Working on My “Figure” — Part 4

It’s hard to say “fleshing out” about a ghost, but I have given her a swirl  around her skeleton and ghostly innards that is part arms, part wings, part very ragged cloak.  There are shreds of burnt, worn, “leather” cloak hanging from the hollow bones.

you can barely see her in daylight

if you can catch her against a wall...

After all, when I’d gotten this far I stood her in the kitchen next to the fridge, in front of the open shelving.  The Gentleman Caller got home after work and set something on the shelves, went over and opened the fridge…  I said, “Whaddya think?”.  He turned and said, “What?”.  He had been moving around and reaching for things within 2 or 3 inches of her and neither seen nor collided with her.  She is a real ghost.

Now all she needs is blood — she is alive, is she not?  And carries some long-ago pain, I think, through time and space.  Now she is hanging out at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette http://artlafayette.org/index.shtml as part of Go Figure: Creatively Transforming our Environment.

I am fascinated to learn that “valr”=the slain [and I think, must be connected in some fashion, perhaps cognate-wise,  to "valour"].  “kyrie”=”kur”/”kuz” cognate with “chosen”.  In Greek, “kyrie” means “lord” which is ideally related to chosen or at least deserving, and is best known from the Christian cry, “Kyrie eleison” — “Lord have mercy”.  I suspect one could write a paper about the Valkyrie — choosers of the slain — and angels, and asking for mercy, and “Kyrie eleison”.

I’m looking forward to discussions of the linguistics here.

view 2...

view 1 of Wearied Valkyrie Ghost

 

Working on My “Figure” — Part 3

She got her head and hair.  I have her looking askance, in the other direction from her shy feet.  Then she was ready to be fitted with her helmet, which was the jumping-off point for the whole piece — I’d been eyeing it for over a year; it screamed Viking helmet, but a little “off”.   Less menacing/protective; more ethereal and elongated, as though swept upwards by a draft, or smoke.

view one

view 2

Because of the reflective surfaces, this piece appears quite different, depending on the light and angle of vision.

The face is attached with knotless netting in wire to the frame and looks out from behind the protective grill that morphs into her skeleton.

 

Working on My “Figure” — Part 2

She’s taking shape from the bottom up.  She now has her skeleton and her ghostly innards.  Before I start in on her head I’m posting some pix of what she looks like now.  The stretchy black/silver netting (boughten, not made) is attached at the top and bottom with knotless netting that no one can see, and anchored at each “rib” with, essentially, lashing, wrap and tie and knot.  I wish I’d payed way more attention to Knot Tying and Lashing back in the Girl Scout day.  http://www.girlscouts.org/ Why yes, dear reader, I was a Girl Scout from Brownies through 12 grade.

An atmospheric view of feet and body.

a better lit view; you get an idea of the "ribs" anchoring her ghostly innards.

a straight-on closer view

a closer view from a different angle.

I’m growing rather fond of her, and am much less worried about being embarrassed by her in public.

 

Working on My “Figure”

And no, I don’t mean I’m doing sit-ups.  After more than one false start it’s coming together.  I started a type of looping with wire for her ghostly innards.  Not do-able with my arm still in recovery.  Spent way too much time looking for those steel mesh sink/dish-scrubbers to substitute and guess what?  They’re scarce.  Remember these?   I went to a half-dozen emporia and found a version by “Dawn”, of dish soap fame, in one place.  Scarce? Eh.  Didn’t matter.  Because it was clear it wasn’t going to work.  But….  Wait.  Um.  It can still be hair!  And it can be, on the feet, a sort of skin that will show through the holes in her boots.

Ah… Boots.  She now has feet, sore, weary feet shod in deliberately distressed and burnt moccasin boots made from funky faux suede with silver dots…

yeah, she's either a little pigeon-toed, or maybe just shy

close-up

more shy and overwhelmed, I think

Once again…  I don’t know why the pix overlapped.  I think she is weary, shy, not sure if she’s arrived or not, and not actually pigeon-toed.

 

How Do I Sort My Fabric? Apparently In The Middle of Everything Else

Frustration — Instead of working on my studio re-org unencumbered, I now have two projects that need doing Right Now, right in the middle of the re-org.  Right in the middle of stuff being all over the work-tables while the shelves are being sorted.  Right in the middle of Chaos.

