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March 11, 2007

feast or famine

You can't shut me up all of a sudden.

Even though I have a lot of work I want to get done, since it's spring break I'm taking things a little easier than usual and only worked five hours in the studio today. I did three separate dyebaths each with both plain cotton fabric and pieces of old flowered bedsheets, orange, teal, green. Later this week I will print on some of them: I'm going to try to figure out how to silkscreen (and perhaps also block print) with dye, as well as just running some of the fabric through the press while I do my regular printing with oil-based inks. The fabrics that come out stiff will become pillows, the softer ones, clothes.

I also put together a few more books, and now have enough to last me until the end of the semester all stacked up waiting for their covers. Here's what some of the pages look like:

Some of these will be a lot easier to draw in than the book I chose to work in first. I'm going to be making my knitting notes in these as well, all part of my big project to fully integrate my art, my knit and design work, the things I make to wear and for my home, and my everyday life. I used to always carry a hand bound book around to write notes in and when I got bored with bookbinding I fell out of that habit.

unrelated: Billie (the dog I'm babysitting) and I found a path today that cuts straight through the woods from the engineering building (which is right next to my studio) all the way to the family and graduate housing. So when I move in there next year I won't even have to walk on the road at all to get to studio. Woo!

further unrelated: daylight savings time is a stupid idea. It takes days to recover from the shift, and I resent having my week off, in which I need to be extra productive, messed up just so that the American capitalist machine can make a buck off all the extra shopping people will do just because we all switched our clocks three weeks earlier than normal.

also: you know that feeling you get behind your eyes on hot summer days when the sun is high, high in the sky at that angle that makes everything black appear to be red when you stare at it? It's pretty unsettling to have that happen in March when you're used to it only happening in July. This twelve hundred miles closer to the equator is the thing that makes this place feel the least like home.

I suppose if my goal is for my art and my life to be one seamless whole then a regulated amount of kvetching about my life does, in fact, belong here in this journal. Gah. This is why I try not to make resolutions: you see how long they'd last. Mere hours. In fact, mere hours minus one, since I didn't remember to reset the clocks until four-thirty-feels-like-three-thirty in the afternoon. And why is it that as soon as I realized I'd lost an hour, I fell asleep? And when the clock says three-thirty and you change it to four-thirty, at what time is it then proper to have your tea?

Posted by jodi at March 11, 2007 06:56 PM | categories:  in the studio

Comments

Posted by: Norma at March 11, 2007 08:00 PM

Posted by: Claire at March 11, 2007 09:26 PM

Posted by: claudia at March 11, 2007 10:49 PM

Posted by: NWJR at March 12, 2007 12:08 AM

Posted by: frecklegirl jess at March 12, 2007 02:53 PM

Posted by: bonnie at March 14, 2007 10:43 AM