Tiny Weaving

 After trying to make my own tiny loom out of square embroidery hoops, foam core and cardboard, I ordered this fabulous little lightweight loom from Wool in the UK. Note the giant, flat-sided needle for weaving. This is a little miracle, this loom.

The first project is a rug for tiny shrine #2, The Shaman's Tipi. Here is the parts list again, since this project is stepping into the studio limelight after completing the Zendo.

cover
liner
threading pins
arrows
stack of wood
fire pit
rug - woven or felt
bed - fur (fake)
beaded bag
talking stick
pillows
blanket (woven or knitted)
back rests
walking stick
baskets
clay bowls
pots/hanging kettle
rattle
drum
pipe
smudge fan
sage wand
canoe

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Making an Afghan, #2

 The next color. I pulled out 20 rows of this color after seeing a dropped stitch on the edge.

I keep repeating my Hobby Mantra, "No Hurry."

Note the two boxes of tools and parts for needle work. The peackock box is filled with threads for tiny weaving and the long art box has knitting needles and other knitter's paraphernalia.

Have you read back through this blog? If you, you've seen my Studio in a Basket posts. Studio in a Basket (in my living room) was a joke on me. I filled up that basket with yarn and projects in a few days. Now it's a studio in a basket and a big Laurel Birch bag and two boxes. Not to mention the tiny shrine series, filling up space in the real studio.

How do I have time for this and writing and editing and building shrines? What else should I be doing?

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Tiny Zendo

The finished Tiny Zen Shrine. I think it has everything but a hanging lantern. I love it.

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Learning to be an architect and builder

 In the last post, I made the statement that everything I learned about tiny construction came from the YouTube tutorial I watched 25 times about building a Japanese Tea House. This is not true.

Here are three photos from 1988 when I studied scale models with an architect in Sausalito. I did a wonderful job on this tea house model. I wish I could remember all the details. I do remember that the shoji screen windows do not slide. So some techniques have improved.



 I can also see that the flooring and possibly the siding are made from craft sticks, which I am losing interest in rapidly. Warping is the issue. Craft sticks are fine if you do not plan to paint or stain the structure.

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Afghan Stitch Sampler

A book called Pick Your Stitch, Build a Blanket by Doreen L.Marquart inspired me to make this lap robe above. The photo on the left is of the 36 squares stacked and ready to be sewn. The book has 80 different stitch patterns designed to make the same size squares. Very handy. Excellent instructions.

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A Simple Scarf Project

This scarf is a great project for a beginner. It is done with a garter stitch all the way (knit, knit, knit forever) except for a little bit of checkerboard (knit four, purl four) until the right length. Just add on whatever colors you like. I used Merino Extra Superfine washable wool with size 7 needles. I  cast on thirty stitches and made it just long enough to lay comfortably across the chest, by request. It’s a soft, cozy beauty.

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HUGS

Hugs are wrist warmers. Each wrist warmer takes about an hour, depending upon the complexity of the design.

Hugs are simple knitted seven inch squares sewn together. I prefer a Merino Superfine or even Extra Superfine with size 7 needles.

 Here it is: you find your gauge for your needles and yarn and knit a square, with or without a ribbing or pattern. The simplest would be a garter stitch, knitting every row. My preference is a stockinette stitch (Knit a row, purl a row), which makes a smooth and comfortable fit. The edge does curl a bit unless you put in a ribbing, but I kind of like that hobo look.

After you’ve knitted the square, fold it over, right sides together, and sew up the edge, leaving a one and a half inch hole for the thumb about one inch from the top. Turn right side out. Ta. Da. My husband, David, enjoyed a thirty year career as an opera singer and, as a troubadour, has many stories of life on and off the stage. Stay with me, here. This IS about Hugs.

He tells of wearing heavy and padded costumes, some weighing fifteen pounds and the only way to stay cool (since one is often sewn into one’s costume) was to roll back sleeves and hold wrists under icy cold running water. I tried it. Makes sense. You cool the blood there at the wrist and you cool the body.

So,  in the reverse, if you warm the wrists…

Hence, My Hugs.

You’re welcome. Make some Hugs and give them away.

