Meabh Warburton’s post, Disappointing Day, sends my thinking in several directions:

To delightful collections of useless objects similar to her son’s bowl of broken pencil leads. I have a small jar filled with the little zig zag ends I cut off zippers at a time when I was sewing dozens of zipper bags.

In the same drawer I keep a box of cat whiskers, picked up off the floor with a “thank you!” to the cat who gifted it.

My thinking also goes to how difficult yet necessary it is to fail in the studio. It’s good to hear Andy Goldsworthy saying he makes a lot of crap when I admire his work so much. I’ve also heard that the Modernist painter Rawlston Crawford said “I reserve the right to make bad art”; a good reminder not to get too precious about results.

But when time in the studio is limited, and desperately needed, I need the encouragement that comes from success. Or at least from being satisfied with the general direction. To finally be working, and then look at the piece and see it’s limitations; that’s hard. So it’s good to know that I’m not alone, and to hear about the bad days.

Noodling around the internet today; I landed at Magpie & Cake where I saw this photograph of artist Chris Cobb’s installation, There is Nothing Wrong in this Whole Wide World, at Adobe Books in San Francisco.

Reading the quote from an interview with Cox I found this:

In some Native American cultures, if you make something, you have to then sleep with it next to you overnight, so that the object is transformed through your dreaming.

A little synchronistic encouragement from the universe after my last post.

I love objects organized by color beyond any reasonable explanation. I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure similar to when I color matched my mother’s sewing supplies as a child.

Something I still do with my own.

Stash is almost as good a word as swatch. It conjures squirrels, eccentrics, and tubs filled with yarn - all good things.

Liza sent me this article which argues that we should change the way we think about our stashes of craft supplies and consider them instead a collection. There must be something in the air because the Yarn Harlot had just posted about “pet skeins” of yarn, and The Next Stop Will Be was coming out about his accumulation of watches.

I love collections, like with like. As a young teenager I told my grandmother that I wanted to collect something, and soon afterwards she gave me three small boxes.

The silver one in the middle is from her time in India and still contains red pigment used for bindis.

Over the years those three boxes were joined by more, like this one from a friend who traveled to China:

and these four in my bathroom.

Good thing she didn’t get me started on something large!

Looking through my photographs I found these four that belong together:

unfurling on a fence in Astoria, Queens,

my new blue glass,

favorite pajama bottoms,

and the fireworks last July 4th.

Some of my holiday ornaments are still up, I can’t bear to put away the snowflakes hanging on my windows just yet. They’re cotton crochet that has been blocked and sized to make a rigid ornament. In the daytime they look like ink drawings on the sky, and at night they reflect the light, white against the darkness outside.

Looking at them day after day has brought me back to drawing mandalas. There’s something so soothing about developing a pattern from the center out, and magical in the way I can’t anticipate what will happen as it grows.

My heart necklace is making me realize just how influenced I was by a trip I took several years ago to Subotica (pron. sue-boh-tea-tza), a little town in Serbia just seven miles from the Hungarian border.

Set in the plains, Subotica straddles definitions, caught between country village and sophisticated city. I stayed in town, but was woken by the neighbor’s cock crowing. On my way in and out of an eleven-story high rise I would pause to watch the progress of a ladder being built by an elderly man on the lawn outside. A ladder, made by hand.

The town has some of the most beautiful examples of Art Nouveau architecture I’ve ever seen, equal to the work of Horta in Belgium, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland.

However the buildings are dilapidated, and the stunning synagogue with it’s heart-shaped iron railing has been closed for a long time. The country has yet to recover from war.

I believe that the local people built the Town Hall themselves. It’s an imposing building that stands in the middle of a large square at the center of the town. Inside it’s more Hansel and Gretel than bureaucratic edifice, there are hand-painted murals everywhere you look.

Here’s a window sill by the main staircase:

Check out this detail - remind you of any necklaces you’ve seen lately?

This is the waiting room at the tax office:

At the top of each column there are symbolic representations of the local trade guilds. (My pre-digital pictures don’t remotely do justice to the charm and whimsy of this room.)

The pattern on the floor is composed of thousands of hearts. This is a tax office I would be happy to visit. Heck I wouldn’t mind having to wait on one of these fairy tale benches.

The main hall is completely ornamented as well; I love the idea of officers of the law hard at work, surrounded by hearts and flowers.

I’m thinking of lobbying my local representative; surely Washington would be a happier, more productive place if Congress and the White House had some murals like these. And the IRS! What might the Internal Revenue Service be, if hearts danced across waiting room floors, and vibrant beanstalks curled their way up the walls.

I love finding relationships between objects or images. Over time I’ve tucked these four pictures into the frame of my bathroom mirror.

Andy’s group portrait of my class at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts

“Fanny and her kindergarten class mourn the death of the class gerbil”
by Donna Ferrato

“Preacher within the Circle” by Bill Traylor

a postcard titled “Hula Hoop Habit, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1958″