Sixteen Candles

Another birthday, another crafting party!

This time we did loom beading and made some bracelets. 

I printed out a template graph and the guests made up their designs and got started. I helped with warping and attempted to demonstrate threading a beading needle with an assist from a needle threader, but the thread was too thick and the needles too thin and the threader too flimsy . . . eventually I broke every one of them with nary a needle threaded. The youngers had no issues with threading, though, and were able to do it without the "assist".

A couple of the girls completed their bracelets before night's end and I added a ribbon crimp end and a toggle clasp for them. The others took their looms home to finish up.

New Yorker Cover - iPhone Brushes App

A couple of videos - the first one showing the cover drawing in progress by artist Jorge Colombo (from the New Yorker blog). I love that the artist extols the importance of the "undo" function! And the second video is an interview with the artist via ABC.

David Hockney's Fresh Flowers

via NPR

Catching up on NPR podcasts . . . I just listened to a show from December about an art show featuring tiny works by David Hockney composed and displayed on the screens of iPhones and iPads (In Paris, A Display From David Hockney's Pixelated Period : NPR).
A few things that I liked or wondered about:

1. When Mr. Hockney first began making these little works of art, he emailed them to about two dozen friends in the morning after they were finished. (Imagine being on the email shortlist of David Hockney? And what happens after you get one of these digital paintings . . . should you save it forever? Wouldn't you feel just awful if you accidentally or on purpose deleted it?)



via NPR



2. The paintings were made with various painting/drawing apps for the iPhone/iPad, including an app called Brushes. Here's a look at what other artists at the Brushes site and at a Brushes exhibit of art in Austin, Texas, which opened on March 10, are doing with the app.

3. Hockney would get so into the "painting" process on the iPad that he would sometimes wipe his fingers on his clothing, as if cleaning the paint off. He prefers using his fingers to using a stylus for different effects, and sometimes will use the fingers from his non-dominant hand.

4. The 20 iPods and 20 iPads in the exhibit were on 24 hours a day, and occasionally Hockney would email a new painting to one of the devices, swapping out images.

5. . A quote from this article on the BBC site (which includes a video of Hockney talking about the show) -
"Drawing is rather like playing chess:
your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make."

6. There's a companion app that creates a video as you're using the Brushes app, and that's how these videos of drawings from start to finish were created. Portrait videos by artist Olechka are here, and a New Yorker magazine cover here. This cover was drawn in May of 2009 by Jorge Colombo while standing outside Madam Toussaud's Wax Museum in Times Square. (I'm sure we passed by this very spot, or close to it, when we were in NYC in the summer of 2009. We could see the Madame Toussaud golden hand from our hotel room!)

Portlandia: Put A Bird On It

I've seen this video in a couple of different places now. Hilarious.

Even for someone who has "put a bird on it" here and there and will more than likely do so again. At any given time. Without warning.

Cupcake Liner PomPom Garland

What's not to like about a handmade pompom garland?
This one - directions included - from Handmade Weddings: More than 50 Crafts to Personalize Your Big Day (through Design Sponge), is made from cupcake liners. The directions say it will take about 4 to 6 hours for 6 twelve foot strands. That sounds like plenty (and also plenty labor-intensive), but I suppose it all depends on the size of the room you need to decorate, and whether you have a crowd of willing minions to do the assembly-line folding and gluing. Right?
All I'm sayin' ... start well in advance. Especially if you're prone to searching for the perfect cupcake liners, and not being able to find them in the right design/color scheme, you decide that you can do some Japanese dyeing of plain liners (or substitute coffee filters! Cheaper! Bigger! Probably more fragile and/or too floppy, but you won't realize that until you've dyed and glued 720 of them!), and do some extra fancy scissor work or punching ... times 720 liners, times double that number if you have a big room to decorate ... times triple hours because you're doing it late at night when minions are not available ... times triple stress because you should have started three weeks earlier ...
Still, it can't be harder or more labor-intensive than the felt pompom garland I was thinking about trying a few weeks ago. After reminding myself about how much work goes into making just one felt ball and then multiplying that by a gazillion ... please. There are not enough minions in the world for such a project and I'm thinking garlands of 720 cupcake liners are a piece of cupcake.

Merry Christmas!

It really felt like not enough got done this Christmas, nor done at the right times,

but when you get right down to it, there was some decorating happening, and lights lit up . . .

there were some stockings hung . . .

and a bit of cheer spread around here and there . . .

and a couple or three little collections got out of their boxes . . .

and the Egyptian cat on top of the hall closet got her bell and ribbon.

Some of us made some cookies.

And we crafted some steampunkish crafts.

And we made our version of Christmas crackers.

We ate a lot and we sang a lot and we went to church

and we greatly enjoyed the company of friends and relations.

That seems like the right things accomplished then.

Christian Tagliavini

Amazed wonderment about these 1503 Series photographs by Christian Tagliavini (studiojudith). At first, I thought they were computer-manipulated photographs, but they are carefully crafted portraits of live models wearing die-cuts of what seems to be a combination of fabric and/or paper-backed or stiffened fabric (Correction here: I thought the very long necks on some of the models were post-photo computer manipulation, but Christian explains in the comment below that while Photoshop was utilized for certain atmospheric effects, the long necks are a result of an illusion).

More wonderment at these photographs, a 2008 series called Dame di Cartone (Cardboard Ladies). Kind of like real people paper dolls, yes?

There is a Casting Call on his site, where you can apply to be one of his models. FYI, he's looking for "great character" and perhaps an "element of surprise". I wonder if you might get a flight to Switzerland if you are chosen?

Christian Tagliavini:
"I start with the idea, then I search someone to impersonate it. I build up stories and dramatize them using photography and creativity as a skillful artifice being at the same time author, stage designer, costume designer, casting manager, director and photographer."

Napkins

This work is part of a room-sized installation of 565 drawings of pen-and-ink flowers on paper napkins by artist Jim Hodges. Hodges explores universal themes, and in this piece, "A Diary of Flowers - Above the Clouds" a correlation is made between the ephemeral nature of the flowers and the material they are drawn on. The 100 napkins in this piece are pinned onto the wall. "A Diary of Flowers", completed in 1995, is now part of the collection of
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.



More drawing on napkins from "The Napkin Dad Daily" blog. He started drawing on napkins for his daughters' lunch bags and did these daily until his last daughter graduated from high school in 2005. That first year, he thought all the drawings were thrown out at the end of the lunch period, but for Father's Day his daughter presented him with all the napkins he had drawn for her as a gift. What a sweet story! And how dedicated is that?

I am more prone to obsessively twisting and folding napkins than drawing on them.
When I was younger and holiday meals were hosted by my mother and grandmother, I was the one in charge of setting the table. I often took great pleasure in lining up the plates and silverware, placing the goblets and stemware, selecting candles and making centerpieces, and rolling the napkins into holders or folding them in different configurations. My mother has a buffet with stacks of cloth napkins in different colors and fabrics to choose from, and a wide selection of tablecloths, all ironed and folded and organized just so. Nowadays I am either a guest at a gathering that uses paper plates and napkins, or I am elbow deep in meal preparation and the table gets a last minute frenzied setting as the potatoes are getting mashed or the turkey sliced. I'm thinking about napkins today, though.
I think I once had a tiny little paperback book with diagrams of napkin folds, but haven't seen it for years. There are, though, plenty of sites that have instructions for fancy napkin folds ... like the Water Lily/Rosebud, Bird of Paradise, and Bishop's Hat instructions at The Butler's Guild. (Really?) Martha's site has some simple and elegant napkin folds featured. Happy Thanksgiving!

Eugene Andolsek

Eugene Andolsek (1921-2008) was an outsider artist who had a secret life creating complex drawings (American Primitive Gallery) ... using graph paper, a compass and a straight edge, and colored inks to create these pieces which never saw the light of day ... he made thousands of them, and they were hidden away and never displayed or shown to anyone until they were discovered by a caregiver when his health was failing. The drawings - highly patterned, kaleidoscopic creations - were a coping mechanism, and he never considered them to be art. An excerpt of an article by Tom Patterson at Raw Vision notes that the patterns his mother stitched into quilts and crocheted piecework were influences on the drawings he later made. They are rather like mandalas, and I can see how creating them would have been a meditative and calming process. And some of them make me want to play the most beautiful game of parcheesi ever.

Turn Around

10.10.10

Rag and Bone

One of my favorite blogs for seeing a vast variety of art and artists in paper and book arts is Rag and Bone. Some things that caught my eye on this visit:
Folded "word" books by Veronica Salazar

The classic British red phone booth recycled into darling little libraries

"Corrugations" folded by Dutch artist Noud van den Boer

Paper Couture

A Zoe Bradley Paper Dress Installation

Through the Rag and Bone blog, a Cardboardia Paper Clothing Gathering