You’ve been Hugged. GB

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Welcome

Welcome to Ginna Gordon 2018
the Diary of a Creative
300-500 Word Articles
Regarding Books, Ideas, Projects, Recipes, Quotes & Pix

My audience:
Boomers, authors, readers, crafters, cooks

My topics:
Books
Writing
GB’s Love Notes
Knitting
Crafts
Food/Recipes
Studios

My 2018 Goals:
Sharing ideas/recipes
Lucky Valley Press

I write about
• scaling down from an 800 square foot space to a basket of knitting and what that feels like after 50 years of large studio spaces wherever I have lived. I share the experience, physically, mentally and spiritually, and find out what other artists do at a certain age when it is no longer appropriate to spin in all directions creating in ten different mediums at once.
• being a writer, about re-writing when I thought the book was finished, about that process, which in the case of Humming, is months and months long: the fallow time of writing, when the characters are taking naps and your mind is filled with the many ways in which you could take the story instead of where you were going.
 • what it feels like to be doing the best work of my lifetime, about working with David, about creating in general, about being a creative, about being created.
• I’ll post recipes, knitting projects, stories, quotes, anecdotes about a client, book covers.
My blog wraps my creativity up in a package and shares it with the world.

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Studio #11 - Above the Market

The studio above Carmel Valley Market: 800 square feet with two big rooms and the only unit in the building with its own bathroom.

Others more transient that I lived in a couple of the units: the red-headed, balloon-blowing clown and his wife lived behind their bike shop on the first floor facing the alley, a down-on-his-luck poet slept in sawdust in the woodworker’s back room. I was next door to an alcoholic hairdresser who sometimes slept in her chair at the salon and whose every utterance and popping cork and musical accompaniment was heard clearly through the paper thin walls. I was above the deli and and the pet groomer and down the hall from the chiropractor. The aromas were a mix of bleach, pastrami, flea soap and the herbal tea blend of the week. I added varnish, glue and ceramic glaze dust to the atmosphere.

This studio saw the biggest production of dinnerware, to use in service and sell at Ginna’s Cafe, just down the block. Under and over my designs, my friend and assistant Christine layered coats and coats of color and glazes to cups and plates and bowls, wrapped each piece in newsprint and delivered them to a local kiln for firing. Not too efficient, but our customers loved the colorful stuff painted with flowers and leaves and hearts.






Erin produced beautiful paper vessels and books.

After Ginna's Cafe closed, the studio above the market was my refuge, a place to rest while figuring out what to do next. The twenty years before had been one long catering job: for gurus real and fake, shamans and showmen, for business partners, leaders and would-be leaders, for parties and weddings and overnights in the mountains, always on the move, running my own business and/or managing a staff and driving my jeeps up and down the California coast.

It was time for me, my artist self and I. My writer, who had been not-so-patiently waiting, emerged.

It was in this studio where I accidentally whiffed Marine Varnish and half killed my thyroid and created a bunch of other chronic issues I won’t focus on (but will warn you about Marine Varnish accidentally up the nose).

It is where I settled down to create my cookbook series, Honey Baby Darlin’ -  where I realized I had something to write: 50 years of stories and recipes. The series started with my three year old alter ego, Little Glory, learning about the love of cooking at her mother’s knee on her grandfather’s farm in Ohio in 1951. I saw the project like a vision of a many-colored sunrise or a multi-layered cake with surprises inside.

I met David during this studio period and this became a familiar scene: Ginna at the big oak desk facing her iMac, tapping out ideas and words and scenes into the documents that would become her next books and David on the little sofa, singing ballads and love songs while playing his guitar.

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Studio #6 - Spring Mountain

“Where will you go?” My friend Sampson asked during the phone call when I told him my restless self would be on the move again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have my little bed-sit in LA.”

“You hate LA,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

“Come see my Paradise on the mountain,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. He didn’t see me roll my eyes, of course, but he knew.

“Stop rolling your eyes,” he said, “and come check it out. I have room.”

So I hopped a plane, which he met in San Francisco with flowers from his garden and a bottle of wine from his favorite vineyard, Folie a Deux. I wondered if he was trying to tell me something. It was too late, if he was. He was 80, I was approaching 50, we’d been the best of friends for years. Sampson invariably introduced me as his “little sister.”

Late afternoon sun glittered over the dormant Napa Valley grape vines, turning the bushy little plants of tiny mustard flowers into shmears of buttery yellow. We drove up, up the hill to the property, seven hundred acres of grapes and seven different kinds of trees. The owner, a cheese and washing machine heir, gave Sam carte blanche to design and build him a house on his little man-made lake tucked away in the forest of oaks, pine, madrone, manzanita, fur, cedar and maple.

