Blizzard and Island

Detail of Blizzard, a work in progress

Today I finished the stitching part of my Blizzard. There's still work to be done to mount it, but that will come later, after I've finished the urgent island I'm making to a deadline. The decorative/visible stitching of Blizzard had to be sewed standing up. Each long filmy piece of net curtain took its turn pinned to the cord that usually holds a noren to screen my sleeping alcove from the rest of the studio.

In order to see what I was doing on the translucent material, I had to work in daytime, with the panel between me and the window, so my thread was silhouetted against the light. Covering each panel with the Blizzard design involved a lot of stretching and bending while I sewed. It was tiring work, which I alternated with the demanding task of needle felting the layers of my island.

Now that the Blizzard is packed away for the moment, I've picked up another task to alternate with needle felting. I'm embroidering the ocean background for my island. I want a very deep blue sea so I'm using my bluest blanket overlaid with a solid ground of dark teal blanket stitch. The colour needs to be very rich and vibrant to hold its own with the intensity of the island colours and it's the largest piece of blanket I've worked on since I finished My Antarctica.

The timing of my switch from Blizzard to ocean stitching is perfect. Today is really the first day its been cool enough to make covering my lap with a heavy wool blanket appealing. The island is part of my Extraction series, with no relationship to the Antarctica theme, yet covering my lap with blanket takes me back to the pleasures of last winter's stitching marathon.

The island and its ocean, although based on a dream with no strong climatic or geographical links to reality, nonetheless reminds me of an island I noticed a couple of hours into my last flight home from Brisbane. Somewhere in the middle of the Tasman Sea, a dot of a gorgeous green atoll sits in a vast blue deepness. It looks absolutely nothing like the island I am making, but I don't have many islands in my memory that are as small and as isolated as this one, so that's the connection.

That island was one of the two most beautiful and unexpected scenes I've ever viewed from an airplane. The other was several hours of Northern Lights, aurora borealis, as I crossed Canada from East to West on an almost empty plane for an almost endless night. One day I might have to stitch those curtains of light too.

A tiny island somewhere between Australia and New Zealand.

Ephemera

In between the very substantial pieces I'm working on, I've done a little experiment in the other direction.

This is what blanket stitch looks like without the blanket (or any other backing). It goes a long way to satisfying my desire to make lace.

I like the watery, airy, foamy, cloudy quality of this technique. I also like the stiff, sculptural texture that suggests many possibilities for stitching in three dimensions.

There is a delightful contrast between this kind of blanket stitch and the very dense, deep and soft island in which I use the same stitch to completely different effect.

Many as One

My embroidered tessarolax fossil (framed) is now part of a wonderful art for Christchurch fundraising project called Many as One, organised by Claire Benyon- another artist with a passion for Antarctica.

The idea is that anyone can donate any amount and go into a weekly draw to win one of several works of art donated by diverse artists. My favourite is the wonderful engraved perspex by Lisa Roberts, another Antarctic themed piece. But there is an amazing variety of art most of which has nothing to do with Antarctica. I encourage you to go check out the site, click to make a paypal donation in any currency, and be in with a chance to win any of the exciting art works on offer.

Coccoliths, carbon sequesterers - LISA ROBERTS (Sydney, Australia)
Engraved perspex
120 x 65MM

I highly recommend Lisa Robert's website, not least for her fantastic Antarctica animations.

(This post brought to you by free WiFi in Garden Place, as the modem at home has died, and I don't know how soon it will be replaced)

Exploring colour

Felted test of reds before stitching, sitting on blended greens before felting

I'm very comfortable working with an Antarctic colour scheme. White on cream, a bit of black with my white, shades of blue to show up the white, some more white, lots and lots of white... these are colours I can handle. It's not that I don't like other colours, as a glance at my wardrobe proves, but manipulating colour as an artist seems a lot more challenging than choosing what to wear everyday (and that can be hard enough!).

The rich earthy tones of my latest project are intimidating. I am creating an image from my poem, Miner's Cook so I knew from the beginning I wanted grass green and iron ore red. But what shades, and how to create and combine them with wool roving and embroidery floss?

