working girl

By that time, it'll be today again.

these were taken earlier, and

everyone's a bit further along 

now. still -- got a bit of a

backlog going; friday will be, 

among other things, a catch-up day. 

lady in waiting

will be working on this

a bit more this evening,

but it looks as 'tho she'll

stretch into another day-

the dress is made from a 

scrap of palaka that came 

from H. Muira; we visited,

one last time, the summer 
before the legendary store 
shut its doors. more, here. 

+

surprise bonus!

paniolo in palaka:

snow

1799 and all that

The pencil is lassoed to his hand so that it might dry in place. The sculpting material wasn't actually for me, but purchased a few years ago for lessons I was giving (it's quick drying, from the Netherlands). The driftwood is from Oregon, perhaps near Bandon (not the links but the older simpler town part, which is fresh).

As all of this terrible business has gone on in France, my thoughts have gone again and again to a chapter in Alain de Botton's work Status Anxiety. It's entitled "Art." If you are so inclined, I recommend reading it.

A friend's recent note mentioned that she liked words I'd posted a few days ago, the "how would they make a toy with no instructions, no wrong way to do it, and only the materials at hand?" bit. She wrote: "But what if we approached more of our projects with that attitude? So much could happen. I need to apply this to my life." (Btw, she publishes a brilliant travel blog.) I replied- something about not being afraid, and how that is a hard place to get to. Well, can I tell you something? Every post I put up lately makes me at least a bit afraid. Sometimes more. (And Thea thank you & I owe you a note, your mail made my day.) There's no road map, and I'm still scratching my head over the appearance of dolls. It's all so soft, I suppose. In this world, we are not really supposed to be soft and admit it, are we? Hard and clean and bright. Clear and concise. The soft world is not easily navigated. It's -- well, it's squishy. Neither here nor there. Primordial. Intuitive.

Which brings me back, sort of, to de Botton, the role of art, and going out on a (pear-tree) limb.

In Status Anxiety, de Botton examines the role of satire and caricature in 19th century France. Note, if you will, that the Frenchman Charles Philipon spent two years in prison for drawing the monarch as a piece of fruit: he drew a cartoon of King Louis-Philippe as a boated pear. As de Botton points out, the French word poire, which means "not only 'pear' but also 'fathead' or 'mug', neatly conveyed a less-than respectful sentiment regarding the monarch's administrative abilities."  In the same vein, we find that Napoleon, in 1799, ordered the closure of every satirical paper in Paris, because "the most powerful man in Europe ... would not tolerate cartoonists' taking liberties with his appearance."

This freedom of expression was not a "falling off the log" thing for the French.

"The most subversive comedy of all may be that which communicates a lesson while seeming only to entertain. Talented comics never deliver sermons outlining abuses of power; instead, they provoke their audiences to acknowledge in a chuckle the aptness of their complaints against authority," writes de Botton.  

He goes on to say this:  

"Furthermore (the imprisonment of Philipon notwithstanding), the apparent innocence of jokes enables comics to convey with impunity messages that might be dangerous or impossible to state directly."

There's the rub.

fig

eve: finished

clothes: not

paris

elsa wolinski

tilde

...is almost done. sleep won out. she might be finished before noon if the stars are in alignment. (she's clearly a californian, don't you think? 'tho her felt glasses are from a little store in dinkelsbühl, the bandana's from rei- leftover from another project- and her curls, straight out of the needlework store in menlo park. you probably can't see it, but there's a little lovely slub in the fabric that made her apparent in the first place: a tiny mouth. since i imagined she had something to say, i tried to gently stitch lips around it. we all need to have a voice.) 

make

on the constraint of finishing a project a day. and: dolls?

a few years ago (like: 2), i found myself immersed in classes and seminars and such. a part of me (directly related to the part of me that helped people with design challenges for two decades) thought that the answer to much of what we do and want and think we need was to plumb the depths of the mind- that whatever satisfied our spirit would be somewhere in a psychology text or so. i'm not very sure of that anymore, just as i'm not sure the perfect sofa will ever make a real difference (although a perfect sofa can be nice).

i found, while working in design, that people are always looking for solutions. perhaps we are often not looking so much for the solution to an actual issue but for a handy solution that would make us feel better (yet the feeling better only lasts a short while, and then it is off to another solution; the snake that eats it's own tail). something about infinite solutions in a finite world with limited time (and resources) can be profoundly unsatisfying. i always wanted my client to book the trip they talked about every time i visited them or maybe let go of the idea that a new sofa (while perfectly nice) was going to make life more worthwhile. what makes life worthwhile, anyway? (i vote for family, seeing the world, making stuff and so on. and love. always love. but that is just my vote and not yours. we all get to vote. we all get to decide which boxes to check.)

