Ellen Anne Eddy's Thread Magic Studio

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Musing: Art outside the Box: The Voice in the Dark

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We all have a voice track in our head that never goes away. It's full of all kinds of nonsense: music that plays in endless loops, the thing we could have said at a bad moment if we'd been more quick on our feet, the arguments, never said, with friends long lost and gone. The auditory flotsam and jetsam of our lives, scraped out of an old verbal closet that haunt us.

My worst fear is that I will die saying the same cruel things to myself that were said to me as a child. I am in no way alone. If you teach you get to hear exactly what people were told as a child. Because when their blood sugar drops or they get frightened or threatened, they'll start saying it to themselves. It's an agony to listen to. It never should have been said to anyone in the first place.

"I'm so dumb."

"I'm not an artist."

"I'm not creative."

"I can't draw, see colors, try, find time, find space, do this ............"

The words hardly matter. It's almost always about the tone of cruelty. It's an echo of bullying.

I always shut it down in class. It's like watching someone dig a hole through their heart with a jagged knife. I tell them no one can talk to my students that way. Not even them about themselves.They'll tell it to you in a cold and clinical way at 9:30 in the morning. At 3 PM they're crying about it in the bathroom.

Oddly enough, it's never anything provable or true. Or it's true but utterly harmless. We are all, in our physicality, fat, or skinny, tall or short, and I think it's impossible to be alive and not be funny looking at some point. What gives it weight is not it's accuracy of the statement but the accuracy involved in having chosen that thing to say. No one could have told me I was dumb. It never worked. I knew better. But they told me daily I was the ugliest girl in the school.

There wasn't exactly a contest. It wasn't like someone proved that.But with the unerring aim of all bullies, they knew that had a sting. Having the normal number of hands, feet, arms legs and heads, I do believe as an adult that I look pretty normal and that this was chosen and said simply for the impact they knew it would have. It was nothing but bullying.

So what happens if we choose different words? What happens if like the video, we choose to define ourselves differently?

I do follow religious seasons and this is the season of Lent. For those of us who do, you usually do what is called a Lenten discipline. This used to be regularly fasting. The current view is that you give up something like chocolate or tv.

But it does me more good to do something rather than to stop doing something. This year, I promised myself to remember my meds and do my face care every day. It sounds like vanity, but it's not. There's a little girl in me who has heard too many ugly words and needs to hear actions rather than words. We're almost at the end of Lent and this time I've held on. A really good Lenten discipline is one you want to continue after Lent for the good it did you.

It's my own anti bullying campaign. It's my beautiful frogs. If they are beautiful, perhaps I am too. It's the ability to listen to that dark inner voice and change the channel. It's the ability to change my world with my words.

Labels: life as an artist, lifestyle |

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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Musing: Art outside the Box: Un-entitling Entitlement.

9:26 AM |

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"Every life you lead does you good if you let it, every life you lead. Sometimes it's hard to take your mind off your mind"

I watched an upload on infertility today on Facebook. I will not link to that upload here. The woman's pain was so raw, and so real. She's in her twenties and just hit the fact that she cannot have a child.

I don't think she'd like to hear what I need to say about all of this.I remember her agony. My mother was given hormones during her pregnancy (You're over 40. You're not pregnant, this is menopause.) I was told fairly early that there would be no children. As there was no one to have a child with, and I think that's especially difficult, I simply had to wade it through and wait it out. At 42 I had the inevitable hysterectomy that confirmed it all. I would not make a child. I would never have my baby. Eventually I came to understand that I would never have family in the way others do.

There's this illusion that the world is fair. That we should all get a certain similar plate, decorated and filled with the same things in equal parts. Wouldn't that be nice? Shouldn't we arrange that? It's almost monstrous to argue otherwise.

But it's simply not how it works. Life is massively unfair, much of the time. There are those without money, intelligence, education, opportunities, loves, lovers, connections, health and strength. We can legislate some of these factors to a more even place. But much of it is simply what we have. It's the raw material of our lives.

I don't think we get to change that raw material much. As cruel as it is, there are people who I think should not have a child. I'm one of them. My mother had an alcoholic approach to child rearing that I want to make very sure happens to no child around me. The best way to be sure of that is for me to not be the sole person, raising a child.

