Building the stand and finishing the roof!

watch out world! I broke out the drill and table saw for this section of my house.... and still have all 10 fingers!

 table legs to be on the messy work area

prepping table top for leg holders

holes drilled for leg brackets

leg brackets and interior hole

first coat paint

paint on legs

second coat

the roof panel 

oh yesss.

process of pattern

filling it in with grey tones

So here is a look at what i have been doing for the last few weeks... The roof is killing me. i spend between 7 and 10 hours a day on it and it has taken me 9 days of working like this to get one half of it done.... i am now almost done with the second half and can not wait to be finished with this roof buisness. it has actually taken me longer to roof this house than it took my father and Jeff to roof our real house!!! That took two weekends at about 8 hours a day.
 this is NOT including the yarn dying/ drying which takes another day and a half. Oh the joy!

My intern giving the dyed yarn a head start drying. This is the most action my hairdryer sees in a year.

dyed yarn drying outside

the roof shingles take FOREVER to do

oval window embroidered 

my real door!

cutie pie in house

interior of houes

Finally  a good use for all those art books...

wool to be dyed.

hand tied yarn bundles ready for the dye vat!

the top of the cornerboard and the Capital molding 

the window

the bottom of my corner board where the side and the back of the house join

a detail of the siding again 7 squares/ inch. all of my yarn is made from local wool and the grey and cream is purchased hand dyed. the red shutters and roof (coming on up) are dyed by yours truly. 

house out flat 55 inches long and 22 inches tall at peak

my cutie pie with it (he thinks its going to be a bird house

the amazing interior with all the loose ends that will be tied to the knot ball!

here is the top floor of the front of the house. each side is made up of multiple panels that i join together 

the shutters are made out of yarn i dye and have french knots for a border and then two layers in the middle to cover up the mesh and give depth. the canvas has 7 squares to 1 inch to give a sense of scale.

this is my front door. the molding is made in a double herrinigbone pattern and my door is woodgrain with multiple brown yarns layered. eventually you will see the leaded glass oval window in the door and the finished door detailing. 

Here are some photos of my house not quite finished yet but almost there.... the front of the house (where the door is) is not yet on, here are some in process pics of it i took a few days ago.

a little yarn tangle

My blogging once again fell by the wayside.
  A lot has happened over the last few months (!). I am now an unbelievably happy single mom working frantically to get my project done.
   I was inspired by this passage line in the Tao about essentially how the emptiness inside is what makes things useful, a pot, house, etc. it seemed so perfectly suited for my life at that point. My  (ex) husband and i built our house with our own two hands over two long years and in 7 months after moving in our dream home had become a completely unlivable space because of his addictions, this tangle of my desire for control and his lack of control over any part of his life that also made me confront my lack of control and desires for an appearance of perfection while the interior of my life was a mess.
      After originally deciding to create an 8 foot tall 8 foot long 6 foot wide needlepointed house i came out of my insanity and realized that (in a most un-american fashion) i needed to downsize by a few billion percent! So now my house is a nice 14 x 21 inches and measures almost 1 inch to the foot to my real house of which this is a model. Inside this obsessively perfect hand made needlepointed house is a massive yarn ball tangle pulling at the yarn used to make the walls from the inside and dragging the whole thing down with its weighty disastrous mess. this little house sits on a 42" tall pedestal with a hole for a foundation and the  yarn tangle dribbling beneath it like entrails. yummy...
     In a brilliant stroke of luck my therapist, to whom i mentioned this project to, confessed to being a weaver and a yarn hoarder and gave me a trunk full of the nicest wool yarn ever in the most perfect colors of my real house (grey if you were curious), the other yarn she bequeathed me i had oodles of fun dying to match the trim, roof, and shutters.
    Now my fingers are ready to fall off because i have been non stop needlepointing for the last month and realized it take me over 18 hours to just needlepoint each panel (and my  house has 12, not counting landscaping) and this time does not take into account the cutting and measuring and planning and dying of each one.... who would have guessed that little old ladies took so long to make those tacky tissue box holders!? what a waste!
    So i have decided to take the train in to boston and either lug this or ship it or perhaps a bit of both with the pedestal table and am having a terribly hard time finding bar height table legs under $100 a pop. any suggestions are welcomed for that problem!!!
I have a meeting with Wendy (my mentor) next week after i see the biennial on Wednesday and will write back in then!

