Stitching

I have been liberated by my recent spate of grad school rejections. I feel a little differently about painting right now. I am was so careful the past few months because I knew I needed each and every painting to be a success so that it could be added to the portfolio I hoped would get me into an MFA program. Well, now that I'm not going - by the way, I'm not going. I know I haven't mentioned that yet; but I didn't get in anywhere. I sort of feel relieved as far as art making is concerned. I feel expanded. There is more of a chance now to experiment and take risks because if it doesn't work out, "hey, that's okay".

Hence the idea of sewing drawing. Strangely enough while I was perusing my friend, Mithi's blog, I found she had hit upon the same idea. Even beter was that she had posed the question of "how to" and her readers had given her a litany of enthusiastic replies. And the ideas worked! Thank you Mithi. I know very little about sewing machines, and when I sat down to attempt this initially, before reading Mithi's blog, I was trying to freehand sew with a normal set up. Well the fabric pulled and the thread rebelled. And it was a mess. But here I've replaced the plate underneath the foot in order to raise the cloth off the feeder (feed dogs...that's what they're called, really) and I have changed the foot as well. The result: a very even stitch despite the fact that I was running the machine backwards and forwards, turning it left and right. It looks like a nice continuous line. Now that I know I can do it, I began research into subject matter for some new work.

I don't know about the cardinal painting right now. I suspect it will be abandoned. Then there is the Mockingbird piece that I was working on when we left Phoenix. That is in suspension. And there's also a large piece I researched and bought the supplies for that I never began. I don't know what will happen with those loose ends yet. We'll see.