Artist Grants for Development

I wanted to help spread attention to Cheryl's entry on writing artist statements for grant proposals.  One of the things that surprised me with the art quilters community was lack of application and discussion on application for project support and artistic development from arts organizations.  I have always viewed them as life savers and serious support for development and I know they have given me the space and time to develop projects that would not have been completed otherwise.  I have received 4 of them...1 from the state arts agency and 3 from a feminist organization...the end result was a manuscript of poems based on family mythology/geneaology.  I'm trying to get back in the loop and I appreciated Cheryl sharing her statement.

Grants are also great for taking your art into a wider exposure via community...most non-profit community service organizations welcome artists to enhance their programming. 

Here is Cheryl's link: http://violetpatch.blogspot.com/2006/01/artist-statement.html#comments

I'll be throwing out good vibes (maybe some chicken bones or tea leaves) in your favor Cheryl. 

Today's loot and run off thoughts

It rained here all day yesterday.  Of all the things I can consistently notice is that rain and extreme cold temps aggravate my fatigue and muscle burning and I run a low grade temp.  Last Thursday the rhuemotologist added the diagnosis of fibromyalgia...it really didn't upset me or anything because I've lived with the symptoms for so long that it pretty much seems normal to me.  The only time I complain is when the pain is so bad that I stay on the verge of tears. It really is a horrid habit to have developed and my very first pulmonary doc cautioned me about becoming accustomed to the pain. My enthusiasm for life, my youth, and thinking that if only I practiced postitive thinking well enough that the physical discomfort wouldn't hinder me from doing anything I wanted badly enough.  Pretty much I think I was able to pull it off until the last 6 or 7 years. 

But back to yesterday...it was not a real good day for me physically but my perk for the day was my brother, Upfromsumdirt, coming over and us running a 10 game Scrabble marathon from about 9am until about 4 at which time I took a nap and then got up to play a last game around 8:00.  I still remain the reigning Queen with yesterday's tally being 6-5. (He has been praticing.)  I should have taken pictures of the winning word strategies!

This morning it was cold but warmed up and the sun was shining and the rain had stopped just in the nick of time for me to make a run to the 1 buck/fat quarter sale.  It was easy...I got there when they opened as many others where waiting for the door to open...but since I do not prefer to buy prints or florals (although I tried to make myself purchase them but ended up putting them back except for the few you see in the picture).  It was easy to go through the bins that where set up and just pick and go.  After an hour this is what I left with:

The grays are for the C&C exercise in value.  I think I have enough colours already for the monochromatic exercise. 

My family has been gracious to allow my sewing machine and supplies to remain on the kitchen table without complaining but I have not been up to doing much besides the design exercises in the previous posts...one of which will become my JQ for January.  I did attempt to take one of the b&w samples and sew circular stitches on it using the circular attachment for Janome 6500.  After fiddling with it for about an hour 2 days ago I couldn't get it attached.  Come to find out its not for my machine...kinda pissed me off since I called ahead to make sure they had the one for my machine in stock and then once again double questioning when I went to pick it up and it turns out to NOT be the one I need.  It will take about a week she said before it comes in.

I have 2 book recommendations...Collage Sourcebook and Handpainting Fabric.  The first one I've had for about 2 weeks and its wonderful...I really try not to have a lot of quilting-technique books on the same topic/technique and just get the one good definitive one that speaks to me and with these 2, I seriously scored!  After reading and re-reading Collage Sourcebook, I think I really need to have a printing machine to run fabric through.  I think there is an open teaching studio in a arts and entertainment complex here that use to be a meat processing center that has a drop in schedule and one of the weekly topics is print techniques...I hope to be able to check this out before I get hasty, but I'm seriously thinking I need a printing machine. Don't you think I need one? :) If you say yes, I'll let you come over and play.

Okay, I just came from Ebay checking the price of printing presses and maybe I don't need one afterall. 

Finally finished it!

Have you ever read a book where none of the characters held any appeal for you?  Well I just finished that type of book for me.  The title is You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon. 

A friend sent me this book because I shared that I don't like novels that move in a linear fashion but bend time with flashbacks.  I started it months ago and first kept reading out of obligation because I admire this friend and her literary sensibilities.  Then I kept thinking 'maybe if I just get to the middle of the book' the characters will undergo some major developmental change...didn't happen...then when I was 2/3rds of the way through, I kept thinking that all the adults should just vanish to save the only child present in the book from a generational curse. I finished it because I couldn't stand the thought of not knowing how these characters turned out since they didn't seem to have the ability to learn from their experiences. 

