Showing posts with label Marysusan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marysusan. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Library Loving


So my little exhibit at the library went up yesterday. It was the first time that I had done anything like that and I think that it looks pretty good. It took me some time to finesse it to where I was happy with the display, but in the end, I was pleased. It was a combination of my felt work and some photos of my felt being worn. It is just one display cabinet, but it is a start! It runs for the whole month of June, and at least now I can say that I have had an exhibit!
I also included an artist statement and a bit about the history of felting, as well as some of my microscope images of wool fibers.


Saturday, March 29, 2008

aqua necklace


aqua necklace, originally uploaded by Marysusan.

My newest creation over at etsy. This felted necklace has been treated so that all those hard edges will remain nice and sharp. The glass beads that I used as spacers are absolutely delicious, and I have to admit that I was tempted to keep them for myself. I also used some cute cute cute green polka dot glass beads around the back of the necklace, so that it would feel nice and smooth against your neck.

There you go. It is for sale in my etsy shop. Go get it.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

living room shelves: eye spy game and contest

Can you spot all the hand made items on this page?

If it is an Etsy item, can you find the shop it came from?

If you click on the photo, it will take you to the original flickr file, where you can add your comments and notes.

I think that I shall make it a contest. Every one who leaves a comment on the Flikr photo, trying to ID an item is eligible.

The prize will be a set of hand felted hairpins, just like the one's I sell in my Etsy shop, ...as well as some possible goody destash items waiting to go in my other shop, toomuchmary.etsy.com

The EYE SPY contest will run until March 8th, 2008.

Good Luck!

I will choose the winner totally at random.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

A Dark Confession


nutmeg, originally uploaded by Marysusan.

I have a confession to make.

My husband hates nutmeg. Or at least he thinks that he hates nutmeg. Every time that I make a quiche or an egg dish he complains that I put nutmeg in it. Now I know that I do NOT over season my food, be it with nutmeg, or salt, or anything else. I also know that if you DO NOT put nutmeg in a baked egg dish the flavour falls flat.

So I have started putting nutmeg in everything I cook.

EVERYTHING.

It is only a little bit. But it is going everywhere....all the time.

He has been complimenting me on my cooking more than ever.

What does this say about his sense of taste? What does this say about our relationship? What does this say about his fear of nutmeg?


More importantly, I wonder if he actually reads my blog?

What do you have to confess? Feel free to do it here. I am pretty confident that YOUR significant other doesn't read this blog.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Felting Tutorial Part 2: Curly-que

Here is part 2 of my Video Felting Tutorial: Felting a Curly-Que.

This portion of the tutorial covers the actual process of wet felting around the wire form. Part 1 covered how to wind the felt around the wire form and prepare it for wet felting. (If you haven't seen Part 1, it is in yesterday's post!)

Enjoy!



Link to part 1 of the tutorial here: Take me to it!

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Felting Tutorial Part 1: Curly-que

I thought that it would be fun for me to start filming a series of tutorials on some basic felting techniques.

So here is the first in that series: How to wet felt a curly-que, just like the one you see here!

These little curls are really useful as embellishments or as fun elements in larger pieces, I use them all the time. Besides, they are a great place to start because they work up quick, don't take much roving, and they are just as whimsical as all get out. They can take something that is kind of ho-hum and elevate it. They can also be just the thing to add a touch of the organic to a piece that is feeling a little staid or static.

I hope you enjoy part 1 of this tutorial, parts two and three will follow shortly!

Part 1: Taming the wool (The wind up)

Part 2: Prepare to get wet (Felting it up)

Part 3: Taking shape (Forming the curl)








Thursday, February 21, 2008

Wearing your heart outside your chest: Featured Etsy seller: EHMEGLASS


FEATURED ETSY SELLER: EHMEGLASS.ETSY.COM


My husband has great taste. Let me just start off by saying that. He also has the good sense to shop for me from my Etsy favourites list.

Good Man....


So for Valentine's day I received the most perfect peice of jewellry you could imagine for a romantic biology teacher. Isn't it great? I can't wait to wear it to school, and for the kids to see it. Nothing like wearing your heart on the outside of your chest for all to see...


