TIF- gift giving

December TIF and i can't believe i finished the challenge albeit life happening in between.
This month's TIF is about gift giving and here's a gift to you all.

Fideua, the sound of the name is a prelude for goodies to come!
This is one of our faves and not only is it succulent, but also dead easy. Once you master the basic recipe you can get creative. For example sautéing the shrimp and other creatures in brandy, or perhaps making your own fish broth.
Never mind the BBQ, as methinks this is a concession to Americana :) You can make it on the stove. And believe me, it's better to sauté the noodles until golden before adding the stock. This will ensure that they don't get mushy.

There's no need for anything else except a good chilled white wine and perhaps good company.
Enjoy! and please let me know how it turned out.

neki desu



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kangies

November TIF is now housed in Sharon's new blog, Pin Tangle as you may all know by now.
The theme is typography as a design element.
And to me, japanophilia aside, kangies are the epitome of typography as design.

Kangies are Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. They are somewhat stylized graphic renderings of objects and nature. And they possess the beauty of the brush stroke sometimes energetic and bold other times soft, diffused and demure.

The work above was a UFO that had been lying around waiting to come together.
The background silk fabric was bag dyed(LWI) and the inset was shibori dyed in black with a resulting interesting color haloing or separation.
Then i overprinted a section of a Japanese newspaper with my beloved Print Gocco, one of the most versatile tools for surface designthat have been invented.
Seed and running stitches were added as well as a machine stitched border framing the piece.
And some metallic printing of kangies to direct the eye.

i feel accomplished in having cleared another UFO and completing this months challenge albeit life happening.
And that the list keeps dwindling. :-)

neki desu


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a room of one's own

October TIF is about work spaces. No other person has put it so well as Virginia Woolf.

...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction...

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list of lists

How amazingly accurate Sept. TIF! Lists.
i moved there recently to become a full time member of the never ending lists brigade.
Layers upon layers of lists graded according to their importance. Some are almost hidden, others pop out others do not hold together because there are holes in them.
Perhaps because they are mere sketches of ideas and need more entity.
Those lists are waiting until they crystallize into something worth listing.

Here's my interpretation

neki desu

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a sisyphean task-balance

Balance between the menial and the important, leisure and work, full and empty, wants and needs, thoughts and actions, simplicity and complexity, dharma and adharma.
In other words life.

How to portray balance? Not as a concept embedded in a balanced work, but to give it an iconic presence and make it it visually tangible.

This month's TIF became a living challenge as situations arose and had to be juggled into the available time slots.
The starting idea was walking on a tightrope, then as time went on the idiom to straighten out the kinks came to my mind , perhaps as a result of a very hectic month with not too many hours and too many things to attend.

Finally last weekend everything fell into place, the ideas, the visual stimuli i had had during the holidays and the sense of having some space and time. The studio was waiting for some action and the piece flowed almost effortless.
i think i've succeeded in creating a visually tangible image.

neki desu

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TIF -where did this month go?

i intended working with this month's concepts, as they were very appealing. But suddenly it's the end of the month and i haven't thought or written anything coherent. The heat and the indigo vats must have really affected me :)
And as i'm doing pretty well in this TIF challenge i don't want to lag behind. The option thus, is the colorway.

i developed this shadow weave from a profile i designed and which i'm unable to locate now.
It's a simple 12 shaft parallel threading. There are a few 3 end floats, but these are design elements. Honestly!

Here are cloth views of different color combos from this month's colorway.
The work was done using Fiberworks PCW, my regular weaving design software. The draft is open source and open to further interpretations. In other words be my guest and enjoy!

neki desu

rusting 101 June TIF

My rust story for June TIF. i found my old tjantings while shifting stuff around in my studio.When i was still fielding my way into surface design i started doing batik, but couldn't be bothered with ironing off the wax. In fact as i hate ironing i knew i'd never become a batik artist. Nonetheless i had bought assorted tjantings, the good copper ones, and MX dyes. Those got me into dyeing, while the tjantings rusted away.

