Permission…

‘Twas a busy day yesterday. This notion of giving permission for creative exploration and play…it should be much more prevalent than it is. I realize I rarely do this…give myself time to learn something new creatively. I have to do it all the time for school, even when I’m not interested at all, but I don’t put time in my schedule for my own creativity. Now some of you are going, Nida, you draw/quilt/art all the time. WTF are you talking about? I do make art all the time, but so often I am drawing to a purpose or I’m in the process of making the quilt and there’s no PLAY. The process I use to make quilts is pretty controlled…fabric choice and the drawing are the most free, but even those are not stepping out of the boundaries of what I already know. And that stuff is hard to pop into the schedule.

Hence the paper/embroidery class I’m taking…it’s a way to play in a method I don’t usually use. It’s also in Liberty Station, which is a long and bitchy drive from my house. I’m pretty sure this woman and I have selfied before…

But that’s OK. She hasn’t changed. But it reminds me…I needed to send a headshot for something this week, and I hate those…but I like this one.

You should see the one I have in my prep room at school. Scares the crap out of any kid who sees it.

So I’m taking Paper, Thread, Story with Bhavna Mehta, who is an amazing paper and embroidery artist who I’ve known for a while…she’s in an art group with me. We started by embroidering on some postcards…recognize Georgia O’Keeffe?

Embroidering on paper takes more thought than embroidering on thread. You need holes. I messed around all day, basically…what could be better?

I just wanted to try a bunch of things. Here’s some of the samples…

Although there were a lot more later…ah yes, now we have a hand.

It’s funny…when I first started drawing stuff in ink, like my own stuff, in high school, I used a technique that looked like this, but the cut parts were black ink.

A day of play. In something I don’t usually do. OK, papercutting has never been my thing. It was fun, though. Today I go back and we’ll do a collaborative project. We are each picking a body part. Before you even ask, someone has already chosen the uterus. Sigh. OK. Well. I can do lots of things.

In the evening, I had my 2nd to last meeting with my friend who is moving. After some chaos, we found the Starbucks where SHE was, and I stitched.

I’m only doing one more of these for a pattern. So far. Trying to decide what to do. This one is getting closer to done.

The meeting was fine most of the time. Some weirdness from religious folks about people who don’t believe in God and how religious people could never harm anyone (um. OK. I really had to force myself NOT to say anything…but I knew I would never see that woman again so I was fine. Well, not fine because it’s still bugging me this morning.).

And I finished the drawing…this took about 5 1/2 hours.

It’s big. IDK how big. But big.

So I numbered it…

My goal was large and detailed, but not horribly so, because it needs to be finished soon enough and the copyediting job I knew was coming in August is actually coming early. Like this weekend.

So I have 100,000 words to copyedit, a quilt to finish, school to prep for, and all the to-do list to finish before the world ends. Hey. 727 pieces isn’t too bad.