"being the janitor of the materials"

skillet poached huevos rancheros

welcome to the bel shore

this week in tinas studio

i have my first big dye project due on monday so ive been busy in the dye lab this week. the dye process kind of reminds me of metal finishing in some ways how the dyes never seem to work exactly the same way from day to day. there are too many variables.

heres me, hard at work, more than 400 yards of thread later, removing stitches to see if they succeeded in resisting the dye.

one more thing: i have learned to crochet.

this week in joes studio

potato spindle

spinning is an ancient textile art in which plant, animal or synthetic fibers are twisted together to form yarn. For thousands of years, fiber was spun by hand using simple tools before they devised the spinning wheel in the middle ages and later developed industrial spinning technologies. in class yesterday we made our simple tool with a wood dowel and a potato. we  each left with a grocery bag of wool to spin to yarn which we will dye on wednesday followed by a demo on how to crochet. these are the kind of things that fiber people do. yesterday i found myself online, ordering silk. i dont know where all this learning is going to take me artistically, but it does make sitting in front of the television suddenly productive.

finally finished fotos

i've been having so much fun fiddling around with the photos joe and i took at michael and anjas wedding exactly one month ago and finally burned the cd of images today. whew. it was more work than i had anticipated because of the sheer number of photos we took, but rewarding as i was looking over the photos today in a slideshow. what a fun wedding and a great group of folks!