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August 26, 2007

for those of you who have so often thought to yourselves, 'that jodi. how i'd love to see her dead".

When I showed this to Peter the other night, he suggested I make a blog post in which I pretend to be him, informing my friends and blog readers of the terrible grisly accident that had befallen me, expressing his deep sorrow and then mentioning that they hadn't yet found all the bits (of me) and then directing you here, to Nastassja's blog. And that I should then move to my other blog permanently.

And while I would never play such a mean trick on my friends, I have to admit that I laughed considerably longer than is decorous at the thought of it.

But go, check it out, it's pretty amazing. The best part is that in the second photo, I'm hotter than Bettie Page.

Posted by jodi at 07:27 AM | Comments (6) | categories: 

August 24, 2007

finally.

I was just awakened from a much-needed afternoon nap (didn't get much sleep last night) by rumbling, yet another of those thunderstorms without rain that we've been having so often in these endless weeks of hundred-degree days. After listening for ten minutes or so, the thunder moving ever closer, I decided to exercise some positive visualization and opened up my door and windows, waiting, hoping.

It's raining now, hard and heavy, enough to flood the sidewalks and pool in the uneven areas of red dirt (now red mud) outside my door, and showing no signs of quitting and passing us by any time soon. Just the sound of it makes my heart sing. I'd run out and dance in it, clothes and all, but I'm a little afraid that the water might be hot.

Posted by jodi at 05:07 PM | Comments (5) | categories:  canadians love to talk about the weather

August 22, 2007

so far.

If you like, you can follow this link to my MFA thesis blog. It's ugly but serviceable, and we'll get it looking like the rest of the site soon.

Posted by jodi at 07:26 PM | Comments (1) | categories:  wardrobe project

August 21, 2007

something new

In a meeting this afternoon with my major professor, we discussed my documentation of my current projects (the clothes and the sketchbooks) and she suggested I maybe start a blog. I said, I already have a blog, and it was supposed to be a place to write about my work and store ideas and make notes and document process and then I started sticking my nose into this weird little community and people started reading and I started writing for an audience and it became this other thing. This really good thing, but no longer a place to just jot down thoughts as I think of them, to organize my ideas so that I can maybe use those little scribbles to help me figure out what the hell I'm doing or rework it later into some kind of thesis. Maybe it never really was that place.

At any rate, I feel that right now, as I head into the home stretch of this MFA thing, is a good time to separate these different parts of my creative life out a little, carve out a new space not too far from here that can be dedicated to my thesis work, a place where I don't talk about the weather or what I did on the weekend or how much I hate being away from my partner or what colour socks I'm knitting or what stupid shit the Windsor CBC morning goobs said on the radio today (didn't tell you about the time Pete heard Bill Baker, the news guy, pronounce the president of Iran's name "Ammajammabad", did I? Gah). A place where I won't say "fucksake". You know.

I'm not abandoning my blog. Lard knows I need a place to bitch and to show off and to exercise my potty mouth. But I've created a second blog here on my site, and tomorrow I'll spend some time making a few backdated posts to get it started. Then I'll tell y'all how to find it, for anybody who is interested in my studio work. And for those who aren't, here are some socks I finished last week:

The yarn is from Sweet Georgia, the colourway is Kill Bill. They were quick to knit and they're form fitted to my legs and I love them. I'm thinking about adding a few matching tiny red "blood" spatters to the shoes so that I look like a real samurai.

There will be some knitting on my new thesis blog as well, by the way (when I say separated, it's not like these things can really be totally separated). But some of you might not like what's going to happen to the sweaters over there.

Posted by jodi at 10:58 PM | Comments (12) | categories:  art stuff : sticks and string

August 19, 2007

it's too hot

I see now how it's going to be. Hundred degree days stretch out before me like an endless, hot, freshly laid gooey black road in a flat, treeless, relentlessly sunny landscape. I'm beginning to believe that I won't experience a day with temperatures in the double digits again until I set foot back in Canada (and not just because in Canada the thermometer doesn't go to a hundred).

I'm trying to get a new piece of clothing made every night to wear the next day and failing miserably, not because I'm not excited about this project or because I don't have the time to sew, but because I drop every article of sewing like a hot potato as soon as I get to the point where it needs to be ironed. I've made two of these gathered skirts and they're easy and painless, just a big tube gathered onto a strip of t-shirt material, but I want to do some more complex, tailored things, professional clothes, shirts with buttons, shapely aprons, pleats, darts. IT'S TOO HOT. Tonight I cut out a charming little surplice top from a vintage pattern (printed in 1970, isn't it odd to be the same age as something that can be called "vintage"?), but when I had all the pieces cut it hit me: facings. Need to be ironed. Bah.

