Happy rebirth day to me

Where were you one year ago today?

I was the center of attention (at least as far as I could tell) in the cardiac ICU at Fairfax Hospital, putting behind me the heart disease that had landed me there and on the road to recovering from the surgery that had somewhat reset the clock on my life expectancy. The conventional wisdom concerning recovery from open heart surgery seems to be that it takes between 6 months and a year to feel like yourself again. So, I'm now myself? The truth is I will never be the old pre-op me again again, in much same way that I can never be a teenager again. There's just been too much change and too close of a brush with death. But the post-op me is still me and life is pretty sweet. I'm looking forward to seeing just how much sweeter it can get. And best of all I'm going to be around long enough to find out!

65+ yards and counting

I'm into my 3rd bolt of cloth and I'm building up a nice stash of solid color yardage for my class in Sept (Nancy Crow). I'm learning a lot from the exercise. If nothing else, I've gotten better about keeping lab records. I'm dyeing all of the solids with a full immersion processe. That means mixing and preparing dye and auxiliaries for about30 minutes then standing in front of a bucket for about an hour and a half. I've come up with a setup that lets me do 3 yards at a time. I manually agitate 2 buckets and let my Wonder Washer tend a 3rd yard (with a few quick checks along the way). What is a Wonder Washer you might ask? Well, basically it's like something straight out of an infomercial. It's a table top washing machine that looks just like an old school diaper pail crossbred with an ice cream maker. If you want to see one in action you might check out this slightly odd video of some straight guy doing his laundry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ4Nix460h4. Of course I bought the thing so who am I to talk about odd.

Anyway, I'm using the Soderlund method. My first family of colors (bright) was all dyed by overdyeing yellow, red, and blue to match samples from my (her) color book. This was really time consuming and I didn't realize that I should be using a different approach until I'd dyed about 30 yards of cloth various values of yellow. I had no choice but to continue with the overdye method to the bitter end. It was worth the work. I'm really pleased with the result.

Next I moved on to a more subdued color family (Earth) and switched to a value gradation method. Carol has a nice formula for creating a 10-step value gradation of a single hue from very light to almost black. I wanted a 6-step and didn't want really light or really dark, so I used the basic method, but came up with my own scale (a log10 progression) that's producing very nice results. It's 4 steps of pure color and 2 steps toned with complement.

This Earth family also produces some really excellent browns and blacks. I'd love to dye nothing but this for a while.

I've still got more solids to dye, but I'm also starting to move on to some prints. It's been a long time since I did any printing with the intent to create yardage (i.e., not art cloth). It's a bit confining not to be able to work big and do whatever I want. The repeating pattern, stripe, grid thing doesn't feel right. I want to discharge and go back into all of the pieces below, but I need to resist for now. I might still do something. I need to let these stew for now. I will probably supplement the stash with some commercial stripes and plaids (Nancy's request--I'm afraid to know what we're going to do with plaid).

Multiple printings with two values of two different colors.

Mono printing combined with batik. This piece and the one above were both overdyed with the same blue as the last step to help unify them.

Well, that's all for now. I'll certainly post more before the class (or at least I "plan" to).

Dyeing myself crazy

In mid-May I went to The Crow Barn in Ohio to take the 2nd part of Carol Soderlund's class "Color Mixing for Dyers". What an amazing experience. I learned even more than I hoped and figured out the causes and cures for some of the technical problems that I've been having with both liquid and thickened dye.

While I was there I thought (and talked) a lot about what comes next. Aside from general artistic development, is there an area in which I could benefit from some focussed study? I kept coming back to design. I thought about whether I wanted to study on my own, in a university setting, with a surface design teacher, or with a quilt design teacher. Although each of these options has it's own appeal, and I might end of doing all of them at some time, the thing that seems to make the most sense right now is quilt design. After I returned home I finally made the decision to return to Ohio in September for two back-to-back classes with Nancy Crow. It borders on insanity given the amount of prep work that I have to do and the intensity with which Nancy runs her classes. I seen them during other trips to the Barn, but this will be my first excursion into the big upstair quilting studio as a student. What I think back on my physical condition at this time last year I am nothing less than shocked that I feel so good and am able to even consider doing this. I could barely have managed the packing for such a trip last year, let alone the prep and the class itself. Amazing.

Now, when I say "prep work" what I'm referring to is the rather substantial collection of fabric that I need to amass between now and September--about 100 yard of solid colors, with some patterned stuff thrown in. I'm almost 30 yards into the dyeing using what I learned in Carol's classes. I've almost completed one color palette and will soon move onto a second (pics soon I promise). I've also got to do value gradations of neutrals, a hue series of off-whites, as well as stripes, batiks, and such. I'm not quite through my first bolt of Pimatex and realizing that, while I've got two more on hand, I might need to order a 3rd. (Don't ask about my Visa bill). I'm also making my way through 80 lbs of salt. While I was at the Southern States (farm supply) I impulsively picked up 50 lbs of urea. It was so cheep that I couldn't resist, but honestly--this is a lifetime supply since I'm using it 10 grams at a time.

Stay tuned for more stories from the dye studio--AKA laundry/furnace room in the basement.

New website

It's the same old web address (www.russlittlefiberartist.net) but a new platform and a new look for the site. I just finished moving everything to Google Apps Premier Edition and I couldn't be happier. It's fully hosted and template based. I now have absolutely no site design software on my computer--just my web browser. The site does everything that I want and it's really easy to update and maintain. I had to rebuild rather than move it from the old location, but is was mostly copying and pasting text and uploading images. Perhaps best of all, I didn't have to write a single line of code--a refreshing change.

I confess that I've had some recent experience with a Google Apps implementation, so this wasn't too intimidating. If you're looking for a different way to handle, email, calendar, documents, and your website all in one location you might want to check it out. There are lots of 3rd party service providers who will set everything up for you for a relatively small fee. It's a great small business tool, IMHO.

The one that got away (sort of)

I'm disappointed to say that I did NOT get into the SAQA Creative Force show. A national art quilt show is still eluding me. I feel really good about the piece that I entered, and I guess that's supposed to be all that matters. Still, it would have been nice. Someday.

Here's the piece that didn't make it. It's titled "On Point" I think it's among my best work to date, if not the best. I've held off on posting it until now. It large--close to 80" tall. I've got another show in mind--so try, try again.

A detail shot.

Some pretty cool PR

Last Friday I met with a reporter from the Prince George's Gazette for an interview about my studio work. She's done nice pieces about several of the other artists in residence over the last year. We had a very nice chat and the hour just flew by. I suppose those are the kind of interviews that one should be worried about. If the conversation was that easy, who knows what I said?

Well you've got to click the link below to see what I found in the paper at the end of the driveway this evening after work.

http://www.gazette.net/stories/04292010/hyatnew185958_32574.php

It's a nice article and a good picture (It takes a lot for me to say that!). It's also really good PR for the arts program at the community center. I admit to smiling and blushing when I read the nice quotes from other people. I needed a little ego boost.

Website outage

Not that you're all beating a path to my website, but just in case you try to reach it in the next few days, I just want to let you know what I'm changing my DNS registrar as part of an overall simplification and rearrangement of my web "stuff". The site (www.russlittlefiberartist.net) might not be reachable at times over the next several days.

As I write this, I'm on hold with GoDaddy tech support listening to big band music. Considering some of the really terrible stuff that you sometimes hear on hold, this isn't too bad.

Want to hear some great news?

Last week I had my first post-op echocardiogram. Today I went to see my cardiologist for a follow up. It's so much better than I even dared to hope. He said that the echo looked so good that if you didn't look closely and didn't know that I'd just had valve replacement (not to mention most of my ascending aorta) you would think I had a TOTALLY NORMAL HEART. It was all I could do not to say, "You're F$#@ing kidding, right?" The blood flow is perfect. Best of all, my heart has shrunk to within normal range. That means that the surgery is now completely and officially a success. The new valve and proper hemodynamic action have allowed the dilation of my heart to reduce, meaning that there's no longterm damage to the muscle.

I know that this adventure will continue for the rest of my life, but for now I don't have to see the cardiologist for another year. I've been on a 3-6 month schedule for a long time. It's hard to get used to being healthy enough to be on my own for a whole year.

I've been smiling so much today that my face is tired.

Truly amazing. Thank you God. Thank you indeed.

Not so recent work

The blog seems technically back on its feet and I'm working on a portfolio page. (I'm still thinking that my blog page might replace my website--much easier to maintain).

So, now that things are back in working order perhaps it would be good to talk about art a little bit. Here's a piece called "Vessel" that I finished a while back. It was accepted into the 41st Annual Laurel Art Guild Open Exhibition, which was hung for the month of March.

I'm very happy with the result from a color perspective. It seems to get good reactions from people who see it in person. My concern is that is yet another piece in a series of one-offs. How does this relate to anything else that I've done? Although...now that I look at it, it seems to have a stained glass quality (not necessarily a good thing), which relates to some liturgical work that I did a few years back.

In other, completely unrelated news, I've signed up for Carol Soderlund's workshop "Color Mixing for Dyers: Part II" at the Crow Barn in early May. This will be my 2nd class with Carol, my 3rd visit to the Barn, and a week of very hard work. I'm looking forward to both. One of the big focuses of this workshop is controlling value (light/dark) in thickened dye. I've got a good handle on hue from Part I, and I've been working successfully with thickened dye, but I don't have the predictive control over value that I would like to have. If Part II is anything like Part I, I'll be back in my studio by the end of May doing some really great stuff.

Digital simplicity: is it possible?

The blog is on the mend. In the process of repairing the damage that I did yesterday with the click of a button I discovered some nice new Blogger features. For example, you can create up to 10 standalone pages and link them to a menu. Nice. I'm starting to wonder if I could give up my hosted website and move my domain here. I'm just starting to feel like I've got too much technical stuff to maintain. Let's see, there's a blog, a website, and a Facebook page. Add to that all of the back end tasks of personal and studio accounting as well as studio promotion and it becomes a whole lot of computer time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no Luddite. I think technology is great. I just seem to have too much lately. When I get overloaded I back away from all of it, ignoring the good and useful (my website) along with the questionably useful (Facebook).

Well Cr@p!

I just "broke" my blog. Ironically, while considering a redesign (I know, I should consider actually writing instead of redecorating), I thought to myself, "I should really backup this site design before I mess it up." Instead of creating a backup I changed the template, thus irrevocably deleting all color, font, etc. changes that I had made. I'm not happy. Where's the undo button?

So, the blog is going to go through a bit more renovation than anticipated. Maybe I'll write about it. Your never know. Stranger things have happened. :)

Distraction

It's starting to feel like a great time to be alive (war, suffering, and natural disasters, aside). I've got more energy than I've had in months. I think I'm finally getting to that point where I'm starting to feel so good that I'm realizing just how bad things had gotten before the surgery (not to mention immediately thereafter).

Now I feel as though I've got a year's worth of pent-up creating that's trying to get out and I finally have the energy to do something about it. And yet, there are the distractions. Work is busy--very busy. But, that makes the days go quickly. Home is busy. I'm still amazed by how much laundry there is to do for two adults. I don't even want to imagine a household with kids' clothes to clean. Shopping, cooking, blah, blah, blah. It's the same litany that every one lives with. I expect I should be grateful that I have clothes to clean and food to eat.

So, despite all of the distractions, I'm working on finishing a piece to submit for a local art show. As soon as that's finished, photographed, and submitted I need to start quilting a piece that I'm submitting next month for a national SAQA show. I've gotten to local and regional shows, but never a national show. It would be nice to reach that goal with this particular piece. Sorry, no photos today, but soon. Promise.

No more anonymous posts and hopefully less spam

I've switched the setting on my blog (largely inactive though it might be) to not allow anonymous commenting. I regret having to do this, but recently I've been getting a number of off-topic anonymous comments that are phishing or just plain weird. For example, I posted a while back about going through a "dry spell." I was referring to a lull in my blogging. Apparently someone (more likely some bot) interpreted that as a bedroom reference and I ended up with several postings related to--how shall I put this--men's pharmaceuticals. I suppose it's funny, but I'm not laughing.

I hope this doesn't exclude anyone who wants to post because I enjoy and value your feedback. You can still post if you have a Google/Blogger account or via an OpenID user name (i.e., Yahoo, etc.) and you can reach me directly through email.

A new year

In "The Artist's Way," Julia Cameron recommends (requires) that you write one page every day. It's intended to be a way to unblock the stifled creative voice. The daily discipline is even more important than what you write. According to Cameron it's OK to write something like, "I don't know what to write" over and over again.

I sort of feel that way.

I'm sinking into the winter blahs. Too much snow, wind, rain, clouds, and cold. I need sun, warmth, and the smell of green things coming back to life. And that's months away. Pooh.