Could I have said that at 20? 25? 35 when the clock was ticking hard? I'm not sure I could. My body said it for me. And if we wish to discuss what is fair and unfair, did some child deserve me taking that chance?

Oddly enough, I have children. I just didn't make them. I've gone through batches of neighborhood kids, god children, lost lambs, grown up 3 year olds in big bodies and 40 year old ten year olds. All I had to do was open my door. Because they came and went at will, there was a safety there for them and for myself. The things I feared I might do, did not happen. Instead, I got to love the children in front of me.

Life is not fair. It can be right, but it's never fair. Fair is a measure of average. Who of us is ever that?

I go through whiny places about being alone. I'm not someone who does primary relationships well. By the time I was 40, it was pretty clear I'd never pair up or marry. Recently I shared one with a friend who told me to shut up and count my blessings. This is the answer only a real friend can give you. My world is often very lonely but it is full of imagery, art, creation, space and time for the world of the mind and the imagination. It is not average. It has gifts for me. But the average world of what is fair, does not have space in it for the odd and lovely gifts my loneness hands me and then demands of me. For that is the other edge of it. The gifts life gives us all demand a commitment of time, strength and focus. You can't just hold your child at the photo opportunity. You also need to do that at 3 in the morning when she's crying and scared. You cannot love someone only when they've brought you roses. You need to find your love when they're incomprehensible and terrifying

(and we all are). You aren't just an artist at an opening. You're an artist when it separates you from much of what others do. Life is not fair. It is rich, it is odd and it's mostly our response to the very unaverage person we are.

I love the fairy tales where the fairy give us a cruel and unwanted gift or task that makes us braver, stronger and better. Like the two boys on Christmas,one given everything he wants and the other given a room of manure, it works out differently than we think. There's a pony in there somewhere.

So, to that woman, I want to say, " You can have children, just not in the way you hoped." To myself I need to say, "All your love is here, it's just not in the form you wished." It's cruel to say " Your art is your child." It's not true. Your art is your creation, but it is never a child who puts their arms around you or rejects you when they hit 17. They are very separate things. Both of them excellent. Perhaps if we can put aside the notion of what is fair, we can see the good in what simply is.

Labels: life as an artist, lifestyle |

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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Print on Demand: Confessions of a Book Junkie Wandering the Printing Industry

11:02 AM |

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I can't help it. It's a disease that runs in my family. My mother was the president of the library board, and my father read me Gods, Graves and Scholars when I was three.We kept books in the same quantities my mother kept gin and extra undies. The answer was simple. Are there more books? Then we need more books!

One of the odd things within our current financial world is the book out of print. I didn't believe it happened when I was a kid. A book was a book forever. You could always find it. It wasn't until Ms. Driscoll, my junior/senior English teacher sent us scattering to find a bunch of out of print 1920-50s plays that I even knew a book could go out of print. My mother, president of the library still at that point, hunted each of those books down. They might have been out of print but our library had them.

Now it's a constancy. Fabulous books go out of print. Buy it now. You may never see it again. Or you may find stacks of it at Books a Million. It's an unpleasant crap shoot.

Publishers make their most money out of the first flush sale. A book that is classic does not make the kind of cash a best seller does. It can't. And it will, unless someone protects it, go under. A new book itself is a huge investment for a company. They sensibly go for the main chance, and that limits what gets into print.

Enter into that the print on demand publisher. This is probably just one step above the company that will print your loving-hands-at-home book in a beautiful leather binder, and post it on their web site with other titles like My Amazing Life as a Hardware Salesman or How to Bronze Baby Shoes for Fun and Profit. Shall we say, it's a limited market.

But for the cost of upload, and printing a hundred books, you can print on demand. And post it on the major book sellers market. I've done it. More than once.
Why?
Because in the same way I crave books, I crave putting out books. I love working with a professional book company. I've done it before and I'll do it again if allowed. But for small books that I think people need, and that I need to put out, it's an answer.

Here's the rub. They always cost more, for you and for your reader. You're not having 15,000 run from China. Instead you're paying an American company for a much shorter run. And the wonderful wheels of promotion that every publishing company has will not roll out for you. It's all your own.