Sam lived in a three bedroom/two bath caretaker’s cottage. After three days of friendship, conversation, good food and rest, he said, in distillation, “You need healing. Do it here.”

And so I did.

There’s not much to say about the tiny bedroom/studio on Spring Mountain: a drawing board and a folding table. One of Sam’s architect friends taught me how to make miniature houses to scale.

I made a tea house. I made earrings out of old book papers and created a bunch of largely unsell-able stuff for a couple of local gift shows.

I did heal on that mountain. How can you not? Quality air, with only the sounds of the hoot owls and coyotes at night. No more honk, honk, beep beep, hurry hurry. Just me, my own bed, my yoga mat, music, some good food, someone to talk to and a little room for my ebbing and flowing stash of art paraphernalia. It was good.

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Studio on the Move

About the time I stepped into the Orchard studio in Ojai, my attentions got diverted to LA, where I signed up for the UCLA Design Program. Classes in the arts of Trompe l’oeil, Shiburi dying and surface design (and a little dip back into commercial acting) took me all over downtown LA to various teacher’s studios (and several theaters).

I divided my time between Ojai and LA for the next three years, transformed the kitchens of my two borrowed apartments into temporary art spaces (one in Santa Monica and one in the fancy shmancy apartments in Marina Del Rey) until I rented a friend’s guesthouse in Culver City, where I could prepare my artsy homework and rehearse for acting classes unseen and unheard.

Three years! What was I thinking? Compared to my life now (where I walk to the grocery store and post office and take the car out twice a week), I was in Hell - on and off the freeway all day, stuck in traffic on Highway 10 at 11pm, looking for places to park ad nauseum. Schlepping art materials and paraphernalia up stairs and into elevators and down escalators. Driving back and forth to Ojai for long weekends, busy busy, and then back to LA for three days of classes.

On those long weekends, I reveled in my Orchard, sucked in the rarified orangey air. I drew ideas in the dirt with a stick. John Denver crooned in my ear, reminding me… just reminding me.

On an eleven day “Burro Trip” in the high Sierra with the Headmaster of Thacher School and 10 other intrepid hikers, I took my drawing pad, a few pencils and a journal and kept a few notes.


I made a Bisquick Apple Cake, buried in two pie tins in the coals of a hot fire, drank out of a tin mug, led burros, hiked trails, ate Toblarone Bars that taste like Heaven on top of a mountain after an all day hike.

Better, to be out on the trail than stuck in LA traffic. GB

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Studio #4 - The Back Porch

A studio can be anything, anywhere: a room in the house, a corner of a room in the house, a closet in a room in the house, a barn, a garage, a desk by the window, a shack, a kitchen table.
    Ginna Bell Bragg 2003

The Back Porch is barely worth mentioning as Studio #4. But… see 2003 quote from yours truly above. Can’t leave out the Back Porch.

1984. New digs on the Thacher School campus: tiny tinder-box of a house built in 1915, with room on the screened porch to stash a drawing board in the corner and call it a studio. Why not? Views of trees and a rocky little garden and the roof of the Boys’ Dorm, a few special papers and pens and boxes of dyes. A washer and dryer for dying fabric. It was enough.

In a teeny den I called an office, with an IBM Selectric typewriter, an antique desk and wooden stool, I kept a journal and wrote short stories about old women saving the world and taped recipes into binders.

The small kitchen was an extension of Studio #5. Not only did I cook up my usual storm of food, I taught Sumi Painting and served Green tea to two Thacher boys, James and Tom, both studying Kung Fu and looking for an art sensei, which for some reason turned out to be me. They painted bamboo leaves and peonies while I sat on a stool in my dressy silk kimono and read them The Tales of Genji and played Rampal on the boom box. They called me Ikuko Sensei, “Scented Teacher.”

The 1985 Fire was a studio space turning point for GB in Ojai. We were serving fruit soup to two grand dames of Ojai society in our tiny dining room. It was a 110° and the fire watch had begun. Our get-away bags were packed and we served the popovers and chicken salad in a hurry. After a tour through the tiny house and a rushed dinner, Patsy said, “You, my dear, need a studio. Come see me after the fire. I have a shack in an orange orchard for you.” She really said that. “Come see me after the fire.”

