…looking for anything that caught my interest. Some will be used to create fabric designs. Some are just for looking at.
Detail of agave leaf.
Seeds caught in a web. Ever since I got bit by a spider and ended up with a blister the size of a golf ball, I have killed any spider I see in the house. I normally don’t go near spider webs.
This is a flower spike from a red yucca. They bloom in the spring. This one is blooming now. It seems as if the plants are reacting to climate change.
I’m not sure what this is. It looks like an itty bitty cactus growing from seed. It sort of looks like a cholla (choy-ah). If that’s what it is, it has to go. Cholla have nasty spines that once imbedded in skin are incredibly difficult to pull out.
I know I want to use the bottom photo for fabric designs, but I’m not sure what I want to do with the top photo.
A bit of fast designing. I’m liking the bottom one.
I can do one (or both) of two things when I have anxiety. I can either eat a couple gallons of rocky road ice cream or I can knit. While waiting for the results of a biopsy (turned out to be not cancer, thank you God) I worked on a stress afghan.
First, I bought two big skeins of yarn. That’s what’s at the bottom of the afghan. Then, I realized two skeins weren’t enough so I bought more yarn. That’s what the rest of the afghan looks like. While it may not be great art, it’s nice to snuggle under.
The full moon this month was a super moon. I shot moonrise.
And I shot moonset.
There are problems getting the sky right when shooting the moon. The moon is so bright that it throws off the light metering.
The antidote is to put the landscape into the photo.
Fall in western New York, where I’m from, is yellow, gold, and red. Fall in the desert is mostly green with a bit of white and yellow tossed in.
Itty bitty flowering plant that flowers in the fall.
This is what the flower looks like up close.
So far, this barrel cactus has survived a two-decade drought. But something weird is growing on top of the cactus.
I’ve no idea what this is. I don’t think it’s a seed pod and I have never seen a barrel cactus grow a little cactus.
I’ve no idea what this is, but I thought it looked interesting.
A few flowers cling to the desert sage bush. The bush flowers after it rains and it hasn’t rained in a while. I doubt more rain now would trigger blooming. The shrubs know it’s fall and time to rest.
I decided to take my commissions from Spoonflower sales and order sheets. This is the pattern I used. What I love about the Spoonflower sheets is the fitted sheet actually fits the mattress and the top sheet is generous.
There’s something weird growing on my arm. It changed colors. It grew larger. The border is erratic. The thing is scaly. All the stuff that indicates cancer. I saw the dermatologist. He said it wasn’t melanoma, the most dangerous skin cancer. He did a biopsy. I will have to wait at least a week for the pathology report to find out what this thing is.
In the meantime, I find myself making a bucket list. There are two trips I want to take. One is to New York City to shop at Mood. I want to fondle fancy fabric and buy the kinds of fabric I’ve never worked with. The second is a Hawaiian cruise. I’d like to spend a couple extra days and see Volcanos National Park. I want to see flowers and green in the winter. I want to swim in the ocean again. I will take Brady on both trips. I will have to have some forms filled out by the vet for the Hawaii trip.
My iPad is from 2017. It still works, but it does’t have all the bells and whistles the new iPad Pro has. I ordered one this morning from the campus bookstore. Along with educational pricing, I get a free iPencil. I need a more powerful drawing program in order to design more fabric. I also need to work on the second novel. I’m at the point where stuff gets written only to get pruned.
I have a few bra kits in my sewing room. I need to sew them. I need to sew slacks to wear to school. I’ve got a free pattern from Mood and need to make a muslin.
I am frozen. I’m finding it hard to get going on projects.
I still have photography. I got my first SLR for Valentine’s Day 1980. I took that camera everywhere and shot everything. I got my latest DSLR for Valentine’s Day 2020. I take the camera everywhere and shoot everything.
I did some landscape/outdoor photography today. I’m able to walk farther and stand longer although I still have limitations.
Fall in southern New Mexico doesn’t look like fall in New York. Instead of reds, yellows, oranges just before the leaves fall, we get green. We don’t get rain in the spring; we get rain in the summer. This is one of the wildflowers that grow and bloom this time of year.
These are chocolate flowers. You can’t eat them, but they smell like the finest chocolate. Because it’s cooler, I could take this shot after lunch. In the summer, the flowers go to seed within a few hours.
This is one of the desert sage growing in my yard. The shrub is triggered to bloom when there’s sufficient humidity. The bushes will bloom several times during the summer. The flowers only last a. couple days and then the ground is purple.
Why did I think hand quilting this would be a great idea?