And now for a brief interruption of our regular broadcast:

note: plaster cast of dino foot print on floor

pteradactyl chandelier  

pin the tooth on the t-rex anyone? a 7 foot non archival tempera paint masterpiece

i was afraid the smoke alarm would go off...

Some random not art related things i found myself doing last week for my sons 4th bday party. excuse the distraction from the art blog, just ignore this if you so choose. My latest installation: transforming the house into a dino-land.  complete with volcano cake ( red velvet with marbled chocolate). mmmmm...

Drawing! How much further away from the expected could i go?!

So for yet another "should have experimented with this my first semester" moment i have started to DRAW! yes me, it has been such a looong time that i had to wrestle out my art bin from under a few sedimentary layers of shit in the studio closet (which is actually a pile that extends out into the studio a few feet, like a landslide). I decided to start on a roll of rice paper which i have always loved working on because of its translucency and texture (and the fact that it is a roll and cheep to boot). After rigging up a bungee cord drawing board system for it i ventured into the frigid outdoors, figures i decide to start this when the winter temps finally set in! I am making a kind of time line map. using time to be the organizing principal of the map in a linear form. so starting at one end of the rice paper i drew interesting things (using pencil and charcoal) when it felt "done" i rolled that part up and started on a new part the next time i saw something i felt needed to be memorialized. i built a little pile of rocks (ala inuksuk- not the people kind) and sketched it that so i would have a record of when and where that session was over so i could start back up there next time. { http://indianrockpiles.weetu.com/articles/RockPileTypes.html - interesting link from the uk about different rock piles and significance. } This is functioning as kind of a mapping of landmarks according to time and where i was wandering (most of which are really small but i have a tendency to draw really really big). I will see where this goes and how i will install my big ol'roll!
I also found this about rube goldberg style contraptions and i am in LOVE. must make one. http://cre.ations.net/creation/sticks-and-stones
 I have a meeting with my mentor Wendy Jacob on Thursday! Yay!

work ideas

green= chair frame, black= fabric cover

{disclaimer: i just sketched these out on a index card: not final sketch} cross hatch is a "wing" flap blanket

So i have been thinking about what i am going to do with my art this semester and have a few ideas. 1. i want to make a cover for this amazing comfy chair that is a folding lounge. here is a picture of my sketch the green lines are the chair (viewed from the side) and the black are the lines created by the edge of the material, making it a streamlined unit. I am drawn to the simple, clean lines and would use a white fabric that would stand up to the woods. i would also make "flaps" or wings (drawn with little cross lines) that would extend like a triangle from the feet to the head with the longest point part being in the middle so i could wrap myself up like a cucoon in this chair in the woods and just sit and think. after this idea and some puttering online i found the work of elizabeth holik and fell in love.... i could totally use a cucoon chair! so i am also reading a (depressing) book: dying of the trees: the pandemic in america's forests, and second nature,  and a small farm in maine, as well as some other similarly minded books whose exact titles are escaping me at the moment but i will later post.  i am trying to stay away from the reading but am obviously not succeeding much in that regard. 2. i've started going on looong walks in the woods and making a mental map of the stumps and other interesting features i have managed to overlook for the last 26 years of roaming these woods. i am going to make some sort of tangible map out of this, experimenting with different ideas, strongly influenced by my last semesters readings on space, place, lost, maps ect. (particularly "you are here")  and indigenous ways of directional intelligence such as carin's etc. 3. i have started a little thought listy thing to keep sane, has not worked for that but is interesting as is.  oh and yes i kicked my husband out for a trial separation! go me! onward with life.