I’m trying to think of the projects as being Fun, rather than Frustration.

Project One is to create a figure from recycled materials.  For delivery Monday a week.  And I have to include something textile.  And it will be seen in public and I’m having the big I’m-going-to-be-so-embarassed clutching feeling, unlike the confidence I felt about my NICHES show pieces, the Death Mask for an Owl and Burning Bush in Walnut Wood because this is more outside my expertise.

Materials so far:  from Goodwill — a standing CD rack, tire cables, napkin holder.  From my garage/basement — part of a wine cooler, styrofoam blocks, spray paint.  From my studio — fabric, ribbon, and just a touch of panic.

 

Sewing Machines!!! Part 1

In my latest “Then, Then, and Now” post I listed the embarrassment of plenitude of sewing machines I own.  (Would a car buff own up to embarrassment about how many groovy cars they owned????)

Then I got sidetracked by SNOW, beautiful SNOW, and a really cool program put on by the Purdue Ag School here:  Lafayette Science Cafe — the third one I’ve attended.  http://www.jconlineBut .com/article/20100209/LIFE03/2090302/Science-cafe-explores-health-benefits-of-dark-chocolate-and-wine and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lafayette-Science-Cafe/206974027344?filter=1

But I am now holding the open-house for my sewing machines for those of you who want to drop in and meet them.   Like a mother with many children or a connoisseur of wine, I appreciate each one for what it can do and accept its, um, weaknesses.

My sewing table is actually a huge desk that my brother-in-law was giving away years ago.  It’s got a big smooth top, approximately 6.5 feet wide and a little over 3 feet deep.

Why yes, the cat likes the table.  The basket on the left is where he is banished when he gets in the way.  The little cabinet on the left holds some CDs; it is actually a CD rack, but was intended to be floor-standing.  The figurine suspended from the tall table lamp is a Zhar-Ptitsa — Firebird — puppet that a friend gave me.  I puzzled over how to hang the excellent halogen lamp from the vaulted ceiling, but… The Gentleman Caller came up with a fine fix for that:

Two lengths of closet pole are mounted to the beams, perpendicular to the lamp, and the lamp is    hung from them.  That lets me move the light nearer or further from my work area, depending on what I need.  Someday I may even get around to staining the wood to match the beams.

One great thing about this studio is that it is lined with light, slightly limed panelling.  That means I can use push pins anywhere I want to pin things up.  If I stick the pins in the grooves of the panelling you can’t even see the holes.

In this picture the cat is looking modest about his accomplishments.

 

Pillow-top for Lap-top

I love having a laptop, and have never had a problem with the slightly smaller keyboard or the touchpad mouse.  Until recently.  My fingers and wrists are getting cranky with old age, and I’m using an external mouse more and more.  I’m also trying to pay attention to the angle of my wrists, and it’s almost impossible to get it all right unless I’m at my drawing table desk, but I like to be able to work elsewhere too, whether in the sunny pool room, cozy dining room, or wonderful public Library.  Soooo….

I’ve been using a hardboard/cork-backed placemat on a pillow, but it’s barely bigger than the lap-top and one side’s slippery.  I thought about putting hook-side velcro on the slippery side so it would hook into the pillow, but I didn’t really want to deface the mat that way.  I’ve been noodling away about this and tonight came up with the solution.  I took a piece of hardboard that came as the inside back of cupboard unit Ikea Journalist shelving system and which I’ve never used because I wanted the back of the cupboard open for electrical access, and cut it down to approximately 22″ x 14″.  I faced one side with sheet cork and the other with that rubbery stuff originally marketed to RV-ers to keep stuff from sliding around on the shelves of the ‘bago.

That sits on the pillow, rubbery side down, and I can squoosh the pillow around to what ever angle feels good, and it won’t slip.  Then I can set the lap-top on the cork side and it isn’t smothered by the pillow, doesn’t slip, and there’s room on the left end for the external mouse to run around.  I can also prop it against something at the back edge, sans pillow, to get the slant.

Ahhhhhhh.

I think I need to re-cover the pillow, though…

 

PS –Kitchen Project Budget

Result: 68 square feet of storage/worktop (after final top shelf is installed)

Cost: $146  — hollow-core doors; $15 — labour (trimming doors);  $21 — hardware items;  $55 — finish materials; $28 — brackets for final top shelf.

