Week 41: Adobe Illustrator

Diamonds & Streamers © Karen Thiessen, 2012

Big news: I finally made it through the Adobe Illustrator chapters on text! It took me eight weeks, but I made it. As a pattern girl, it was a hard slog, but I did take time to make a few patterns. Normally I make ten to fifteen patterns a week and only show you one. During my text odyssey, I made only three a week. Diamonds & Streamers is more random and uneven than my usual patterns: it's good to depart from the usual. I'm really excited to dig into more advanced chapters of the manual and finally learn how to integrate Photoshop with Illustrator. Although I've been working with Photoshop for eight years, I'm sure I'll learn to use the program in new ways.

Pickle

Pickle; Photo credit: Karen Thiessen, 2012

I saw this stencilled onto a freight elevator door at 270 Sherman Street North.

Studio Series: sketchbook collage

Black & white sketchbook collage © Karen Thiessen, 2012

The studio is a busy place this autumn. September was my month of fear, but thankfully that passed and in October I found my studio mojo. I'm preparing for a May 2013 solo show of my modular work and I'm making two quilts using children's drawings digitally printed onto fabric for a community project. One of the quilts will be auctioned off to raise funds for an inner city after-school program for children. Last night I put the first top on the quilt frame and today I start stitching! It's been a few years since I hand-quilted a quilt, so I'm really looking forward to it.

The above image is a collage from my sketchbook. The white lines on black paper in the lower left corner is a direct photocopy of one of my hand-stitched textiles.

Andrew McPhail @ TH&B

CRYBABY by Andrew McPhail, 2010-ongoing; Photo Credit: Karen Thiessen, 2012

I saw Andrew McPhail's CRYBABY at the TH&B collective's exhibition in an industrial space at 270 Sherman in May 2012. Can you guess what Andrew has hand stitched together to create this immense textile?

CRYBABY by Andrew McPhail, 2010-ongoing; Photo Credit: Karen Thiessen, 2012

If you guessed Kleenex, you are correct. My appreciation for this piece deepened when I learned of what it was made. I felt protective of it, knowing how vulnerable Kleenex is to tearing.

CRYBABY by Andrew McPhail, 2010-ongoing; Photo Credit: Karen Thiessen, 2012

Andrew started making CRYBABY in 2010 and continues to add to it. It is made of thousands of Kleenex hand stitched together, tears, and a toy airplane. Oh Andrew, what were you crying about when you wrapped that toy airplane?

Quotes: Socrates

"Wisdom begins in wonder." 

– Socrates

Week 40: Adobe Illustrator

Dots & Circles © Karen Thiessen, 2012

This week's pattern is brought to you by distraction. Learning text from the manual has its interesting moments and I share those on Mondays. Hey, did you see the crude hand that I made for Monday's post? I'm proud of that! I look forward to moving on but I'm committed to not skip through the manual chapters that I think are dull. The section on layers was boring until I realized that the information was useful. The more I learn about text, the more respect I have for graphic designers. In the meanwhile, Dots & Circles is my pattern fix for the week.

Ant

Ant on peony bud; Photo credit Karen Thiessen's hubby, 2012

Ants are remarkable creatures. They are ordered, industrious and work together in communities called colonies. Oddly, they sound a lot like Mennonites. For the past fourteen years I've been working off-and-on a sprawling Russian Mennonite material culture project. Early in the project I interviewed elderly Mennonite women about the textiles that they made and used while still in South Russia (present-day Ukraine). I'm grateful that I gathered these interviews (from 1999-2003) because all of the women are now deceased. They told me stories that I never expected to hear. Naively, I thought textiles were a neutral subject. They weren't. I knew that the Mennonites who came to Canada in the 1920s had survived multiple horrors but would not talk about them. When I asked the elderly women about textiles, they unburdened themselves and told me about bandits, hunger, murder, sickness, and fear. Bandits stole clothing, thread, food, and people. They brought typhus laced lice. They raped, pillaged, murdered, burned houses and barns to the ground. To survive, Mennonites revived dormant silk industry skills and started raising silk worms in their kitchens so that they would have thread to mend clothing and knit socks. One woman cut up the skirt from her wedding dress to make diapers for her infant daughter. They made bread from floor sweepings and boiled plum branches to eat. Some survived, some did not. Those that survived carried on and worked together to rebuild their lives, a lot like ants.