 4.8%.

What does all that mean? I means I've got a busy day ahead of me. The alarm just went off. Time for a shower, some more DayQuil, and a lot of coffee. Please take a moment to pray for me to be delivered quickly from the grip this virus, which has arrived at a most inopportune time.