Cool, eh?
I had so much fun doing her.
Next are Valentine's done in the same way: draw on fabric with permanent markers and then bead to my heart's content. Here's a start on Valentine One:
Gotta go. See you soon.
More silver foil. More beading. Though I think that this section is up for revision. I really like how those packed lines of beads look. The original drawing on the cloth has back and forth scribbles to color in these sections, so the beading is reminiscent of that - though you can't really tell as the beads cover up the drawing ... well, anyway.
There are some guys in the latest issue of American Craft that have six foot panels of glass beading. Oh yeah. Steven and William Ladd. My idea of a good time. Hundreds of hours of beading. It wins out over bombing the National Museum in Bagdhad, or inventing Christmas tree lights with "lead and other substances which are known to cause birth defects and cancer. Please wash your hands after handling." I'm not kidding. Go read the packages. Lower right hand corner of the back panel on the box that I saw yesterday. I am so not kidding. The people who invent this stuff? How do they sleep at night?
California has a law that makes manufacturers at least label the boxes with warnings, but what sickness of spirit makes a person approve of the decision to add toxic substances to Christmas Decorations??!! So shall I decorate with gloves on this year, and tell the children not to touch the tree/tree lights? Or shall we skip the lights this year? Maybe I could put little footlights at the bottom of the tree ...
Oh dear...
I'm gonna go back and bead.
What do you think?
I am getting close to done. See up at the top of this picture? That is silver paper. (Chocolate wrapper - fairly traded chocolate I'll have you know.) I just feel so strongly about using reconfigured trash in my pieces; it's pretty, it's free, there's just so much of it! I need something more... the picture isn't quite balanced ... I will go and keep beading. I wish you Monday morning occupations that you love as much as I love mine.
In Her Dark Grace
I Must Change My Mind
Pond Dance
Embroider My Heart With Compassion
First, I pasted the edges of the pages together with acrylic gel medium, and cut a niche into the papers. Well, before the first I perused the book and tore out pages with great drawings; I found pictures of architecture - things we have made - bridges, houses, arch and column styles. I cut these up and pasted them randomly over the inside of the end pages and inside the niche.
Then, with the paper that I had cut from the book I rolled some beads. Ever done that? Over a knitting needle or toothpick roll evenly cut strips of paper until you get a bead of the heft that you like. You can use triangles and get a semblance of round-ish bead, but I wanted tubular beads.
There are the strips with glue on the ends to hold the many strips together, and an experiment with blue acrylic paint and gel medium to see if I could make the blue transparent, and the beads lined up with their pearl and Swarovski crystal spacers. I had also pasted tiny pictures of the history of furniture styles, exampled in chairs over the ages, onto the beads - which I wanted to see through the blue paint.Below, here, I had painted the beads and was drying them - and in the process invented an amazing Bead Drying Rack! I tucked a T-pin through the bead and stuck it into a piece of blue foam insulation board. (I usually paint fabric on these boards, so they are paint ridden anyway.) They let the beads spin around while I painted them, left them open to the air on all sides and I could move the board into a safe place for the hours that they would take to dry. I am so pleased.
Here is a picture of the back end paper - a view of the Pacific Ocean and its encircling land masses - the front end paper has a map of the Atlantic.
And here is the end result! 
You can go here to get to the Rockport, (Maine) Library website for the Out Of Bounds Altered Book Show http://www.rockport.lib.me.us/OutofBoundsAlteredBookProject.php or just come to the Rockport Opera House on Friday evening, Saturday or Sunday to see the show! See you there! R
I have had this YES up on my wall for a while, and now it is time to pass it on. I have listed it for sale at http://robinsunne.etsy.com There are glass, stone, plastic, metal: all manner of little beadlings, about 1/2" of colorful beadifiers.
I learned YES at The Bread and Puppet Circus with my Haystack Mountain School of Crafts class from the summer of 1982. I still have the original small paper poster that first said YES to me. My YES is that I believe myself. That tiny piece of paper told my to hang in there with my dreams.
What is your YES? Let's have a Commenters Drawing: all of the commenters to this post, between now and the end of the month will be put into a hat and I will get one of my children to draw a name and you will win ... well, I will make up some wonderful little goody box of treats. Something will definately have beads on it!