It’s taking forever and I’m not having fun doing the hand quilting. I’m at the point where I need to get this finished before I can’t stand to look at it anymore.
I use my photography to design fabric.
No idea how this will turn out, but I think it’s an image that will yield great fabric designs.
I accidentally moved the camera and got a blurry image. Great! I can play with this and make a fabric design.
Maybe. I’m not sure the photo is broken up enough for a good design.
This could become a quilted panel.
We’ve had rain and the desert sage bushes have been triggered to bloom. The blooms only last a couple days. Then, all the flowers wither and fall off.
I played with this in editing. Note the areas of green cheese. I’m taking an astronomy class and I doubt any of the other students ever heard of the moon being made of green cheese. The composition of the moon was learned long before the other students were born. It’s a pity. They missed out on a time when there was magic in the night sky.
I’m so tired of physical setbacks. I broke my foot in December. Foot surgery in February. Six weeks in a wheelchair. Four weeks pushing a walker. Physical therapy. Going to the gym to build up muscle and to regain strength. Fell off my tricycle, bruised my tailbone, bruised my abdomen, major scrap on my shin for which I should have gone to the Emergency Room, and I’m regressing. I feel like curling up in a ball and sleeping for a month or so.
I noticed I’ve got some blooming cactus in the back yard, so I grabbed my camera.
We’re in a multi-year drought and we’ve lost cactus.
There was more to photograph, but I am limited on how much walking I can do, and I had reached my limit. Which is one of the reasons I’m frustrated and bummed out.
It’s easy to get side tracked if you’re an artist. It’s especially easy if one of your media is photography. I was about to make myself some oatmeal for breakfast and I looked out the window. Fog on the mountain! Fog is rare in the desert. I grabbed the camera. Clad in PJs and slippers, I went into the back yard and started photographing.
Fog eating the Robledo Mountains.
Fog eating the Dona Ana Mountains.
We don’t often get rain, and it has rained hard the last couple of days.
Raindrops on Desert Sage.
Some photos aren’t meant to be pretty. I used the one below will be used for designing fabric and put nine new designs in my Spoonflower shop.
I’m still struggling to get myself put back together. After the phone pole jumping out in front of my electric tricycle and causing several booboos, owies, a bruised tailbone and a sprained thumb, I lost two weeks at the gym. Now, I have to backtrack a bit to get to where I was before I fell off my tricycle. I’m planing on getting back into the gym on Monday. This inability to do the things I want to do is frustrating, anxiety causing, and a PITA.
I am working my way back to healthy by going to the gym and working out, doing exercises at home, and riding a bike. I am prone to vertigo so a two-wheel bike is a horrible option. So I got a tricycle. An electric tricycle with pedal assist. I got an expensive helmet and flashing lights so people would see me when I’m riding my tricycle. I took my trike for a ride. Everything was going great until a telephone pole jumped out in front of me. When I hit the pole, I rammed the handlebars into my abdomen and slammed my tailbone against the seat. I put a serious scrap on my shin. Although I was bleeding, my sock never ripped. This getting in shape business is tough work. The shin is healing, the bruises are starting to disappear, and my tailbone hurts. Fortunately, my helmet had a great warranty. Because I fell, I got a new helmet for free.
I got the little person sewn down. I was doing hand quilting along the bars, but if it hurts to sit, I’m not going to get much done. I do want to translate this into a painting.
I’ve added some jewelry to my online store, Deb Thuman Art. I’ve got a pile of jewelry that I made and I need to get it all in my store. If I put three items into my store each day, in about a month, I’ll be up to date. Maybe. Provided I don’t make anything new.
These are all in my store here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com. There’s a necklace to match the blue/green earrings.
The photos are a tad odd because I had to crop them like crazy to use them in my store. Now when I put them in a blog post, the background gets a little weird. It’s always something.
We lost power for a couple hours because we had a rollicking thunderstorm with pouring rain. This made for some rain photos.
I’ve got the strips of fabric sewn together. Using a one-way fabric was interesting. I had to make sure all the eyes were going in the same direction.
I’ve drafted the little person. Now to figure out where the little person should be.
Next, I’m auditioning thread.
I think this one is going to be both hand and machine quilted. I’m thinking about how I can quilt barbed wire between the bars. I’ll outline the little person and the bars by hand.
I hit a sale at Superior Threads and my latest batch of thread arrived in the mail today.
Some of the thread is designed for hand quilting. Some will be for the embroidery machine. Some will be for the sewing room.
