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September 29, 2007

i can't stop writing punk rock because i am stuck in a ghetto of folkies

Still here. The thesis weblog is sucking away most of my blogging energies these days, and the three-year mark of my writing here came and went without a whisper. Tonight's no different, I'm afraid: I printed for six hours today and then came home and cut and half-sewed five dresses, and I've got just about enough energy left to sit here on my arse watching a video while I turn four sets of spaghetti straps right-side-out.

I had studio visits with three of my four committee members this week, and it left me feeling pretty confident that I'm on the right track with the work that I'm doing. I have struggled a lot during my time at UGA with feeling like maybe I don't belong in grad school, like I'm too attached to craft to be taken seriously here, and I've taken some shit from a couple of people here about the way that I work (while I work constantly and make a lot of stuff, my work doesn't always resolve itself quickly, but rather grows and evolves out of itself almost while I'm not paying attention, absorbed in the doing of it). I'm realizing now that there's nothing wrong with the way I work, and that I do belong in grad school. And the path by which I'll leave here, degree in hand, and get back home where I really belong is pretty straight and clear before me now.

I've also had a couple of exciting exhibition and publication opportunities come my way in the last week or so, which I'll tell y'all about as they become more solid realities. And my thesis project was featured on Whipup.net last week, which has brought a lot of new people around the blog and generated a lot of great dialogue in the comments.

Here are some of the things I've been working on lately, with little comment and in no particular order:

Cutting new images on old woodblocks.

Knitting something lovely with my latest handspun.

Making really big prints (what you see here is the print folded in thirds; the full size is 36 by 78 inches).

Oh, look. I meant to just toss up a couple of pictures and I ended up sticking around chatting. I guess I miss this place.

Posted by jodi at 09:35 PM | Comments (7) | categories:  in the studio : school : sticks and string

September 20, 2007

new camera

Since fixing the dead camera proved as costly as buying a new one (oh, how prices have dropped!), we bought me a Canon PowerShot A560 yesterday. Although I haven't yet done much more than figure out the bare minimum I need to shoot my daily wardrobe images, I'm quite happy with it so far. Here's a test shot from last night, of some lovely handspun I recently finished:

I spun up all eight ounces of this, into what I thought at the time was a pretty haphazard thick-and-thin single, on Mouse's Louet which she kindly brought over for me to play with last week. Once I had it all plied up on the drop spindle later, there was considerably less thin than thick, but I'm happy with it all the same. I think this is going to be a little bolero or shrug to wear over my printed dresses now that the hundred-degree days are behind us (I hope for good). The fibre is blue-faced leicester in the colourway "mango", from Maggie's new online shop; I chose the colourway to give myself a little bit of fall palette to carry around with me in this land of endless summer.

Posted by jodi at 09:35 AM | Comments (13) | categories:  sticks and string

September 13, 2007

there once was a teacher of great renown

Tonight we attended an opening/auction at the Lebel Gallery in honour of my former professor and beloved mentor, Daniel W. Dingler, who has retired after thirty years of teaching lithography and drawing at the University of Windsor. This event is the reason I flew home this weekend. It was wonderful to see Daniel and his wife Susan again after too long. It's really only been recently that I've begun to realize just how much I've been influenced by Daniel, and how much of his personality and his classroom manner I've absorbed; I often find myself saying things to my students that sound so much like him that they take me aback. Daniel was a wonderful teacher, an unflagging supporter and a great friend, and it's one of my greatest hopes that there will be students for whom I can fill that role, and fill it as well as he did for me.

From the looks of this photo, Daniel and I even make the same funny face:

(all photos in this post courtesy of Peter Zimmerman)

Before leaving the art building I was able to pay an all-too-brief visit to my dear, cherished Griffin press. All y'all printmakers out there* might think that Takach is the shit, but I'm here to tell you that my precious Griffin is worth twenty of those pieces of crap.

We had to have a moment alone. . .

And look! That's my tabouret!

*just keeping the dialect police on their toes, eh.

