Textiles and Tea, mobiles and deer noses

 Yesterday's Textiles and Tea featured Carl Stewart 

Originally from Prince Edward Island, now working in Ottawa, which is a great place for supporting and funding the arts.

His weaving covers a lot of issues around suffering, loss and homophobia, from the traffic death of his brother, Owen, at three years old, to the terrible assault, chase and murder by a gang in the 1980s in an Ottawa park, of a young gay man. 

The longest work shown here is 80 feet long, describing the height from which the young man was thrown over a bridge to his death.

Aside from such stark confrontation of cruelty and suffering, he harvests fabrics he finds in the streets, especially mattresses and other discarded pieces. Sometimes he makes quilts, sometimes unravels the fabric to weave it.

He also uses cross stitch and beading, in portraits of his brother as well as on reclaimed fabrics.

In the last piece, a tour de force of weaving a circular pattern, there are silvery threads woven in, created from the foil cover on yogurt containers, cut into spirals then manipulated into straight threads for weaving.

He weaves in the Swedish dukagong style, woven from the back of the image, like ancient tapestries.

He's endlessly creative and accepting of beauty in the messiness of life. That includes a pandemic urge he had to collect and weave the strings from used teabags! A good humored man, despite all he's been through.  Worth checking out.

Back on earth, my car running nicely yesterday, I shopped for the first time in months, to make up the gaps in my Misfits order. 

I finally found, yay, wholewheat flour, so I can bake bread, also Envy apples, long absent from Misfits. They're a lovely apple, crunchy, juicy but not bitey like all the varieties with crisp in their name, which hurt my face, too tart.

And the jigsaw puzzle is complete, final piece going in, ready to admire then return.

You can see how much repetition there is in shapes and colors. It's quite a spectacular image though. 

Tomorrow the house cleaners come, so I'll stay out,  return the puzzle and borrow the next one, also stop at the PO to send off three pairs of  Knitting Ministry gloves, the last one of which I plan to finish today, all being well.

I did do a tour, as promised,  of my current remaining mobiles, old, faded, well, aren't we all, made very simply.

Kids can do these. A skewer, fine string or thread, tie different lengths, and a hanging thread knotted at each end of the skewer. No need to worry about three dimensional balance here.

The pieces are all cut twice then glued together with the thread trapped between. Done. 

Hard to detect this one in the forest of artworks around the downstairs bathroom. The pieces are made to show the architecture of inside a deer's nose.  Like this

It's astonishingly complex and lovely, and I based quite a bit of art on this shape a while back.

The birds are two sided, one black one white, so they're changing interestingly black to white and back in any draft.

These shapes, sorry, terrible image, best of several I tried, are cut in Arp like shapes from old aniline ink paintings.

And I thought if you were in the bedroom you'd probably want to look at other pieces, too, so here are a couple of ink drawings

And a large mixed media, handmade paper,  wire, and painting, called The Moon's a Balloon. Seems suddenly timely..

So that's where we are. Blogging early today because it's going to be in the sixties and I need to get out while the getting's good this afternoon.

Happy day everyone, do your thing, no matter what! Show your pictures however poor, if they're making a useful point.