Three base colours of left, blending in progress on right.

With three earthy and three grassy colours of wool roving I blended them by hand to achieve a variety of shades. The colours of the wool are then modified and textured by the not-quite matching colours of embroidery floss. This is all worked out by trial and error. My visual diary holds samples of each colour I mix with notes on the base colours that make it up.

Colour notes with stitched colour tests

Then I stitch a test piece that combines the wool shades with threads. The test pieces help me help decide which thread colours to use on which felted shades. Its a slow, thoughtful, demanding process saturated with uncertainty and doubts. After a long week of exploring colour I am finally hopeful I can start working on the actual island, which itself presents another set of new challenges on top of the ongoing demands of applying the colours, not least of which is a near deadline (something I usually try to avoid!).

Rapid Response

What a week! Even at this safe distance, the emotional turmoil of bearing witness to Christchurch's earthquake and aftermath is draining. I can't imagine the exhaustion and trauma that my friends, and other quake survivors are going through- whether they have stayed or fled the city. My heart is full of aroha for everyone, especially those who have lost family or friends or home or possessions. Every news report brings tears to the surface, and I keep casting around for something useful I can do besides give money, and let my loved ones know they are in my thoughts.



Today Bethwyn and I met up for a Frugal with the Bruegel session of collaborative altered book making, our first in many weeks. We spontaneously decided to devote our session to working together on a single book, responding to the Christchurch earthquake. Without any particular preparation or planning, we began making a book which may turn out to be our most coherent narrative yet. Drawing only on our collection of old (mostly) children's books, which includes nothing specific to Christchurch, yet the result feels to us very evocative of our emotional response witnessing the earthquake from a distance.


Making this book feels cathartic and healing: a compulsion to channel survivors' guilt, grief and helplessness into creativity. Working with focus and synchronicity we got about half way through the project this afternoon and hope to have it finished in our next session, ready to auction off as a fundraiser for a Christchurch earthquake response fund. Here's a sneak preview showing some details from the spreads we've completed so far.


New Zealand is a small country, and everyone knows somebody that knows somebody. My prayers are daily with friends and acquaintances as well as the people who's faces or stories I know only through the media coverage. There's one of my oldest friends, a nurse at Christchurch hospital who lost their Kaiapoi home after the September earthquake; and her extended family which includes several other nurses. A young librarian I've known all her life, who's had to leave behind everything in her red-stickered home within the cordon. Her parents who are sheltering her and her only possessions - cellphone and purse- in the one-room country cottage where they live and work. Old friends posting facebook updates to let us know they are alive, who are shovelling silt and trying to keep their spirits up with intermittent electricity and no running water. The USAR workers from all over the world (how grateful am I to the international community?) including the father of a Hamilton friend who kept us updated with messages balancing the desolation of recovering only dead bodies from the ruins, with wry humour about consequences of the lack of showers.


Like many NZers outside of Christchurch, I have developed a profound sense of appreciation for my flushing toilet, hot shower, endless drinking water, electric power, cosy bed, smooth streets, sweet fresh air, fully serviced city and most of all, the solid ground beneath my feet. It may be a while before everyone in Christchurch can enjoy such amenities again. Bethwyn and I hope that our book can provide some small contribution towards Christchurch's recovery.

Imperfect Iceberg

I can normally go for days, even weeks, without paying any attention to the news, but all too often lately a disaster which touches my world turns me into a news junkie. Today I am teary and shakey with fear and grief as I listen compulsively to the stories of survival and loss coming from Christchurch. I can't concentrate on anything, I keep jumping from one activity to another, all the time with my attention turned to radio and internet news.

A tragedy on this scale puts one's personal neurotic little dramas in perspective. At least today I have a day off from work to indulge my news addiction, and work has been the source of my neurotic drama recently. I've been on a full time training course every day; instead of my usual part-time evening routine which allows me plenty of time to manage my art work while staying relaxed, healthy and rested most of the time.

Full time intensive learning quickly exhausted me and I didn't have the resiliance to get through it without becoming very unhappy. I did manage to survive without getting physically ill, but only by withdrawing from almost all non-work activities including some that had been planned (and eagerly anticipated) months in advance. And that only made me feel worse. Yesterday was our final day of the training, and we spent the afternoon completely distracted by the earthquake news as it broke, increasingly more devastatingly.