Oh that lovely patina on copper, that's what i want! This is my project!
i took some of the copper wire knits i have been trying and added acetic acid and salt. But it didn't work.Then my friendly chemist from around the corner suggested what's used here to decrust (is that English??) calcium encrusted taps,faucets toilet bowls and and voila mesdames, lovely patina i got! It is a potent and vile substance called salfuman. Don't ask me the name in English as i haven't been able to find it.

Ok now how does one give that idea a textile body? Think. Think more. And time was fiercely ticking away as i remembered i had some linen and silk fabric as a permanent resident of my stash. Why not use it and destash a bit?

The fabric was dyed first in an alkaline bath for the linen and then in an acid bath for the silk because i wanted the silk to be more saturated in color than the linen. i was pleased as the color came out very similar to the patina.
The next step was to do some sort of reverse shibori.This was accomplished by masking some lines and brushing Fiber Etch to burn away the linen. This Fiber Etch has also been a long time resident of my supply stash.

As a final step i located one of-if not the -last pleating shops in town and had them custom pleat the fabric.
You can see the result. The shawl is very simple, but has a lot of movement.

All in all this has been a challenge albeit a fun one. Conceptualizing while destashing or vice versa.
i could not refrain from giving one of the photos a cross process look so it would also look rusty and aged. :)

neki desu

June TIF

June TIF is a challenge. It's about potential, about becoming, about transformation, about possibilities.
We all work with materials that are transformed, sometimes coaxed into something else.
A hairy mass transforms into yarn. Yarns and threads stop being linear and become tri dimensional, white fabric gets dyed, cut and shaped. Materials alter their look by getting distressed in so many ways...

i have been thinking lately of how the stitching that i learned last year from the TAST challenge
has slowly found a place in my work, sometimes more successfully than others.
And all the techniques that i've come across with have stopped being just techniques and have also filtered down adding new vocabulary to my work, trying to be part of it, not just sitting on top.

It's an exciting process from learning to production, from borrowing to digesting to incorporating.
Although i'm not sure yet where i'm going. So don't follow me. :)

neki desu

parting thoughts-TIF

i did the blogs yesterday and found some very interesting thoughts on this month's topic. Almost everyone disliked being categorized and labelled. It was also a general perception that labelling or categorizing was limiting and that people are polyhedric.
However, Fiona of Love Fibre made a distinction between naming and labelling that, as i see it, clarified concepts. She put it down beautifully. And that got me thinking again.

So for me, i really do not care if i'm labelled or classified. Can't complain being in the company of Anni Albers, Peter Collingwood, Alice Schlein, Bonnie Inoyue, Mary Atwater, Arai Junichi..... :)

And insisting on the topic of being a weaver :) the photo is the scarf that came out of the woven sample that was used for May's TIF.It is my favorite scarf, a double weave in colorful cotton warp and silk weft to brighten up winter blues.

neki desu

the good news is that i think i'm 20

The bad news is that i ain't. As a result i don't know how to gauge my energy and end up overextending myself.But why? i could do all of this and then some more a while ago without exhausting myself.

Take last week i was all over the place, literally and figuratively.
Went to Girona to visit my friend and caught the flower festival wrapping up, yet was able to see some of the displays and take some photos.
Then it was stripping some paint off the doors on the hallway. Hallway and doors will be painted this coming week, if we can decide on the color, that is.
A lot of studio work, finishing up May's TIF. testing paints and sketching some ideas for a new series (hurray,hurray), threading loom 2 and finishing some ATC's. And i'm already exhausted just by listing the activities.

Back to may's TIF.
These are close ups of my different textile and life interests.

Or textile practices.

Or techniques.

But notice that the central element is a double weave woven sample.
Don't know if i was successful in conveying what i wrote about in my preliminary thoughts.
Perhaps i forgot to mention that although i know that i am a weaver i'm in constant doubt about my textile work. This piece for example i'm still debating whether to stop here and leave it as is or give voice to the baroque in me and keep on adding stitching and some beads to the background.

