Moving A Work Along

Remember this work made from a collection of domestic linens dyed red and green...

...strip-pieced and cut a number of times...

...and how the colours where the same as what popped up in garden in spring?

After an incubation period, this is what has happened to it.
I have shaped it to refer to the human form, a tree and an animal hide put on the wall.
Now what?

Victoria College of Art Library

Over the summer I spent more time organising the college's library.

All of the books on individual artists are grouped and labelled with a bold sticker matching the first letter of the name of the artist.

The rest of the books and magazines are group by the courses taught in the college.

Each course has its own coloured sticker.
The system is proving to be most successful.
The books are being used and they are finding their way home.

Himalayan Blackberry

Thought you needed to see close-ups of the blackberry we have been battling to remove. 

The canes reached high into the trees, growing on these thick stems.

The roots are huge and take a lot of energy to dig out.

I have read deer like to eat blackberry but we have a lot of deer and I don't see any sign of them snacking on them.
Goats like blackberry. We are looking into the 'Rent A Goat' program.

Forest Restoration Project Report

Our big project is to restore the wedge of  Douglas-fir forest on our property. The 1st phase involves removing the invasive plant species preventing native plants from growing. While my sister was staying with us, she put in many long days working at removing these invasive plants. The area she focused on was the shady bog area below the pond where the outlet stream meanders.
This is the view looking further down this stream from where we planted the ferns (previous post). All invasives have been removed but there is likely to be regrowth of them.

This is the view further down the stream. Before Donnel came, it was a 10 foot wall of Himalayan blackberry, some holly and a little English ivy - all invasive species in this ecosystem.

Once the blackberry was removed there was very little vegetation left. Now with the light reaching the ground, the nurse logs and snags can do their job supporting new growth.

It looks like a bomb went off and the blast killed all the vegetation.
I will be watching the area closely to find signs of new growth and to remove regrowth of  the invasive plants.
Thanks Donnel for doing battle with blackberry for all those hours and for sharing your wisdom so freely. 

Gardening

While my sister was staying with us, we cleared the steep banks along a little stream of all invasive plants - mainly blackberry. We then bought 7 different varieties of ferns. Donnel wasn't able to plant them before she left but she did leave me detailed instructions on how they needed to be planted.

On Sunday Ron and i got them all planted - 19 of them. Ron dug the holes and i did the planting.

As per directions, i made little collars of decaying weeds and put them around each fern for protection from frost and to retain moisture in the soil. Then i added a knit cloth (Donnel's suggestion to hold the bank and to add more compost as the cotton and linen decayed. It was a hand knit tube found by friend Carol in a thrift store. 

While stones held the cloth in place, i cut holes for the ferns to poke through. Now these 4 ferns are wearing a shared sweater/jumper/jersey. I am sure they are most comfortable in their new home.
Oh, and it started to rain just after we had finished planting - perfect timing.

Clean-up Time in the Studio

After completing the Pattern Design course, my studio was a chaotic mess. I knew I couldn't begin on my next project until I had put everything away so I had some clear horizontal surfaces to work on.
The 1st thing I did was to pick up everything off the floor and put it on my central work tables. Then I added everything else that was out of place.
What a pile of stuff!

I worked away through the layers putting things back in their place so I could find them again when I next needed them.

Everything that needed more of my attention got piled into the 'Action' basket, which has morphed into a slippery, tottering double pile.
I'll attack it bit by bit whenever I have a few spare moments.
Or perhaps I need to deal with 5 items each day - that sounds like too many. How long would it take to eliminate the pile if I dealt with 2 items each day? That would be better than leaving it to compost and grow down onto the floor.

This is another pile waiting for my attention - fabrics and threads needing to be put away in the right containers.
As long as the pile stays like this I feel as though I don't have complete access to all of my textile resources. I might as well not have them. What if the perfect thread  I need for my next project is hidden deep within the pile? But it would take most of a day to put it all away. That day needs to go towards meeting one of my looming deadlines.
Now I have 2 and a half clear surfaces to work at.
Onward....

Pattern Design Stations in the Studio

To teach the Pattern Design course I set up stations around the studio.

This is where I demoed how to make different stamps.

This was a cutting station, though the students had space to set up their individual cutting stations too.

This is a print station. I learnt this set-up from Eleanor Hannan when I was in her Compositional Cloth course at MISSA this past summer (it is officially fall now). I found having the large foam print pad made printing so much faster than inking with a breyer or roller.

This was the Supplies station. Different people donated materials to the class so the students had a lot to choose from when they were planning their stamps.

Pattern Design Course

One session during the Pattern Design course I taught at Victoria College of Art, we explored the concept of Notan. I had been keen to find out if the point in a notan design where the tension between the light and dark areas produced an oscillating balance was the same point for each student. Group critiques of individual's designs proven there was a point when everyone saw it happening.

Another exercise was to find examples of the many different types of patterns we had examined.
Each example was analysed to work out how the pattern was made then it was documented in the student's Pattern Dictionary with a detailed description. By the end of the course, those bulging Pattern Dictionaries had become an invaluable design resource for each student.

Articulation Farm Study

Articulation is working on an exciting project. Several years ago, we all spent a week based in Regina while studying farms on the prairies. Leann organised our research week and now she is taking a work from each of us as part of Articulation's proposal to exhibit in many different galleries across Saskatchewan. I'll share the innovative details of the proposal with you later. I want to show you how my 1st piece developed.

This is the beginning of a work I called 'Roadside Weeds'

For this body of work I decided to knit the ground fabric.

There is lots of mixing of yarns to get the blended prairies colours

The finished work with lots of hand stitching on top of the knit ground fabric

'Roadside Weeds'

Gardening

I haven't posted for a while because my time has been devoted to lesson planning/teaching and to gardening. I want to learn as much as I can from my sister (the landscape designer - she calls herself a gardener) while she is staying with us. We have been putting many hours into the garden.

Here is an image of a earlier successful experimental plot where the blackberry and other invasive species were pulled out, the grass cut short then newspapers and bark mulch laid on top. Once the rains start it can be planted to convert it back to forest but this has taken a year to get to this stage.

If you look hard you can see the hose and little orange flags marking the new line of one of the cultivated beds closer to the house. We are making the beds a more interesting shape and reducing the amount of lawn because it is very expensive to keep a green lawn over the summer in Victoria.

Here is a bed that has been extended with Donnel's potent mix of layers to suppress the grass and build up new soil: a thick layer of wet newspaper/paper/cardboard, next - old grass clippings, then a layer of coffee grounds (yes, we have been collecting large bags of them from the coffee shops we frequent), then a layer of green weeds, and now we wait for a layer of fall leaves. The grass underneath is already turning yellow.

Here is another extended bed, though that ugly line on the right has to be corrected.