My First Joint

So, I saw this joint just laying there in the drawer, it was, like, just a sample to get a beginner like me started. I thought, why not? Ya know, just experiment a little, take a few deep breaths, expand my horizons with nature's plants.

 So I rolled...my sleeves up, was taught how to use this crazy looking jig...

 ...and started cutting! The first joint was so liberating that I wanted another...I can't remember what kind of joints they are but the first cut was hinged on a nail and the second one I drilled a round hole and put a dowel inside the joint. Joints get you inspired, man.

You might notice a band-aid on my thumb. This was my first incident in the wood shop. It involved picking up a new drill bit that was resting on the table and not connected to any machine. After using large noisy machines all over the shop all morning, I start bleeding from holding a small drill bit in my hand. Classic. It sliced a paper cut sized gash through my thumb, because of public health reasons I could not keep my bloody portion of the wood I was working with...that would have been awesome.  

I now have the beginning of an ankle and knee joint for my creature, a work in progress.

I run 35 miles and my car dies.

This blog post is a two-fer. I have two pieces of incredible news. As my title suggests, the first is that I ran 35 miles in 72 hours. The second is that my polka-dot car bit the dust.
Item #1: The reason I ran so much is because I had the privilege of running on an all-woman team, called Jungle Rot, at the Great Lakes Relay last weekend.It is a 10 person team but we only added up to 8 this year. Yikes! That meant we had to split the approximately 270 miles of the course between ourselves over 3 days. It started in Rogers City, MI Friday Morning near Lake Huron and ended in Empire at Lake Michigan on Sunday. Add to that lots of mosquitos, an average of 4 hours of sleep per night, the chance of getting lost in the woods... and hitchhiking your way back (which happened to someone this year), shampooing your hair in Lake Huron, and spending lots of time with other crazy runner types who put sea salt under their tongues to re-hydrate (delicious!), ...and you have the making for an unforgettable weekend. I think my official mileage may have been 34.9 miles but I'm tacking on .1 miles for running (or should I say hobbling) out of the way of a bee attracted to my neon shirt. On day 3 with no sleep, there is nothing funnier than trying to run (on locked up quads) away from a bee. I also thought I was truly crazy when I saw this hill I was voluntarily running up on my 34th mile:

Certifiably Crazy!
I later realized I was following runners who had taken a wrong turn on the course, making my 5.6 leg into 6.3 miles. Ouch. But, I can't wait til next year!

So onto my second item of the blog: THE POLKA DOT CAR (aka Polkie) has died. Her final resting place is in Orland Park, Illinois. I was on a lunch break from painting at the Orland Park Library and heard massive amounts of squealing (more than I've heard in the past year-which is saying a lot) and pulled over into a parking spot right in front of --very appropriately-- Michaels Crafts Store. I even called Michaels to tell them not to tow away my craft project stuck in their lot. On that fated Friday, only one week after a cross-state trip to Kalamazoo, my wheel stopped moving apparently and was skidding along the lot making a beautiful final arc on the asphalt, leaving its last mark on this world. Contrary to family members who think it might just be something easy to fix...IT IS DEAD! I'm taking it off my life support.


A full memorial in the form of a short film will fully commemorate the car this summer. Stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, I'd like to dunk my head in one of the Great Lakes again:

Get your craft (and jam) on!

The holidays are here! Pictured here are images from the pre-holiday craft fair I participated in this past November. I am now showing them on-line because the next Holiday Craft Fair will be this Friday, December 4th, the First Friday, at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. Yahoo! Most of you readers out there know that I think the Old Town School is the bee's knees. But the school will be even greater with its First Friday happenings this week. Along with other crafty types, I will be selling my art prints and cards while folky music is happening all around us. Bliss!
See you at school on Friday! (4544 N. Lincoln Ave.-near Western Brown line stop.)
We'll be in the lobby from 6pm 'til at least 9pm.




