ode to the baltimore green awning

in keeping with drawing and stitching a daily gratitude list, i focused one day on the green awnings in my south baltimore neighborhood. a few days later, i received an invitation to join in a baltimore print exchange and turned my embroidered piece into a hand-colored linoleum print!

sowebohemian festival

our local sowebohemian arts and music festival was this weekend - great fun, good food and lots of local bands. one of the events that supports the festival is a poster silent auction which will be held on june 7. here are the posters i made:

more community arts

i have been volunteering with an artist-in-residency program at an elementary school with black cherry puppet theater, a local baltimore arts group. we worked with the students to teach them how to make paper mache hand and rod puppets, how to manipulate the puppets, how to make scenery and props, how to block out a show. we will put on a performance for families later this week. sooo much fun...and exhausting. this is all new territory for me. many thanks to b'more's fabulous black cherry puppet theater for letting me tag along for the past two weeks and apprentice with their enormous and hilarious puppet talents. and a shout out to local artist and puppeteer, jen strunge aka cotton monster who is on staff at black cherry and who taught me some good tricks of the trade.

baltimore's kinetic sculpture race

a rite of spring every year here in baltimore is the kinetic sculpture race. this year i had the prestigious job of judging the sock creatures on each vehicle. here i am in all my sock creature regalia. and here are some photos of the fabo sock creatures that were competing. great day!

crocheted sculpture

inspired by the work of liz grobler, i am working with the folks at the local senior center to make a crocheted sculpture. these women are the hardest working, most enthusiastic artists i have ever worked with. we are hoping that our sculpture, called 'warm welcome' will grace some of the local art venues in the coming year.

as you can see, being out of work is giving me lots of good community art time!

small packages: the LAST MINUTE MAUL

this is what i do in my day job. i work at a local art center in baltimore and was asked to put together a craft event this year. so...what could i do that would be different from all of the other myriad of excellent craft events in our city? i came up with 'Small Packages: the LAST MINUTE MAUL. Locally crafted art no bigger than a fruitcake.' we will see how it goes tomorrow. i can't wait! lots of good local crafters will be there.

portland and baltimore in stitch

for my level 1 opus personal specialism i was working in the theme of cities and combined my two favorite cities - portland maine and baltimore maryland. this piece has wrapped wire, stitched bicycle tubes and a background of maps and a painted cereal box!

stitching cities

working on my current opus module, focusing on the appearance of line in a cityscape. i took images of the two cities where i spend most of my time: baltimore, maryland and portland, maine. i combined the images in several mediums: photocopies of photographs, wire and stitch. more exploration on cities to come!

the things we do for love OR sock goat on a boat

let me start off by saying i am not a sailor, but we do own a sailboat. sometimes things need to be fixed on the boat that require going up the mast. i have avoided this duty for years, but decided to give it a try today. BH flattered me by telling me he need a 'light weight' person to do the job...so i did and it was actually quite fun. i took a sock goat with me for good luck. the sock goat was made by my friend gavin. as you can see, i did make it down ok, cuz i am posting on the blog and i couldn't do that very easily from way up there! back to opus homework!

PARADE SCHOOL

been doing lots of good stuff: stitching and painting and all. two weeks ago i went to parade school. what a great experience! we made all of these parade structures in four days and week culminated in a PARADE! great community event. i kind of learned how to stilt walk, altho most of the other students were faster learners. i made a big purple prom queen, and an apartment building. three people carried the queen and i was inside of the apt building, carrying it with tall pole.