Handbags for Hope 2009

This isn't my piece - nor is it weaving - but I had to just point out that Laura Aiken - who recently taught me in mosaics - donated a mosaic handbag for the local auction to raise money for the South Carolina Ovarian Cancer Foundation. Her piece was featured in the Greenville News this morning!!! Great job Laura!

Check it out at:

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009909140306

http://laurakaiken.blogspot.com/2009/08/pocketbooks-for-hope-2009.html

Pear Shaped

With all the excitement of Shadow, I don't always keep up with things - so true to form I had forgotten my camera the second week of the mosaic class with Laura K Aiken. So this entry will be for the last two weeks. I started this post here if you want to see where it started. My hope was to learn the technique of mosaic and see if I could use it in my tapestry weaving. I learned a great deal and I'm excited about the mosaic itself. I just love learning new things and creating. Is there a better way to spend a Saturday AM? Okay maybe at the lake with a brand new dog, but that's another story.

The second week of class I worked on the table cloth below the pear. Here were just two values of the teal that allowed for the shadow of the pear. I did add in a number of small decorative bits (forgive me Laura for not remembering their name!) They were mostly circular where the mosaic glass was rectangular. Working to integrate those two shapes took all day! One of the things I love about classes is getting a true appreciation of how much it takes to create something like this. Whatever a mosaic artist charges - it's worth every penny!
The third class involved the background. The color is purple and the color value did not have quite enough to cover the space, so I blended it with a slightly darker value. It was fun just to make a pile and start gluing them in place. It's almost like a jigsaw puzzle where I look for the right piece - except I get to decide what the right piece is!
The glass tiles are quite varied. The thicknesses depend on the tile and how I cut it - which was completely random! Then the choice of which side of the tile to use can change is it is a solid colored, striped, flat, etc. While there is a plan, the tiles really "make as many decisions" as I do.
And here is the finished piece. I was able to finish the background on the third day. The studio has a couple of skylights and the sun was straight down on the piece in the last half hour. I loved how the glass gleamed. The next step is to frame it!
From here my thoughts are to recreate this with paper, but shift the colors - i.e. teal pear, purple tablecloth and red background. Then also to recreate in tapestry again shifting the colors. I had started this thinking that the mosaic would be my cartoon, but I've now decided to just create little blocks within an area and let the yarn dictate shapes and color blends. We'll see the piece is small enough there can be lots of experiments. I'm really curious to see how this will change from glass, shiny and 3D to yarn, soft and 2D. I'm sure there will some things lost and others found!

Fostering

Dictionary.com defines fostering as:

1.to promote the growth or development of; further; encourage: to foster new ideas.
2. to bring up, raise, or rear, as a foster child.

Let me share with you how we hit both of these today.

Today I went and took a class in tile mosaics from Laura Aiken. I've really only looked at geometrics in my tapestries and I wondered if I could stick with it, but use a mosaic cartoon to do some representative pieces. I thought it was worth a shot. So here we begin with a blank.

I then chose colors and went through where to place them. I tried these three combinations, but then this is there I ended up.

I liked the purple in the background and the red pear.

From there I began working on placing the tile. I'm thinking this is going to work for me. And I was able to finish the pear in the first session. It's really a great deal of fun. I always love to create something out of what seems like nothing.

Then from there I headed over to the Greenville Humane Society and looked into foster care. We have decided against a puppy at this point because of the construction, and have hesitated about a dog because I have a monumental birthday this year and we're planning to be in New Zealand for a month. Boarding fees would just be too much. We really miss having a dog around. I also made the mistake of checking out the website for who was up for adoption. There were 3 that had kennel cough and were looking for foster care. This seems like a good compromise. We can help the dog get a chance to be out on the adoption floor and we get to have a dog around again. Well, the Humane Society thought it was a good idea and i brought home Samson - a 2 year old 67 pound pure bred black Labrador retriever.

They provided us with a kennel, food, medication and a bone. He loved the bone, chewed it chewed it and chewed it. Then I let him out in the back yard and he promptly buried it. I can already see we are going to have issues about the couch. He knows the words "No" and "Down" already! I don't think his tail has stopped wagging since he got here. He'll be adopted almost instantly if we can just get him healthy.