Now if you can't make it, I have updated some art items over at my etsy site...just in time for holiday gift giving. Sorry if this blog post is really commercial...I will do something non-consumable in my next post. Promise.

Road Home

Pictured above: World Atlas, Altered Book made at Penland School of Crafts, 2009

I was eager to get home this past week...eager to see friends, eager for my own apartment, the ability to walk Chicago neighborhood streets in the Spring, put my dishes in a dishwasher, boil my own water, imagine!

We made it from Penland, North Carolina, to Chicago in 14 hours...but not without a few roadblocks in the Cherokee National Forest.



View Larger Map
The chainsaws were already going and it was at least an hour to turn back to other roads so we waited it out in the woods.
Ciao for now, North Carolina. Helloooooooo summer in Chicago!

Doodling O's and 1's in the mountains

It rained, it snowed, flowers bloomed, then it snowed again, then those flowers wilted, and then, one morning, everything seemed to be green all at once. Now in my last week on the mountain, I'm trying to soak up all of the North Carolina spring that I can!

My daily walks have had this view above and I tend to carry whatever book I am working on around with me like a pet.

This "computer book" is a work in progress. 0's and 1's, 0's and 1's, 0's and 1's.

Doodles Morph into Space

This week's doodle is once again within a "book" form but it also resembles a vegetable steamer! ooooor an artichoke! ooooor a flower!

Doodling Tuesdays

Strange weather we're having here in North Carolina! But the art books keep on! And yes, the doodles are in the form of a book again.

How to Go Crazy, I mean, Make a Clamshell Box

This weekend was full of boxmaking, hikes up a mountain,
boxmaking, a bonfire, dishwashing, oh! and more boxmaking.

A Clamshell box is a special cover used to encase and protect books. I decided to just make one really huge box for no particular book in mind. Go big or go home!

Clamshell boxes are already difficult, labor-intensive objects to create, but I decided to make life harder by making it oversized and using old crumbly paper. Faaaaantastic. Making a box like this requires measurements as close as 1/32nd of an inch. At many points I wanted to just go play in the mud but it paid off at the end of the 9th hour!





The sound of a good clamshell opening is very satisfying... I'd also like to think a chorus is singing somewhere everytime I open the box...

Green Friday: Artists and their Environment

Today's blog is a part of a Green Friday Synchronized blogging event. Check out the other bloggers linked at the bottom of this post who are also exploring the topic of Art and Environmental issues.
Many of you may already know I am in the middle of an 8 week bookmaking course at Penland School of Crafts in Western North Carolina. The studio coordinator for this books class, Emily Barrows, was willing to sit down with me today and tell me a bit about an art project she has been working on where she lived with all of her trash for 6 months.

Here is the interview:
Jean: So could you start off by telling me what your project is about?
Emily: It originated from my need to purchase a computer. I struggle a lot with buying and consuming things in general but for some reason things that you plug in have become even more disturbing to me. Alarm clocks, coffeemakers, anything you plug in has such a short lifespan. Computers are especially scary because they have semi-precious metals in them. The things that go into making a computer are so epic but it's this really slim laptop and looks really sleek and beautiful but the amount of chaos and disorder that arose to just give me this little pile of order is overwhelming. So I guess that almost as punishment I decided I will live with my trash for six months. Anything that I would otherwise throw away, anything that can't be composted or recycled or that I would normally flush, I had to actually keep in my bedroom with me. I decided that this would be an interesting project because I would journal about how this was affecting me and my relationship with trash. I still plan to combine this into a personal narrative and critical essays which will be bound into books made out of the trash from that time period.
Jean: What did you do with your trash?

