Just finished a piece of wearable art, and I think it’s stunning! I had real fun making it, and although it’s perhaps not the best, and I can see ways in which I could have improved the production process, I love it!
Actually, I didn’t ‘just’ finished it, I completed it at the beginning of last week but I have ‘just’ been able to get an image of it onlne, as our digi-cam has bust so we wait for Milesy’s dad to come over with his camera and snap a couple of pics.

I got a real buzz out of making it, and that was after actually completing a set of ‘veggie-leather’ jewellery, which was revelation in itself. I decided I just didn’t like the necklace and brooch set enough, to send it to someone else. No sooner had I made this decision than I had a stonking idea for this bag. Originally I planned to stamp onto the tiles but then I decided that if I used dark enough tiles, the lining would show through beautifully! I was in a bit of a quandry about how I should make the handles, and of what materials, and then it came to me, chopsticks would be perfect. Of course then I had to scour the net looking for the perfect pair, but once I saw these, I knew my search was over
So here it is - best be careful or I’ll have fashion-houses all over the world queueing up to buy the design from me - ROFLMBO!! ha!ha!

cool or what??

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

I chose to have my book, on Sri Lanka, which I thought would be quite easy, given my roots, but ended up being quite difficult. I didn’t always feel satisfied with the spreads and I think they ended up being more intense than I first imagined.

The first spread was the sign-in page, which I made using 10 rupee notes and I printed a design from a batik shirt, onto cotton for the instruction page. I also partially covered the covers with the batik print.

Spread two uses a poem that I half-remember from a book I had as a child, and half-made-up. Unfortunately I can’t remember which is which or who wrote the original poem.

The dial on the right is a wheel that can be turned to show three names that Sri Lanka has been known by: Taparobana, Serendib and Ceylon. The colours on the page represent the colours on the Sri Lankan flag, yellow, red and a green and orange stripe.
The next series of pages fold out from the top and from the left-hand edge.

When opened the pages read “War baby, Cry baby, Don’t wanna die, baby.” I used images of a group of young boys who have been recruited by the ‘Tamil Tigers’.

Children as young as 12 have been recruited, boys and girls, given a machine gun and a cyanide capsule to wear around their necks in case they were captured by the military. Many of these children lose their feet and legs as a result of the impact of land-mines.

The other image is of a small child, bewildered by the war around her. These children pay the price of war.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

I was asked recently if I have always been creative, and that got me thinking. When or what or how, did I first create?
As a small child I wrote poems, mainly for school projects and the like. I remember being told off by a teacher for not giving credit to several poems in an anthology I had been putting together. I was a bit confused because the poems the teacher was referring to, were written by me. I think she had a hard time believing I had written them myself.

I then learned to play the accordion for several years, and if I was ever any good, it was because my parents made me practice a lot. No real talent there I’m afraid

I returned to writing in my late teens, poems again, this time full of woe and teenage angst. I found it somehow therapeutic to put into words all the things that nobody wanted to hear. Lots of my writing was about escape and liberation, fromm my situation at the time. Looking back on some of my poems (yes, I still have them!) it’s hard to imagine being in so much pain.

In the midst of this I discovered cross-stitch and embroidery. Starting with pretty little designs and samplers, I moved on to altering a pair of jeans, embroidering flowers and various signs and logos onto them. Around the same time I remembering decorating a pair of espadrilles and even my DM boots, with markers and paints.

Again, I returned to the pen and wrote multitudinous poems about lost loves and the accompanying pain of heartache sorrow. I’m sure I’m not alone in scribing those thoughts, am I?

Towards my mid-twenties, I was introduced to gouache, and watercolour paper. So began my first relationship with paint. I painted because I had run out of words, for me, the paints became an extension of my vocabulary, allowing me to pour out my soul.

I revisited my gouache and my brushes a few times over the years, but never with any seriousness.

Now here I am, and this is what I make. I want to explore and experiement with art, but there is a certain safety that comes with being told a theme to work with or given a deadline to create to.

I’ll be back.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

I’ve had a bizarre couple of weeks.

A few weeks ago my district nurse came over and gave me an injection ‘where the sun don’t shine’, and somehow managed to inject into a nerve. Now bearing in mind that most of the nerves in my body are well and truly frazzled, he managed to find one that works perfectly, unfortunately. For a week after the injection, I was fine, and then the injection site starting getting painful, then hard, and then the pain spread north and south from that point until the pain became excruciating. Remember I’m sitting on it all day, here! I went to see a GP at my surgery, who was very nice but not very helpful, it wasn’t until she called another doctor in, and he explained something about scar tissue hardening and pressing on the nerve that had been aggravated by the injection, that it all started to make sense. Some high-dose Iboprofen later, it was moderately comfortable again, but not great.
A couple of weeks ago I met up with an MS nurse from the specialist MS clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. I exlplained that my right hand/arm has been playing up these last few months, and that originally I thought it was a reaction to the extreme heat we had here in July. However since that spell has passed and my hand is still no better, I told her I was concerned. The nurse told me that she thought I may have had a relapse with the MS and that I should see one of their doctors at the clinic and discuss it with him with the view of having some IV steroid treatment.

My appointment with the doc was set up for yesterday, and he agreed that I’d had a relapse. Then, to my complete surprise, he sent me upstairs, to start the 3-day course of steroids! I was a bit thrown by this and I think I was in shock for the rest of the day, not least because they sent me home with a cannula sticking out of the vein on the top of my hand, which became increasingly painful as I tried to push myself along in my wheelchair.

The upside of the IV steroids, whose job it is to ease the inflammation of the nerves, is that apart from appearing to be giving me some strength and co-ordination back in my hand (HURRAH - but early days yet) they seem to have eased the inflamation of the aggravated nerve in that area ‘where the sun don’t shine’. So, good new all round then!

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

I’m in the middle of doing a spread in my Sri Lanka AB, and part of the way through it asked my Beloved what he thought of it, that was my first mistake. My second mistake was gettng mad because he couldn’t read what I had stamped on it, and yelling at him, lots, for not ‘getting’ the concept of what I was doing.

This eventually led to a conversation about who I make my art for. My response was that I make it for myself but that it helps if the people looking at it knew what it was, or what it meant. Sometimes I feel like I need to explain my art to people, it feels important to me that they ‘get it’. But why? Does it mean that because I seek others’ approval, I’m actually making art for other people rather than myself? Surely what I’m trying to do is to express myself in some way, not get other people to ‘like’ what I do? I’m all confused now

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

I altered some finger puppets recently, and realised that they are SO not my ‘thing’. How’s that for reflective capacity? LOL! These were tough, as a result I think my alterations were a tad lame… grizzle grizzle

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites