Art and Sewing

Oh boy, just my luck. I'm just about finished with all of my sculptures, and my sewing machine breaks. I have a wonderful Singer that I received when my Grandma passed away. I have much sentimental attachment to it. And it really is becoming like one of those old cars that you love... But that just keeps breaking down from one thing or another. I was able to fix it, kind of, and I'm starting to think the day to get a new one is fast approaching. Any ideas on what would be a good machine to get? At this point I don't think I need anything fancy. Just straight and zig-zag stitch, maybe a button hole capability. The thing that stinks is that it is not really the machine that is even breaking... it is all the little rubber parts. Mainly the foot paddle. And my machine is so old that I cannot find replacement parts for it. So it goes.

Anyway, back to the sculpture bit. This is one of the works that I did for my beginning sculpture class. The really neat thing it that you cannot hear is the audio. I took recordings of TV shows and overlapped all of them so it is kind of a jumbled mess. The audio was then slowed down so it is really kind of creepy and weird. Also, the speakers are inside the TV's and the sound is turned down low. There, but indistinguishable. I guess it's my commentary on the slowing down of our minds because of the negative use of TV's as bed time stories. The assignment was to create a paradox... Which for me was TV bookends holding up children's books.

The other piece that I am doing involves the plaster cast that I did of my crawling form. I am piecing a bunch of fabric that I have acquired from my grandma, mother, and myself. The pieced fabric will drape the crawling, weighed down form. (I really was weighed down too.... Plaster is heavy, especially when in a crawling dynamic pose for 2 hours). It is my reinterpretation of a sculpture by.... Shoot I can't remember her name, I need to look that up... Which was the assignment for this work. It really turned into a comment on domesticity in women's lives today. How they are expected to have a career and still be a full-time homemaker.... Thankfully for me, Jason has never pressured me like that... Responsibilities are pretty equally divided. It is still a common problem in our society... And that bothers me.

I'm also working on that sweater for Catalina yarns this week. I have all of the back finished and the rest is well underway. I'm on skein 3... So about 1/4 of the way done... Not too bad considering I just got the yarn on Tuesday night.

Oh I finished my fiber arts piece last night too... I'm not too fond of the documentation so I might set it up again and redo it.


Okay, so I realize that it looks a lot like an explosion of fabric all over my apartment... So I will explain the assignment a little bit.

We were instructed to create an instillation in a space we considered Home. The instillation had to deal with our own concept/feelings/idea of home.... So that is what I did... Home is a tangled mess of fabric for me... hehe... No that's not the point of this piece. I started out with the fabric from my grandmother and cut it into strips, sewed them together, then my mom's, and then my own. This one long strip I piled and spread all throughout my apartment... The implication is that my grandmother and my mom's influences have permeated all of my "home" and hence my fabric which the piece ends with. That is why there is fabric in the sewing machine being added on. That is where the work starts/ends depending on the way that you look at. I guess... A continuance of generational crafting, haha.

And with that I will leave you, I need to get back to knitting that sweater. Have a good night!