At the end of the book, I figured out that it was a story of how mental illness and the environment surrounding our births can be passed on from one generation to the next and never be recognized as such.  Overall, it was a dull (sometimes interesting) story about dull people living ordinary lives and their unresolved issues.

I will definitely bookcross this one...if anyone wants the book, let me know...first one who says so, I'll gladly mail it to you...otherwise I'll do a book drop at one of the coffee shops I frequent.

Now that I've turned the tv off,

I can carry on with my thoughts. 

The gray-scale and monochromatic exercises from C&C I do plan to do but I'm going to wait until after Saturday when a local quilt shop is doing their buck a fat quarter sale this Saturday.  I really love monochromatics so I want to make sure I get this exercise. 

Here are the Shapes...

from Color and Composition:

I did one yesterday and the other today without remembering the one I did yesterday and they both are asymetrical. 

And now the 4 things meme:

Four Jobs You've Had: Clerk at the Census Bureau, Sales Clerk at Stewart's Dry Goods, Teacher of African American Literature at a Bible College, Mary Kay Consultant

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over: Daughters of the Dust, Beaches, Waiting to Exhale, Toy Story

Four Places You've Lived: Shively, Germantown, Shawnee, St. Matthews-all neighborhoods here in Da'Ville.

Four TV Shows you love to Watch: LOST, Boston Legal, Commander In Chief, Democracy Now

Four Places You've Been on Vacation:  Martha's Vineyard, Edisto Island, Atlanta, Memphis

Four Websites You Visit Every Day: the local newspaper, AQ blogs, Democracy Now, Blogs of friends.

Four Of Your Favorite Foods: Dill pickles, Penn Station's Italian Sub, home-made rolls with butter, Greens (mustard, kale, collards) with hotsauce.

Four Places You'd Rather Be:  Nothing really comes to mind right now.

Four Albums You Can't Live Without: Paganini After a Dream (Regina Carter), Salt (Lizz Wright), Beautifully Human (Jill Scott), The Earthshaker (Koko Taylor)

incoming cryptic message: WHY IS THIS MAN IN MY CITY TODAY TRYING TO DEFEND HIS LACK OF INTEGRITY AND OUTRIGHT LIES AND JUST PLAIN RIFF-RAFFISH THINKING AND DEEDS...A THUG IS A THUG IS A THUG I DON'T CARE WHO HIS TAILOR IS! HE REALLY REALLY SCARES ME AND GIVES ME THE CREEPS IN A REALLY FRIGHTENING SENSE.

Lines, from Color and Composition.

The first 3 are 8.5x11 and I ran out of white fabric on the last one.  Juanita had me do these exercises in a workshop 2 years ago. I couldn't tell then but I know now that horizontal is my favorite orientation to work in followed my mixed horizontal and vertical, followed by asymetrical, framed border, grid, symetrical.  Circulating and radiating I like the least in my own work. The last one I named My Little House and Boat Down By The River. I'm going to run out and pick up some more white fabric and I hope to get to the exercise on shape this evening after dinner or tomorrow afternoon.

I'll get to my meme later too.

Doodling with fabric

This is what I did today. I really have a hard time throwing away even the smallest of scraps.  My goal was not to cut any fresh fabric but use up the scraps.  I just sat at the kitchen table and cut and fused. The first one I cut wonky triangles and just laid them where they seem to fit the best.  The second one is are wonky rectangles some as narrow as 1/8 inch but none wider than 1.5 inches and none longer than 3 inches.  I think the rectangles will grow pretty large as my scraps increased. The only reason I stopped was for lack of darker greens and a wider range of blues. 

Introducing Adrian II, my first grandchild.

Hey, I'm so happy to be here! And here I am with my great grandmama. I was born on her birthday. She turned 77.

Color and Composition continues

In the previous post are my exercises from pages 24-25.  For those who remain interested in working through this book, lets post results from Line and Shape, pages 26-29 this weekend.  The exercises on Value and Color, pages 31-33 and Monochromatic and Achromatic Color Schemes, pages 35-40 will be due to post the weekend after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Holiday which gives you 2 weeks. For those who are outside the U.S. that is the weekend beginning 01/20.  How does that sound? Who's still hanging in with this?