Dan and I have been off work since Christmas Eve. We visited family in NJ, stopped in Wilmington on the way home for an overnight at the Hotel DuPont and dinner in the Green Room for his birthday. Since then it's been puttering around the house, catching up on chores, and a couple of movies. Yesterday I was moping around so much that he sent me to the studio. Good thing. It was just what I needed. Too much vacation.

I had a fantastic December in the studio from a retail perspective. I sold oodles of scarves and grossed enough to cover more than 6 months of rent! It was a great feeling. I got to work hard and make pretty things and lots of my work when out into the world--I hope to the surprise and delight of the recipients.

Today we're off to have dinner with my parents, with a quick shopping expedition along the way. Tomorrow it's open studio (Greenbelt Community Center, 1-4pm if you're in the area). Monday it's back to work. Returning to the "routine" won't be such a bad thing.

Venturing out for the sake of art

I haven't had too many excursions out into the real world since surgery. It's been mostly trips to see doctors. Yesterday was a milestone. I drove (white knuckle) to the studio with Dan to see the "My Island" exhibit that's up in the gallery. It's the annual exhibit by the resident artists. I've got 2 pieces in the show and I was delighted to see how well the show has been hung. It really looks great. If you happen to be close by or find yourself in Greenbelt between now and mid-September stop by.

So, here are my pieces. "Island Meditation" is a journal quilt. The text has a lot to do with fear and its sources, about letting go of fear, and about connecting with others rather than being isolated (i.e., islands). I was delighted to find it hanging on a column by itself, with nothing close by. It really shows the piece quite well.

Here's Dan standing in front of "Island of Misfit Stitches," which began with me fiddling with some torn fabric strips and turned into a wild crocheted "thing" stitched down to a piece of canvas onto which I painted and stitched and appliqued bits of cloth. I don't know that I'll be doing another one of these soon, but you never know. Idle hands...

Here's a detailed view of the piece shot in the gallery.

What I did on my summer vacation

Rather than a big lead-up I'll just cut to the chase. On July 27th I had open heart surgery, and the rest is history--in the making. June and July proved to be a whirlwind.

In mid-June it was the cardiac catheterization. It was very manageable and not something to fear if you're ever faced with the prospect, but the recovery took a little longer than I was lead to believe. They gave me all kinds of drugs and I barely remember most of it. Bliss.

In early July it was time for the surgical consultation. Dan and I knew in very short order that we had found the right guy for us. There was virtually no discussion about whether I needed the surgery. We left the office having signed many papers, had a few tests, been scheduled for more, and finally been given a surgery date just a little more than 3 weeks away. The rest of July was spent packing the freezer with food to live on after surgery and trying to get my work affairs in order. There was also a lovely lunch break spent getting a thoracic contrast CT. Very weird. There was no pain, but the tech did connect me to a machine that injected something that looked like a liter of contrast solution during the scan. I'm not kidding. This wasn't a drip it was a push.

So, what did we learn from all of these high-tech and expensive tests?

• Bad: Yes, I did have a bicuspid aortic valve that was very stenotic and severely regurgitating.
• Good: I have lovely clear arteries, so no bypass was necessary.
• Bad: The enlargement of my aorta had reached the point of being considered an aneurysm. (4.8 cm in diameter instead of the normal 2.5 - 3 cm).

That changed the game plan a little. Now I was having valve replacement and aortic resection, which meant a longer procedure, more time on the heart bypass machine, and a bigger incision (i.e., a traditional median sternotomy instead of a "mini").

Again, let's cut to the chase. It all went very well. Dan and I arrived at the INOVA Heart and Vascular Institute at Fairfax Hospital at 530 am on Monday where we were met by my parents. The prep was easy. I was unconscious before they took me to the OR. Surgery started at 7 am and the surgeon was briefing my family by about 1030 am. I woke up in ICU in the late afternoon. I remember parts of the ICU experience that I would prefer not to, but that's life. Bottom line: Dilaudid is a good thing. The next morning I moved to stepdown care and started walking and trying to get the other bodily functions going (easier said than done). I was discharged on Thursday--total stay 3 nights. It was amazing.

Today marks four weeks since my discharge. The first 2 weeks were difficult, but the recovery was fairly linear. Each day I felt a little better than the previous. I must have been running on adrenaline or maybe it was just my body fighting to get over the trauma of the bypass machine and the anesthesia, both of which cause of number of strange side effects. The last 2 weeks have been a cycle of good and bad days. On good days I'm up and around the house doing things and taking my exercise walks. On "bad" days it's all I can do to get off the sofa and I nap almost as much as the cats. Lately I've started to realize that these "bad" days are probably the times when my body is doing the most healing, sending all of the energy into repairing damaged tissue and bone. Now I'm trying to celebrate both the good days and the bad days for what they are.

