Wednesday, August 27, 2008

alphabet soup


Hello again! Finally I finished it! I've been brewing up a quilt for months and finally it is done, packaged and posted. Not only that, but I managed to actually take some photos of it before sending it off - amazing! So here it is, Ryco Drawbridge's Welcome to the World Alphabet Quilt ... mostly hand stitched (until I managed to get my hot little hands on a beautiful Bernina 830 and then the pace really picked up). See if you can figure out each creature/creation representation of the alphabet! Some are obscured by Vincent's head so you might have to guess what I stitched for WXYZ.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

brown spot pot


As you may be starting to gather from my pottery explorations, I'm not a very exact kind of potter! David came home with a few of his new pottery creations last night and I was amazed by how perfect they were - the attention to detail was incredible. I tend to just throw things together. In the time it takes David to make one thing, I may have made three or four things. This pot was made about two years ago in Wellington. I spent ages applying the glaze, thinking that every colour spot I made would stay where it was when I fired it ... but they didn't! And I ended up with this blurry, faded, version of what I had imagined. But I still liked it, and David liked it even more, so I gave it to him. When I was building this pot I was thinking of this enormous hand-built pot I saw in a pottery book (damn, I just went and had a look for the picture, but it's hiding). It was huge! It was maybe 5 feet tall and all hand coiled. My pot is tiny, and was never going to be tall, but the thought of that other pot is somewhere imbued in it's essence.

These days the brown spot pot sits in the kitchen filled with: two sets of keys, several coloured pencils (blue, red, orange, and green), a one dollar coin, a green ribbon, two plastic pegs (one yellow, one white), a plastic container of sewing pins, a silver bracelet, several nails, a needle, an Allen key, and an I love Hackney badge.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

the many faces of david


When I first met David (great love, father of my child, man of many faces) I painted this picture of him. Later, I found this collection of passport photos and added them - the evolution of my love! When I painted the picture, that was how he looked, but he has changed since. He went through a big phase of experimenting with his facial hair. It lasted weeks. First he shaved off part of his beard so that he had a goatee. That wasn't too bad. Then he shaved off the hair on his chin so he had one of those incredible handle-bar moustaches (which was pretty awful - but attractive in a very quirky kind of way). It was during this period that we held a performance party where he dressed up as a German farm boy; and earlier on in the evening as a geisha - a geisha with a handle-bar moustache. Beautiful!

But then he shaved off the bits that descended down past his lips towards his chin and he was left with a Hitler moustache. Even despite the associations (impossible actually to dispense with), it was Hideous with a capital aitch. I refused to kiss him that week. The awful tickly pricklish patch on his lip seemed to have a life of it's own. But as you can see, David has always been preoccupied with his hair-do.