The one saving grace of the past two weeks was my stitching. I managed to do a little bit of my big iceberg most evenings while watching junk tv shows so that its about half finished now. Stitching helped me relax, restored a little self esteem and positivity, but last night I couldn't manage more than a few stitches on the iceberg, because my hands were shaking as I flicked between Facebook, Twitter, the news video streaming websites.


Aside from the awful news from Christchurch city, the earthquake also managed to have a beautiful iceberg connection. The incredible blue of this newly exposed ice from Tasman Glacier is caused by its formation over hundreds of years as layers of snow are compressed and more and more oxygen is squeezed out of the ice (the blue faded to white within an hour or so of being exposed to the air). These layers of ancient ice hold the history of the earth's atmosphere with minute particles of volcanic ash, pollen and other traces that settled on the snows surface between one fall and the next.

Like a real iceberg, my stitched sculpture tells a story in its layers, tracing my emotional state of the last couple of months. The first few week's stitching is very even and tidy across the deepest teal shades of the graduated colours. I was stitching through a relaxed happy summer with plenty of rest and fun between each layer. This part of the iceberg showed the culmulative improvement in my skills in this technique since I started making layered blanket sculptures.

In contrast, the lighter aqua layers that I stitched in recent evenings and weekends around my full time training are relatively sloppy, uneven and careless. They show the traces of exhaustion, irritibility, anxiety, sorrow and shame. In the middle of all this I decided to restitch part of my early 'good' work because the colour change was too abrupt, so now there's a few layers of crude stitching through the centre of my earlier tidy happy work.

Fortunately, at about the same moment that I stepped back from the iceberg enough to notice the contrast between the stitching of my different emotional states, I was reaquainting myself with Brene Brown who's work on authenticity has been a great solace to me lately. So instead of getting even more upset and ripping out many hours of work, I decided to leave it in place to show the environmental reality of its creation.


Of course, I realise that the difference between my 'good' stitching and my 'sloppy' stitching isn't very noticable to anyone except another stitcher, or super critical viewer. After all my 'good' stitching isn't as perfect as I would like. You may not think it matters, but I always notice, and the uneven stitching will be what I see first and foremost whenever I look at this iceberg.

But when so many lives are devastated, not only in Christchurch, but in Libya, in Queensland, in so many parts of the world, it seems to me that to elide imperfection is to disrespect their suffering.

Donating to support Christchurch earthquake relief

Peering down the coal tunnel

Jane Ussher's Still Life

Still Life: Inside the Antarctic Huts of Scott and Shackleton is a magnificent book of haunting photographs by Jane Ussher. Not since Ponting have these buildings been so beautifully photographed. Jane's images of the huts deserted for 100 years and yet almost undecayed are strong enough to sit comfortably alongside the now iconic contemporary images of Scott and Shackleton's occupation. And as a book object, this heavy, cloth bound volume, with wide format photos in gatefolds at the centre of every black stitched section, is covetable.

Jane Ussher's slide show from the book.

One of my Antarctica projects involves some text which I have cut out of blankets. I always like to have a portable stitching project so I can work on it away from home. Icebergs and coal mining tunnels are bulky and awkward, but I can pull these letters out of my handbag anywhere, anytime and blanket stitch the edges while I talk or wait. I can even look at photos and stitch at the same time! Which gave me this idea...

"t" with cross next to Shackleton's hut

I'm stitching what is probably the most famous and poignant quote in Antarctica's short history. Captain Oates' final words as recorded by Captain Scott: "I'm just going outside and I may be some time". In the Huntsford-led campaign to undermine Scott's heroic legacy, this quote has been disputed, but I agree with Fiennes that the words were in character for Oates.

Anyway, I'm stitching each letter in random order so there's nothing much that makes sense from the letters completed so far, except this:

Positive space, negative space

The blue/green blanket stash

I've been on a binge of building up my materials stash for all the work I have planned for the coming months. I've been buying blankets in many colours, and a whole kilogram of wool roving for felting! It usually comes in 5 gram packs so this was a major investment. I also bought a new set of felting needles for some serious needle felting and every now and then I think I might have enough embroidery floss to keep me going. But I use it up so fast I always seem to be running short of one colour or another.

