New Sights

The end of summer brought many new sights that I compiled to share with you. For example, Rock Hill's latest public work of art made in cooperation with Winthrop University's art students. The heads are supposed to look like they are talking to one another (according to the plaque). Thus continues the trend in creepy Rock Hill public art.

Below is the interior.

A scene from Charleston. The cow and milk rotate on a turntable. Seems so poignant through a rainy car window.

Enough with South Carolina.

And our latest endeavor, Project Gold Box , one of the many ways we distinguish ourselves from those 'other neighbors,' a room entirely gold with a large crystal protruding from the ceiling. I predict the room will function similarly to an orgone accumulator.

Hatch your own moldy dinosaur

I bought Jace a lovely dinosaur egg from Food Lion. The packaging said the dinosaur would hatch after two days of being submerged in water. Well, ours was a late bloomer and took a whole week and by the time I took it out of the water, the dinosaur was disintegrating.

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Our very own beguiling blue-eyed Stegosaurus!

Documenting the hatching process made me realize nature moves at it's own pace... and I need to clean my incense burner more often.

Spring Inventory

Here are some examples of the work done this past semester. The first set is from my Surface Design studio:

Here I chose a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder as my color and composition source. I really concentrated on color matching on this sample and for the composition I took my inspiration from Mondrian and applied squares of color in the same place as they appear on the original composition.

Here my color source is Wayne Thiebaud. I decided to take the color stripes found in the ice cream and make my own stripes. The colors follow from left to right. Color matching was very difficult in this sample because there were so many slight variations in each of the colors in the original painting. I tried to keep the ice cream feeling in the stripes I made.

Thickened MX dye with a seaweed solution, set for one week. Resist dyed. I'm not too crazy about what basically amounts to tie-dying, but I like the sense of depth created by this thickened dye. There is more color variation and is more visually interesting than most tie-dye. This was made using only two dyes, orange and chino.

Marbling!

A while back I bought a marbling kit and I found this to be the perfect opportunity to try it out. I use two methods, raking with a fork and droplets. Many of the colors dispersed differently. Notice some of the Lisa Frank influence?

Some more samples (old school PBS influenced):

Reverse applique by hand

Machine Appliqued

Embroidery in Progress:

The dark park of the fabric is reverse appliqued fabric that I overdyed. The rest is stitches in different golds. I want to fill more of the space with embroidery. Below is a detail.

This past semester I also decided to learn how to weave. Here are some of the results:

This was my first successful weaving, boxes made from satin weave structures. It was made on an AVL compu-dobby 24 Harness Loom.

This is a sample playing with twills on the same loom.

We learned how to use the Jacquard TC-1 loom. Below the weaving is my pattern made on Photoshop.