blue sketchbook, pages 30 & 31

page30-31

Lots of layers on the verso with spirograph, fungal growth, folding spacetime, and a bird. The recto is a tipped in newsprint bingo card (this is the back) with some stuff Profesora was saying in Spanish class. That little antler wiener character is giving a bit of side eye to Tito wishing his girlfriend would drink some beers.

Ballpoint pen, Sharpie marker, coloured markers, white gel pen, opaque white paint marker.

drinks diary, 18 january 2014

sb14-1-18

Ballpoint pen (black, blue, red, green) and markers.

Working midnight shift at the bingo hall on a day when I had foolishly thought would be my first day of giving up coffee and I lasted about five minutes in the dismal bingo hall lighting where you can’t tell if it’s day or night. Giving up coffee was a bad idea anyway, I’m never going to do it.

One woman got bingo four times in a row that night.

studio update

I’ve been moving furniture and presses around in the studio for the past month, trying to figure out a way to get the natural dye operation into the same space where the printmaking and bookbinding happen, because it’s the space with all the good lighting and the ventilation. It’s a big, exhausting job. But it’s starting to feel like it’s going to work out, and it’s shaping up to actually feel more spacious than before. If I can find somewhere for all the STUFF to go.

studioprogressjanuary30

This is what the south wall looks like as of yesterday. I moved that gray table on the right, with the extremely heavy Nolan flatbed press on it that’s too heavy for Peter and I to lift together anymore, all the way over next to the doorway by shifting and scooching, shifting and scooching kind of like how the Easter Island heads were put in place. That was literally the only work I could do that day. Then the press table, which used to jut out into the middle of the room, got pivoted against the wall (with that Chandler & Price Pilot press on it, which is very heavy but not too heavy to lift), and the drying rack in the corner also pivoted 90°. And suddenly this whole space feels wide open, and for the first time in this studio all the letterpress furniture and spacing is on the same side of the room as the presses. Now I can’t wait to get back to printing in here, except for the chaos I’m not showing you over on the other side of the room.

That handpainted Tabor Metal Fabricators sign came from the business my Granddad came to Canada to operate. They made those truck trailers that carry cars, and when the business folded my tricycle, which my dad had taken into work to fix, got abandoned in the locked-up building and when I was a teenage I would regularly stop by that still shuttered building on my jaunts through the industrial park, peering through the murky windows trying to spot my trike in all the abandoned junk that was in there.

I use that sign to block the studio doorway, moving it into place every single time I leave the room so this very cute asshole won’t try to come in and poop on the floor. She has a thing for concrete.

wandainthestudio

Don’t let that sweet face fool you. This is an absolute monster.

2025 daily stitch, day 29

25daily0129

I think I’ve decided how to make this project work for me over the upcoming year. I’ve been planning to start breaking up the longer chunks into small sections, adding just one section per day so that a single strip may represent a week or two rather than just one day. But while I love the look of long pieced strips in a big log cabin quilt, I’m also very much enjoying the rigid lines created by the folded edges of these applied strips, and don’t fancy the idea of those strips being broken up by folded edges crossing those strips.

30+ years ago when I was a wee baby art student in the Bealart programme (link: Bealart), majoring in printmaking and minoring in textiles, my textile instructor Nicole Crozier called me a “textilian in printmaker’s clothing”. When you see how much I’m currently condensing the footprint of the presses in my printmaking studio to make space for my natural dye operation you’ll probably agree. But still I’m a printmaker first, and we tend to work in multiples. I feel the best way to go forward with this project is to make a new block each month, but finish each off as a separate small quilt rather than waiting until the end of the year to assemble them into one large piece.

This project is about establishing and maintaining a daily practice, not so focused on what the final product will be, and so far this year I haven’t fallen behind once (in stark contrast to last year). I am a champion starter and not much of a finisher, and my projects tend to drag on, and on, and on. Stopping at the end of each month and taking the extra time to finish each block with backing and binding as I go will actually make the daily practice more valuable for me, a person always working on something but rarely finishing anything. And at the end of the year instead of one large quilt top needing to be quilted and finished, I’ll have twelve small finished works. And in 2026 I’ll be able to move on to the next Daily Stitch project with no loose ends.