After a very slow start on my big iceberg, its starting to become an object instead of lots of half worked pieces. The base of the iceberg is momentarily shaped a bit like a hat. Unlike a hat, this is a very solid piece and will end up quite heavy, so I'm reinforcing the blanket stitch and needle felt with some invisible internal sewing to hold it all together when its hung. It's becoming a very substantial object.

The very base of my iceberg, just starting to spread out and change colour as well as shape.

In contrast, I'm also starting to make pieces that are hollow, cutting away and stitching up from the inside instead of down from the top. It's taken me a few experiments to get this kind of negative space working the way I want. The brown piece is my latest, most successful, experiment with results encouraging enough for me to launch into making it for real, in the materials I've intended all along.

Experimental tunnel

Thrilling Science Reading

Bibliophilia has become a bit of a misnomer for this blog over the past few years as book arts have taken a back seat to textiles as my favoured form of creative expression. But my love of reading books has not diminished. This year I intend to start sharing more of my reading with my blog readers, not least because books are by far still the most influential media I consume.

My summer reading so far has been mostly guided by what catches my eye on the Public Library's science shelves. These casual choices have kept my brain bubbling with unexpected connections, new insights and revived enthusiams. As a result I'm getting more purposeful in my book choices. Here is one strand of thrilling reading, I will share others soon.

The first frisson came near the end of the Kathleen Crane's riveting memoir of life as a woman oceanographer, Sea Legs. She underwent some incredible challenges to break into the all male world of oceanography, and had some incredible adventures on the high sea. Her passion for the deep sea floor ignited a spark in my imagination: can I use bathymetric data to make emboidered blanket representations of the bottom of the sea? This riveting idea led me to seek out an Philips Atlas of the Oceans so I could look at bathymetric maps, and the contour lines. Suffice to say I have started buying up blue and green blankets and I expect I will be blogging more about the sea floor.

My newfound passion for the deep drew me to Deep Blue Home by Julia Whitty. Julia Whitty writes nonfiction prose like a poet and savouring a few chapters before sleep each night is one of my great pleasures at the moment. Here is her describing a close encounter with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland:

Its skin is wind-polished to the luster of diamond, water -sculpted to sapphire, its form purely feminine, purely voluptuous, curves hewn hard in the foundry of the far north. Although the air termperature is cold enough to make us shiver, it is not cold enough for this relic of snowfalls past to survive, and a silver cascade of meltwaterpours from its summit down a chute of polished translucent turquoise. Crystal by crystal, its ice diminishes, collecting in a pool on the iceberg's saddle, where Arctic terns dip and splash, unfurling freshwater rainbows.Deep blue veins and track marks of gravel scar the ice, records of good years and bad years in the glacier world.

Can you see why I am in love with this book? I will be chasing up her other books as well, not only for their sea content, but for the delicious writing.

Six Years On

Oil slick on ice

This week marks the beginning of my seventh year blogging on Bibliophilia. Some 750 posts over six years have traced the development of my creative passions from book making to letterpress printing to hand stitching textiles. Many posts also share stories from the rest of my life, other creative pursuits, friends, travel, play, all of which form a context and narrative to make sense of my life as an artist.

The nature of blogging is that only the most recent material is visible to the casual viewer . The disadvantage of this is my art-focused blog is not always presenting an art-focused face to a first time visitor.

However, since my original gallery website was lost many years ago when the long forgotten hosting service disappeared, I've relied on Bibliophilia and my Etsy shop to represent my art on line. Though each is wonderful in its own way, neither adequately does the job of a gallery website.

While I gradually work on overcoming my internet intertia as well as technical and other obstacles on the way to creating a gallery website, I have started a new Facebook page for my art: Meliors Simms- Handmade Art. I know that there are still admirable hold-outs who refuse to go near Facebook, and others who avoid it as much as possible, so it is not a long-term solution. But its free, its easy, its wonderfully interactive and for now, the best way of plugging my online gallery gap.