I’m having a peripheral neuropathy flareup. One of the sure antidotes to the pain is to make art. I had a major depressive episode Monday, and saw the beginnings of a quilt in my head. Or maybe it’s the beginnings of a painting. I’m not entirely sure. I thought about how bipolar disorder, or any DSM-V label, separates the person with the illness from the rest of the world. Like the time I listened to a woman clearly old enough to know better talk trash about someone who had bipolar disorder. When I told her I have bipolar disorder, she literally backed away from me. Gotta watch out for those mental illness cooties.
I dug out my box of fabric and started auditioning fabric for this quilt.
This usually takes a long time. Today was not usually. Today, the fabrics jumped out of the box and insisted on being put together. I was careful about values. How many times have quilters gotten out fabrics and then realized every fabric was a medium value. The red is medium bordering on dark, but I didn’t find a fabric I liked better.
Start here:
End here.
I”ve been playing around with moon shots lately. We’ve had partially cloudy skies and I wanted to get some of the cloud feeling into the shot. The shot, without any editing, is the top photo. I shoot in RAW rather than JPEG. Current thinking is that because modern sensors are so much more sensitive, there’s no need for RAW. RAW files are huge and take up a whole lot of room on the hard drive or the external storage. I don’t use the cloud. I don’t trust the security and someone dumping child pornography into your cloud account can net you many years in a federal prison. Worse, because cloud users don’t own the cloud, the feds don’t need users’ permission to run barefoot through all the person has stored. Because the user doesn’t own the cloud, the user’s standing to contest the warrant or warrentless search is likely nil. Translation: if the feds find child pornography in your area of the cloud, you’re screwed.
The RAW advantage is the sensor records far more detail than JPEG. That advantage is critical when doing nature photography and you have only what nature has given you to work with. When I adjusted the exposure, the background was revealed. The photo is a whole lot more intriguing than the sky was when I took the original shot.
I’ve been playing around with photos in editing with the intention of using the final photo to design fabric. Lately, my Spoonflower shop has gotten a lot of traffic and I’ve had some sales. You can find my designs here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
I wanted to go to the No Kings demonstration yesterday. I planned on it. I didn’t go.
I’m still doing rehab following a broken foot. I can only stand for so long or walk so far without a walker. Because the demonstration was in a park, I’d have to be pushing a walker over grass. That’s not easy. It meant if there had been any sort of problem and I needed to leave in a hurry, or out run a bullet, I couldn’t. I still planned on going. I had wanted to photograph the demonstration. I got up, looked at the air quality index, and realized I needed to stay home. The air quality was solidly in the poor range.
Our poor air quality, which has been going on for several days, is because of two wildfires in the Gila Wilderness. The fires are more than 200 miles west of us so we are in no danger from the fires. All the crud in the air from the fires is blithely floating by my house. This is causing an allergic reaction.
This is what I saw the other night. Looks pretty, right?
Tweaking the photo in editing shows what the camera “saw”. Those vivid blues are courtesy of air pollution from the fires.
I saw photos of the local No Kings demonstration this morning. There were more people than I expected. There was someone with a “Free Palestine” sign. Apparently this person is utterly ignorant of Israel’s history. Israel left Gaza in 2005. In 2006, led by hatred, the people of Gaza voted Hamas into power.
Another person was wearing a keffiheh. The only reason for anyone in this country to wear such a thing is to advertise the wearer’s hatred of Jews.
I’m now glad I stayed home.
I’m slowly recovering from the broken foot and have been able to do some photography outside.
The Dona Ana Mountains about a half hour after sunrise.
The view from my backyard a half hour after sunrise. Yes, I know there’s a dead yucca spike smack in the middle of the shot. Yes, I know it shouldn’t be there.
This was taken about an hour before sunset last night. I liked how the light was on the cactus.
This is what a cactus dying from thirst looks like. Note the tiny tuna developing on the cactus pad. There were incredibly few blooms in the desert this spring. We had less than half the average amount of rain last year. When the annual rainfall is about 10 inches, missing half of it is disastrous. Monsoon season – don’t laugh that’s what it’s called here – started June 1. Since then, we’ve had less than a half inch of rain.
I had made a couple pairs of pajama bottoms from knit fabric I got at JoAnn’s. The fabric had an incredibly short lifespan and developed holes faster than I could patch them. That’s what happens with cheap fabric. I hit a sale at Mood and bought cotton knit for three pairs of pajama bottoms. I started on one pair yesterday.
This is for the pair that’s in progress.
A future pair.
The other future pair.
