Two-headed snake and an eyeplant with rhizome. Red, black, and blue ballpoint pen and black Micron pen.
2025 daily stitch, day 13
My hand stitched log cabin is growing nicely.
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:
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.
mysteries of the archive
I’m trying to clear up and consolidate a massive jumble of files and duplicates, the result of several years of just not being careful with how my work was stored on three or more different computers. There’s a lot of stuff like this photo, clearly made by me (the goose is part of an image on a set of old placemats we used to have). But what’s going on here? We may never know.
drinks diary, 11 january 2014
A dragon tree in a commode and coffee at the Maple Leaf Diner, the one and only time I’ve ever been there (for a meeting with the roller derby league board of directors). I feel like I may have actually drawn that plant in my partner’s office in the library, though, because he used to have a dragon tree in a commode that died when the first covid lockdown happened.
Drawn with all the Zebra F-301 colours: blue, black, red, green.
blue sketchbook, pages 24 & 25
Red winged blackbirds, male and female, and a giant bird head. This was the first sketch I made while thinking about a design for my chest tattoo. KEEP IT BEAUTIFUL was the slogan on Ontario license plates produced between 1976 and 1982 and I guess it’s about littering on the highways but I’ve always thought it was a good philosophy to live by and I don’t know how many people know where it comes from when they see it on my clavicle.
Ballpoint pen and gesso over top of an older drawing of ballpoint pen and coloured markers.
the worst buck ever
Last week my partner’s sister and her husband spent the night so we could indulge in our favourite sleepover pastime of getting wasted and playing Solo, a weird old German card game my family plays. It’s similar to euchre but your partner changes each hand according to the bidding, and there are funny words derived from Low German for the different bids. Players go out when they reach 36 points, and the game is played until only one person is left, which is called “taking the buck”. I had the worst game of my life, dealt terrible cards and also ending up with the least helpful partners, and at one point well into the game I still had no points and thought, I’d better take a picture of this to show my mom. So here’s a thrilling scoresheet photo for you:
By the time the game was over and I was declared The Buck, I’d earned points on one hand. I’m kind of wishing I hadn’t, because that would have been a scoresheet worth framing:
I still might frame it, and hang it behind the kitchen bench where we play cards, because my mom said it was the worst score she’d ever seen. In our family’s heyday there would be three separate tables of Solo going at every holiday gathering, so having any kind of superlative game in this family is kind of amazing.
Don’t tell my mom (hi, yes I’m 53 but just don’t tell my mom, okay) but I’m planning to get knuckle tattoos, in the fancy lettering from the Bicycle Playing Cards box, that say CLUB SOLO, the biggest scoring hand you can get. Even though a couple of my friends have said that everyone will assume it’s some kind of Star Wars reference.
drinks diary, 4 january 2014
This 4×6″ black hardcover sketchbook was filled between 4 January 2014 and 4 January 2015 and contains a drawing of everything I drank outside my own home that year.
I started drawing in a fresh sketchbook while sitting in the Exeter Lions Youth Centre after my cousin Jon’s funeral, watching beads of coffee leak through the side of a styrofoam cup on the table in front of me.
Drawn with blue and red ballpoint pen (0.7mm Zebra F-301, for the pen nerds).
blue sketchbook, pages 22 & 23
Lace and a portrait of a man in front of floral wallpaper. Red and blue ballpoint pen, yellow marker.
found
I’m currently in the thick of a big studio clean and rearrange, carving out a space to set up my indigo and other dye vats in the printmaking studio where there’s beautiful light and ventilation, unlike the dark and cramped laundry area where the dye vats currently reside. Today I moved the two-tier metal flat file unit and am spending some time decluttering the drawers as I move them. I found this great drawing, done *I think* by my friend Monica’s son, from back when I had my shop and public access studio. It appears to be a jewel thief being arrested under a crescent moon by a law enforcement officer who is simultaneously pointing a gun and eating Tic Tacs. Not sure if my favourite part is the fluffy police dog that says “reeef” or the giant ghost of my trusty spray bottle of watered down Simple Green.
As if that weren’t delightful enough, on the flipside is this portrait of me, wearing bright green glasses and a Pugs Not Drugs shirt and drawing a dinosaur. Which is pretty on brand.
Here’s the dinosaur I was drawing:
2025 daily stitch, day 5
I think you can see where this is going.