Thursday Thoughts...

"Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials." 

Anni Albers

I always think when you hear people speak about the conversation an artist or maker has with their work, that you know that they get it.

I sometimes find that materials tell me what they want to be; at other times I make because I simply need to make.  Most often tho I think it is a dance, a meeting in the middle.

I will be wondering or thinking about an issue or a topic, reading about it, writing short notes, trying to make it make sense for me. Realising (or not) that I want to say something about it, as she suggests in the first part of the quote  - the desire to do something.

This then leads to the listening part of the conversation - what is around me, what does the idea say to me, what can the things I see or do suggest? And often this arrives in flash - I can see clearly what the thing needs to be. I haven't directed that this be so - I have simply paid attention to the things I know and see, and they have subconsciously forged the idea.

At other times I struggle, investigate options - sometimes I try to drive it too much.

Of late, I have come to realise that I sometimes say to myself - push your boundaries, do something wild, do something different. And in the end I keep coming back to things that I feel best represent me and the things I want to say, and how I want to say them.

In the end,  I listen.

Postcards Home

 I stitched away merrily with this book - stitching the pages as planned, and then letting the rest of the book work itself out. When I make I seem to be a strange mix of planning and prepping; and then reacting and responding.

With this book, there was a fairly even mix of both; and along the way I did less recording than I usually do.

I had stitched three pages; and so I went on to stitch the next three.

Sadly, the first thread I selected was too heavy and too thick. Despite my best efforts it was going to tear the fragile paper and would not sit happily on the surface. So it was replaced.

As mentioned, I didn't record all that well - and here is the first of the pages stitched; and stitched onto its perspex backing, and attached to another. Quite late in the game really. I had originally planned to stitch the page in between two pieces of perspex like a sort of sandwich; but after I had done this for a couple, I realised I much preferred the texture of the paper being available, rather than contained. So I unstitched the perspex..

Comfrey

Rosemary

Agapanthus

Then it was on to thinking about the covers. I took this little stitched line for a walk with running stitch and thought it worked OK on the soft paper.

And then pierced the title on the page, realising I would need to do a back stitch in order for the lettering to be more fully read.

Called Postcards Home, the book uses three threads I naturally solar-dyed in Maleny; and three threads I dyed at the cottage in Scotland, bringing them together in a way...

I trimmed all the threads except for those that hold the perspex pages together. 

The covers are two sheets of Perspex with a sheet of paper held within them.

The sequence is: Agapanthus, Rosemary, Comfrey - Stinging Nettle, Thistle, Devil's Bit Scabiosus.

Email subscriptions...

 Dear all

If in the past you have received an email in your box letting you know that I have written a new post, you may have missed my blog updates for a week or two.

I previously had subscribers sign up using Feedburner, which for reasons best known to them, Google deleted a few weeks ago. I was initially sceptical of the emails I received saying 'have we got a deal for you'; but soon discovered that in fact, one company actually could replace this service and could help me do it.

So I have hopefully imported all the folk who previously subscribed and we should be able to resume regular transmission.

You should now receive regular emails from follow.it with Paperponderings in the subject title. Maybe check your junk folder if you don't - I blog regularly on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday (Australian Eastern Standard Time) so you should receive an email sometime after that.

Apologies if you don't. If you are reading this and the transfer didn't work for you, and you would like to re-subscribe then you can find the new subscribe gadget in the right hand sidebar of the blog... or feel free to leave a comment and I will try to sort things out.

Phew.

It has been quite the saga and now I have to go and try to do the same for Barry over at Rustnstuff!

I appreciate each and every person who reads my blog, who comments and who emails me separately and am ever so grateful that you are out there (fingers crossed most of you still are...)

Thanks and go well

Fiona 

The next steps

 Having worked out my piercing and my stitching I have now done three pages. The plan is for three more, and then some covers.

I am still not sure of the final format of this wee book, but hopefully all will reveal itself as I take the next steps. The covers remain a bit of a mystery as well.

My next page was stitched from Thistle thread, once again from Scotland.

My new technique for piercing the holes along the vertical made for slightly better alignment.

The Thistle thread.

Next up was Stinging Nettle thread.

 

And here they are as a trio, soft and muted.

Thursday Thoughts...

"It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative". 

Doris Lessing

In thinking about 'the unprecedented times we live in" I wonder how true these words will hold?

I oftentimes think that the stories we tell ourselves and others, are how we make sense of the world. During the pandemic it seems to me that as we look back we can begin to understand some things; and yet it is not necessarily easy to draw the links to things we are experiencing at this point in the pandemic.