I'll probably be off work for another 2 weeks. I need to be able to get though an entire day sitting up and not napping before considering a day at the office. Between now and then I need to start driving again, get back to the studio, and still not overdo it. No small task.

Sorry, no pictures of artwork in process for now. But, I can offer this. It's a link to a site showing the artful work of others. Follow this link to read about my fancy new aortic valve, the St. Jude Epic Supra bioprothesis (ESP-100-27-00). Truly miraculous.

Dry spell for the blog

I'm still here, but judging from this blog you'd never know it. It seems that I'm going through another writing dry spell. Work is busy, the studio is busy, and Dan and I are recently returned from a trip to Cape Cod. It was lovely; so very quiet this time of year. I've been back into the studio for about a week getting ready for an open studio today. I should find out this week if my studio residency has been renewed for next year.

I'm still anticipating surgery in August. I say anticipating because I won't know for sure until I meet the surgeon in July. If I'm being honest though, it's far more sure than not. I'm starting to feel as though I'm running up against a deadline; as if there are things that must get done before the end of July, most of which really don't need to done. It'll all be there when I'm back on my feet. Right?

So, that's just the quickest of updates. I've got pics of what's happening in the studio. Perhaps I'll post them in the next day or so. For now, here's this month's open studio announcement. I've just finished a batch of about a dozen scarves in silk habotai and crepe de chine. It's amazing to see how the two fabrics take the dye differently. I'm really starting to love the crepe.

Open studio this weekend (Sun, 5/3, 1-4PM)

Home again

I'm back from Ohio after an uneventful flight. I really do love Southwest. Nobody's perfect, but they're way better than average.

After a week of hard work at the Barn I've been thinking a lot about just that--hard work. Yes, I have my lazy, slack-jawed moments in front of the TV, but generally I think I'm pretty hardworking. Or, perhaps it's just that I'm in constant motion--mental and/or physical. The last week has reminded me of the importance of spending time on an idea or design and going deeper; approaching it from different angles and resolving issues. Looking back at my work for the last year it has been, to a large extent, a series of one-offs. Now I'm feeling the need to focus on design work and to do more series work. In doing so I think that I will improve my critical eye and ultimately improve as an artist. I've also got to develop a mentoring relationship of some sort, either here or somewhere reachable by mail. I need some consistent critical feedback.

For the last couple of years I've tried to set a developmental goal. The goal for the last 12 months was to improve my knowledge of color theory and my use of color. I believe I've achieved that, though clearly a lifetime of applying and refining lies ahead. I think that the goal for the coming year is going to be to create a body of work that:

• Covers a limited number of themes
• Explores each design through several media (e.g., art cloth, art quilt, painting, drawing, photography)
• Includes design and color iterations (i.e., the same piece executed in multiple design variations)
• Applies what I have learned about color
• Requires a deeper study of design principles

If I can do that in 12 months (along with everything else that's on the calendar) then it will be a banner year. Someone blow the starting whistle.

Color: Days 4-5

I got home so late last night that there was no way that I was going to post. That means that you get a condensed version of the last two days. Heavy on the pictures and light on the words.

This is the crit wall from late yesterday morning showing all of the free studies created from the proportional color inventory exercise that I finished Wednesday night. The caliber of the work was really amazing. You can find mine in the 2nd picture. I did a very geometric design from the color inventory and a much more abstract design in reverse proportion . Can you tell that it rained for 4 days this week?

There was more crit, more discussion, and more work in between, but cutting to the chase, here are shots from the final crit. We were to pick 2 of our best free studies.

Everyone's work just kept getting better. I think we all agreed that if we could have a day of rest and resume work next week with a focus on design we could do even more. Perhaps that's a class for another year.

For now, I'm off to meet some folks for dinner, then back to pack, and fly home tomorrow morning. It's been great, but I'm ready to go home. Dan and I have been off on separate adventures this week: me to Ohio and him to NJ to visit family and play golf with his brothers, then on to Hyde Park for a couple of days of quiet and Holy Cross, then home just long enough to eat and sleep before heading to car show in PA. We've both got Saturday and Sunday to be home together and get our feet back on the ground before it's back to work on Monday.