I already know I'm going to skip doing the color wheel in fabric...for some reason I have an aversion to making a color wheel in fabric...any arguments in favor of why I should I'm open to hearing.  It just seems a waste of time to me when I have a printed one...I don't get the point made in the book.   

Also, Gabrielle Swain has a quilt, Autumn Improv, on page 30.  I would like to see Nest I by Sue Benner and Forest Floor by Jan Myers-Newbury (page 28) in person. 

from 10 til noon-Color and Compostion continued

this morning's work (ignore the dates on some of the photos because its not correct, i've been fooling with this camera to fix it for some time now, i think i've finally corrected it and am now in the right time zone w/ daylight savings time) and now its lunch time. the menu: fried okra with horseradish sauce and a glass of sherry. the music: Strange Fruit, an orchestrated jazz movement that combines story telling and choral ensemble.

lesson learned from the above exercises: patience is required to do thread painting.  after lunch, i'll do the apple and orange and the border. also, its annoying to me to stop to change thread colors, (try working monochromatically) but once i do, i quickly forget the annoyance (but this hasn't been tested on a quilt requiring a lot of thread changes either).

A Return to Routine

It is quiet with the return to school and work for my family and I once again will need to establish a routine.  I'm dressed for the day, coffee is brewing, Simply Quilts just ended, and I've cleared off the table for machine quilting.  Its been awhile and I can feel the adrenalin rushing as I think about where to begin. I've got a new still life set up for thread drawing and 2 pieces to quilt that are warm-ups more than "my" work.  Nothing percolating artistically of late other than being drawn to blues and grays and bluish grays.

Adrian II has been breathing on his own for the last 2 days and might come home tomorrow and I get to begin figuring out how I want to grandmother...I found myself in children's literature at Border's yesterday and I thought about my sister who started building her stash of movies for children long before she became a grandmother and laughed at myself.   

To everyone who sent well wishes, prayers, good thoughts, and birthday greetings, thank you very much.  I'm sure there will be a few forthcoming entries on grandmotherhood.

The turn of the year found me in a run of Scrabble competition with my family.  We started on the 31st and stopped on the afternoon of the 1st (with a few hours of sleep in-between).  I am the Queen of Scrabble but did make a little room for my brother, Upfromsumdirt (aka Ron), at the foot of the throne.  I love the game and even thought about joining a Scrabble club so I could play weekly.  The only time we play as a family like this is when everyone in on vacation and I always go through withdrawals after routine returns to a schedule (like today).  I had the online version but the disc became damaged and I decided not to replace it since it was feeding my insomnia and was the cause of dinners being burned.  I'm really not that great of a player if I consider serious competitive play, I'm just better than most of my friends and family who enjoy the game but not as much as I do, thus I get to declare myself Queen and request they address me as such (been having a little rebellion about this from the peasants though). 

My goals for the new year are summed up by checking out the new list in my sidebar entitled "Stay Focused".  There is an upcoming deadline of January 10 for Quilt Visions and I'm not sure I'll meet it but we'll see, nothing like waiting to the last minute, eh?!

I had thought I would have 4 or 5 pieces hanging in a local yarn shop this month but it didn't pan out.  After I met with the owner some months ago and sent her a thank you fabric postcard I didn't hear from her and because I had felt lukewarm about the meeting I decided not to pursue it any further with any follow-up calls.  It was good practice though for me to show and talk about my work with a stranger. Maybe I need to cultivate the show of enthusiasm in my presentation...I'm more a laid back and quiet, observant person and I have to work at it to project enthusiasm outwardly.  For 7 years I was an enthusiastic consultant with Mary Kay Skin Care and Cosmetics, so I know I can do it but it does use a lot of energy which is why I've thought twice, trice, about doing booths at art/craft fairs.  I'm more suited to a storefront where customers can come in and sip wine or tea and hear some low funk jazz and ask me questions about what motivated me to create a piece or join me in experimenting.  Since my goals are to enter juried shows, along with this will come learning to write about my pieces in statements, exercises that will lead to strengthening my creative vision in cloth, and discipline in a work schedule.  I will attend AQS in Paducah and aim to take at least 1 intensive major workshop which in turn will mean keeping my budget on the narrow to do.

Now is time for me to begin sewing...next post will be pictures (of something).