O.K., so what or how is your YES? To whom did you say YES? Let us know...
R
Once again my camera and I have not figured out how close I can get, but let me walk you through.
1. Come up at A, (I came up at the outside edge of the top fabric ). Go down at B, up at C, (1/8" or so inside the edge).
2. Go down at D, up at E, (outside edge).
3. Go down at F, up at G, (inside the edge).
4. Keep repeating 2. and 3. overlapping all of your cross-stitches. This is not a neat stitch, with the angles of the crosses all parallel. No, this is one of those dreaming stitches: your size 12 glides, you meditate, and Goddess takes care of all the angles.
It is doing a great job with all of those fraying edges too.
See ya tomorrow.
R
Most of what I have done is just followed the green lines in the drawing with green beads - an activity that I find extremly satisfying, (or just easy and mindless). But I have also been figuring out some other embellishments:
I have some area beading and some stacks that follow one of the blue lines. After the beads comes the trash. I have some silver papers picked out ...
See you tomorrow.
See those "feather" stitches on her wings? Get it? ... I really love the feeling of thread and beads on fabric. Lovely little Braille-like bumps telling intimate stories.
I have been thinking and talking about our physical beauty. Some people think that our beauty shouldn't be so important. But I keep thinking that often what someone looks like is our first knowledge of a person. Unless we know them in writing - like here on a blog, or an author in her book, or we hear someone on the radio. But as long as sight is one of our active senses, looks are what usually draw us first with the people in our lives. The other senses are more intimate - though maybe sound on the radio, or in a speech in a crowded place is less so - normal talking voices need proximity, touch needs, one hopes, permission, which implies a relationship. Smell requires a moment and nearness, and certainly taste implies relationship, even if you are only sucking the venom out of a snake bite and in the relationship of healer.
So touch is intimate, (I love to sew), and sight is our first knowledge of another. Why wouldn't our looks be important? We lowly humans who have lost much of our awarenesses of psychic skills. All I'm saying is: why fight that? Why shouldn't we train ourselves to use our beauty for whichever good causes we stand for? Dress up, look fabulous, and go speak about Peace, or Kindness to Mother Earth, or Voting. Not that dating isn't important too, but as long as people are being drawn in by the visual - well, why not use the audience to say something important?
Oh, all right. Enough. I am off to sew the sky.
It is 4" x 4" square. There it is all inked up. Below on paper:
And below here it is printed on cloth. Cloth that I printed in Susan Sorrell's class on fabric painting.
See the background shapes? They are paper clips laid over sun dyed fabric. I think that beading this one will be great.
Gotta go, more tomorrow.
and here the heart.
I used golden iris beads, and pink translucent, and deep red, and gold, and gold translucent ... I sew the beads in, deep and full, wishing that I could recognise the shape of God's heart at my fingertips.
so I cut the center out and now the beading goes a bit more easily. And I have an idea about sewing it all back together.
Here is the heart and the root. Not crusty enough yet. More, much more is needed.
But the Out of Bounds Altered Book Project is due in less than a week, and I am behind in my class, and I haven't finished October Bird yet, and here it is November... Yeah, I will have plenty to write about as long as I get my little fingers nimbling along here.
Wait 'til you see what I am going to do to the root.
See how the paint pools on the silk? I never really understood why so many folks like silk for a painting canvas ... now I get it.Now, I was drawing the glue on in a pretty fast stroke, and had the nozzle open pretty wide, so I wonder, if either of those things were changed, if the "problems" of this painting could be minimized or even eradicated. Above you can see where there are thin threads of glue that dripped as I went from one place to another. See on the polka dots on the pink?
And see here:
These are her eyes, but the gel glue tends to spread out as it sits on the cloth, before it dries, and so here her eyes ended up having very little detail. Bummer. The glue is a bit thick and it takes some hand strength to draw an entire picture in gel, I was probably just excited, and wanted to get going. I will try another one using a much smaller opening to use less glue so that it won't spread around so much.
