important Shorty update!

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You might remember a few weeks ago I mentioned that Shorty had shown up here after an absence of more than three weeks. That was 3 January, and she didn’t show up again until this past Saturday, 8 February. Long enough that I’d done all of my rationalising, reminding myself four years old is pretty old for an urban squirrel et cetera. And then Saturday morning I looked out my bedroom window and there was her familiar bald back and scraggly short tail popping up out of the hole in the lid of our neighbour’s garbage bin. And today she came and sat with me and gently took walnuts out of my hand while I froze on the concrete step in my bathrobe in -12°C on her behalf. I’m so relieved to have her back.

blue sketchbook, pages 30 & 31

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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

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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.

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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.

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

2025 daily stitch, day 29

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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.