Category: The Studio

fiber arts, making, process, tactile work

  • Welcome To October – 31 New Days, Autumn To Savor, and Two Full Moons

    \"\"Well, it\’s October, Dear Reader! I\’m not sure how it happened either, but here we are. 31 fresh new days, two full moons, and #artober.

    Why #artober?

    Because art for art\’s sake is good for you. Putting your focus on something other than the dumpster fire is also a good thing.

    If you decide to play, please share your IG handle with me in the comments.

    If you want to watch along, go to Instagram and look for the hashtag #artober and follow artists you enjoy.

    Okay, but what is #artober?

    It\’s a daily art challenge designed to help us get back into the habit of daily art practice. I\’m doing mine probably mostly with calligraphy, but I go by the seat of my pants so you could be in for anything. I\’ll be posting it on my Instagram @a.catherine.noon.

    What other ideas have you come up with to keep your focus on your creativity and off the dumpster fire? I\’d love to know.

  • Self-Care September – Everyday Bodycare

    \"\"Sundays are a good day for pampering, and if you\’re in the States and have the luxury of tomorrow off for American Labor Day, all the better!

    Here\’s what you\’ll need:

    • Cornmeal
    • Honey
    • A warm shower
    • A half hour to an hour

     

    Optional:

    • Music (something calm or spa-like would be perfect)
    • Candles
    • Essential oils or a room spray that you like
    • A warm, fluffy robe
    • Slippers or warm socks

     

    Start your shower and let the warm steam fill the bathroom. Start your music and candles, and spritz your room spray. If you have essential oils, you can drop 5 or 10 drops in the back of the shower to create an aromatherapy shower for yourself.

    Set the cornmeal on the edge of the tub or somewhere outside the shower where you can get at it. Also get the honey and set it close by.

    Instructions:

    • Put about a teaspoon\’s worth of cornmeal in your hand and add enough honey to make a paste.
    • Start at your feet and rub in a circular motion. Pay particular attention to your heels.
    • Then, moving up the calves, continuing in a circular motion, massage the skin.
    • When you\’re done with your thighs, rinse your skin.
    • Then starting with your hands, move up your arms toward your shoulders. Pay attention to your elbows.
    • Rub circular motions along your stomach – in a counter-clockwise direction around to the left.
    • Get what you can reach of your back – or, have a friend help. 🙂
    • If you have long hair like I do, the thick goop will make a mess in your hair so you may want to put your hair up for this or just keep it out of the way as you\’re working.
    • When you\’re done, wash your body and make sure you get all the cornmeal off.
    • When you get out, use a light moisturizer and then wrap up in a warm robe with slippers and rest.

     

    If you try it, I\’d love to know how it goes for you! Please share with me in the comments.

     

  • Self-Care September – Saturday Socials: Craft in the Time of Coronavirus

    \"\"September Dates:

    • Saturday, 09/12/2020
    • Saturday, 09/19/2020
    • Saturday, 09/26/2020

    If you are interested in attending, drop me an email and I\’ll get you the log-in info. Email noony AT acatherinenoon DOT com.

  • Self-Care September – Foody Friday! (Yes, I Know, It’s Sunday…) – Menu Plans!

    Sorry for falling out of flow with my schedule, but Friday turned out much busier than planned. I\’m back to share some ideas about menu planning with you.

    It\’s very easy to get into a rut with our weekly shopping and making meals. Instead of letting that determine our reality, it\’s helpful to get intentional about our daily round. What we eat daily is what becomes our body. We know that, but putting it into practice can be challenging.

    What works for me is to use my favorite cookbooks and pick meals from them that I\’m familiar with. I use those as a generic palette to choose my weekly meals around, and then plug in other things like vegetables and pre-biotic foods.

    If you need a good starting point, I hope you find this useful: Menu Plan. It\’s a word document that uses tables, and I print it out weekly and put it up on the fridge.

    Here\’s how I make it work for me, though: I don\’t just plan the week, I make notes about what worked and what didn\’t. This is how, for example, I figure out when particular meals take too long to prep on nights when I have other commitments. For those nights, we\’ll put in, say, tuna salad instead of roast pork.

    We also plan large meals once a week for Sundays, typically, depending on our hiking schedule. That lets us drag out all the old favorites: roast chicken, pork loin, mashed potatoes, and all sorts of goodies. Don\’t forget desert – with a little planning ahead, pies and fruit crumbles aren\’t difficult to make.

    What\’s your secret for your daily round? What works for you?

  • Self Care September – Theme Reveal

    \"Calligraphy

    I don\’t have to tell you that this year has been challenging. Between the pandemic, learning new terms for windstorms like \”derecho\” (which is a land hurricane, if you hadn\’t heard it before, and occurred in Iowa and left devastation in its wake), the fires in California, not one but two hurricanes in the Gulf, shootings and protests and rioting, it\’s a wonder that any of us can sleep at night.