We watched the fire scream toward campus over the hills as we evacuated and upon our safe return two days later found marmots in the bathtub looking for water and rats in the Back Porch Studio drawers nibbling my precious rice paper. GB

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Studio #3 - the book studio

Two years after discovering the Carmel Guild of the Book Arts, we had enough knowledge, and without doubt plenty of materials since enthusiastic trips to Flax and Britex and Ganes Bros & Lane filled our cars with creative loot, and plenty of hubris, we opened the book studio in the Barnyard in Carmel, California.

Floyd, our buddy from Salinas, brought us whitewashed barn wood for the interior walls. We sanded and sanded, exposing artistic scratchings, love notes, hearts with arrows and messages from the past.

We and the other fifteen artists with reduced square footage rent were the monkeys in the Barnyard zoo, a public arena with regular hours where we must behave like merchants, not artists, do our art and be willing to
commune with customers about whatever it was we were creating, scraping, sewing.

From the lush Barnyard gardens, let’s walk up the open stairs to a red tiled hallway. Lean over the dutch door, observe us at work in 1976 at the workbench with a tiny  hammers tamping the soft white threads of hand bound books flat onto book boards. Or looking out the back window at the Stuyvesant Fish Ranch, an open vista of green hills that mark the entrance to Carmel Valley, stirring a pot of fish glue.

The pounding and the fishy aroma propel our quilting artist neighbor out of her digs to the front door of the book studio. She flings the door open and bustles past the phantom me and gives us a piece of her mind regarding our noisy and smelly activities before she whirls around and floats back to her studio to bury herself among the protective and muffling piles of fabrics. She nicknamed us the “Polished Apples.” We never knew why why.








Look. I still have the sign, painted by yours truly in one of my favorite fonts of all times, Legende. We had the chop made in Chinatown San Francisco. Loosely translated, it says “a place where two young women make books.” We hope it says that.

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Studio Inspiration

Two women, names and faces long forgotten, so influenced my life that I quote them in any article or story relating to my budding artist days in Carmel.

Let’s call them Marty and Terry.

In 1967, I lived in a tiny and truly messy two bedroom apartment with my small son and worked for an attorney in Monterey. Second hand furniture barely filled the rooms. Piles of laundry were legendary and my dishes … well.

I grew up with a lovely maid named Mildred who did everything. Mildred made my bed every day, excusing me to my mother as “being so busy.”

In my apartment in 1968, I waited for Mildred, or a Mildred, to show up and do it for me. Not the most illustrious nester at the time, was I.

I signed up for a silk screening class at the Red Cross Center in Carmel. Into a paper shopping bag I tossed brushes, cutters, film, screening, etc., which I brought into the class and deposited on the table as if it spilled accidentally out of Fibber Magee’s closet.

Marty, 40-ish, blonde ponytail bobbing, unrolled her materials from a perfect calico cotton burrito: little pockets for every item, brush to knife. It looked so cool. I was immediately defensive. Kind of sarcastically, critically, even, I said, “My God, you’re organized.” Can't you just hear the sneer on my face? Like she had created some sort of artistic faux pas, she was a traitor. Inside, I was already embarrassed.

She looked at me over her narrow half-glasses for several seconds before responding. She didn’t shake her head (like, “you nitwit”), but she could have. She should have. Instead, with that steady gaze, she said, “My dear, it makes life infinitely easier.” I looked into my lap, duly chastised.

Later that day, I came upon my new neighbor, wife of a Naval Post Graduate School Visiting Professor, painting bookshelves in her front yard. I could see she’d made curtains for the apartment kitchen.

I asked, “Terry, why are you doing all this when you’ll only be here for a year?”

Really, Ginna?


I swear she looked at me with the same eyes, thoughts and sentiment as Marty had not two hours before. She held my gaze. She said, “Because I live here.”

I love the phrase “Listen to everything, ideas come from everywhere.”

I eyed my unwashed dishes and went up the stairs to my chaotic, clothes-strewn bedroom. I paused. I thought about these two women;  these two incidents on the same day.

Listen up, GB.

I made a sign “Ginna, Mildred is off today, as she is every day. Pick up your clothes.” I posted it on the wall opposite my bed so it would be the first thing I saw every morning.

Hey. You've got to start somewhere.
GB

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