Original steel shelving unit and lighting which were free money to us — Approximately $100 at the time of purchase.

If one looks around at Ikea, Lowes, wherever, oh my!  that’s a bargain!

 

Kitchen Project — How I Did It

The foundation of the project is a steel shelving unit, by Seville Classics courtesy of Costco, which I had been pressed into use as a stop-gap measure: http://ietextiles0manninghamilton.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/polyeurathane-refugee-and-kitchen-project/ .  Ours is the 48″ version of this:

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?ec=BC-EC22708-ProdID11245665&pos=0&whse=BC&topnav=&prodid=11110255&lang=en-US

The space between the fridge and the spice cabinet is just shy of 80 inches, the standard length for doors.  So I had Von Tobel’s Lumber trim 1″ off the one end of each of three 24″ wide  birch face hollow-core flush doors, and rip a fourth one down the middle to provide two lengths of twelve inch wide shelving.  Once all the damn Poly was on I carefully measured and marked the location of the holes to correspond with the posts of the steel shelves and drilled.  As I mentioned, even without the police action interlude, it’s a bit nerve-wracking — three sets of four holes have to line up almost perfectly and slip over the posts…

And they did!

Each “door” shelf actually rests on a steel shelf, distributing the load over 6 square feet, rather balancing it on four points.

You can see how the load is carried by the steel shelf

I had given some thought about both the appearance and the durability of the join between the “door” shelves and the steel posts and spent some time looking for a grommet type thingummy that would protect the edges of the hole as well as cover up the raw edge and keep out debris.  Well — no such item in the right size seems to exist.  So I perused various bins in the hardware aisle and finally came up with a combination of pipe nipple and lock-nut.

The pipe nipple slips over the post, nesting between the post and the drilled edges in the door, and sticks up just enough to screw on the lock-nut.

In order to spare you five thousand words, here are pictures: (since I still don’t trust WordPress to put the pictures up in order, visually, I am numbering them)

1. steel shelving pipe sticking up through drilled hole

2. pipe nipple dropped over steel post

3. Pipe nipple pushed down between steel post and hole

4.finally, lock-nut screwed down over edge of hole

Careful thought and measuring of worktop height and cookware was vital.  The height of the bottom shelf conflicted with  the location of a crucial electrical outlet, so I cut a notch out of the back of that shelf.

I know, it’s like baby pictures.  They all look the same except to the proud parent.

The light is a halogen work light, one of three I bought several years ago.  There isn’t any electrical box over in that area so a hardwired fixture would have been a pain and expense, and this light is a plug-in.  If I get feeling really swanky, I may spray paint the housing in copper or hammered steel…

 

Kitchen Project — Hurdles and Interruptions (including) the Play Within the Play

Well, most projects take longer than one expects and this one has been no exception.   Who knew that one can buy (12) 1″ galvanised pipe nipples and find that… TWO of them have burrs on the inside (which would trouble no plumber in the wide world) that would juuuust be enough to keep them from sliding over the posts they were intended for?  Who knew that one would have to cut a large notch to fit around an electrical receptacle?  Most of all, who knew that while one was out on the patio carefully drilling four holes into three doors each with a hole-saw,  holding one’s breath because if one screwed up,  money, time, and polyurethane fumes would be wasted, one would be interrupted by the closest encounter with, um, a heavy police arrest one had ever had?

Lovely sunny winter day, snow melting, kids walking home from school.  There is a sibling pair that we have termed the “mutual tormentors” made up of an older sister and a young brother.  They were walking by the patio with her about twenty-five feet ahead of him.   I called to them, “So, who’s winning today?”  The older sister shouted, “I am!” and the younger brother  went into high gear to catch up with her and perhaps prove her wrong.  My back was to the stop sign and I heard sirens and figured someone had run the stop sign, misfortunately while a cop was around.  Then two cherry-tops passed me and pulled over a blue pick-up truck.  THEN, about a minute apart, two MORE cop cars scream through.  I start in that direction, reflexively reacting to the kids being in the thick of it and see a cop kind of taking them under his literal wing while his confreres have a guy on the ground…  Then they handcuff the guy and frog-march him to a paddy-wagon and… sheesh.

A bit rattling and distracting and it was getting late, but I got the rest of the holes drilled.