    Which brings me to my theme for this month: Focus on what I can control.

    I can\’t fix the weather, and I\’m not a doctor so my job as regards COVID is to stay healthy and stay out of the emergency medical system to the extent that I can – which means, wear a mask, social distance, and avoid travel. I haven\’t really left the house since March other than to walk, go to the community garden, and essential shopping – and I\’m stir crazy!

    Which got me thinking: I can\’t be the only creative, highly sensitive person out here with these challenges! I suspect there are a lot more of us than any of us realize, partly because when we\’re overwhelmed we don\’t communicate as loudly about our personal reality as we might during times when things aren\’t falling down around our ears.

    And thus, the image at the top of this post. Did you know, there\’s such a thing as \”faux calligraphy?\” Here\’s how it works:

    • Write out a phrase or statement, leaving extra space between the letters than you normally would.
    • On the descenders of the letters, draw a second line next to the line of the letter and then color it in – I used the same color for my letters but you could get really fancy and color in the spaces with different colors, even using a colored pencil!
    • When you cross the \”t\’s,\” be extra intentional and make a wavy line. You could even add flourishes if you felt called to.
    • Voila. Calligraphy. Who knew it could be that easy?
    • If you try it, please link me to your Instagram or other place you share your images; I\’d love to see!

     

    And in the meantime, tell me in the comments – what does \”self care\” look like for you? And I\’m not talking here about mani-pedis, necessarily. I\’m talking about really caring for yourself. What does that look like?

    And be sure to come back throughout the month while I share some ideas, challenges, and suggestions so that we can make September a great month together. And on September 3rd, I\’ll be back over at Delilah Devlin\’s blog for a guest post – watch for the link to come visit with me!

  • Letters

    \"\"

    I\’ve been an inveterate letter correspondent since I was a little girl. I loved getting mail in the mailbox, because it was news from the outside. I was raised in what might be now termed a cult, in an environment of severe child abuse. But the letters existed outside of all that, in a clean, happy world where people wrote of the lives they led and everything was interesting.

    I remember once that I did a stack of letters for the post office. My mother had agreed to drop them off on her way to work.

    A couple days later, I got a call from one of the recipients, a lady that was a friend of my mother\’s. I\’d sent her a birthday card, but I\’d expected my mother to hand deliver it so I\’d just scrawled her name in big letters across the front. My mom, on \”autopilot,\” dropped it in the outgoing mailbox.

    It got to its intended recipient.

    This isn\’t because it was such a long time ago. (Please, I\’m not THAT old.) It had more to do with the size of the town where we lived. There were only about 5,000 people in the greater area, and everyone knew everyone else. I guess that the letter carrier knew the recipient and figured, what the heck, I\’ll deliver it. The only admonishment was, next time, use a stamp.

    We put the correct change for the stamp in an envelope and left it for the letter carrier on our route.

    And who says the post office doesn\’t bring people together?

    What about you, Dear Reader? Do you like to send or receive mail? I love to; leave me a note in the comments and I\’ll be happy to add you to my card list. Who knows – maybe I\’ll even remember to address your envelope! 🙂

  • Knitting Notes For Saturday

    \"\"

    I realized that I hadn\’t been posting about the projects I\’m working on, so I took some pictures last evening to get caught up. A few years ago, I started a course on Craftsy called \”Wee Ones,\” by Susan B. Anderson; making little stuffed elephant toys, and then set it aside. I picked it up a few weeks ago and finished this little guy.

    Nadya was sitting next to me and wanted to see too.

    \"\"

    Maybe not THAT close…

    \"\"

    She decided to sniff it a couple times.

    The eyes are made with some antique buttons from my grandmother\’s button collection.

    \"\"

    Here\’s a close-up. It\’s a cute little design.

    \"\"

    And in other news, I decided to try making a koi fish. Susan B. Anderson has a little fish pattern and I used this to adapt the pattern and make it bigger.

    \"\"

    This will be the face. I stuffed it too much at first and then realized I\’m not making a sock, I\’m making a fish, and it needs to be flatter.

    \"\"

    This end will be the tail. It\’s made in similar fashion to socks.

    \"\"

    The tail is made on two needles, but still knitting in the round. I\’ll post pics when it\’s done.

    I\’m thinking I\’m going to try another one with a lace pattern to simulate scale. And also one with overlaid fins. We\’ll see; still playing around with it.

  • Friday Night Musings

    \"\"

    I was chatting with a friend online this evening and shared a picture of my pin loom weaving box and realized I hadn\’t shared it on here. I haven\’t shared much on here recently at all, really.