I think one of the best things about it must be in the nature of the glass itself. As you wear it, it gets warm. And while I am certain that it only acheives body temperature, you could almost imagine that it feels a bit warmer than that...giving it the illusion of having a tiny life of it's own. The detail in this coronary cadeaux is just amazing, and the biologist in me delights in it. The artist in me wonders at the process, but honestly, doesn't want the mystery spoiled.



All of the work coming out of Amy Johnson's Toronto TANK studio has this amazing organic quality that just draws you in. It makes you want to touch it, and caress it. Because while all her product is glass, it does not appear precious or weak. This stuff is strong. At least in appearance and intent if not in reality.


You owe it to yourself to see what she can do...I can attest that as fantastic as her work appears in photos, her efforts are even better when you hold them in the palm of your hand.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

ON pins and Pins


Hair Pins...something new to do with my hardened felt:

I had these left over felt beads that had already been hardened with the acrylic so I had to figure out what to do with them. I am kind of over seeing buttons stuck on the end of bobbie pins...but I thought that my felt disks were quite different!



Now I think that I shall whip out a few of these whenever I have some left over bits at the end of a necklace making session...

Monday, February 18, 2008

Too Much Mary


Too Much Mary Banner copy, originally uploaded by Marysusan.

So...while I did not get much made, I have gotten some organizing done. In the course of going through my studio I decided that I have too much stuff. Plain and simple: there is Too Much Mary.

I have too much of Mary Jane in me. She was my grandmother who ran an antique shop called "The Elephant's Foot" and never threw anything away. It is a dangerous and delicate rope to walk, and I acknowledge that.

Hence, me opening up a second shop purely for destash. And when I say destash, I mean it. I am getting rid of the dusty, the old, and that which I must finally admit to myself that I shall never use. Maybe these things will inspire someone else.

Come check it out, I will be listing things fairly constantly, until the point is reached where my studio space no longer tests the boundaries of physics.

So the new destash shop is: http://toomuchmary.etsy.com

I will ALWAYS be found making art at my regular address: http://marysusan.etsy.com

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Abandoned


abandon
Originally uploaded by Marysusan

Where is my muse?

I am waiting for inspiration to strike. Now that the play is over and I can finally get into the studio and make some things for myself alone, I find that I am at an impase as to how to do so.

Perhaps I just need to get in there and make something, anything, to get the juices flowing. I know I NEED to do it....or else I will just stay in this grey limbo of doing nothing, which is a kind of artistic metastasis.

It has got to break.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Dress without a face


I have discovered the danger of things being too good.


Here are two of the costumes from the show that I just finished. They are from the "Dancing Cavalier" section of Singing in the Rain that I made for our winter production. Faces have been removed, as it is a High School production and the actors are minors.


The dress has almost 20 yards of fabric in it...BTW.

Unfortunately, tons of people just assumed that we had either purchased the dress or had borrowed it from a local museum or costume house in the city (one of the possibilites being this close to Manhattan). Folks just could not beleive that we (my mum and I) made this dress. She gave me some amazing help on the bodice during her Christmas visit and then I completed and fitted the dress over the next week. There were over 30 woman hours of work in that baby. Don't get me started on the man's version...
They were just amazing on stage...I was so happy.


Thursday, January 31, 2008

Exquisite Corpse


I can't show you what I have been making lately, as it is for the school play...perhaps I can post some production stills later...


But I can post some links to my most current writing. I recently reviewed the book Exquisite Corpse by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss. It is about the connections between surrealism and the Black Dahlia murder. It combines my two interests of art and forensic science. You can read that review in its entirety HERE.
But here is an excerpt, or an amuse bouche if you will :
The authors of Exquisite Corpse, Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, posit an extremely interesting hypothesis: that the murderer of the "Black Dahlia" was inspired by, and intimately involved with, the surrealist art movement. This in and of itself is an extraordinary claim, which unfortunately relies on too many layers of assumptions and suppositions to be held truly credible in anything but the realm of pure theory.

