Wa's Up?

So, I've been busy. First, the yarn:



















Here, I'm attempting to spin a silk/merino roving into a kind of thick-n-thin wackiness. You'd think wacky would be easy for me. Turns out, with spinning, it's hard to not spin 'normal' once you get 'normal' down. Who knew? The roving is from Lisa Souza, color Mardi Gras. Waaay too yummy. I'll be buying more.

Next, my current lace knit:
















This is the Swallowtail Shawl from fall '06 Interweave Knits The yarn: my finest handspun to date! Once again, Lisa Souza roving: Blue Faced Leicester. Not sure which colorway.

So much for knitting. That's my hobby, you know. Everything else is my 'job'.

I've been fooling around with this image:






















This is a sketch I scratched into a flour paste silk screen. Somehow, she keeps asking to be more than just a screen. Having scanned the image onto my computer, she was just waiting for the magic touches of Lucienne (my pen tablet pen, whom I love with fierce devotion).























Where does this stuff come from?!? Somewhere in the twilight of my mind, these images lurk and I'm always amazed by them. I've been talking online with a friend about what medium she wants to be. I'm so afraid of the amount of time she will require in fiber. The thought of even beginning overwhelms me. But begin I must (at the prompting of said friend).

Lucienne helped me boil the image down to the most basic terms:






















I'm doing all this drawing in Photoshop Elements. The red lines were added as a seperate layer. Before I met technology, this was all done with tracing paper and Sharpies. In Photoshop, I was able to convert the red lines to black and then print them seperately. This will become my fabric 'background'. The rest of the image will be built on top of it, though I'm not sure how.

Here you can see the background pattern, the drawing, and a bunch of pattern pieces traced on tracing paper. The background remains intact to use as a reference. All the drawn segments are numbered so I can fit this back together like a puzzle.

















I really have no idea what will happen next. Maybe some fabric auditions. Intuition tells me that I'll be dying fabrics for this project. There's so much about making art that terrifies me...I can't put it all into words. Trying to break it down into baby steps keeps some of the fear at bay. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.