jaeleslie

Thought I was going to be posting here more often, summer vacation and all. And I will. But just trying to get into the studio every day is enough of an assignment.

I gave myself a week to work on a project for the Art Fair on the Square (next month) that has been at the back of my mind for a long time. I dug out the stuff I had done on it already, must be ten years ago. I had painted some quilt square type geometric washes on student watercolor paper, lettered a bit with the text to the song "Simple Gifts" (theme used by Copland in Appalachian Spring), worried helplessly about the way the black ink feathered out which was beyond my technical control back then, and made lots of notes for a bigger, more ambitious project. Now I am hopelessly ambivalent about whether my lettering is surely much better, or whether this is lettered in a perfectly acceptable italic (with spacing problems).

First, discard old layouts. Then get over feeling all precious about how I have to start all over from scratch now that I am so much older and wiser. Then I cut all the stuff I had already done into squares (with the blots on the edges) and rearranged them. Thought about it some more. Decided to sew them onto light-but-strong unryu paper. Next morning the pale purple unryu fairly flew into my hand. The sewing machine which I haven't used in years either still had black thread in it. A zig-zag stitch makes very fine black lines of thread all around each. The completed piece is a nine-patch. I had wanted to do this for years. It's awfully exciting. I started getting more ideas, I could go on from there. And I still have a couple of small watercolors I made for this project with no lettering on them. So on to layout...

But next week, something different. Must work up lettering again. Sigh.