Carol Larson - textile artist

This morning I finally got back to the cloth that has been batching all week. I set two plastic bags in a bucket with a lid on it, out under the apricot tree on Monday and our blessed fall temps went to work on it. I had a busy week tweaking a PowerPoint for a class I am teaching tomorrow at the art center; and running down to my former hometown for lunch with a bunch of gals I knew in high school. That is a subject for a whole ‘nother post!

Just as soon as I promise myself to give up this toxic sport of hand-dyeing, I do another batch and am captivated by the results. It’s another never say never thing I fear. Of course this is just the first step. By the time I am finished with the layers of paint and discharge they will never be recognizable.

One thing I have taken to doing is picking up interesting linens in thrift shops. It is the ultimate recycling to ignore the bolt of yardage on the shelf and use these old treasures. These two tea towels were yellow with a few blood stains and lovingly hand-embroidered in black thread. I saw potential and dye-painted them in black. After more embellishment, I envision a piece incorporating both and calling it “double d.”

Last weekend when I was in the gold country my sister generously gifted me some of the family linens from the hall closet. She said she would never be using the hand-woven linen table runner nor Mom’s 24 neatly pressed damask linen napkins. So into the mix a few of these pieces went this week…

Most impressive was Aunt Lucy’s hand-woven table runner. Aunt Lucy was my grandfather’s sister and a complete battle-ax. She was additionally an exquisite handweaver for most of her life. When I took up weaving some 40 years after she started I saw her partially as a mentor although I could not understand why anyone would hand-weave such exquisite linens, when they could go to Macy’s and buy it. She certainly was not saving any money. The same could be said of quilters today, but as a weaver and as a quilter I never strived for production line quality in my work.

So it brought Aunt Lucy a lot of pleasure and all of us were gifted hand-woven 200 threads per inch baby blankets, shawls, and table runners. So when Debbie offered me what appeared to be a beautiful Aunt Lucy hand-woven 200 thread per inch linen table runner, which also appeared to never have been used, I hesitated. I don’t know….hmmm. I don’t know if I can throw Aunt Lucy and her hand-woven 200 thread per inch table runner into the dye bath. And the next thing I knew it was in the car and then found itself in the bucket! In chartreuse green, no less.

Now that I have committed major sacrilege by throwing the labors of the late Aunt Lucy’s hobby into the depths of slime green, what’s next? I may start stacking the dishes at the table with a tip of the hat to my grandmother’s girl-hood friend, Doris. She was all over us about how rude it was to stack dishes at the table. If that is not one of the most useless rules in life, I am not sure what is. Maybe that is how she got her exercise making 9 trips to the kitchen, one plate at a time? What a legacy…

Today being the first day of autumn also means summer water rationing is nearly history. I seized the moment and went downstairs to add more paint to a dress I painted years ago. When I first started painting clothing about 20 years ago, I had stamped it with foam stamps from JoAnn’s and it now looks very elementary and sparse. Why I had kept it so long is a mystery to me, but this morning when I was looking for something cool to wear to an appointment, I grabbed it. This afternoon, I applied the first of many more layers of paint.

Then I used up more jars of Dyna-Flow on various cotton and linen remnants I picked up this weekend in the Gold Country. Two pieces were yellow linen tea towels embroidered with the letter D. I poured black paint over and already I love it! I also batched two bags of procion dyebaths, covered the bucket with a lid and set outside under the apricot tree. I hope I don’t forget it is there like the rusting fabric that was outside all last winter!

My ulterior motive for getting to dye and paint, as if I need one was a very busy, stressful, high energy weekend. On the 3 hr drive home, I contemplated what I could do to essentially vacuum out my brain. Of course last night, all my usual mantras and meditation mojos did not work and I was sleepless albeit exhausted. So today I added a level cup of textile passion to see what that might do. I think it worked.

The image above is more Tall Girl art cloth.

When I was a kid, like many of my generation I was admonished to be seen and not heard. The entire concept had been passed down through scores of generations probably from the Victorian era…from which so many of our outdated rules of civility came. So I plodded along in my life not calling any undue attention to myself, other than the obvious…being the tallgirl. And God forbid I should ever have an opinion on anything!

So imagine my surprise when I trekked off to my first SAQA regional meeting and heard women stand up while displaying their artwork and declaring where they were showing their work, publications their work was in, honors, awards, achievements, accomplishments etc. At first I thought it was entirely boorish, and in short order got it that this was the one place where we all could really boast about our achievements! And slowly but surely I learned how to do that myself, including most recently when I made a list so I would not forget all of my achievements.

As I began to market myself as a professional artist, most of my e-mails to family were met either with silence or with that’s nice dear, now go away! Of course I took it personally totally missing the fact that I had broken the golden rule by boasting about myself. Gasp!

