Birthday Week: Confetti Cake + Salt Bagels + Soap

over past two years i've been doing a lot of self reflection, figuring out who i am as a person, doing a lot of discovery and exploration - now the time has finally come where i will be at the end of an era. since i will be turning 24 on wednesday, it will be the last year where i can be considered a young adult, and next year will reluctantly be added to the 25-30 age group. i'm not ready for this, time moves too fast.  no longer will i be a care free college student, but rather a working class/student loan debtor/starving artist who has other responsibilities. these i am ready for, and thank my parents for raising me to be responsible and independent, but it i think it is the age itself that scares me, and all the experiences i feel i missed out on. instead of feeling sad about what i missed so far, i decided to start working towards those experiences and opportunities, do what i always wanted to do, and work on my character and my flaws from here on out. not only do i want to catch up, but i want to work on being a better person.

so having said all that i have decided that since this is my week, i am going to spend it the best way i know how, striving for daily goals, and spending any minute i can savoring and enjoying the day. i am calling it my week of discovery and expanding my horizons. each day i will explore the things that i love : food and crafts. my goal for the entire week is to have a very fulfilling birthday before my 25th birthday...so why not start a year ahead?!

monday december 5:

 first of all gorgeous, warm day!

food that made me think of this in the first place: 

strolled into South Street Philly Bagels, while going to drop off a rent check on this gorgeous day. ordered the turkey club on a salt bagel....thought i died and went to heaven. i almost didn't want to eat anything for the rest of the day to not loose the taste in my mouth, but realized that was kinda gross and got some gum....nonetheless it was this huge bagel sandwhich -while drooling over it - made me come the conclusion that i started my birthday week off the right way and should do this for the rest of the week (that is eating at all the places where i've always wanted to, or discovering a new spot for awesome food).

for dinner i stopped at Grindcore House, (mainly because i had no food in the house) and decided to keep my birthday week alive my treating myself to a big mug filled with a chai latte and ordered a new sandwhich that i had not tried there yet. the treehugger salad on sourdough bread (mixed greens, olives, cucumber, avocado, tomato, and shitake vinagrette) was great. to top it all off, i got a big slice of vegan confetti cake.

the craft: 

i finally made a curtain to hide my messy clothes in my closet! this is fabric i had designed junior year in print class, hand screen printed by yours truly. :)

my work space, my painting, my fabric....my closet :)

i also made a test batch of soap tonight! i decided for christmas to make everyone handmade soap. every year i make people gifts for the holidays, however this year i am broke even more and decided to make a big gift and give a little of it to everyone i care enough to share it with. this year i decided to make handmade soap. it has been a "quite" passion of mine for years, and it something i find really fascinating and enjoyable. i got my supplies in the mail today so i made a test batch with ingredients i had ready...

Eucalyptus + Clove+Coffee Soap

since i do not have the luxury of spending time with hand processed soaps from scratch (which i have done before and is quite a process) i decided to just got with microwavable soap bases :\ i know i know, not the most ideal, but they do the trick. it was super easy and only took me about 15 minutes tops! i bought shea butter and goat's milk bases to try and experiment with.

combine equal parts of shea butter + goat's milk base. 

microwave until fully melted (for the amount i used, about 3-4 mins)

add desired amount of avocado oil, ground cloves, eucalyptus essential oil and hazelnut ground coffee

stir and pour into mold

let sit for about an hour or less depending on how much

remove from mold and cut

 soap!

it smells like oatmeal surprisingly....

the team at work will be happy to be my first testers i'm sure!

that wraps it up for monday of my awesome birthday week. i'd say it was pretty successful, wouldn't you?

Emerging Artists & Designers Show

 

installation shots from my senior thesis show at Moore College of Art from april 27 - May 14 2011

so grateful, i won the Kathryn Welsh Memorial Award for Textile Design

thanks to everyone who came out for the support. it was so rewarding being part of an awesome senior show.

i am also selling small 18 x 24" prints of my designs. feel free to email me if you are interested!

unfinished project: self portrait in thread

just found this under my bed. a project i started last year on old canvas fabric. i wanted to start drawing with thread. definitely needs work but i still love it :)

Ikat

our first project for woven design, resisted ikat warps with a simple pattern

Shibori'd Out

for our first assignment in my print II class we learned the art of shibori, a resist dyeing technique that is similar to tye-dye. for this project we had to create at least 20 designs using the four techniques of shibori - planghi (wrapping), itajime (clamping), tritik (stitch) and arashi (tube wrapping). it was so much fun, i really enjoyed doing shibori but now we are moving on to batik designs. this whole shibori project took about a month to do.

