Creating, Recycling or Procrastinating?

When one has art work to finish, yet viewing a studio filled with stuff 

to be given away and still wanting to be creative, 

while not wasting precious time....... what word would you give this mental detour?

 Instead of being a procrastinator, Barbara Lee Smith coined the word 'determinator'.

So for the last couple of days I have been just that, a determinator.

 Notecards are my favorite method of saving these frustrating days 

when one wants to be creative.

Two above are part of my reusing 'things' I don't want to throw away.

 This had been a maquette for a large art work. 

The two cards above and these two below are cut from that 

maquette and reworked with thread.

 Before throwing away magazines I tear out pages that appeal to me, 

usually for their color. These become the 'frames' for the center of interest

in notecards and collages.

 This small piece placed on a stormy cloud page is from another maquette.

 Small scraps from an actual piece (Dominie Nash fabric)

plus window screening and a torn magazine page 

make up the composition for this notecard.

 Another maquette I was able to resurrect into useful cards.

 By taking off the large twisted blue fabric 

this maquette became five more cards.

 It was like creating a puzzle to use every scrap of that maquette.

 Of the five cards this was the most difficult, yet my favorite,

probably due to all the red.

 In a crowded studio, small bits and pieces are often lost.

Finding this tiny piece of painted orange canvas was exactly 

what I needed to set off a bit of embroidery. 

The rug was from another magazine page.

Thinking ahead to Christmas I found some glitter and 

 thread samples, a small embroidered pine tree and 

more colorful magazine pages for these last two cards.

It is time to get back into the right mind-set 

and work on that large piece waiting in the studio.

Recycling Slides or Tossing Them? That is the Question.

Before June ends I want to add further explorations for recycling slides.

Much of this months was filled with many friends and relatives 

visiting DC for Clark's 90th birthday surprise party. 

This party day was organized, orchestrated, and produced 

by our daughter, Vicky, who along with her family

 gave Clark the biggest surprise of his life.

Now, back to the studio......

A month or so ago I started taking my old slides apart. 

I wanted to see if I could do something with 

the thousands I had besides throw them away.

 At about the same time it was discovered that I had a detached retina.

Discovering that it was hard to draw, at least with color, 

I spent most creative time varying ways to work with the slides.

 Painting or using markers......

 Removing the film and filling with small abstract drawings.....

 Embroidering symbols to fill the frames....

 Stitching the actual film on the sewing machine...

 Stitching film with colored thread or black so it wouldn't show...

 Filling painted frames with fabrics.....

And, just painting the frames with stripes.

I will continue working out ideas with the slide frames and film 

until I find a way to produce a finished object 

that I am happy with or till I've decided they should just be tossed.

Cards and Slides and Recycling

It seems to have been a long winter and the cold weather is almost all gone.

I feel I have wasted a lot of this hibernation time 

and haven't added to my blog in a while but I have been thinking

about recycling.

This blog post will show bits and pieces of my work during the last very cold days.

 As I have mentioned before that when I need to work and 

do not have anything pressing, I work on notecards.

A while ago a friend gave me some beautiful old lace. 

Cutting some of it apart I stitched it on a few cards. 

 The colored pages in some magazines have beautiful ads and articles.

I save a lot of them for use in collages, notecards, and gift wrap. 

Often there are ads featuring rugs. 

These I cut out, resize, and sometimes recopy. 

Above an embroidered hyacinth on one of the rugs from a magazine ad.

 This rug I recopied and changed the color bit before adding some embroidery.

Saving the colored pages is a bit of recycling 

but I wanted to see what I could do with the thousands of slides I still have.

It seems waste to just toss so many old slides 

so I spent the last month trying ideas....

 Rather than keeping the slides whole I started taking them apart.

I had many cardboard frames and removed the film.

They stayed whole.

 The plastic frames opened like a book. 

Another way to redesign something?

 Now I have an endless supply of film. 

With the holes on two sides of the film, 

there must be unexplored ways to stitch through them.

 This will be in the next blog if something unusual does happen.

Some of the cardboard frames are dirty or have printing on them.

So, I have painted many of them black but am having 

a hard time finding a paint that goes on smoothly.

 Anthropologie, a favorite store of mine, has innovative thinking designers,

not for the clothes (although their many fashion designers are exceptional)

but for the store walls, shelves ceilings and windows. 

Each time I visit one of the Anthropologies in the Washington area 

I am fascinated to see how the store has changed.

The picture above was a backdrop in the Anthropologie window

when I visited on March 14.

 This window reminded me of what I was doing with the slide frames.

I filled a 12 by 12 inch board with these black framed marker colors.

Before painting the black frames I had been playing with the clean white frames.  

I was using them to fill with tiny abstract compositions.

I must admit that this was fun using colored pencils, markers and paint. 

I have now filled two 12 by 12 inch boards with these tiny abstractions.

With 36 on a 12 by 12 inch board, I have used 108 slide frames.

Is this a useful recycling project? Only time will tell.

Now back to painting more frames and figuring out how to use the film.