In the end, it's your consumers who decide if it's worth it. Is it worth a bit extra to have the book that wouldn't get published otherwise?

So I've done it again. The Town of Torper and the Very Vulgar Day Lily is arriving today, according to ups. I'll start shipping them out to those who've ordered. We'll see if its a companion piece with the book on bronzing baby shoes.

The Town of Torper is a little cautionary tale about small towns, gardening standards, war and peace.You can order it at my site at www.ellenanneeddy.com.

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Saturday, February 26, 2011

In Search of Peacock Colors: Anatomy of a Color Study

9:03 PM |

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Confessions of a color junkie. I get drunk periodically. Not on alcohol or ice tea or even ice water. But I do get drunk on color. Every so often I find myself swimming in a color combination that is just plain intoxicating. It hits me viscerally. Color is visual emotion. It's a language all its own.But just because I find a color combination exhilarating doesn't mean I understand why.

Whenever I find a color combination I can't leave alone, I like to work with it until I understand it.I've always loved peacock colors. I don't necessarily feel like quilting a peacock at this time. But the colors.....
So I went in search of peacock colors. Dyeing fabric is one of the best ways to understand color. So I went out to dye some peacock colors.

Peacock colors have always mystified me a bit. They're an analogous range (a row of colors in a line) but there's something odd about it. When I charted it out on the color wheel it began to make sense.

That's when I find it's time to chart it out on the color wheel and to see why these colors do what they do. The color wheel is a family tree for color. It shows how colors are related to each other. The basic color is teal, with bright blues, purples and greens. But fooler is that olivey chartreuse green. It's a dulled out sun color in a range of clear cool colors. In another way, the contrast in the combination is the olive that leans towards the sun while all the other colors lean to the shade.
No wonder it's so exciting.

So this is what i dyed!

Mystery solved! I used an analogous range of procian dyes including turquoise, teal, robins egg, chartreuse, jade, cayman island green, and sun yellow. The chartreuse is the olivey contrasting sun color. I stalked the wild peacock. Now those colors are mine!
Don't be afraid to hunt for the big game: the fabulous colors that rock your world and move your furniture. Use them, chart them, put them where they can excite you and illuminate your world.

If you want to explore more of the world of sponge dyeing and how the color wheel works, check out my book, Ellen Anne Eddy's Dye Day Workbook. Not just a dye book, it explains why the colors do what
they do together visually. It's available on my site at www.ellenanneeddy.com

Labels: color, design |

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In Search of Peacock Colors: Anatomy of a Color Study

9:03 PM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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Labels: color, design |

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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Beadaliscious: Eye candy and puctuation

3:45 PM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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I have a love affair with beads. It's such a good thing that at least one thing I truly love has no calories to count, packs up small and delights me every time. I'm not strictly a beader, but I still have a collection of fabulous beads, and they still find their way into my work.

As addictions go, it started small. I worked in an antique mall for a while where there were several people working in old Czech glass beads. I can ignore most gem beads. I can ignore crystal. But Czech glass can empty my pockets so fast it's like there's a hole. I made my fair share of necklaces and earrings and found myself way too involved quilting to play endlessly with beads.

But beads sneak in. They're so pretty. They're shiny. They're almost like candy without the calories. They also make fabulous details. When I did the embroidery for Tigrey Leads the Parade, almost all of the flowers in my gardens were great glass beads.

Where do they come from? I never pass on a bead shop, no matter where I'm traveling, but the bulk of these beads came from an amazing store that's literally down the street from me.
Blue Stem Beads. They're in my little town of Porter, but their collection is mighty and for the size, it's one of the best bead stores I ever saw. Almost all the beads for this book came from there.
These were hand stitched onto tea towels I embroidered. They were fabulous flowers and too much fun. You can see and purchase Tigrey Leads the Parade at my web site www.ellenanneeddy.com
You'll find Blue Stem Beads in Porter,Indiana (just an hour out of Chicago. It's an astonishment.
For the next few posts I'm going to talk about other cool and wonderful ways I've used beads and seen beads used in quilting.
You'll find

Blue Stem Beads at

300 Lincoln St # 1X

Porter, IN 46304-1894

(219) 926-9004

Labels: beads, bobbin work, color, design |

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