The core of the text makes the basic assumption that the murderer of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. The Black Dahlia,was George Hodel. This information is relied upon as if it were fact in this book, which unfortunately, it is not. There is one major source that proposes Hodel is the Black Dahlia killer, and that is his own son, Steve Hodel. Exquisite Corpse fully hangs its hat on this idea of Hodel being the killer. If this were not the case, their hypothesis would crumble like the walls of Jericho. Once one buys the idea of Hodel as the killer (largely based on the presence of two pictures of a pretty, young unidentified woman in a Hodel family photo album, which Steve Hodel identifies as Elizabeth Short, frankly, I don't see the resemblance), then the connections to the surrealist movement can be made.....

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Superhero

I love fun silly saturday morning time wasters. Here is my newest one, the HEROMACHINE.

I have generated two alterego's for myself:


The Lab Girl:
Has the ability to...
  • Prepare lessons at lightning speeds
  • Implant info in students' brains telepathically
  • Blast the occasional jerk with a "Behaviour Modification Ray"
  • Fold time for grading purposes
  • Look fabulous Doing it
  • Repel stains and evildoers with her Lab Coat of Majesty

The Good Girl Mary
Has the ability to:
  • Create something from nothing
  • Whip onery felt into shape
  • Get others to shop Handmade
  • Blast the Big Box Stores (metaphorically speaking or course)
  • See the good in everything
  • Alter space and time to pack more matter than possible by mere physics into a small space
  • Blow away creative blocks
You can make your own SUPERHERO at:
Have fun!

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

What have I been doing with myself lately?





You might have noticed that I haven't been posting a terrible lot in the recent past. This is because I have been working my little fingers to the bone costuming our Winter Musical. I thought that I would post a couple snaps of one of our latest creations.





This is Miss Marissa, a lovely young student at my school who is playing Lena in our production of "Singing in the Rain." The gown was sewn by my sainted mother and myself. We mostly completed the bodice together in a couple afternoons and one hectic morning during her Christmas-time visit, I then completed the remainder of the dress last weekend. The wig is constructed from two wigs, that are supported with foam inserts and supplemented with flowers, bows, birds and yes a cage.




And this is just the beginning.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Felt Heirloom Roses




So...I am off the Peonies for a little bit and on to Heirloom Roses. I consider this little guy to be an heirloom rose, cause he is so open. Aren't those the roses we always remember as smelling the best and lasting the longest, even if they were not the most showy in the garden?
This 4 inch wet felted and hand beaded beauty with needle felted details would dress up any ensemble, from a simple black turtleneck, to a blushing pink evening gown. It also looks spectacular in a chignon, and that is why it is convertible from a hair fork mounting to a traditional corsage pin.










I love making these, and I made the flat felt for this over the summer, and had it sitting about for a while waiting for it tell me what it wanted to be. Last night it whispered to me...so I helped it along.

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Winter White Majesty Necklace




This is the Winter Majesty Necklace. It is a blend of cream and white merino and corriedale rovings that were wet felted and then sculpted. It is embellished with freshwater pearls and some very tiny sweet pearly seed beads. I simply adore the sculptural nature of this piece, and think that it is one of the most visually interesting and inspired things I have made in some time.





I can imagine the White Witch of you-know-where wearing this to a garden party before she drinks some sweet pale wine. It would look amazing with a simply cut evening dress....or a black V-neck T-shirt. It would be divine for a winter wedding! It weighs hardly a thing for being so substantial.





The process of building it was really organic, in that I started with the curly-cues and then went out from there, adding elements and sculpting parts as the necklace called for them. The part that is slightly redolent of a marriage between an open egg and a bird's nest dusted with spun sugar was actually felted around a small stone from my garden, which I then freed from it's woolly captivity. The tiny felt and pearl "cameo" on the opposite side is the doorway through which the stone made it's exit.



I'm almost too much in love with it to let it go....almost, but not quite. It could be yours...just go to Etsy.



Sunday, November 18, 2007

Wet Felting Flower Seminar with Carol Cypher

So, I said that it would be coming and here it is. The complete rundown on the Carol Huber Cypher workshop that I went to last weekend. If you can imagine that lovely wooley smell that is slightly redolent of wet dog, then you can feel like you were actually there.


We arrived and were greeted with a long table covered in luscious wool. It was full of little bags filled with roving in stunning color combinations. We each chose our seats and our bags, fully geared up for a full day of felting and fulling. ( Could I use the word "full" there a few more times?)