This Facebook Page will be a web site that is all about my art. Photos of all my work will be easily accessible by theme rather than chronology. I will also post links to the best from Bibliophilia's archives because I believe the knowing context of my work is crucial to appreciating the images.

This is a new project for me, and there's not much on the Page so far, but if you 'like' it, your Facebook wall will be updated whenever I add new material. Oh, and please share the link with your Facebook friends.

Sewing Marathon

i love my collection of old wooden spools, even if the thread tends to snap on the machine

Here are the results of Thursday's 12 hour marathon sewing bee with Anna. It was a hot humid day so we took frequent breaks in the paddling pool to cool off. In fact we spent the whole day in our swimsuits and sarongs, which is the perfect summer sewing outfit as you can try on half-made garments for fit without having to change.

When I arrived, the machine was already threaded with turquoise so I jumped right in with altering a skirt into a dress, inspired by Bored and Crafty. The beautiful bright skirt which my Aunt Laura gave to my mother and she eventually passed to me was originally made by sewing circular tiers so there are no vertical seams. I've never seen a garment made like that before. It was a wonderfully full skirt, so when I trimmed the bottom 25cm, I had enough fabric to make the whole top of the dress, a matching hairband and still have some leftover for future fun. The finishing touch to my new dress is a beautiful embroidered applique flower from the amazing box of goodies that Helen sent last month.

This white skirt has been altered twice before at sewing bees and ended up shorter than I really wanted so this round of sewing bee the objective was to lengthen. I bought some bridal veil, cut it into two different widths and sewed them inside bias binding so I could attatch it to the skirt lining without getting the open weave of the veil tangled up in machinery. I also trimmed the outer skirt's hem with some ribbon to cover up the ugly yellow overlocking that I did last time. I'm not too keen on how the ribbon looks, so this long-suffering yet much loved skirt may yet return to a future sewing bee for more attention.

In an unprecedented flurry of attention to clothing I made a pair of shorts as well. These had been bright blue trousers which I cut off just above the knees and trimmed with part of an orange flowery skirt from Helen's magical box. The rest of the skirt I made into a drawstring potato bag.

set of four vegetable bags

In fact I was on a bag-making roll. I tentatively made a few net vegetable bags to take to the greengrocers and store fruit and veg. They are light enough to not add to the weight of my purchases, reusable, washable, pretty, close securely and open easily! They were also super quick and easy to make and I wish I'd bought more of the nylon net so I could have made a full set for myself and some to give away.

Inspired by the double drawstring technique I was using for all my pouch style bags, Anna was easily convinced she should make a lettuce bag. She used a wonderful handprinted Pacifica print tea towel and used it straight away to make our lunch salad.

Anna's lettuce spinning and storage bag

Anna spent the day altering patterns, cutting fabric and overlocking. I think she was deliberately staying off the sewing machine because I was in my usual obsessive focus and running the machine hot. I'd done most of my planning, cutting and pinning in the days before our bee. At Anna's suggestion I have discovered the wonderful world of free sewing patterns on the internet. I'm all keen to make this pouf, as soon as I find the right kind of fabric, but in the meantime I was looking for a peg bag pattern and found this.


I made three little blue baskets from scraps of quilting fabric passed on from Anna's friend Tai, decorated with sweet wooden hand buttons from Helen.

mini peg bag

I altered the basket pattern to make a slightly taller peg basket (it wouldn't hold a normal quantity of clothes pegs but I don't have very many). Anna was cutting out shoulder bags from these gorgeous floral print linen tea towels and offered me the offcuts: just enough for a short little peg basket.

It was a long, busy, fun, productive day and I finished ten separate items, almost all repurposing old clothes and off cuts. I also harvested yellow and purple beans and two kinds of peas from Anna and Chris' vegetable garden. We have gone in together to buy a freezer, so I have blanched the beans and frozen them into one- and two-portion sized bags to grace our shared freezer. Which is already well on the way to being an overflowing cornucopia of summer harvest: Anna and I picked about 8 kg of blueberries the next day, and Chris went fishing and caught four fish!

beans in a net vegetable bag

Pretty Chutney

I made eight jars of chutney using the plums from my parent's tree. I'm not sure the chutney is going to taste so great, but I really like the labels, and the circles I cut out of a fallen-apart picture book to decorate the lids.