Emily: Originally I thought, okay, I'm just going to keep my trash but then I started to compartmentalize the trash in my room . I would have takeout boxes in one pile, cellophane in another pile, and dental floss in another. The actual act of sorting was keeping it from being trash anymore. Taking what is trash and trying to project another identity on it, even simply by compartmentalizing it, keeps it from actually being trash. I was going out to a lot of junk yards at that time just to look at stuff. I lived in Atlanta at the time and there are acres and acres of junkyards like a moat around the city. It's then that I realized they do the same thing: there will be miles and miles of one kind of thing like just tires. I realized it doesn't become trash until it becomes that icky stuff that you don't want to touch and you can't distinguish one item from the next...dumpster juicy trash, that's trash.

So as I continued to compartmentalize my trash, I became really compulsive about not producing any trash because I didn't want it in the room and certain types of trash are stinky so I really tried to manage the stuff I was producing. When the 6 months was over, the stuff that I would use to bind into my book I saved and the rest of it ....I ceremoniously put into the trash...so it is gone.
Jean: Do you have any samples of that trash here with you now?
Emily: I did start to make two book covers. One book cover is made out of q-tips and dentalfloss and the other is made out of hair trimmings. I hope to literally print the narrative and critical essays directly onto the trash that I have collected and combine the trash with the paper. A lot of paper isn't recyclable.
Jean: So what have you learned so far?
Emily: It definitely has affected the way that I think and the way that I look at trash. I would go out to restaurants and would have to put the napkin and straw in my pocket. If there was a lemon wedge in my water, I'd have to take it home and compost it. If I didn't finish my meal, I'd have to take it home, which meant that I had to get a to-go box. Whenever I walked into an establishment, I had to walk out with just the product in my hand and that is so difficult, you know? I would watch the amount of trash generated by just dining out. It really made me neurotic and strange! I won't lie about it. [laughing]
Jean: Do you make different kinds of artwork now?
Emily: I do. It has profoundly impacted the way that I make art. My art has become a lot more visceral and a lot more trash-y. I like to to deal with dirty gross things now. I'm infatuated with it and I'm not ashamed of it. Not much of my art is pretty anymore. Even if it isn't a found object or doesn't incorporate found objects, it appears as though it does. I have a much more intimate relationship with things that have been handled and touched or abused or whatever. I feel like that has a lot more power as an object to me now than the clean and the smooth and "finished."
Jean: How has your view of the environment changed? Or has it changed?
Emily: I don't think it has. I think when I approached the project I was already overwhelmed by how epic the state of our consumerism is. I wasn't even approaching it from an environmental standpoint but more about my relationship to other people. That's particularly what I'm ashamed of. My little study of the amount of trash that I generated confirmed what I already suspected which is that there's a lot [of trash]. The fervor with which we produce...I mean the entire contents of a CVS store are made to be thrown away, including the store itself. It's such a large scale that I don't think my project put a kind of perspective on it because you can't. It's just too huge. It didn't change the way that I see the environment. Ultimately, it didn't even change my consuming habits. I've found since then, in the name of convenience and surviving like a normal person in our society, if I'm really hungry, I will go buy a bagel even if it means it comes in a bag. Whereas before I wouldn't have done that just out of fear of having to sleep with it that night!
Jean: So what will you be doing with this project now?
Emily: I plan to make an edition of probably only about 10 books [made out of the collected trash.]

Here are the beginning of the book covers made out of some of her saved trash.



Because one cover has hair sculpted into the shape of shrimp, you can e-mail Emily at hairshrimp@gmail.com to inquire further about her work.
Thanks for sharing, Emily!
Here are what other people are saying on Green Friday:

The Art Teacher's Guide to the Internet w/Craig Rolandhttp://www.artjunction.org/

Blissful Thoughts w/Chan Blisshttp://blissthink.blogspot.comchan.bliss@sdhc.k12.fl.us

The Carrot Revolution w/David Granhttp://carrotrevolution.blogspot.com/
Learning IT w/Frank Curkovichttp://frankcurkovic.edublogs.org/
The Teaching Palette w/Theresa McGee + Hillary Andrlikhttp://theteachingpalette.com/