photographing, archiving and twittering

It’s been a day. I’ll leave it at that.

But there were some fun parts. After I drug myself home from work, I set about pushing around the mess in my studio.

It’s graduated from being cluttered and unruly to resembling a toxic waste dump. I need to clean in there in a big way. And now that our weather is making friends with the 50-degree temperature range, its time to open the windows and change out the air.

My main goal for venturing in there today was to photograph some new work. One I’m going to hide from you because I’m submitting it for a show and I have this weird thing that its bad luck to show it off before you know if its made the cut or not.

But I can show you this:


This is “Vintage”. I made it for Art in Stitches and didn’t have time to take a good photo of it before the show. So I did today. This is one of those pieces I have labeled Stitched Textile Collages. There is just too much of assemblage vibe on it to call it an art quilt.

In order to take pictures today I actually had to strip everything off my design wall. Normally I bungee cord my tripod to my ironing board and shoot down on my work since my habit is to produce small pieces but I ventured (way) outside my comfort zone and made something much larger.

Which meant I had to make a choice on how to photograph it. I could 1) attempt to raise my ironing board high enough so that I could do my normal shooting down thing (in which case I would most likely need a step ladder to reach the camera since I am so stumpy) or 2) I could suck it up and clear off my design wall and hang it there.

Needless to say, we chose self-preservation and went with option 2.

But something strange happened. As soon as all that older work was taken off the design wall, I felt better.

Way better.

In a big way.

I kept thinking it was the cluttered mess in there that was making me avoid it like the plague, but now I’m wondering if it was that wall of unfinished work that was bugging the snot out of me. I need to archive away (aka stuff said object into my UFO box to never see the light of day again in my lifetime) the things I know I will never finish.

Sort of like a spring cleaning of the mind.

Oh, and I don’t know if you are all mind-numbingly sick of me gushing over Dooley but I have to show you this. He usually flees from my camera like I am trying to give him a root canal but he wandered into my studio today while I was taking pictures and I was able to snap this:



I think this is my favorite picture of him so far. (Be sure to click on it and make it big so you can revel in all his cute splendor. Go on. Do it, you know you want to.)

So my plan is to hopefully do a kamikaze cleaning attack on the room that has been my studio in name only for the past month or so. And starting with a blank design wall should be interesting, perhaps it will be a kick start I didn’t even know I needed.

Apparently I also do not have enough of an online presence and have now joined the rank and file of twitter users. If you look on my sidebar you’ll see the status widget for me.

If you look super close you will also notice that there was a two month time gap between my update today and the last one. Why, you ask? Good question.

Because for whatever reason (I was half asleep every time I logged in, the stars were never properly aligned, there was a conspiracy put into motion to defeat me, Dooley did a voodoo dance to prevent one more thing from taking attention away from him), I could not figure out how to use it.

It is painfully easy to use.

*sigh*

But I have unraveled the mysteries of twitter and am finding that there is a huge networking thing going happening there that borders on being viral. So if you are inclined, I can now be found there as well.

Tomorrow will be filled with art stuff. There are a couple of shows I want to enter (also another motivation for the photo taking today) and have some exhibit paperwork to finish up for a show I’m curating.

Should be a pleasant day as these are all things I can do while laying like a slug on the couch (back is hurting again). Laptops are the best things since sliced bread.