And as for drying: In Susan Sorrell's fabric painting class there was always lots to dry and then heat set. I blew out a brand new iron in my speed to get results. (Paint all over the bottom!!!)And then I remembered that my clothes dryer has this removable shelf that braces against the front and back of the dryer so that it doesn't spin, but does get all of the heat and moisture removing properties of the dryer. I snapped it in place yesterday, set in a couple of pieces that needed both drying and setting, this face piece amongst them. I think that I set it for 40 minutes or so on the highest heat setting, and voila! It worked perfectly!
Gel glue can be a bit of a pain to get out - washing, scrubbing and all - but I let the silk painting soak overnight in, initially, hot water, and this morning the glue was all gone. There also was NO color in the water, so the heat set worked. Yay. So I rinsed it, and ironed it, and feel much more confident now about going on to do more pieces without gumming up that new iron I'm gonna have to get.
Oooh! Ooooh! the gel glue, if I can get it to write thinly enough would be an awesome way to make a Robinsunne's Multiplication Clock on fabric!!! OH YEAH!!! Make it big enough to be a quilt! Sleep with your multiplication answers!!!
One day I was teaching and - this sounds a little woo-woo, but its true - there, in my mind's eye was the RMC as a fairly whole picture. It seemed a natural for folks who wanted to practice their multiplication tables. One would draw out twelve circles for each of the twelve times tables and write in the numbers corresponding, 1. to their place around the circle of the clock, and 2. to their place out from the center of the clock.
So a student who already mostly knows their multiplications gets a chance to do a little geometry, and measurement, and gross motor movement, (it is 18" x 24"), and best of all: coloring. I am learning that repetition is the deep secret to learning a thing, and if the repetition can be spiced up with some other neural pathways then the learning goes all that much better.
I also have a philosophy about how art makes everything whole and complete, but more on that later.
My plan, now that I took some time to do a nice one to show off on the website, now that I know what goes into making the edges even, the numbers correct, and the sheer bliss of laying color down onto paper, is to get all of the high school and college students making a RMC. O.K., adults too. It is more delight than even I knew! It is also more challenging the more one knows. Getting those numbers all beautifully written, choosing colors, making perfect circles. And now I want to make one in fabric - like a quilt. I want to see someone do one in paint too. Or wood. Or, or, or ...
So, go to the flickr group site to post photos of how yours turned out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/robinsunnesmultiplicationclock/
And my web pages also got some new photos here and there in the last few days. And there are now links to subscribe to my newsletter which will always contain at least one new art project to do with yourself, or share with your family and friends.
Busy week at SunneSpot Central ...
phew!
R
And next we have a getting-there, almost-embellished, view of her eye. O.K. Now we're in heaven. Well, almost. Not quite crusty enough for my liking. Yet.
Now, I am SO attracted to Susan Sorrell's stitching, and there are some other folks who have this heavy-stitching-technique-over-hand-painted-fabric thing going. I really like it. I, however, am not enamored over the practice of dragging those thick full needles through all that tightly woven fabric. I don't know how Susan does it. I kept resorting to pliers. (I can't possibly be doing it the way she does...).jpg)
Here is another quilted vessel. Y'know years ago, I was making a little art quilt and I put my quilting stitches so closely together that they made it all stiff. Boo Hoo says I ... until I realised that THIS could help me into my beloved, tactile third dimension. Yay..jpg)
This line of hearts is from Prayers II, an exquisite embellished applique that I did about a year ago. I adore the set and would love to put them out ... I will have to work on my in-house photography set up. Prayers I and II are each about 4' tall. I'm not quite sure how to get any clarity with the distance I'll need to get the whole piece in. 
I had a little painting flurry two years ago, and made lots of Madonnas, and a few goddesses. This lovely is at my etsy
Oh! And Nannee gets to breathe some fresh air too. My first book. Self-published. She's at my etsy too. (Am I using those link buttons too much? I could be dangerous with all this computer info. - Oh Dear God In Heaven ... this stuff is so much fun ... D'y'spose God and Goddess send each other emails? yhwh @ yahoo .com???)
So this is the latest in my pilgrimages into the land of fabric painting. 
Sometimes when I sew fabric layers together and my intent is to make a rather stiff quilt, I have used this pattern ... I think that I saw it once called stippling...?
And then,
Check out how the words did...
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