    As we collectively learn to navigate our catastrophically changed reality with COVID, it\’s important I think to realize the collective stress we are under. It\’s attractive to fantasize about all the \”things\” we\’ll get done in this new in-between-time, but the reality is that stress seeps into everything like poison into a creek. Particularly for us here in the States, that new reality is horrific: as of this writing, over 150,000 dead and 5 million infected.

    I find it hard to focus. I am, though, keeping up with crafts. Oddly, I haven\’t been pin loom weaving this month but knitting – I\’ll post some pics of that at another time. What I wanted to share for now is a glimpse into my pin loom weaving because it\’s something I can do when my body is too stressed, my hands too sore from stress, and my brain unable to count for lace repeats.

    \"\"

    As I shared the pics with my friend today, I remembered that I\’d started weaving for a purse to replace one that my mother crocheted. It\’s a project bag and it got so ratty and falling apart but I didn\’t want to get rid of it. It wasn\’t out of a pleasant sentimentality, since my mother was a horrible child abuser, but I still held onto it out of emotional attachment. I finally decided that\’s goofy, I don\’t want to drag around such negativity with me – particularly with my art.

    And thus the idea for a knitting bag was born. The weavies are done, and next up is to sew the pieces together.

    On the rigid heddle weaving front, we\’re getting ready to start our weavealong in the Yarnworker School of Rigid Heddle Weaving. (If you\’re a weaver, why not join us? More info here.) I\’m so excited because I\’m experimenting with some endangered wool called Churro. I\’ll post pics of that at another time. But I was noodling about my weaving tonight and recalled reading about Morse code weaving in the Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom by Syne Mitchell. I decided to look it up again and there\’s a Morse code translator! Check it out, here.

    I thought it might be fun to try weaving a poem, and I even have one picked out to play with. I\’ll keep noodling it and if it comes about, I\’ll share pictures with you.

    What are you up to these days, Dear Reader?

  • Playing With My Pin Loom

    \"\"

    Today I took some time for Sunday crafting while I was watching and participating in the BotanicWise Allies for Plants and People Symposium. This year, the Pin Loom Weaving Support Group held a Weavealong hosted by TexasGabbi of Turtle Looms. The weavelong ran for six weeks and, though I did not finish on time due to the stress of the global pandemic, I\’m still plugging away at it. I made all the weavies called for in the weavealong, but I used to be intimidated by sewing the weavies together – part of the weavealong instructions.

    I\’m happy to say that I no longer am intimidated by this process! I\’ve successfully sewn Week 1, Week 2a, and Week 2b weavies together. And today, I worked on the extra project for Week 2, embroidering a weavie.

    This caused me some consternation, because my very first textile art was embroidery. I could not settle on a design I liked. I dithered and hemmed and hawed, and overthought, and finally, today, decided I\’d had it: JUST DO IT, as Nike says. Right? Right.

    Only problem was, when I started to embroider on a finished weavie, I couldn\’t get it under tension. It was flopping all over the place because the weavies are such loose-weave fabric, and I don\’t have a small enough embroidery hoop. A friend suggested putting the weavie back on the Zoom Loom, and thereby under tension. I tried that, but fabric off a loom settles and it\’s next to impossible to get it back to its former state.

    Then it hit me: why not make a new weavie?

    Voila.

    This time, I switched back to my main color, a lovely charcoal grey marino wool blend. Then I used my CC3 color (contrast color #3), which is a light grey variegated color, also a marino blend. I used a detail of a pattern from Alice Starmore\’s book, Celtic Needlepoint (if you haven\’t checked out her work before, you owe it to yourself to visit her site that she shares with her talented daughter Jade Starmore, Virtual Yarns). I added the year and then took it off the loom. I\’m really pleased with the final look of it. When it came off the loom, the threads relaxed and came together, so the needlepoint really pops.

    \"\"

    Next time, I\’ll share some of my herbal adventures. I have some lemon mint infusion steeping on my counter overnight and tomorrow, I plan to make a mint syrup.

    What about you, Dear Reader? What are you making?

  • Slow Craft

    \"Image

    Fast. 5G. Upload speeds. Download speeds. Streaming. Faster cell service. 24/7 news cycle. Always-on. Technostress is stress induced by computer use. \”Its symptoms include aggravation, hostility toward humans, impatience, and fatigue. According to experts, humans working continuously with computers come to expect other humans and human institutions to behave like computers, providing instant responses, attentiveness, and an absence of emotion.\” (1)

    I don\’t know about you, but I find that all exhausting. I use technology and have done since I was a teenager. But I find myself called to slow down in my craft pursuits. Take weaving, for instance. I enjoy pin loom weaving, which is what the picture above features. Popular in the 1920\’s through the 1940\’s, pin looms can be used to make clothing, housewares, toys, and other useful items. The standard size is a four inch square, though makers have created pin looms in a variety of sizes to satisfy inquisitive weavers.

