I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0)
"The road goes on forever and the party never ends …" Robert Earl Keen
I can’t stop stitching. Well, I can, but I don’t like to. I’m having so much fun seeing this come together that it’s frustrating to have other stuff like laundry and meals and sleeping to attend to …
And there’s some very happy news to share from daughter Meliss (click for full images) …
Not to mention a celebration for Meg’s birthday (click for full images) …
I love that Meg lit her own candles and started to sing with us … she’s such a great mom.
And today the art blog has a rare two-fer …
We both finished projects today!
Don’s acrylic take on a photo from our recent New Mexico jaunt …
and my cloth book Moon Myth …
Both will eventually make it into the new art blog, but for now here’s the story of how the cloth book ended up.
The story began in May 2018 when I started to play around with ideas (click the pix to see complete images) …
And fortunately, much of its making was documented in blog links on the new blog and in page form on the old blog.
But as noted recently, I stalled in late 2018 when I tried stitching the plastic impregnated canvas text to the cloth blocks … that was no fun at all.
Fast forward to this past week, when I brought it back out and determined I was going to finish, dammit, come hell or sore fingers.
There were some hiccups along the way, but none of the problems were insurmountable. The most recent involved the too-skinny spine of the book, which I disassembled and then bolstered up by folding and hemming every other page edge …
The disassembling also gave me an opportunity to re-photograph every page with the light box, shown here with the latest art blog entry …
But honestly, I still like taking pictures on our soumak rug …
although I promise to do a proper art blog post … eventually.
I thought it was going well … until it wasn’t. As each new page of Moon Myth was attached, a problem emerged: the bottom edges were distinctly thicker than the top edges, which resulted in a troubling upward slope from top to bottom (impossible to photograph, so you’ll just have to take my word for it).
In fact, it was a problem I had somewhat anticipated when I designed the book to have a row of patches running along the bottom of each page, depicting the phases of the moon changing over the course of a month …
but I had thought that the appliqués and text blocks at the top of each page would compensate for that …
It turns out they didn’t compensate enough. So I unstitched the top edges of the five pairs of pages that were already assembled …
slipped a folded piece of cover stock into each, then restitched them one-by-one …
It was a much simpler matter adding cover stock padding to the as-yet-unassembled pages …
with the overall result that the top and bottom edges of the text block have become more balanced.
Although now the spine has me a little worried …
It’s always something, right?
Oops, I almost forgot! There’s also a new post on the art blog …
I'm Going to Texas (version 2.0) 