artist highlight: paperdashery

"the artist

is a receptacle for emotions

that come from all over the place:

from the sky,

from the earth,

from a scrap of paper..."

-pablo picasso

paperdashery: (n) the artful design, creation and selection of fine paper and paper arts.  the woman behind paperdashery is my own mother, julieann madl!  a very talented artist, my mom manifests the most amazing mixed media pieces ranging from dolls to hand bound art books and display pieces.

this santos cage doll is a work in progress but is already a beautiful expression of mom's creative vision.

this gypsy caravan has so many details i couldn't even begin to show them with my simple camera!
 

each side (front, back and both sides) have a myriad of marvelous little curiosities to explore from a winged pig, ghostly american gothic painting, lamps that actually work, and even a full sized art album concealed in the base of the wagon!

a host of hand bound books exhibiting a wide range of binding skills lean here and there throughout her studio...

books whose binding techniques challenge even the most creative bookbinder... with pages that have tags and note sheets tucked everywhere, upon which to record your most secret desires or creative ideas...

books of various themes and styles are everywhere!

even flip books filled with imaginative pages for photos and memories of every kind...

 not to mention all the mind-boggling display "boxes" (for lack of a better term) harboring still more books and albums!

mom doesn't have a blog (though i've been trying to drag her kicking and screaming into the 21st century!) but i did just buy her a brand new digital camera, so maybe we'll start to see more from her soon enough!

namaste'

silent sunday - 05/12/2013

on the road again...

"what's this? blueberries!!

oh, oh my god!

oh, that's better than sex!"

-stewie griffin

there is nothing quite like fresh blueberries in the morning! these little babies found their way into a lovely smoothie, along with a banana, some homemade peanut butter and protein powder. yum!

still fighting what seems to have become an endless parade of colds (or one mega-monster of one) so haven't felt up to needle chanting...or much of anything lately besides sleeping in between shifts. 

i'm headed over to mom and dad's for a week and a half. got the saint, some scraps and some more of these blueberries to munch on along the way. perhaps this will be just what the doctor ordered to eradicate this nasty cold!

namaste'

my lovely bones

"these were the lovely bones

that had grown around my absence..."

- alice sebold

so much of my time has been wrapped up in music of late. exploring this new (to me) world of cigar box guitars and their link to depression era delta blues. so much so that it felt almost foreign to my fingers to pick up a needle and thread and begin chanting upon cloth once again. almost. but memories have a way of ebbing back into place once we are receptive to them again...

oh so long ago (there's a blog entry somewhere about it, but i haven't taken the time to hunt it down) i mentioned having this enormous collection of vintage linens. pillow cases. dresser scarves. chair leaves. candle mats. kitchen linens. i had been contemplating using them somehow in a new interpretation of a crazy quilt. perhaps there is a predominantly white crazy quilt or two out there somewhere. i'm quite certain that a quick google search would probably spit back an endless flow of images (google seems to be good at that). but i don't want to contaminate my idea with someone else's so i will resist the urge to investigate further. instead, i simply acknowledge the old axiom that there are no new ideas is most likely true and forge on ahead nonetheless.

this is the beginning of my first block for what will become a large shelter cloth. it will span generations of expression in that it will be comprised of the daily toil of countless stitchers from unknown generations, cobbled together by my own vision. i'm calling it (for the moment at least) my lovely bones and will be infusing it with tangent images and design. as many of you know, bones have long been one of my own personal symbols of great meaning and endless whispering... i will be dispensing with "traditional" crazy quilting techniques (with the exception of embellished seams) and utilizing contemporary boro, or slow cloth, techniques. building layers of cloth fragments one upon another until the shelter cloth is of the size and weight desired. allowing the layers of time to provide its own density and warmth.

for now, however, i must get my head back under the steam cloth for i can not breathe (how dare this cold strike me down in the hour of my inspiration!).

namaste'

silent sunday - 04/28/2013

silent sunday - 04/21/2013

it seems someone doesn't think we've had enough snow this year...

nightshift blues

one of the advantages of working nightshift is that everyone else is asleep and you have more free time to mess around with stuff. or to wander the world wide web and become entranced by things you may never have been exposed to before. i've seen cigar box guitars around before and always dismissed them as a poor imitation of a mountain dulcimer (an instrument i've loved and played for years). i now realize that i was sadly mistaken!

this little baby went together much faster than i expected and i still have a few modifications that i want to make, like finding a nice vintage bakelite knob for the volume, some abalone fret marker dots to inlay on the ebony fingerboard (instead of the little red stickers), and i have a set of skull-shaped tuners on order that will replace those garden variety ones in it right now. i even found a cool metal plate for the hookup jack that i am thinking of installing. but for now, he's got a sweet acoustic sound and a killer electric beef that i get to play with until those other parts arrive!

i've never played a four string guitar before, so i'm still learning the fretboard layout and discovering the chords (which are surprisingly different than on a regular six string guitar). at the moment, i'm just using a basic glass slide by fender for the slide work, but i have found instructions for making a genuine (that's pronounced, "jen-you-WINE") bottle slide from an old wine bottle that i plan on giving a try. i recorded this little noodle session through a line 6 pocket pod which is an ingenious little speakerless amp with hundreds of tube and filter combos built right in which gives me a direct line to record from on my laptop, could be plugged into a headset for practice, or be plugged into an amp and used effectively as a pre-amp. hope you enjoy hearing a little something on my latest obsession!

meanwhile, back to some needle chanting on community at large in between noodling around on my new geeTAR!

namaste'

a break in the storm

after two days of snow, it was nice to have a day of "warm" weather to melt it all away and then find a beautiful sunrise the next morning while hiking with the saint up in the prairies above the rims...

namaste'

creative chaos

"don't think.

thinking is the enemy of creativity.

it's self-conscious,

and anything self-conscious is lousy.

you can't try to do things.

you simply must do things."

-ray bradbury

i ought to find something in this drawer that'll work...

it's been snowing these past couple days and night. snowing and bitter cold. well, bitter cold by spring's standards at any rate.

in keeping with the bradbury quote above (which, by the way, hangs prominently in my studio), i've been reaching past the threads and bits of cloth. ignoring thoughts. forgetting thinking. fingers grasping wires and solder and wood. can't help it. that cigar box guitar bug has bitten my butt hard!

almost finished with the first rendition....

namaste'