    What is it about slow craft that\’s calling to us? There are now craft revolutions all over the U.S. and around the world, such as Seattle\’s Urban Craft Uprising. Makerspaces are independent and now even part of public libraries. People are merging craft with technology, bringing new ways to old.

    And for many of us, slow craft is the antidote to fast culture. We sit and chat, or watch streaming shows or listen to audiobooks. We meditate using fiber or wood. We dream on the canvas or with words on the page. We journal and take pictures with our smartphones. There are even classes on how to be a better photographer using your cell phone. All of which is designed to help us to slow down, stop running, and be in the moment.

    The act of creation is a radical act. It\’s saying to the world, this didn\’t exist before but I\’ve made it so. It is rule-breaking, not rule-following. It\’s not necessarily rebellious, it\’s simply outside the known. Sometimes it comments on the known and sometimes it finds the known irrelevant.

    During pandemic, I\’ve found myself returning to my pin loom. It calms me in ways that even my knitting can\’t – it turns out I can\’t count during times of high stress. I don\’t have to count to weave a pin loom square. My pin loom group is on Facebook (fast technology meets slow craft) and hosted a Mystery Weavealong that went for seven weeks. It was such a relief to get off work, wander over to my nest on the lounger, and weave squares. Not because I had to, or because I had something in mind – the mystery part of the weavealong meant that I literally didn\’t know what I was weaving until the very end – but because the act of making squares settled my mind and let me feel productive but not pushed to finish any particular project. Just make a square. Which color? The instructions told me. And through that practice, my mind calmed.

     

    Resources

    (1) Laudon, Kenneth C and Jane P Laudon: Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, c2007, Chapter 4, pg 156.

  • Craft in the Time of Coronavirus – This Saturday April 25th at Noon PDT

    \"\"

    Are you tired of being stuck at home? Want to hang out with other makers and focus on creating?

    Join us! Leave me a comment below and I\’ll get you the zoom link (I\’m not listing it publicly for security purposes).

  • Anxiety

    \"Growing

    Anxiety sucks. It tells lies. It feels true. And it is constant.

    Why is it there?

    That’s a complicated answer. I am not a psychologist, so I can only tell you what I understand about my own anxiety. I am a survivor of child abuse. My mother was mentally ill and my father is a malignant narcissist and psychopath. These aren’t descriptors, in that I am not saying them to be insulting. They are factual statements based on evidence of behavior. While I am not qualified to diagnose either of them, I am able to evaluate their behavior over years of evidence and those two statements fit the evidence.

    Because of their prolonged brainwashing, I now struggle with regular, daily existence. I have a hyper-developed sense of danger, sometimes referred to as “hypervigilance,” which is one of the symptoms connected with Post Traumatic Stress. Anxiety is one of the symptoms as well.

    The thing about anxiety is that it uses all your brain’s faculties to create scenarios that feel incredibly real, yet aren’t. It can take someone’s failure to smile in line at a Starbucks or in the office break room and build an elaborate scenario about how they hate you, want to get you fired, and are dangerous.

    Take the coronavirus situation. I live in Bellevue, Washington State, the epicenter in the United States for the current outbreak. The hospital where the first recorded deaths have occurred (and are still occurring) is five miles from my house. Closer to my office.

    So of course, my anxiety brain thinks I have the virus, even though I have no symptoms and to my knowledge, have met no one who has been exposed.

    This, then, is a conversation with my anxiety brain:

    I HAVE CORONAVIRUS.

    No, you don’t. You haven’t met anyone with it.

    BUT I COULD HAVE.

    Yes. That’s true.

    SEE? I HAVE IT!

    No dear.

    THERE! I SNEEZED! SEE? I HAVE CORONAVIRUS!

    It was dust.

    YOU CAN GET CORONAVIRUS FROM DUST!

    No, you can’t. Dust is dust. Or cat hair. Besides. If you get it, you’ll be fine. You just saw the doctor yesterday.

    BUT SHE COULD BE WRONG.

    Shoo. Go write something.

    WHEN I DIE OF CORONAVIRUS, YOU’LL BE SORRY!

    Yes, that’s true. But in the meantime, write some words.

    NO!

    You could write about coronavirus. Write a romance in a post-apocalyptic world where there’s a continual quarantine.

    …

    Hello?

    I’M NOT TALKING TO YOU. I’M SICK.

    Okay, you go be sick. I’LL go write something.

    CAN YOU WRITE WHILE YOU’RE SICK?

    Yes. It’s a superpower.

     

    If you struggle with anxiety or other issues, I urge you to seek help. Psychology Today has a great therapist finder on their website, here.