TYOM W9 30 November 2021

A weekend with the girlfriends and kangaroos. Lots of rain this past week and no one complains. A few days of stitching, mostly by hand, and precious time spent with just a few of the nearest and dearest. Our first night I was kept awake by a leaky ceiling which meant a drop or two every five seconds either on my face or hitting the pillow nearby. At 1am it was not time to test friendships in a full house so it didn't help the mood or humour despite the surrounds. A second day of stitching and made good progress on the hexagons. New to me this week: I kept at one project for the whole weekend, planned how I would spend the creative time and managed to achieve a lot, in a slow going process. Spent a couple of hours in town browsing and enjoying the company of a single friend. Coffee. Drifted from shop to store - from whimsy to practical. A wonderful morning out. Relaxed without caring for the time, stayed in the moment. Didn't manage to cope with the hearing not listening crowd - perhaps tiredness and personal issues meant I had less tolerance for being spoken over, interrupted and generally feeling my own views about my own beeswax was disrespected. New to me will be how I deal with that conduct moving forward, as they say.

My two yearly brain scan contributing to Alzheimer's research - new to me was a decision made in TYOM W1 that I would learn to breathe my way through stressful situations (like the MRI or Pet Scan tube). It was not my intention to snort myself awake - a long day lying still in the CT, PET and MRI scanners. Truly alone, able to concentrate on the breath, dispel other thoughts and snort myself awake a couple of times. What claustrophobia?

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The peaceful rhythm of quilting

Three or four hundred upper thread and bobbin changes over the past four weeks. There's a textural effect I'm trying to create with the quilting - that compliments the imperfect shapes of the pieced fabrics. Something akin to wabi, sabi and shibui. The infinite ways that dense, linear quilting can be used to create story are coming to life, one piece at a time. Sometimes barely visible, sometimes contrasting. There is an uneven fullness in the seams that help create miniscule bumps at the end of each line. There are also the seamless directional changes absorbed into the looser weave of some fabrics. Every change and every bobbin. Testing tensions, adjusting for the different threads as each shape submits to the process. It is a peace-filled activity, permanently set up so I can work for several minutes at a time. Never wasting moments. I get immersed in the meditative quality of the quilting and thinking only about the stitch. Some of the combinations I use: using the same ...

Carvings and the meaning of life

Carving a new print is relaxing but requires full mental presence and even more patience. A rushed cut or slip results in nothing printable at all. The grevillea leaf is one of my favourites. Spiked points and gentle curves mean it can carry many meanings in an art work. It can speak to nature, trees, the outdoors, Australian native plants at a very obvious level. It can also carry deeper meanings about our lived experiences. This one is carved in soft plastic - which generally works better than lino on fabrics. It has a little more give and manages to get the full print onto the substrate whereas sometimes the linocut version leaves an imperfect mark. Getting to the final carving is an evolving process. Then there are test prints on paper, choosing paint, ink or decolourant (dye stripper) and how that works (or doesn't work) with a particular project. Sometimes I will use discharge paste and strip out the dye before offset and overprinting with ink. This gives t...

TYOM W1 5 October 2021

Midnight came and went. Seven more hours of suffering before we go to hospital and that was probably the best birthday decision of all. Turning 60 in the ER. Another 4 days before I am home and the positive takeaway is there WAS a stone blocking the duct to the liver, and it WAS the cause of me turning yellow. It WAS NOT copious, continuous comsumption of champagne. They had landed that one on me 8 weeks previously, and I obediently and conscientiously avoided said champagne for almost 7 weeks until the weekend immediately prior to TYOM. So there WAS a bottle of Dom Perignon 2010 consumed between four of us - deliciously sipped down to the last drop. It WAS true the pain started sometime in the next 24 hours and truer that I thought this was the end my relationship with champagne. How blessed to be wrong. They had managed to rule out all forms of known hepatitis, some novel considerations including HIV, drug use in my younger years, clots in one or more vital organs, a...

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