planghi technique. for this particular piece i pleated the fabric and wrapped monofilament around it, throwing metal washers in the folds of the pleats to create the diamond shapes in the design.

arashi shibori. since this fabric was longer, i folded it in half and wrapped it around a pvc pipe, then wrapped monofilament around it to hold it in place. after wrapping, i swished the fabric to the end of the tube so it bunched together allowing for the color removing chemicals (thiox) to penetrate inside the folds to create this beautiful ripple.

tritik shibori. tritik is more of a pain to do because to stitching takes a much longer time then wrapping and clamping. for this particular piece i pleated the fabric diagonally and simply stitched a line in the center. once it unfolds, the line was repeated throughout the pleating, creating this lovely design. i ombred the fabric in orange dye for a more dynamic pattern.

itajime shibori. for this piece i folded the fabric in half and then in triangles. i placed a large metal "L" bracket on the top and on the bottom of the bunch and clamped them in place. after removing the color in thiox i then went back in and placed a large square metal square on top of the bunch and placed it back in the thiox to remove even more of the color, while saving the original purple color of the fabric and the color underneath the metal square.

Trimmings and carpets and furniture, Oh My!

today i took a trip with my print professor and a fellow student to get a lot of discount fabric at jo-mar in whittaker, and on our way there we stopped at the most amazing and overwhelming store i've ever been to. material culture, an ENORMOUS store filled with any kind of eastern-influenced furniture, artifacts, trinkets, fabrics, carpets, pots and pans, books etc. it took us about an hour and a half just to browse the entirety of the store. this place was exactly where i want to buy all my furniture from, and i won't forget this place too easily. i could have kicked myself for not bringing a camera with me, just describing it doesn't do it justice. we found the most amazing pile of trimmings and sari borders and i ended up buying two incredible trimmings that are handmade are a reasonable price. sometimes the hidden treasures like that are sooo worth it. 

this is one of the two trimmings that i bought. this is so delicate yet so weighty, i love the feel of it. there are spots in the chain that are falling apart and i love that about this piece. if you look closely at the golden leaves you can see that the gold thread is actually wire that has been so finely coiled that it looks like beading. my favorite part about this piece is the fact that it is all stitched to newspaper! if you look at the last picture you can see that on the back there are letters and words on the base, the entire piece has newspaper as the base.

the trimming above is extraordinary and the picture doesn't do it justice either. the beautiful blue-grey silk with hand beaded, hand-stitched, and intricately coiled metal thread are spectacular. its things like this that i live for....

the pictures are terrible, i know but until i get a better camera we will all just have to deal with it. so the lesson of this post is to go to material culture and have just as an amazing experience as i did.

Cochineal!

I forgot to mention in my last post that I bought Cochineal at the fair yesterday, which is a tiny bug found in South America that is dried and crushed into use for dying. It creates the most beautiful red color and was prized at the time of Christopher Columbus because red was hard and expensive to find. I can't wait to dye with the little critters!

Spin Span Spun

If you have seen my newest post on Spindlejoy, you will have noticed that I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival yesterday. It was a great time and a great opportunity to buy some items that would be expensive and hard to find elsewhere.

I have really taken a liking to spinning, I find it very meditative and relaxing, and I feel very fulfilled when I weave with it. It makes me feel like I am contributing to every step of my working process, and I feel self-sufficient in a materialistic culture. I bought two books yesterday at the festival, one of which has really fascinated me; Spin Span Spun and Handspindles. Handspindles describes various types of spindles used throughout the world and throughout history, while also describing different types of spinning methods. Spin Span Spun is a book about spinning and weaving facts and folklore throughout different cultures across time and is incredibly fascinating. It is really humbling when you realize that spinning and weaving were everyday tasks for people in every culture for thousands of years, but now we have no connection to it, it is almost lost.

Here are just a few facts about spinning from the book:

"Yogis in India believed that a person's level of awareness was reflected in their reasons for spinning. The lowest level of awareness was spinning in order to sell the yarn, the next higher level was spinning in order to weave, next was spinning in order to give away the yarn, and the highest awareness was spinning as pure meditation."

"Asbestos is a mineral fiber which does not burn. It has been used by handspinners or at least a dozen centuries...A table owned by Emperor Charlemagne in the eighth century was made of asbestos. After dinner Charlemagne would amaze his guests by throwing the cloth into the fire to clean it. After the stains were burned off, he would return the clean white cloth to the table."

"Some Indians in the highlands of Peru attribute supernatural powers to alpaca and say it is the only fiber from which magic or curative thread can be spun."

(the image above is of asbestos cloth)