Breastplates, Templates: Weaving On and OffLoom (On and off roading for textiles)

To date, I've devoted this blog to my embroidery projects, giving an inside view to my thought and physical art making processes. I may not have mentioned that I'm also a weaver?

Lately, I'm experimenting with using furniture in my house to create makeshift looms, varying tension of the warp (vertical) yarns to create mixed textures, feels and effects across a fabric. This "breast plate," pictured above, is irregularly shaped, like an animal skin.

Our clothes are a second skin. They are part of how we share and shape our identities. In this selfie (selfish), digital age, in which we obsessively pose and posture who and how we are publicly, incorporating second skins into my selfie creations seems a propos. For me, textiles have an inherent narrative and are a language. My goal as an artist is to use them to shape and share stories I infer, overhear and imagine. While I most often use embroidery, I am finding weaving an important additional tool. I am weaving, in part, to create clothing and environments for my almost life-sized, selfie-in-progress.

I'm excited to continue my circular weaving/apartment-as-loom experiments. They let me know that I could make fabric anywhere in any environment.

Embroidery 3D Workshop at 61 Local - join me Monday, 9/15, 10:30-1:30

I am teaching a special brunch time 3D embroidery class on Monday, September 15 from 10:30am - 1:30pm. Join us in the 61 Local mezzanine, 61 Bergen Street, Brooklyn. Among in-class exercises, we will make mini doll houses, like the ones below.

To purchase a spot in the class, $35 for 3 hours of instruction with supplies provided, use the button below:

Night Static, Frost

2013 reignited my interest in poetry, thanks in part to a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council for my @EmbroideryPoems project. 

Yeah, I was one of those literary kids - poetry editor of my high school literary magazine, Patterns (thanks Sharon Lustbader), with a librarian-poet father and a linguistically-gifted mother. My brother also wrote poetry - he had a "blog" of sorts long before anyone had a blog.

Anyway, I'm back to writing WITHOUT embroidering first/while writing. It feels weird but somehow like a high school reunion with myself. Know what I mean?

Here is something I'm working on - something new. I feel totally uncertain about this direction - writing for writing's sake. But when I sat down at my computer the other day, this poured out, surprising me.

Maybe the best thing to come out of all of this is that I'm spending lots of time with InDesign - not a bad tool to learn...and as I'm a freelance artist, I'm up for hire...writing, design, art commissions, etc. Inquire within.

"Night Static; Frost"

Do you remember

the night we stood

on 7th Avenue

on mounds

of hope like snow?

The soft crunch evidence
that purity
could still exist
in NYC.
Do you remember
our talk on 7th Ave?
Static crackled
as you pointed to the hospital
where your nephew was born.
You admitted
how scared you'd been.
I shared
a story of loss that had left me
crying in the street,
on the train,
in a doctor's office,
everywhere, really.
"Sorry
to end your
Saturday night like this,"
you said. We stood
for 10 minutes or more.
You never stopped talking
Sidewalks seemed to invoke
your tongue, the thief
who stole
another morsel
of my time and attention,
pulling
grey hairs from my head,
the ones you claimed
never to see amidst the red.

That night on 7th Ave
our snow
started to melt
under my tiny feet—
my one foot
pointed towards you
as you reassembled your bike,
unlocking and then snapping
the detached front wheel
to the slim body;
My other foot
pointed towards the subway.
I was looking
for a way
into you or a way home;
for the night's 
static to leap from your cowlick
into my mouth
encasing me 
in unrelenting light.
I would have
stood there all night
but you rode off,
slightly drunk,
without a helmet,
still talking,
as I took my snow
home with me on the F train.

It wasn't love at first sight in Prospect Heights

Prospect Heights love story as told by a friend now living with her husband and two kids in Flatbush, Brooklyn. When she and her husband met, she lived in Prospect Heights with a roommate (who is a good friend of mine).

"I remember the first time he cooked for me. It was maybe our third date, and I felt taken care of, like I was home.

He cooked spaghetti with an instant Japanese sauce pack, which was funny for two reasons:

1) the flavor was gorgonzola, which I don't like, and

2) I didn't know it at the time, but he's a great cook without having to lean on mixes, so I'm not sure why he used one then.

Maybe he wasn't trying hard to impress. He's cooked me countless meals since then, but that was the first time I thought he might be a keeper.