Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Breaking News: Tapestry artist thwarts hoarding nature to discover priceless drawing

Okay, so the drawing wasn't really priceless, just fervently searched for.

Let me back up a little bit.

I am currently working on a commission and the client really loves a couple of my Emergence series pieces and wants some elements from them in her piece. As you can imagine, designing the new piece with those elements is far easier if you have the original drawings.

That was where I thought my "save everything" nature would help me out. The problem? When you save everything, there is so much stuff that it is hard to find what is really important.

I knew where the dye formulas were. I had them in hand in about a minute. Score!

Next I went downstairs to look for the full-sized cartoons. I knew that I hadn't thrown them out, though I was sorely tempted, when I packed up my Santa Fe studio. I also knew they were in a couple long skinny boxes. Found and found. Two minutes for both the paper line drawing and the acetate upside down weaving copy.
But what I really needed was the smaller original drawings. The ones I could copy and modify for the new work. The new piece is about twenty percent larger than the piece I am sourcing the large forms from, so I needed the originals so that I could reposition pieces of the puzzle and then let FedEx Office do the work of the full-size cartoon.

Searched my one flat-file shelf downstairs. Found some cool stuff I had forgotten about, but no Emergence drawings. I put on some shoes and crawled under the stairs where we have some boxes full of things we'll "never need"... after climbing under tubs of stored yarn and sifting through the empty boxes (stored for the next inevitable move), I realized the drawings weren't going to surface.

At that point I gave up. I sat down to re-create the new cartoon from scratch.

But wait! The term "flat file" jogged something in the back of my brain. I remembered an old plastic file box that was shoved in the back of my closet that had received some papers in the Santa Fe move. After moving a good quantity of spinning fiber, I opened the box and right in the middle was a lovely file labeled "Emergence series". Bingo. The drawing I needed was at the back of that file.
Maybe that hoarding nature isn't so bad. What I really need is organization... and a flat file?
I'm off to draw a cartoon. Dyeing by the end of the week if the client likes it!

10 comments:

  1. I love seeing your photos of how you create ... it's always so inspiring to see others work! What a treasure your planning notebooks and creative messes must be! How I wish we lived closer so I could come and just visit your studio!

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    1. What a kind way to say it! My "creative messes" sometimes get the better of me. I need a huge purge... but this was one example of how I don't know what to get rid of! Having those cartoons was really useful yesterday... I almost threw them out. At the same time, they take up a couple big boxes and probably I could just keep the small versions. Grin. Glad my messes are helpful though. I'll undoubtedly continue to have many of them for the rest of my life. I just bought a couple cork boards to organize a new project. We'll see if that helps keep things in order.

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    2. You are SOOooo much like me. But I never find what I need until later. Always find neat stuff I thought was lost, though.

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    3. Ha Ha!!! Jeanne Bee, you are so right. I DO always find neat stuff I thought had disappeared forever. :-) I'll try to remember that bright spot to my messes.

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  2. Yes, I love hearing and seeing your creative process....sounds like how I did/do things with the aid of the copy store process for sizing....thought I was cheating, I guess not! ;-)

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    1. Oh heck no! It isn't cheating at all. I'd never be able to size things correctly if it wasn't for my copy machine, scanner, and FedEx Office. :-)
      I have also heard of many tapestry weavers using a projector to get the correct size on a wall and then they trace it. Infinite variability in resizing.

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  3. Your works is amazing. I am still preparing for the day I can design something myself.

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    1. Thanks Liana! Keep your eyes open. The designs will come!

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  4. Sometimes even the KonMarie method isn't helpful, where you hold an item and feel or not feel the love to determine whether or not to keep something!

    My design method is comical, but I don't follow my "cartoons" 100%, though the last time I was pleased to see that I was able to follow a shape pretty closely with the design underneath the warp. It's mostly a marker drawing, and I often cut & paste things onto it & don't have a mylar version!

    There are some things we want to keep, but where to put them is the big question. Yesterday, I thought we might need more duct tape to put a piece of plastic on the car because of last Monday's hail storm & impending rain. I knew I had some pretty duct tape, but WHERRRRRE???? lol. Luckily we had enough of the grey stuff. I know the pretty stuff will turn up eventually: when I'm NOT looking for it! :)

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    1. Sounds familiar! Always turns up when I'm looking for something else... then I put it somewhere where I'll remember and I don't.

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