Has there been some sort of unconscious collective agreement that - if we don't write about it, make shows and films about it; if we don't mention its name then perhaps we can all pretend it is over, or it never really happened, or it wasn't really that bad?

I don't really know

I am intrigued by how few movies, novels and theatre productions there are set in the times of the pandemic. I have read one novel by Jodi Picoult which was kind of fascinating; and yet others that purport to be about the issue stray quickly from any direct link to our lived experience.  Are we too frightened to be reminded? 

I think if the storytellers (with books and films and plays) could start telling stories about it, we could all perhaps process things differently. We could as Doris Lessing suggest recreate ourselves. 

Poster by Barry, April 2020.

Getting ready for new work

As ever, I remain a somewhat fascinated observer of process- how things come about, how ideas spark one thing and then another - which can lead to a different approach; but nearly always things need to be tested and trialled along the way.

After my middle of the night moment back here, I have been testing what might be possible with the bits and pieces I found and wanted to use.

Barry helped me and drilled holes into the perspex bits I found.

Then we tested if you could drill through he plastic protective sheet and we could so that is good - the perspex can be protected right until the end.

My templates may not have been perfect, but if I move things around a bit, I am pretty sure the holes will line up.

So then to see if the stitched paper could be held within a perspex 'page'.

A few more holes were drilled to allow for X X to hold the paper in.

So then it was down to piercing the stitching holes on paper. But first up I had to draw up a template. The rectangle is 5cm x 1cm and there are 8 lines of stitching in that 1cm. Tiny!

I realised that if I were to pierce the template and then do lots and lots of piercing on a bunch of paper, that the holes might well and truly widen as I repeatedly pierced. 

Then I had to check which of my awls had the finest tip; and was the narrowest along the shaft for  the longest length. That way if I was over zealous in my piercing I wouldn't create a massive hole. The lines are so close together, a large hole would probably join in to the hole above or below and make messy rip.

Not all awls are created equal.

My chosen tool and my first page pierced.

Let the stitching begin.

A lovely soft green.

From my botanically dyed thread - this one is from Scotland.

And I learnt from that rather wobbly first attempt that rather than pierce along the horizontal lines, I was better off piercing the vertical lines against a ruler. Always learning!

Beautiful string

 We are headed towards International Day of Peace in September, but all things being equal (and heaven knows they may not be), we will be away. So we tried to get ahead of ourselves and get our weather grams and other peace pieces out into the world in time. Fingers crossed, that seems to have worked!

I must admit that each year as I make my weather grams, one of the parts I love best is the string.

Which is not to say I don't value thoughts and hopes and dreams for peace because I truly do. But the gathering of string nearly always makes me so very happy.

I wonder what the collective noun for all this string might be????

Apart from string I also love cake and flowers! We celebrated a niece's birthday last week and I managed this raspberry chocolate cake and lots of small vases of flowers from the garden. All very happy.

Thursday Thoughts...

“Lovely days don’t come to you. You should walk to them.”  

Rumi

There is always complexity for me between being open to things happening to you; and not waiting for things to happen to you.

Something that oscillates between control and release. 

And I guess really it probably all comes down to "all things in moderation" or "maintaining a balance".

The quote here appears to me to be aimed a bit more at those times when we moan, or bemoan, that things aren't great. That everything is miserable. That we deserve better.

In this manner it makes me think that we should be active participants in the seeking of joy, happiness or loveliness.  We should walk towards these moments. We should get ourselves up and make it possible for these moments to happen.

Of course, beautiful, magical and precious moments do appear out of the blue and in unexpected ways and they should be celebrated, but I feel as if this quote is kind of saying: 

Just don't sit there waiting, assuming and expecting they will come to you, without you doing anything.

Unknown title

 The third piece of work for Vessel - as yet unnamed. It has two working titles: Carried or Borne.

I can't decide if that is what I am really on about or not; and if either of those describes it well enough.

Envelopes are containers for thoughts and emotions. They carry and transport our feelings, our connections and our attachments to people and to places. Letters home. Letters to loved ones. All wing their way around the world in this humble vessel, the envelope. Envelopes are also places to store the thoughts and feelings of others. Their wishes, their hopes and their dreams. 

The handmade envelopes are presented in this vintage French cashbox. Precious items, protected.

Bundled together are four envelopes, each with a card with a verse from some poetic prose on it. There are three of these bundles, each with a different style of writing, different shapes, different papers, different string.

Displayed alongside them are more beautiful bundles of delicate envelopes, and the first verse of the poetic prose is found on a letter alongside.

Hopefully, it's name will work itself out soon.