That is, until recently. I had occasion to Google a family member’s name and gasp! there it was for all the world to read the many accomplishments of said person. I was flabbergasted that this person who never has uttered a peep about what she does in her life beyond motherhood, is actually a very accomplished human being in her own right. So on I went, googling hither and yon, learning of accolades, awards, achievements, etc. Suddenly I was struck by this fine line of civility. It is okay if others can ferret out what you do, but for goodness sakes, don’t boast about it yourself.

Why is it acceptable that those in certain professions (car sales, realtors, brokers, doctors, lawyers, hookers) to market themselves while it is frowned upon for those of us in other professions, such as artists? If I applied the do not boast mantra to my art career I would not have achieved what I have thus far.

So all I can say about that is you haven’t heard the last of me!!

It is said we spend our entire adult life re-programming ourselves from our childhood. If you are a kid reading this, which I doubt, rest assured, soon you can rearrange all those dumb rules.

My father grew up on a dairy farm in Iowa and seemed to love morning. So much so that my sisters and I found our resistance to it met with a loud blast from the stereo two rooms away. He began this ritual of torture with the theme from Mondo Cane, and then graduated into the fight songs from various colleges and universities, including my personal (non) favorite…I’m a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech.

After two decades of living in my parents’ home, I just assumed I too was a morning person. When I began to work, I lived for the weekend, not to party but to sleep! Since I retired a decade ago, I have slowly come into my own body rhythm which often finds me in the studio at 11 pm, wide awake going hog wild. If I go to bed too early I can’t sleep as my creativity is on overdrive.

It’s not that I have anything against morning. It really is a spectacular time of the day. I have learned this from the various times I HAD to get up early to catch a flight. And this summer I have disciplined myself by setting an alarm to get up and walk before it gets too hot. Alas, winter is coming…yeah!

This morning I woke at 8:30, which is a decent time for me. I decided to swim at noon so that left my morning free to do what I wanted. Normally, I would read the paper, have some tea, maybe watch a little TV, do email, generally fart around. This morning however, I decided to go into the studio and do some fusing before it got too hot.

And glory be, it was fabulous!!! If you have read this blog for any time at all, you know how I continue every day of my life to fight my tendency towards over-work. I sense that WASP work ethic was not just programmed into my cranium, but actually patterned into my DNA. I suspect this as so many others in my extended family are all workaholics. They can’t all blame my Dad!

The very best part of working in the studio first thing seems to be how I left to face the day with a feeling of complete contentment. If I wait until I get all my other chores and tasks done, contentment never happens. I seldom go in there, before 4 pm.

I would have made a great psychologist as I am so fascinated by the human brain and how it functions. It certainly does not take an advanced degree though to understand if it feels good, do it! So my new goal is to work more on being in the studio first thing… after exercise. And this is not new information, either. Twenty years ago a mentor said she goes into her studio first thing, in her jammies, with her coffee and music. She said she doesn’t need to use her morning brain cells for running errands and grocery shopping.

There is also a bit of irony in this tale. My Dad who now is 85 with dementia has night-time caregivers who found it nearly impossible to wake him in the morning. Finally my sister suggested the fight songs from various colleges and universities, including my personal (non) favorite…a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech. He loves it and now bounces out of bed with a spring in his step!

The other day I went down to the basement to shoot new work. Our basement serves many purposes from my dedicated dye-paint area & professional photo set-up to storage of gardening supplies, yard equipment, skis, boots, luggage, Costco water & toilet paper, canned tuna and gallon jugs of water for the Big One, a thermofax, my grandfather’s desk & chair from his medical practice, maps from the days before the internet and GPS, boxes of various sizes and shapes for mailing/shipping anything anywhere, onions hanging to dry, bags of potatoes from the garden, an old dirty toilet which could easily outfit any gas station, a ping-pong table used once in the 38 years and a partridge in a pear tree. I kid you not, except for the last one! There is one big room and three side rooms, one of which contains hubby workshop, which is a story in itself.

Last year when I was designing cloth for an exhibit I was not juried into, I asked hubby to open the ping-pong table and cover it with a blue waterproof tarp so I could dye paint whole cloth on it. My print table is fabulous although the surface is a rough 30″ x 50″. So with the ping pong table opened up, dye-painting was nearly a breeze except for the fact that the table is about 20″ high! So I dye-painted these two pieces of fabric and the table has remained in the middle of the room ever since. I keep threatening to try soy wax and want to leave the table up for that reason, but come on…how long will that be?

My reality check (note subject of this windy post) was going down to the basement on a hot September day to shoot my work. As I descended into paradise, where the temp was easily 20 degrees cooler, I had a flashback to last winter. That was when I blogged complaining it was too cold in the basement to go design cloth. Well, hello? It is now heaven on earth! What am I thinking sitting upstairs chained to my PC day and night when I could be downstairs playing with my dyes and paints?

The piece in this post is another of the Dyna-flow dye-painted with screen-printing on top. I love this dyeing with Dyna-flow paints and it is a good thing I work in the basement, as the floor is now quite colorful as well! That part of it I can still see, that is…