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June 17th – Full Moon and witchiness

The Lost Words

Kristian bought me a book for my birthday that I had been pining for. It’s called The Lost Words, A Spell Book. It is a big beautifully illustrated picture book, ostensibly for children. The Oxford Dictionary has been taking words like acorn and dandelion out to make room for words like selfie and pwned. Robert McFarlane and Jackie Roberts made this book to keep those words in our mouths – to make sure these important pieces of nature don’t fall away from our language and hearts.
I am working on a project (that will likely take years) where I will add my magic to theirs. Making pieces of beaded weirdness inspired by these words. The contemplation of each work as I stitch it into my frames will contribute to the spell of keeping these words in circulation.

Hello Moon project with Brianne Burnell

Download file

One of my fave things is collaborating with other artists. I love the organic way things come together and how unpredictable the results are. Brianne and I can’t wait to work together on something more large scale. This project was a fun foray into figure possibilities! And we wanted to share that with you. Brianne sent me the image for the small frames I use – those little round ones I use are 6.5 inches across. I printed it out on a sheet of iron-on transfer paper on my ink jet printer and ironed it onto a piece of plain poly-cotton broadcloth. Then I hooped it up and voila! Started letting the weird beads assemble themselves into geodesic domes.

  1. Download image.
  2. Flip image if required by iron-on transfer paper. It will tell you in the instructions if required.
  3. Print out on home printer. I used the $5 sheets from Staples because I’d never used them before and wasn’t sure how well it would work. They worked great! Plus I only messed up one, so I have four more, as there are 6 sheets in a pack.
  4. Iron on to your fabric. I followed their instructions to the letter. The only thing that messed me up is that they say to put the iron on for the first press, then lift up and move the iron over for the next press. Nah. That left a crease the shape of the iron through Bri’s moon image. The next time around I just moved the iron smoothly around in a more normal ironing motion and that time I didn’t get any crease marks.
  5. Boom! Ready to bead onto. I really hope you do! I can’t wait to see what you make. I might make a video of the process for this, I just wanted to make sure I tested everything in advance for you and didn’t want to be late on my newsletter again this week. Please let me know if you have any extra questions. xo

Here is my piece so far. I have more things to stick onto this, it’s going to get more crazy.