Pemi II and III

For those of you with different schedules, this past week was February school vacation week for kids in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and a few other communities tossed in here and there. When you live in a ski resort town, that's big news. This coming week is vacation week for most schools in New Hampshire and Vermont. Sheer population statistics say that this next week won't be as busy as last.

My art time was limited to sketching in the evening. Mostly just doodles, but another river piece is emerging from these exercises. I am overcoming my fear of wasting paper; I overcame the fear of using fabric a couple of years ago, but the paper fear has remained. Maybe it's the permanence of a sketchbook? Even wire-bound, I hate tearing out pages. It leaves all of those little "chads" all over the place.

On my most recent trip to the real grocery store (as opposed to the supposed supermarket here in town) I bought a couple of 15" x 18" foil trays. Now I can make silk fusion larger than 7" square. I ordered a bunch of dyed silk roving from Treenway Silks to add to my collection from The Paper Shed. Maybe tonight.

Maxine Farkas on Exhibit

Last Wednesday evening we hosted the Lincoln-Woodstock Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours. This is a monthly informal gathering held at different businesses around town each month. We prepared a buffet spread of our new gourmet breads, fresh baby spinach salad, oven- roasted turkey breast, home made corn and clam chowders, and corner waffles with ice cream and toppings for dessert. It was a big hit, but the best part of it all was that Maxine Farkas came up from Lowell to help rearrange the gallery exhibits and add to the current collection.

I can't believe what a phenomenal job she did! And it was well worth it -- many of the attendees spent time with her talking about her art and fiber art in general. By the time the evening was over we were talking about off-season artist workshops and had planned a special exhibit to be timed with the NH/VT HOG Rally to be held the end of August at Loon Mountain!




She also reminded me that the couches really needed covers. This was one of the urgent things on my list back in November when we first expanded into the space but has long since been forgotten. The new covers should arrive early next week!

Thank you Max!

Happy Valentine's Day!

We're headed off to a party this evening ... the price of admission is one original poem. Doesn't need to related to Valentine's Day at all; you just need to "write" a poem.

Here's mine:





Passion

Silken threads, woven
into one; iridescent
even in darkness.

I used some silk roving I had gotten from the Paper Shed (UK) and made a 3.5" x 5" piece of silk fusion. I also made 3 small "roses" which I formed separately and then added to the base piece. The haiku above was then written on a piece of purchased handmade paper and stitched to the back with #12 perle cotton hand-dyed by ArtFabrik. Add hand-dyed silk ribbon "stems" and - voila!

Where'd I go?

Wow - apparently I've been away for an entire week. Yikes! The restaurant got very busy last weekend, and it hasn't slowed down since. In between I went back to the house for a couple of days to jump start the moving process. I spent an entire day just clearing out the master bedroom! It felt good, but there's still another 4 rooms plus the basement to go.

In the meantime the temp got up to 50 degrees, which caused a great deal of thawing on the river. First there were cracks - just lines, really - like stress fractures. Then the snow and ice began to disappear and the rushing water was once again visible. Fast forward a couple of days and a foot of snow later, and the river is a combination of rushing water, snow, and ice. While the river is beautiful all year long, it changes most dramatically in the shortest period of time during the winter.

Hopefully I'll get some stitching in this weekend!

Pemi I ... cont'd

I've added some tulle and some really cool fibers to help amplify the "sound". I also made some silk fusion rocks, which will be enhanced with beads/stones.



Now I get to stitch it all down and embellish. Can you hear the water rushing past?

It's warm ...

and I should head back to the condo while it's still daylight to see the river. This morning it was still covered in snow, but it's been close to 50 all day with the sun shining, so I expect that some melting has occurred.

This is the beginnings of Pemi I




It's mostly Judy Robertson's hand-dyed fabrics reverse machine appliqued a la Susan Brittingham's technique. The crinkly stuff is crinkled silk shot organza blue/green. And there's a bit of Mickey Lawler's fabric in there as well.

More on the gallery website

Another breakthrough ... one of the things that I think is really cool is being able to create "subdomains" - that is, rather than having to go to www.kingscornercafe.com/gallery you can instead type in/link to gallery.kingscornercafe.com. Okay, until this morning I didn't know that was called a subdomain, so I wasn't sure how to go about finding instructions. Now I know, and I know how to do it! It also means that I can make better sense of the all of the files that make up this domain and try to keep my gallery pieces separate from the restaurant piece. I think I'll also create espresso.kingscornercafe.com and music.kingscornercafe.com.

I fixed the gallery name image on the gallery pages; it had the wrong color background. Two more issues - getting the right pictures to pop up along with descriptions and fixing the logo image.

Cool Templates

Well, I printed out the manual and was able to make sense of most of it. There's just a couple of bits left to do. Hopefully I'll keep it up-to-date because otherwise I'll forget how to do it again by the time I have to do it again. It really is very cool although overkill for what we need. Who knows - maybe by putting together a really classy site we'll attract really classy people with lots of money to spend on fiber art! That's the hope anyway.

We'll see. It's almost done.