Hope #3.

Page 3: They all came flying out - hate, greed, lust, jealousy, envy, sickness ...

The Evils (cotton, fabric offcuts, embroidery thread, photocopy, vilene, found objects)

Hope #2.

Page 2: She was given a special gift - one that she was expressly told not to open. "Well, what is the use in a present if  I cannot open it?" she thought, and in any case, she needed to know.  And so of course, she opened it ...

The Gift (cotton, fabric offcuts, embroidery thread, photocopies, vilene, rubber stamps) 

Four.

Snous turned four this weekend. We usually only celebrate her adoption birthday (in November), because that is when she came into our lives, and also, I am not too confident that the date given to us by the Rescue Society where we adopted her is in fact her true and exact birth date. But she looked so cute that we took some photographs (and gave her a prezzie of yummy marrow).

Happy 4th birthday, dearest and most beloved Snous!

Lunch in Africa.

In Stellenbosch last Wednesday:

Hope #1

My mixed media art teacher is in the United States at the moment - collecting inspiration and ideas and all kinds of lovely things for her students. Before she left, she gave each of us a homework project. Mine is to make a book using fabric and stitching, with Emily Dickinson's famous poem about Hope as starting point. After reading and researching for a bit, I decided to use the Pandora's Box story as the central theme.

Page 1: Pandora - the all-gifted - desired the one thing she was not given by the gods, knowledge,  to know things, oh, how she wanted to know! She did not understand then that knowledge would bring with it the distinction between good and evil.

Pandora (cotton, mesh, fabric offcuts, embroidery thread, photocopy, vilene) 

Blankie.

In between work I have been knitting baby blankets for this charity project. It is not really feasible for me to go and sit in a coffee shop and knit a few rows, so I am knitting rectangles at home.

It releases stress, but much better yet, a baby will be kept warm this winter ...

Monoprint.

I squeezed in a monoprint workshop before work started in earnest. The workshop was taught by sculptor Andre Stead, and it was (as usual, when I'm learning anything new and exciting) great fun. Rolling out the ink, positioning the paper, making the drawing - either on the back of the paper or in the ink itself - and then that final dramatic peeling off of the paper to see the resultant image.  Here are a few of my efforts:
Girl with bird

Lady with Big Hips

Nerdy Guy with Glasses (and half a bird, hahaha)

Multiple morphs.

Remember my machine-stitched picture - the lady with the missing earring? It has morphed from this to the one below. Actually, in between, there have been no fewer than six further morphs, and I now wish I had taken photographs of all of them. Alas, I did not. After this one, I painted it all grey. Then a few weeks later I added a gauze bandage as an eye mask, stuck on with acrylic medium. (I think it may have been a subconscious reaction to frustration during the period when I was proofreading extensively and when my eyes were feeling particularly sore and scratchy, hahaha.) Then in an effort to make it look a little better, I added blue and silver paint and a line from this beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda. But quite frankly, the mask looked a little scary, so not long after that I scraped off the mask, and painted over the whole thing with washes of cream paint, building up some areas with gesso. Then a few weeks later, I decided it looked really boring, so I added doodles with a thin black marker all over the (at that stage) cream painting. And finally, some weeks ago, I painted over it, letting some of the doodly bits peek out.


And now I think I am done.