BTW can you find the representation of all the categories i listed? After all this activity let's play and have some fun :)

neki desu

May TIF

Never fails. Spring gets me doing twenty five things at once. And this year's spring is as if it were on steroids. Such is the excitement generated at stitching fingers and the weaving group.
May's TIF is progressing along. A bit hard to conceptualize my idea posted here But i finally came up with an idea and a layout.

i'm using a piece of cotton fabric that i rusted last summer as background with rectangular pieces laid on it.Each rectangle represents an item of my list and the layout will be give or take like the one presented here. Nothing earth shattering, but i think it's working.
Still have some work to do to call it finished.

neki desu

a weaver

My response to May's TIF.
Terse and self assured it has taken me years of agonizing, questioning, justifying and being apologetic about what i do.

Times when i dreaded filling forms with the deadly occupation question. i studied literature and became an EFL teacher, but that was not what i was, that was a small part of the cake.
Always felt and said that i am at my very best when weaving. i can think, create and transform reality into something else either functional or artistic.

i am a weaver who dyes.
i am a weaver who experiments in surface design
i am a weaver who has recently learned to embroider
i am a weaver who is teaching herself to machine knit
i am a weaver who likes to work with animations
am a weaver who creates fractals
i am a weaver who is married
i am a weaver who loves to cook
i am a weaver who gardens
i am a weaver who is a crazy japanophile
i am a weaver.

neki desu

sometimes , not always, it pays to be bored

After all that weaving activity the inevitable crash down and bored syndrome kicked in. Being totally uninspired i took on menial tasks such as ironing and trying to organize chaos, but that was no help for boredom. On the contrary it aggravated it.
i was working on the contents of a drawer and found this gingham material that i had been shuffling around because i really hated it as it was a poly cotton blend. Being a fiber snob i had worked a bit with it mainly using it as a base for needlefelting and that's how far it had gone.

Nothing to lose here and as i've found that's really liberating. i also had a batch of pigment i had mixed with Golden Soft Gel Medium and GAC 900. Noticed the frequency of hot pink in my work lately?

i started mindlessly dabbing the pigment on the hated gingham and to speed up drying i used the heat gun. i knew the poly would react to the heat, but what i found was that where there was pigment it acted as a resist.
Was it actually the pigment?

Control experiment showed that it was not the pigment, but the gel. Hope you can see the effect in the above photo. It was printed in a twill pattern:) using a square sponge stamp and soft gel medium.

What i've found:

• contrary to common advice waggling the heat gun gives more control
  
• zapping from a grater distance than usual prevents scorching the fabric
• i've only tested a poly cotton blend other fabrics need to be tested to see
  
• if the process works
• color can be added to the gel medium thus getting a two for one effect
• speculating here- perhaps using a thicker gel might give a clearer resist .

If you take from here and experiment further please report. i'd really appreciate it.

i think this qualifies for April TIF don't you? :) Can you list all the changes?

neki desu

Enter TIF

i have been joyously weaving away and thinking-that's what i do when i weave- of changes but in the way of transformations. What it means, ways to carry out transformation, how those thoughts can be put into practice on textiles. Textiles per se are transformation moguls, from seed to cloth, from, grass to fur to yarn to cloth, from worm to yarn to cloth. Not to mention the vile synthetics, all those CHs and OHs chained together.

As weaver by trade and a purist at soul i fiercely resisted synthetics. But then a heat gun crossed my path and melted away my resistance. i don't think i'll ever weave with synthetics, but as far as transforming them into something else... Well what can i say?

Here's this week's TIF exercise, a heat shaped polyester organza island with plowed fields, rocks, hills and bays.
Quite impossible to fashion with cotton fabric, dont you agree?

neki desu

Change -a project

from this to this

i keep following this month's TIF concept with a twist.
Need a display case for your ATCs? Well, now you know what to do with a wooden wine crate! Buy cheap acrylic paint because you don't want perfect coverage. Thin it even more with water and paint carelessly, giving it a distressed look that goes well with the rough, knotty veiny wood.
Let it dry and that's it! Display your ATCs.
The bonus is that you need to drink all that vino :)

neki desu

Change

According to the Thesaurus:
change, verb1 definition: differ

accommodate, adapt. adjust, alternate, commute, convert, diminish, diverge, diversify, evolve, fluctuate, make innovations, make over, merge, metamorphose, moderate, modify, modulate, mutate, naturalize, recondition, redo, reduce, reform, regenerate, remake, remodel, renovate, reorganize, replace, resolve,restyle, revolutionize, shape, shift, substitute, tamper with, temper, transfigure, transform, translate,transmute, transform, transpose, turn, vacillate, vary, veer, warp.