Posted by jodi at 08:57 PM | Comments (10) | categories:  canadians love to talk about the weather : wardrobe project

August 16, 2007

one week he's in polka-dots, the next week he's in stripes

Today was the first day of classes, and I taught my first litho class today. It's also the day I chose to kick off a little performance project I'll continue until I graduate, in which I'll wear clothes made from my prints every single day. I'll continue to print and draw on the clothes as I wear them, and date stamp each item every day that I wear it. Eventually I'd like to have both tops and bottoms printed/drawn/made or altered by me, but for now, since I didn't really get all any of the sewing done that I wanted to over the summer, I'm mixing and matching with plain things. All of my tops and skirts that are not a plain solid colour, and t-shirts not printed by me, I left back home. I'm also going to whip out some plain jumpers on the knitting machine that I can print on and print from and wear. They'll get kind of gunky with ink but I think it could be fun.

This project isn't just about making clothes, but rather than write about it just yet I'm just making the work and thinking about a lot of things that are all tangled up together, some of them contradictory. More later when I start to weed out all of the less important ideas and whittle it down to why I'm doing this.

Here's the new skirt I wore today, and my "first-day-of-teaching" outfit (who's the dumbass who gives a litho stone graining demo in high heels? me, of course):

I don't have a good close up photo of the fabrics, but the skirt will get printed on some more anyway. The shirt will too.

I'm working on a skirt tonight in this yellow/green fabric, and can't decide whether this little fragment of last year's embroidered drawings would make a nice patch pocket or whether it's gawdawful ugly. I'll probably end up putting it on there anyway, because ugly doesn't actually matter that much to me and I need pockets.

Posted by jodi at 08:14 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  wardrobe project

August 12, 2007

here we go again

Peter left this morning. As soon as he was out of the driveway I walked over to the studio (three minutes away, now!) and spent the next three hours schlepping my entire studio contents over to a new space on the other side of our building (so that I don't have to listen to the Hollander beaters anymore, or endure people starting up the pressure washer outside my door when I'm in the middle of a critique with one of my professors). I figured out a while ago that it's better not to stay home after seeing him off, that working in the studio for a while doesn't just push the hurting off until later but diffuses it a little as well, distracting me from the worst part, thinking about him on the highway and wondering where he is, is he out of Georgia yet? Is he through Tennesee? and waiting all day for him to call even though I know he won't be home to do so until late. Still, as I turned from the driveway and climbed the stairs to lock the apartment door before heading to studio, my limbs ached with that familiar heaviness. But this time apart will be short, just four weeks; I've sworn, after last winter, that we will never be apart for eight weeks at a time again. Ever.

I left my new studio in a shambles, too distracted to put anything away once I'd moved it over there, and came home to knit and watch back to back episodes of The Sopranos instead. Tomorrow I've got printing to do, finishing the litho I started last week when Peter was working in studio with me. Then the next day the interminable every day meetings and obligations start up again, Thursday I teach my first litho class, and it's into the home stretch. Eight more months and I'm outta here.

Posted by jodi at 07:16 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  self-absorbtion

August 09, 2007

what we've been working on this week

I needed to check out the undergrad litho shop since I'll be teaching a class in there starting next week, so I've been teaching Peter lithography! Here's his first print, finished today:

It's a four-colour reduction, printed in process colours (yellow, cyan, magenta, black), with a cyan tint base layer dropped on top of the whole thing at the end.

Here's a close-up of that beautiful water wash in the clouds:

The fact that he enjoyed doing this and wants to do more thrills me to pieces; I've been wanting to get him into the print shop for a long, long time. And I think he could soon be better at this than I am, because he actually cares about knowing what's happening in all of the chemical magicalness, whereas I am usually content to just toss stuff around and see what happens (ahem! I won't be teaching that way, though. Honest).

I've stayed away from lithography since coming to grad school, mostly because I don't like the press we have at Green Street. But forcing myself to bone up before plunging into teaching it next week has fired up my enthusiasm for this medium all over again, and I'm burning to get back on the litho press. I'm going to be that totally absorbed and crazy studio teacher who is always SO EXCITED about what she's teaching. I hope my students are going to be able to handle that.

I put up a new set in flickr of my Rock City photos from last week. Here's a taste:

Bowling gnomes.

Posted by jodi at 09:07 PM | Comments (3) | categories:  in the studio

August 03, 2007

get slushed

At our party last weekend we served my mom and Lynne's rum slush recipe, which was such a huge hit that I spent most of my evening in the kitchen, ice cream scoop in hand, dishing it out.

1 can frozen orange juice
1 can frozen pink lemonade
1 can (1.36L/46oz) pineapple juice
1/2 of that pineapple juice can of water

Mix this all up and add a 750ml bottle (26er) of rum. Freeze overnight.

To serve, fill a glass halfway and top it up with ginger ale (we used Sprite). You can make it stronger or weaker by changing the ratio here, but we found that half and half is pretty much perfect.

Posted by jodi at 05:44 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  food