The gift of the blue knife

I was given a beautiful, blue, very sharp, paring knife. It puts all my other knives to shame, so yesterday I cut my finger while peeling potatoes a little carelessly. It's a shallow but long and wide flap right across the side of the first joint of my right index finger.

Turns out its pretty much almost impossible to cook, clean up, eat or anything else without bending that joint, so it didn't stop bleeding (and throbbing) until I went to bed. This morning I built a little splint for my finger which is working a treat and allows me to type and do most things without pain or blood.

But not stitching. Yesterday morning I'd been out shopping for some long-awaited iceberg supplies and was raring to get back into my project. Before that had been several days of no stitching, partly because I decided it made sense to take a real break and rest properly but mostly because I didn't have all the materials or tools I need to move forward.

Now my break has been involuntarily extended because I just can't hold a needle comfortably or control it reliably. I could feel frustrated but I don't. I have plenty of time to complete the iceberg, there's no urgency driving my desire to work on it. Besides, it's really too hot to be covering my lap with wool blankets right now.

Luckily I can still wield scissors, so today I have been cutting and pinning in preparation for my next sewing bee with Anna. I'll be altering some clothes, making net vegetable bags (no more plastic!) and some other bits and pieces. I'm excited about trying new ideas and using some of the pretty fabric I've been given.

It always feels so self indulgent to use time to make personal and domestic things when I could be working on art to exhibit, so I tend not to. Today, this time out from hand stitching feels like a delightful gift from the blue knife.

First Steps in Crochet and other makings

There are a few memes floating around the internet urging people to share influential books from their childhood or recent reading lives. I've never seen a 'how-to' book mentioned on any of these lists (or a recipe book for that matter) but I was recently reunited with one of the influential books of my life.


Bethwyn picked this up along with a pile of other old books to contribute to our altered book project, Frugal with the Brughel (have you noticed I spell the B word differently every single time I type it?). She had no idea that I would fall upon it with coos of delight and sighs of nostalgic rapture. I had no idea I would either, but every single spread was deeply familiar even though I can't have seen my, or any other, copy of First Steps in Crochet since at least the early 80s.


My first copy would have been well thumbed through the mid-70s, when I taught myself to crochet by laboriously following the excellent diagrams and instructions provided by the 'Editress: Patience Horne of Clackmannashire'. I don't remember actually following any of the patterns to make a 'dashing little bolero' or 'jaunty little hat'.


I suspect that even at a tender age I was more interested using traditional methods to make my own original designs. I do remember working a sky blue wool with the tension too tight, and my frustration at not having the manual dexterity at 8 or ten years to be able to satisfactorily manifest the creation I imagined. Even if all I ever finished was that wobbly-edged scarf I must have studied the whole book very closely to have imprinted it so deeply on my memory.

My first real success with a craft was knitting, which I took up some ten years later, after disappointing dabblings in sewing, embroidery and zine making etc. Penelope started making me a complicated fair isle pullover and then stopped at the sleeves, leaving the body for me to finish. So I was forced to learn to knit but at least I didn't have to cast on until I'd made a whole garment. I became addicted to knitting and didn't stop for about ten years until I'd made everyone I knew a jersey or a hat, and gave myself OOS.

Bethwyn was so thrilled at my delight in reconnecting with First Steps in Crochet, that she withdrew it from our altered book pile (one of our rules is that either of us can withdraw any book from contention for cutting up at any time) and gave it to me as a birthday present.


And then for Christmas Bethwyn gave me this even better gift, a badge made out of an old blanket label (I think it's the label from the blue blanket I used as the ocean background for Ross Island). I love it so much, even though when I wear it, everyone I meet peers at my chest and says 'Hospital? wha?'. The fabric in the background is the excellent bag that Anna sewed for me as a Christmas present. And below are some (just some) of the insane variety of cookies that my mother and I made together last week.


Happy holidays!