Because fabric from Mood is so often wider than what I could get from JoAnn’s, I’m discovering I can make gym shorts and pajama bottoms from the fabric. I need gym shorts as well as pajamas.
I saw the surgeon on Tuesday, and my foot is healed! No more boot! I can’t walk around barefoot. I need to wear arch supports in my shoes – something I’ve been doing for years. Now that I’m able to walk again, I’ve developed new pains. I’m so used to sitting or being hunched over a walker, that my hips and lower back need help. Part of the problem with wearing a boot is that no matter what I do with my shoe on the non-broken foot, my legs aren’t the same length. I’ve got an appointment with my chiropractor in two weeks to get everything aligned correctly.
Being able to walk again, I took some moon shots last night. There’s a tiny sliver of a moon. I used a long shutter speed and moved the camera around. I merged. two shots in editing and then started playing.
I finished another bra. This one has free standing lace that I made on my embroidery machine. Even after washing out the stabilizer, the lace is pretty stiff.
I was having a depressive episode, so I made Brady some bandanas.
I finished sewing this one this morning but I haven’t yet photographed the finished bandana.
I made another wild moon shot by taking several shots and doing a focus merge.
This is what the moon really looked like.
I woke up in pain at 4:30 AM. The only reliable pain killer for neuropathy is art, so I went out and shot the sunrise.
Going outside has caused a major allergy attack. I’ve taken two decongestants and an antihistamine and I’m still feeling miserable. Bleah.
I’ve finally reached the point where I can start to integrate the crap that happened to me growing up, feel the feelings it wasn’t safe to feel then, and start to heal both mentally and physically. If you’re wondering what I’m writing about, it’s child abuse. My mother was a violent, drunken narcissist who had four children she didn’t want and made real sure we knew she didn’t want us. Her husband was a violent drunk. By the time I was 10, I had myself and three siblings to raise. I mirrored what I was my mother doing and did a lousy job of raising myself and siblings. I grew up hiding in my room so I wouldn’t have to hear them yell, literally, at me and hit me. I had no idea there was anything unusual about my family. At the age of 9, I had such severe depression that even the kids in my class noticed. One boy asked me what was wrong. His words had to go through many layers of water before I could hear them. Then, I had to formulate an answer, and the words had to go through many layers of water before I could say them. I eventually told him nothing was wrong. I wasn’t lying or covering anything up. I truly had no idea that there was any other kind of family.
I’ve been reading The Body Keeps The Score. It’s not an easy book to read and I can only read it in small doses. I’ve been doing micro-dosing with ketamine for little longer than a year and I finally found a therapist who takes my insurance and accepts new patients. The combination is allowing me to feel what I felt at the time the crap was happening. I’m even getting the stress pains I had at the time. It sucks. But it’s the only way to integrate what happened into whole memories and process them into something I can live with. At the moment, they are fractured memories that cause a plethora of physical problems.
Meanwhile, I’m working my way through the current trauma of a hate crime, antisemitism, and confronting terrorist wannabes – students being manipulated by real terrorists and being conned into thinking antisemitism is a good thing. I’m angry. I’m pissed. I want to scream. I’m considering a civil rights suit against the university.
And so I’m not myself. I’m having reactions out of proportion to events. I’m sounding like a crazed woman. I’m not having fun. It sucks.
Art. It ain’t called art therapy for nothing. I can lose myself in art. I can figure myself out in art. So often, I don’t understand what’s going on inside of me until it comes out of my hands. I’m working on a sequel to the novel I finished. Like the first novel, the main characters are a woman who is my age, Jewish, and a criminal defense attorney. Her lover is a police officer. In the first novel, I wrote about an officer involved shooting, mental illness and people who are homeless. (Unhoused is such a sanitary, offensive PC word and I won’t use it.) This time, I’ll be writing about antisemitism and hate crimes. What’s inside of me needs a voice. I’m considering taking a writing class in the fall. That could be dangerous for me. I’m hoping I can bring Brady, my service dog in training and the world’s cutest labradoodle, to class with me.
I’ve been playing around with my embroidery machine. And I’ve been surfing eBay for embroidery thread bargains. I found a doozy and it will arrive on Monday. I’ve played a bit with making my own designs.
The ferns are my design, the border is a stock design from the embroidery machine.
I bought a set of Hebrew fonts and started playing with them. The Hebrew is shalom. Shalom is one of those multi-purpose words. It’s use for hello, goodby and peace. Peace meaning the absence of war, but also a deep personal inner peace. The Star of David is done with variegated thread and I like how it came out.