This means only two more days’ worth of strips on this square and I’ll be ready to quilt it.

home stretch

sleeve

I’ve finally reached the armscye bindoff row on both sleeves of the cabled sweater I’m currently knitting for my partner. The body pieces are finished, so once these sleeve caps are complete it’s just assembly and neck band left to do. This sweater has raglan shaping with a pseudo-saddle shoulder so the rows will get much shorter much faster from here on.

This is the third such sweater I’ve made him, all reverse engineered from his favourite store bought sweater which is all stretched out and shredding apart. The first two, one in a heathered blue and one in brown, were faithful reproductions of that allover cabled sweater. This one has exactly the same basic framework but with a different set of cables, including a central front and back panel of the cable I drafted in 2005, taken from an illustrated page in the Book of Kells, for my first published sweater design at Knitty Magazine (link: Mariah Cardigan).

All three of these have been knit in Wool of the Andes from Knit Picks, which holds up very well to heavy cables yet is a nice discount yarn. We’ve already got enough for a fourth, having lucked into 20 balls of the same yarn in a small town thrift store a while back. It’s a dusty rose colour right now so I’m going to be throwing swatches into all of my dye baths for a while until we find an overdye combination we like, hopefully resulting in a good red, orange, or burgundy shade.

I’ve been out of the knitwear design game for a long time now, not really having been all that good at it, but I’m considering writing up the pattern for this and sharing it here for free, in this one size with notes on scaling up or down.

drinks diary 16 & 17 january 2014

sb14-1-16

Ballpoint pen in every colour my beloved Zebra F-301 comes in: black, blue, red, and green. Plus a few markers and yellow highlighter.

The Money Train was a special feature that came around occasionally back when I was working all-night volunteer shifts at the bingo hall on behalf of Artcite, our local artist run centre (link: Artcite Inc). I don’t know if I was ever actually present when the Money Train arrived (if I was, it will turn up in this book eventually) but it features heavily in this sketchbook and the big blue one, both of which I used to bring to the bingo and draw in during our significant chunks of downtime.

This was also a period in our lives when we used to put my partner’s daughter on the Greyhound bus every other Friday to go stay with her mom in another city, and after the bus we’d eat pizza at Terra Cotta (link: Terra Cotta Pizzeria) and share a half litre of red wine. Back then I only had about a 50% chance of getting a migraine from drinking red wine; now it’s more like 100%. And yes, that song lyric is misquoted, whoopsie!

2025 daily stitch, day 13

My hand stitched log cabin is growing nicely.

25daily0113

It’s already clear that I’m not going to be able to just add strips every day all year to this block. I’ll soon run out of pieces from which to cut such long strips among the fabrics I have earmarked for this. So far it’s all been scraps from the dresses I made during my thesis work, The Wardrobe Project. I’ll switch to some other block printed fabrics when the strips get too long, but adding a strip every day will also make this thing far too big, too unweildy. A year of stitching every day is a lot of stitching so it makes sense that the finished piece be somewhat monumental, but it also has to be manageable.

I’m considering a few different options: making a separate block for each month and assembling them at the end; starting a new centre somewhere else on the backing sheet and then gradually filling in the gaps (tempting but would lessen the impact of the one big log cabin), or having some of the longer strips be made up of smaller sections, thus allowing myself to spend a week or more building up a single strip. None of these is 100% appealing but right now I’m leaning towards the last option. I’ll give myself until the end of January to decide, after I’ve seen the final size of a month of strips.

The back is looking pretty fun, too:

25daily0113b

I’m stitching this with two colours of variegated crochet cotton I picked up in a thrift store. It’s partially a test to see if crochet cotton is strong enough to quilt with (so far I’m leaning towards NO). The twist feels quite different from the sashiko thread I’m more accustomed to using, and I don’t expect it to behave the same way so I’m tying knots rather than relying on the thread to swell and grab itself like sashiko thread does. I sure do love those colour changes though, especially in the orange.