Prompt Challenge – Green Chair Press Blog

Portraits

Recently Etsy changed their default, generic avatar to this rather androgynous one (the previous image was decidedly female). It’s sort of creepy looking, if you’re asking…

While many sellers replaced the generic avatar with something else, Etsy began encouraging shop owners to use pictures of themselves, rather than a pet or product, to better emphasis the personal quality of our shops. Since I opened my shop in 2006 (yikes!), I used this image I drew of myself

But very quickly, a handful of people decided to use the generic image as the basis for an image of themselves, rather than using a photo. I’ve quite enjoyed watching this creative play. And I liked how some of them incorporated their shop name or artform into the picture as well. Here are a couple of examples…

Prompt Challenge: Replete

The word for my prompt challenge group this month was “replete.”

replete: adjective & noun.
► adjective: Filled or abundantly supplied with or with a thing or things.
► noun. A thing that is replete; spec. a honeypot ant distended with stored food.

I decided to do a very practical response to the word. I have a hard time keeping track of all my projects and (especially) half-formed ideas. There are notes and sketches pinned next to my desk. There’s several notebooks with lists and more notes. And a spreadsheet attempting to keep track of progress on various things. And a shelf of half-done books. I collected up all of these things and made a a set of playing cards, each with one idea or half-done project and some lines to keep notes. There are 50 cards, plus a couple of blanks. Then I made a box to keep them in.

My first idea is that when I’m at a loss for what to do next, I’ll pull out a card and work on whatever it says. Or I can got thru them and see what I’d like to make progress on. Or, when going through them, I’ll remember something I wanted to work on but forgot about. Time will tell if this style of organization is any better than the previous scatter shot one!

replete

Prompt Challenge: Embroider

The word for my prompt challenge group this month is “embroider.” I knew immediately I wanted to use embroider in the “add fictitious or exaggerated details to make something more interesting” sense of the word. Then I saw Carol Blinn’s fabric book and I knew I wanted to try something with hand sewing and fabric. The pleasure (and challenge) of these prompts is making a book combining things I know with some skill I’m not as comfortable with. Sometimes the balance is off though, and this month I fumbled around a lot with too much of what I didn’t know!
My first step seemed safe enough—I investigated embroidery stitches and decided I could probably safely do cross-stitching. Then I went to the fancy fabric store in town and got completely overwhelmed, over-awed and side-tracked. I came home with this:

Embroider: Starting materials

If you sew, you’ll know that I should have bought something linen-y, not something meshy. I spent several days trying to make the fabric work with my limited embroidery skills until I noticed that Carol had used french knots in her book. French knots don’t work at all on meshy fabric, they just fall through the holes, but with the proper (tighter weave) fabric I could use the knots to make what I hoped would be interesting patterns. So back to the fabric store for an embroidery hoop and some new fabric.
As I practiced making french knots, I realized I could use them to write words in braille—the dot patterns would meet my criteria of “interesting” and if the words were synonyms of “embroider,” I’d be working in the meaning of embroider I was looking for. Here’s “puff up”

Embroider: French knot practice

The words I chose: misrepresent, ornament, make much of, embellish, disguise, upgrade. I made 5×7″ “pages” out of my fabric and sewed the words onto them, then bound them into a book using Claire Van Vliet’s single sheet woven method.

Embroider: first book try

I knew the others in my group would like this book because it was so not me! The binding is loose. The edges are frayed. It’s messy. It does feel nice in the hand and I really like the verso pages because you can see where the sewing comes through. It was also a novelty using an iron to make folds rather than a bone folder.
I meant to stop at this point and declare victory, but the book idea kept gnawing at me. Not to mention that I had enjoyed mastering the french knot! It dawned on me to incorporate more of what I was comfortable with into the book, so I tried sewing french knots into paper. The more fabric-y paper I pulled out first—rives BFK—didn’t work. But thicker, crisper 80# French paper did very well.
After I’d sewn a few pages, I thought “why not blind stamp the word above the embroidery.” So I set some type and used my letterpress to do just that. Here’s the cover, a spread, and then a close up of one of the pages. Now I was ready to stop—this book kept what I liked about the fabric book but is much more of my neat and tidy style.

Embroider: cover

Embroider: spread

Prompt Challenge: Derived

Here’s the third and last matchbox I did for the September meeting of my prompt challenge group. It’s part of my artist in a matchbox series, and the artist is Julian Schnabel. In the 80s and 90s he made huge mixed media paintings on canvases covered in broken plates. It’s probably apocryphal, but I’ve heard the glue didn’t adhere very well and the plate pieces regularly fell off. In the box are tiny painted, broken plates. See Schnabel’s plate paintings here.

Broken Plate Artist in a Matchbox, Green Chair Press

Prompt Challenge: Derived

Here’s the second matchbox book I did for the September meeting of my prompt challenge group. It’s part of my artist in a matchbox series, and the artist is John James Audubon, the 19th century bird illustrator.
What inspired me was a poem I read 10 or so years ago by the poet David Wagner. He often writes about birds, and his poem The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct vividly describes the tension of how to accurately draw a bird—often 19th century bird illustrators caught and killed the birds they wanted to draw, so it seemed fitting that a box about Audubon should include bird specimens (that I drew and cut out). The top has a US postage stamp, commemorating Audubon with his illustration of the birds in the box.

Audubon Artist in a Matchbox, Green Chair Press

Prompt Challenge: Derived

The September word for my prompt challenge group was “derived.” I decided to look at the definition “originate; come or descend from” and work on some ideas for my artist in a matchbox series. This is the first one, based on Emily Dickinson, the mid-19th century American poet. She didn’t publish much during her lifetime, and when she died, her sister found hundreds of poems in Dickinson’s bedroom desk. Some were copied neatly into little pamphlets, but many were written on scraps of paper, old envelopes, as well as the margins of letters and newspapers. My little box contains all those things.