We had a particularly bright moon last night. It’s a smidge past full, but well worth photographing. I used a 400mm lens. Sure would be nice to have something like a 12,000 mm lens, but that’s far outside of my photography budget.
This is a mindless landscape I painted so I could have a mental health break from all the emotional paintings I did this semester. This one was fun. It’s not great art, but it was something I needed to give my brain a rest.
I thought this was going to be a fun little painting. I had taken several shots of a smiley moon and did a focus merge. That should have given me one very detailed smiley moon. Something went awry, and I got this wild photo with moons all over the place. I thought it might be fun to paint. Not wanting to use up all my black ink, I put the photo into a negative and printed out something intriguing. I thought it would be a nice abstract design. Then I decided I wanted to work with just one color of paint – Da Vinci Soulshine – plus black and white. And that’s how I got all the colors. I am not thrilled with this painting, but it set off a series of ideas in my head. This will be a series next semester.
The original weird focus merge is below.
Finally a decent photo of the painting about the events of October 7, 2023 as reported in The NY Times (a notoriously anti-Israel newspaper).
I survived facing down terrorists on Monday. Classes are done for the spring semester and I get a three month break before I need to worry about my personal safety again. I didn’t realize how much a hate crime, pro-hamas terrorists on campus, and feeling alone had affected me until I realized I have been six 5 times in 5 months. The last time I was sick this often was when I was in kindergarten. I had never been around kids until I started school and there were no vaccines against childhood diseases back then. I had both kinds of measles, mumps, and chickenpox all while I was in kindergarten. Since the first week of December, I’ve had covid (and I’m fully vaccinated and boosted), bronchitis, a UTI, an infected hair follicle, and the flu. I haven’t had bronchitis in about 15 years. I haven’t had the flu in about 20 years (I get a flu shot every year). I haven’t had a UTI in at least 5 years. I’ve never had an infected hair follicle. After finally finding a therapist who would take my insurance, I started therapy this past Tuesday.
I bought an embroidery machine, bought some additional embroidery patterns, and dyed some tee shirts.
A bit off center, but I’m learning. This is the small version of the Star of David. I’d like to try the large version – maybe on a tote bag. But I like how the dye came out on the tee shirt.
Now that I’m 71-year-old walker pushing bad ass who doesn’t back down from terrorists, perhaps I need an appropriately bad ass tattoo. I’m not a tattoo kind of person. Tattoos to me are like wallpaper. If I paint a room and get tired of the color after a few years, I go to the store, buy more paint, and repaint the room. Easy. Wallpaper is another matter. Putting wallpaper up is a PITA and taking wallpaper off the wall is a PITA times a factor of 10. Tattoos are like wallpaper and I get bored too easily. So, no tattoos for me. But I have having major emotional fallout and I went in search of an appropriately bad ass type tattoo. I didn’t find anything remotely bad ass. I did find a tattoo that said: Have The Courage To Live, anyone can die. I thought the last part was superfluous, so I embroidered Have the COURAGE to LIVE onto a tee shirt I had dyed.
I took the third tee shirt I had dyed and added Laurel Burch designed. The shirt looks much better now that I’ve removed the thread lines and washed the shirt. Laurel Burch designs are fun….especially considering I’ve a penchant for variegated threads. Makes for stripes in odd places, but cute nonetheless.
At the moment I’ve got three dye buckets going. Three tee shirts and enough cotton fabric for four large dog bandanas. I intend to embroider on all the tee shirts and bandanas.
It’s a Babylock Meridian 2 – a stand alone embroidery machine. I have a Pfaff Quilt Expression 4.2 sewing machine which I love, so there’s no need for me to have a combination sewing and embroidery machine.
I had my first lesson yesterday. We made a gnome appliqué and attached it to a tea towel.
I had died a length of linen a gorgeous shade of green. And then discovered there isn’t enough fabric to make a pair of slacks. I’m not sure if I’m going to make shorts or a blouse out of the fabric. At the moment, I’m working on a pair of slacks made from a print of eyes. Lots and lots of eyes. Here’s looking at you, kid. .
The iris are blooming. It’s a short iris season here in the desert.
We had a smiley moon the other night. It was setting so I had to take photos fast. I was having problems with the exposure. Fortunately, I was shooting in RAW and was able to retrieve the images.
Next, I decided to take all of the shots and do a focus merge. Usually, the images line up. This was not usually.
I want to use this as the starting point for an abstract painting. I needed to print the photo, but I didn’t want to use all that black ink. So I made a negative and I’ll use that to guide my painting.
Deb's Art 