Then it was time to design our flowers for our lariats. Mine started out looking like the love child of Cousin It and Man Ray. They were puffy and lovely and tempting to pet, but always remember and never forget: Don't pet the felt!






The water came out and it was time to start felting....and rubbing and felting and rubbing some more...with intermittent peeks to check on the progress of the flowers.








Next we moved on to the fulling and shaping of the flowers. Folks went wild here, some ended up with multi-petaled rose/violet hybrids that exist no where but in the imagination. My flower called out to be a trumpet shape, like the Angel Trumpet Flower, so I did my best to give it what it wanted.







Next we made our lariats. This involved essentially laying wisps of roving down over a long length of roving, building up thicknesses where we wanted to cut leaves later, and adding in colors for interest. We then felted these as a rope, and tried not to entangle each other's fibers at the same time.


Below is some great video of Carol explaining how to cut the rope part of the lariat to sculpt it!

Then it was time to bead and assemble. Carol was insanely generous in sharing her impressive bead stash with us. I was immediately drawn to some lavender fringe beads that seemed to be just the thing for my lariat. I didn't want to overdo the beadwork, but I still wanted it to have some pop. I also added a little pekoe stitch beading around the edge of one of the petals for some textural interest.




Here are some photos of the finished product. I really love how it turned out. The image on the left is before it was quite done (hence the hanging thread)...the one on the right is pretty much fully realized. One thing that I did that I love is that I split open the "bump" that I had sculpted into the "pod" end of the lariat and sewed in a lava bead. It looks like a primeval seed.






My husband says that they whole thing looks like it is about to assimilate me , like a Triffid. He couldn't be right....could he?

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Parting with Art...




So I just sent off two of my little paintings and an acrylic felt flower to new homes today. I decided that the flower needed a special little send off, so I made this gift box for my customer to find it in.


Hopefully, it will be a bit of cheer in this week of dreary weather. (And a bit of an added surprise for her, unless she reads my blog of course!)




The paintings were a long awaited commission for a lovely customer who already owned one of my "Angry Flower" encaustic paintings. These two will turn her previously lonely singlet into a fulfilled trio.













It has been a while since I have done any encaustics and it felt good to get back in the studio and get some paint on my hands and wax on the palette.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

As per suggestions

Wow...a week since I posted, I think that I am going through blog withdrawl, but the grading and teaching has to come first!


Ok...I took many of your suggestions into account, and here is my once change purse, masquerading as:



An apple cosy




A vase cosy
























A junk receptical




















What do you think?

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Jelly, jelly, jelly for my belly




All I have managed to make this week is JELLY...lots and lots of grape jelly. But, it is the best darned concord grape jelly to ever pass the lips of man or beast. No Welch's for us here. All our jelly is made from the fruit of our 75 year old vines that grow on the arbor at our Long Island home.





Since I describe the process for everything else, why not this?






We picked over 30 pounds of washed and sorted grapes (so the actual picked amount before culling was probably more like 70 lbs). We have to sort them and pick over them carefully, because we find little guys like this:
Isn't he cute? We named him and all his tiny snail brethren George and set them free in the compost pile.







We then squashed them and boiled them into juice. The boiled mash gets filtered twice. The juice then has to sit in a tall container for at least 12-24 hours so that the sediment and the tartaric acid crystals settle out of the liquid and fall to the bottom, otherwise you get crunchy and cloudy jelly.





We then made two batches (with one more to follow today) of jelly by pulling 8 cups of juice (per batch) and mixing it with 6 cups of sugar, boiling it, boiling it and boiling it some more while carefully monitoring the temperature and constantly testing it for reaching the "jelly point".




My husband claims that I have Jelly Performance Anxiety, as I am always convinced at some point in the process that our grapes didn't have enough natural pectin and that they will NEVER become jelly. This is in fact a VERY good gauge of when the jelly will happen, because about 3 minutes after my declaration that the batch is HOPELESS AND WILL NEVER SET UP....it does. Every time.



SO now we have jelly...for us, for our neighbors' children, for my friends at work, for family. We also still have about 200 lbs of grapes on the vine, which would probably be enough to do 40 more half pints of jelly, but there is only so much jelly one woman can make. Any winemakers out there? Wanna come pick some grapes? Please?

Cause next week we make Fig Jam....