Making it up as I go along

Rug number four - for someone I know who likes earth colours.

First sketch...The design is very loosely based on the Shaker 'Tree of Life' .

This is it scaled up full size on paper.. He said he'd like the tree to be the colour of a cardboard tube...there followed several days of dyeing and re-dyeing white T-shirts with tea/coffee/cinnamon while I jiggled with impatience.

Finally - I could start. All sorts of fabrics in there - as each one is a different weight the tricky bit is cutting strips the right width. This is where I am making it up as I go along because I don't really know what I'm doing, but as it's not "work" there's none of the fear/ anxiety about competence...I can be blithely incompetent without it freezing me into immobility. I've a feeling there's an insight lurking in there.

 I like the look of the backs of these rugs...makes me think of a labyrinth...Minotaur, mazes, cochlea, Mayan - or is it Inca? Also of lugworm casts in the sand...

Having looked at a lot of hooked rugs on Pinterest and read a few blogs of American hookers ( that's what they call themselves) I'm thinking that like patchwork, rug hooking in the States has moved on from its origins and developed a distinctive style. It seems contemporary American makers use mostly woollen fabrics, and cloth rather than hessian for the backing, so loops and rows look much more regular.

Making Dolls

On a whim, I made one. Then I saw some 'Prims', and made another doll. Then Shirley at the Ennis Creative Arts Centre thought it could run as a workshop, so I made two more as examples, dyeing old cotton sheets with tea/coffee for the dolls, and men's shirts for the clothes.

After the workshop, which was hugely enjoyable, I made another doll...this one even more 'prim'. To make her worn-looking, I sandpapered the fabric in places, and made small holes/tears, and wiped the floor with it, and rubbed soot into it and badly hand-stitched the clothes and had a brilliant time altogether.

I think I'll make some more...and make a different pattern/size.
Don't have a picture of the one I made up, but found a pattern for a prairie bonnet, and discovered that by using the measurements as centimetres instead of inches, the bonnet fits these dolls.

Instead of making the drawstrings, which would have been a fiddle too far, I just gathered the back. The whole primitive/naive look appears to be big in America, but I don't think it's admired here -  unless it's the cutesy variety...

And then...a neighbour asked me if I'd make her some of the  fairy 'helpers' that I'd made a few years ago. More playing...even if it is cutesy...so I did...

These are the cleaning, cooking and shopping (ah, the shopping one is missing) fairies that help you get through Christmas...

Here's the shopping one. The feather duster and groceries are fiddly to make but enjoyable in a slightly masochistic (?) way. No, it's not that...whereas gathering the back of the doll's bonnet rather than fiddling to make the drawstrings makes little difference visually, the parcel and bag of oranges in the shopping bag makes a big difference to the end result...so I'm prepared to put in the effort.

Making more...

Rug number three....
Which brings me to the topic of Pinterest. Yes, it's a great resource (never mind that it's funded by big business which is quite possibly using it as a consumer research tool) but I do wonder if it isn't demolishing the last remnants of the concept of intellectual property... if it's on the internet it's fair game for copying.
Even if it's not on the internet it seems to be fair game. A friend of mine was recently at a trade fair and was annoyed to see people taking photos of her work on their phones and drawing diagrams of the patterns. Is it ok to do that?
Having said that, we do draw on sources outside of our own imagination and I don't know exactly where the line is drawn between blatant plagiarism and inspiration.
So- rug number three is rather heavily based on a design seen on Pinterest. I claim no credit and would acknowledge the designer of the original if I knew who it was.

The second one is mine, not yet hemmed...the colours aren't quite true to life. I was aiming for a naive look, which I think is sort of there, but my colours are a bit bright.. the black background makes the colours look richer.

Making masks
For this year's  Hallowe'en event Naomi and I stepped down our involvement, so instead of a full-scale shadow puppet play, it turned into a street theatre performance. How fatally easy it is to say those three little words ..."I'll make it". Of course, having said I'd make the masks, I put it off from day to day until it was a bit of a panic to make it in time. I did feel self-conscious doing it, but

took pictures of the process with this blog in mind.So doing this is changing my behaviour.

The nearest art shop is 50 miles away, so before cutting up large pieces of card I make small maquettes -something I often do just to get a feel for how to construct a shape...and just for the record, I rarely get it right the first time..or even the second time.

the mask..

...in action

And the idea for the mouse came from an image on the internet, as did the hedgehog

Making jam, among other things

I've written pages in my head since the last post...however, am not sure how this is going to work for someone who is introverted and who finds it difficult to be on show, but then what are the chances of anyone reading this when there are millions of blogs?
So why, I've been wondering, did this seem like a good idea ?

A difficulty for a long time has been providing a definition of what I do, which it seems - in many people's minds -  also defines what I am.
In my own head, I'm just me..without a label...the words 'artist' or 'sculptor' belong to other people.
What I do is make things and the (good?) idea was to have a space in which to be just a maker of things.
And now I'm doing the introvert thing of deeply pondering my motives for putting it out there...ambivalence, or what?
In the spirit of "what happens if I...?" which I believe is a driver shared by scientists and creative people, I'll see what happens if I carry on.

Making - jam

Nothing original to say here...the best bit is playing around making the labels and decorations.

Making - mistakes

Brief back-story...Three years ago when I was in Maine, I saw rag rugs in an upmarket shop. At the time didn't know what they were, but loved the look of them. Earlier this year while browsing images (which I do a lot) I saw rag-rug courses by Debbie Siniska in England and although the timing didn't work for me, by connecting her with the Ennis Creative Arts Centre, she ended up coming over to Ireland and I went to her workshop.
Yes, there are plugs going on.

Now I'm hooked (I know, dreadful pun!) - this is rug number one. The mistakes are that the loops are too short, so bits have come undone already - and the colours are much brighter than I had intended...I was trying for a naive/primitive look. Steep learning curve. It's now in front of the stove and is beginning to look a bit better as it gets dirty.

Making it better
(will I be able to keep up thinking of headings with the word 'making'?)

Rug 2, not quite finished yet...
Based on beach stones from the end of  the road, this one has both hooking and prodding...loops are longer this time, tension still a bit uneven and am not happy with the shape of that big stone...it's been altered since the photo was taken. Pleased with the way I used sparkling silver fabric for the crystals that run in seams through these stones.

And the photo for the design..

today

Maybe after trying for the past half hour to set up a blogspot, it might work? But where is the almost unlimited choice of background templates that viv promised me?

trying to set up the blog with viv....