Posted by jodi at 10:22 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  school : sugar shock : windsor

g-l-o-r-i-a

Hey y'all! I've got this sweater here to show you. It was finished back in June, but I put off attaching the buttons until today because I had it in my head that I'd made the sleeves too tight and would have to reknit them. But I'm back home in Canada for the weekend, and it ain't Georgia up here, boy. I can finally wear wool without passing out, and guess what? The sleeves, they are perfect.

The sweater is the "short-sleeved cardigan with ribbing" from Stefanie Japel's wonderful book, Fitted Knits. I've spoken before about how much I love this book. In fact, while I plan to make almost every design in that book, I may just make this sweater again first, it's so perfect. This wool, originally a pile of kinky merino unraveled from a secondhand sweater (geez, does this chick ever use store bought yarn? nope, hardly ever), went through a number of iterations before becoming this, and I think it's going to stay here for a while. I wore it all day around the house and then wore it out to an art opening later in the evening, and it was perfect for both.

Posted by jodi at 10:03 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  sticks and string

September 09, 2007

no broken fingers

Knitting Loksins on the bus:

with some of my woefully underplied handspun; fibre from Mama E.

A couple of garter stitch scarves from some of my first handspun:

The orange is some merino that was already dyed with madder when I got it; I added the rest of the colours with Kool-Aid. The red is Texas mohair, also Kool-Aid dyed (and plied together with the orange). Here's a closer look:

Posted by jodi at 10:35 PM | Comments (6) | categories:  sticks and string

September 03, 2007

printing weekend

Yesterday I printed another layer of woodcut over three of the skirts I've been wearing:

My goal is to make a change to each garment in between each wearing. The ink on these is already dry, so I'll be wearing one tomorrow.

I also printed up a small batch of shirts for the shop:

Tonight is my last night of dogsitting, so tomorrow I'll be back on the sewing machine and hope to make some progress on a few more new dresses. This week I'm also going to get the knitting machine set up and start working on the knit portion of my thesis project. Although the days are still hot, these last few mornings have been cooler, giving me hope that I may actually need the sweaters sometime soon (but not too soon).

Posted by jodi at 07:28 PM | Comments (4) | categories:  capitalist pig : in the studio : wardrobe project

September 01, 2007

shop updates (go dawgs, or whatever)

Today was game day madness here in living-on-campus land, the first game day of the season. For some reason parking services didn't block access to the parking lot behind our studio like they usually do, so I got to wade through tailgate parties on our loading dock to get in and out of the building. After two years here I'm still rather baffled at the football culture; I don't give a rat's ass about football, and where I come from most others don't either. Here the stadium seats nine times the student population and they fill it, every time. From early morning the air is thick with the stench of lighter fluid, charcoal briquettes, and charred flesh. All day long red-flag-bedecked cars whip up and down the streets, hordes of drunken teenagers squeeze into and flop out of the backs of speeding pickup trucks, young women in red and black dresses hobble up and down the sidewalks in spiked heels, and there are people older than my parents out on the loading dock at nine o'clock in the morning setting up a television and satellite dish so that they can watch football-related programming all day long while they wait for the real game to start, and they are all wearing red, their tents are red, their folding chairs are red. And they are everywhere and they are in the way and they will follow you and try to force you to shout "go dawgs" at them and THEY ARE WATCHING SATELLITE TV OUTSIDE, PEOPLE. And drinking beer on campus. I want to take pictures of them but something always stops me. They're too easy to make fun of, maybe.

I've been working away on some new items for ye olde etsy shop, because y'all know I had almost enough saved up for that Lendrum wheel and then spent it on other things. Fabric and living expense-type things, but still.

There are five different style of wee notebooks, with more to come just as soon as I get the edges trimmed on the next stack:

Today I printed up a batch of brand-new shirts, crazy multicoloured ones using some of the motifs that show up so often in my sketchbooks. I'm hoping to photograph and upload the new line to the shop tomorrow night, and in the meantime have knocked a third off the few remaining of my older designs in order to clear up some space. Here's a sneak peek of some of the new shirts in progress:

These are some crazy-ass shirts. I will be wearing one tomorrow (isn't it a nice surprise when the one whose shoulder you blob ink all over is one that's your size?), so if you're so inclined you'll be able to see a picture of that over on my other blog.

Posted by jodi at 10:39 PM | Comments (11) | categories:  athens : capitalist pig : dumbass : school