verb2 definition: substitute

alternate, barter, convert, exchange, displace, exchange, interchange, invert, remove, reverse, shift, supplant, swap, switch around, trade, transmit, transpose.

from here to here
depiction of change

neki desu

March TIF

Photofinishing March's TIF. Too many things happening and i guess that's a sign of Spring. Since the concept was the small things in life i wanted to work with lines and basic forms and started by way of animation
Then continued experimenting with doodles and i never got to post about them. In short here is the distilled concept, a spirograph image drawn on printed silk organza. The spirograph circle is like the mandala of life and the stitching is straight stitch and seed stitch, very basic stitches conveying the idea of simplicity. All of it on gray commercial felt. The choice of felt is because it's one of the basic textiles since the beginning of times and gray belongs to the trinity of basic colors black , white and gray.

Changing direction, the other day i got a comment presumably from the anti black background brigade. i have been pondering a blog makeover, but i don't think it includes changing the background color, the reason for black background being that photos look very well. You have to be a darn good photographer to have a white background and blogs with crummy photos are one of my pet peeves. As we are all approaching a certain age and textile people's vision ages more quickly than others :) there's a solution for dancing typography. You just hit control and+(CTRL+) and type becomes bigger and more readable.
Oh key shortcuts! whoever invented them deserves purgatory points :)

neki desu

small things that make me happy

A list of small things that make me happy has to begin with trading ATCs. Just look what Ati sent me. Thanks for making me such a happy camper Ati :)

The rest would be:

• a good indigo vat
• morning glories in the summer
• a well warped loom
• a comment on my blog
• an e-mail from my sister
• fados( strage thing, they reek saudade!)
• recognising a kanji
• morning chill
• those days working in a state of grace
• evening port and cakes at A Casa Portugesa
• lunch with friends
• red skies
• daifukus
• an attractive fractal
  

i could go on, but let's keep it short.

neki desu

if it's march it has to be TIF

This month's TIF proposal is small things in life. Difficult, but interesting topic as small things are the stuff of life. They make life. Big things don't. They alter and change life, which is a different story, for better or for worse.

As a warm up i started out listing some small pleasant things that make up my life, but had to stop as a daft Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music complex overcame me.
Luckily i remembered Lady Sei Shonagon who in her book The Pillow Book makes endless lists including both annoying and pleasant things. That is more close to life than the Julie Andrews listing. It's also incredibly beautiful and full of textile descriptions of the silk kimonos worn by Heian court ladies.
What more can i ask for? Three of my small pleasures, books, textiles and things Japanese rolled in one.
i still have to make up my mind, but as of March 7 listing is my plan for this months challenge. How to make it textile is another challenge.

As you all know i'm also interested in animation and worked out a graphic representation of the small things that make up life .This is also a warm up exercise and i don't really know where all of this will take me. Stay tuned :)
Oh and for some techie stuff visit the TIF challenge blog

neki desu

Blade Runner, Memories and TIF

One of my all time favorite movies is Blade Runner and i believe, paraphrasing here, almost anything in life can relate to it. Take our case in question this month's TIF topic, memories.
The replicants, who are robots in a world divided into humans and replicants, are so human that they miss having personal memories. There is something very human in keeping memories, and sharing them. And in a very touching gesture they steal photos from humans in order to construct their own memories.
There's also a beautiful invocation by Roy Batty, the most perfect replicant about memories that is actually his death poem, as in ritual sepukku.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die." (Roy)

i hope to have enticed you to look for the movie and watch it. i usually do not go for sci-fi, but this one goes beyond that label. It is a cult movie. And it's a treat to see a young Harrison Ford :)

As for me i kept working some more along the boxed memories metaphor using knitted wire. Don't know if it happens to you but once i get going with the concept i can't stop, had a couple more half finished projects for last month. However, i'm doing a lot of loom work now so i'm done for this month's TIF.

i was looking here for simplicity and i think i can't simplify more than this piece.
Game over.

neki desu