SeaStrands Studio Weblog

I’ve been working through a variety of Abstract-Challenge challenges that I’ve neglected or omitted over the past year. This one is for the “Landscape” theme of November, 2005. I focussed on the colours of the landscapes around me and the elements of the landscape that speak to me. I also restricted myself to using only [...]

Aka my computer system.
I am running (wait for it) a Pentium 266 with 64MB of RAM, Windows 98SE, a CD burner that the system can’t really handle, a floppy drive that doesn’t work, a DSL modem that works faster than my computer and USB ports that don’t work at all. Then there’s the dead Lexmark [...]

You know those jokes end with the line, “I told you that story so I could tell you this one…”? Right. That was the last post. Sunday I spent meandering through ideas that hadn’t quite solidified, going through the motions, as it were, of working.
Okay, I’m not quite being fair to myself here. I did [...]

We seem to have developed a routine to Saturdays that allows me some highly desirable time in which I am the only biped in the house. (Actually, that’s not strictly true, as sometimes Moss is around and he can get around almost as well on his two hind legs as he can on four.) 
So this [...]

Because I’ve had a couple of emails about the techniques and process involved in creating these pieces, here’s a brief run-down on how they went together.

They all started plain white fabric which was either left white or tea-dyed to give it a beige tinge. The fabric was torn to rough size and then ironed to freezer paper [...]

It’s been a busy few days…. 
Working through the idea of women as trees (or trees as women, depending on your sympathies) a bit further yielded a plethora of results, some of which are worth sharing.
The first is “Windswept” (18×10, wholecloth pen and ink on cotton with fabric paints). I haven’t embellished this at all in [...]

I’ve been working on a couple of fabric books, trying to hammer out the content both in terms of text and images. Not much point in making a book if you have no content! Having completed that planning stage for three books, I’m now started in on actually constructing and creating them. Today’s exercise included [...]

A couple of years ago, Mom received two dayplanners for Christmas. Not wanting to return them, she kept one and passed the other along to me. It was a Polestar Business Calendar, but a business calendar with real panache (Canadian, too!).
I’m not one for dayplanners that have your entire life mapped out for you by [...]

As far as I can make out, there are two basic ways in which an artist’s work can become unoriginal; by repeating others and repeating oneself. It’s a tricky thing, originality, because ideas aren’t borne in vacuums and artists rarely execute one lone piece depicting an idea. Most of us grab a hodge-podge of ideas [...]

I have a whole passel of things which, individually, aren’t blog entries but are probably worthy of jotting down:

This is our first real blast of winter in a month or so. High winds, -10 Celsius (before windchill). Not liking it. Please go away, weather…. At least it’s sunny today. Cold, but sunny.
It’s election day. I [...]