the jungian concept of going back to what filled you with happiness as a child: that stayed after all the psychology and compassion and god-knows-what classes. honestly, i kept thinking of bunny rabbit on captain kangaroo. and mr. moose. they- or was it the captain or mr. green jeans?- made things. out of shoeboxes and glue. paper, string, cardboard, scissors, stray pieces of material. tape, lots of tape. they made things a child could make, things that i could make. this made me profoundly happy- 

to make things. often out of bits and pieces that others might regard as junk, almost nothing. jung built the bollingen tower after he found solace doing something he loved to do as a child. jung piled up rocks. rocks aren't a far cry from paper, string, and scissors. simple stuff.

as a child, i spent a lot of time thinking (reading, talking, and creating strange little dioramas, probably) about settlers, people who up and moved to new lands. hour upon hour went toward trying to figure out how they got things done, what they took with them. was everything homemade? how did they know out how to make it? what was worth keeping? (what do you carry with you when there's so little room? theirs was not a world stuffed with infinite solutions.) resourcefulness was plentiful, resources were not. what would the children have? what did they make? how would they make a toy with no instructions, no wrong way to do it, and only the materials at hand? as i write this, i realize: i was a child in a military family. we moved often, as military families do. we moved to strange lands. resourcefulness was a necessity. deciding what was worthwhile was also a necessity. 

deciding what is worthwhile is actually always the thing, isn't it? 

some late day this december, having chosen not to make one single new year's resolution, i thought simply this: start making things. finish one a day. make a collage, stitch something, form a piece of clay, cleverly wrap a matchbox. just MAKE something. another of the lessons from the years of seminars and classes came forward: accountability. tell someone you're going to do it.

finishing the project in the same day isn't usually easy. i'll probably miss days. there are moments i want to stop- sometimes i find i liked the project better unfinished than finished. ribbon frays, stitches slip. things shift. 

still- i'm aiming for consistency here. start something, finish it, post it. start again.

je suis charlie

one never knows, do one?

life does tend to intervene, doesn't it?

due to time constraints today, i veered a tiny bit off course (from the "only using materials at hand" part) and went with something found on Monday at daiso (the place for felting wool that becomes unruly hair which isn't often letting itself be stitched down quite the way i intend it to be but we'll keep working on that, thank you)- anyway- went with something at daiso which they refer to as an "arm cover." 

thusly a rather quick puppet was born: the tiny (thumb) sleeve & a small snip on the right side allow the puppeteer to magically produce two arms and (by tucking their ring finger gently back) two legs. the face is a scrap from the nifty dishtowel which inspired the red head two days ago. i love sewing these, which sort of surprises me, yet it's kind of obvious that the royal school of needlework wasn't part of my career path. working on it, working on it. 

down the rabbit hole

"...curtseying as you're falling through the air! 

Do you think you could manage it?"

rouge

striped stockings were the original plan, but time and tide wait for no doll. her dress is a vintage dishtowel; the embroidery was too lovely to actually use it. you can't quite see it, but there's a frost of glass glitter on the velvet petals that hold (not an easy task) back her hair; those petals graced a snow-covered table in a long-ago christmas window. the heavenly felt leaves are from bell'occhio in the city (if you haven't been there you have to go, it's like the eighth wonder of the world).

beauty on the inside is perhaps more important than beauty on the outside, yes?

glass slippers and all that

cinderella here was finished a bit before midnight, and the perfectionist part of me wants to go back, take another snapshot, snip loose strings and delete the errant piece (or two) of thread- but it doesn't seem in keeping with the "finish one project a day" ethos of the challenge.

We were put on earth to make things- W. H. Auden

bits of ribbon, again; felting wool, beads from long-ago earrings, waxed cotton string from god-knows-where. a snippet of burlap that was left after the rest of the roll was employed as a runner in an oak grove for a remarkable moment two summers ago. the dress, a vintage hand-towel always too sweet to be used for it's original purpose: my stitching isn't anywhere near as brilliant as the frieze of birds below, but the whole endeavor was fun. tomorrow's rag doll will (i hope) be a bit simpler. did i mention the orange ribbon was once curled tightly around a tiny, hand-made corsage? it seemed a shame to ever iron it out, once the rose done been and gone.

wabi sabi

decided the other day to set a challenge for the new year: make something every day, and use- as often as possible- only materials at hand. this may be the week of the rag doll; the cat came about from bits of ribbon, a much loved sweater, tiny mittens (ornaments from another christmas) and other odds and ends. 

with special thanks to ed young, who inspired a post several years ago.

wishing you a happy, happy 2015.