Category: ships
peachy pink ship progress
I’ve got several ships in the works, this is another mini; it’s going to be very pale, tattered and feminine.
sails
More ships are coming soon, including a new non-translucent sort that resembles today’s horse alice. Lot’s of ship ideas have emerged from the horses. It was a perfect dry, sunny day in Brooklyn today for paper mache and dying fabric for sails. I need a drying rack (what I’d love is a clothes line), the window arrangement isn’t very efficient.
dioramas
I found this photo at the NYPL Picture Collection. The picture collection is one of my favorite places, it has saved me again and again (a little of it is online now). I love dioramas but I think I love photos of dioramas even more. This one has ships in it so what’s not to love? It’s sad and sweet, creepy, nostalgic and precious.
This quote from “Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art” talks about the fascination with miniaturization:
” The urge to create small worlds, however, is primordial. Humans seem genetically engineered to want to simulate the terrain of life and to see the world in miniature, or preserved as if in a time capsule. In dioramas, the concrete and the imaginary, the authentic and the artificial become magically intertwined. Writing about miniaturization in her book On Longing (Duke University Press, 1993), critic Susan Stewart notes that the atmosphere in a diorama is charged; mood and time are crystallized, and the viewer is given the extraordinary opportunity to step outside of his or her time and place to view life.”
a pink ship
I’m dying to work on my pink ship but just really don’t have time for a couple days at least and this one is going to require a trip the the fabric store. I think it’s going to be a little different than the two finished ships, brighter and mostly contemporary fabrics. 
Horse #25 picnic
Flying Colors
For the final whiplash I made a little ship. She’s fully underway with colors flying. It features the colors that have been on my mind most lately- teal and green.
two ships in the night
I hung two ships with paper skins to dry overnight.
They looked liked creepy cocoons
blowing in the breeze.
horse#19 Nell
I got pretty derailed today by a variety of really frustrating technical difficulties and didn’t accomplish anything even close to what I had hoped to. When all my technical issues finally got resolved I was distracted by my residual annoyance.
I did get today’s horse and a little ship work done though, I made a couple frames and just now got a layer of paper on one side of each frame.
.
I love waking up to a nice dry layer of paper mache.
back on track
Being two horses behind was driving me nuts. It couldn’t be helped though, the drive home on Friday was a miserable all day downpour type of affair so they had to wait till this morning. I’ve got 16 now and have a better sense what 100 is going to look like; much bigger than I had imagined and I’m starting to have some thoughts about what, if anything, to do with them when it’s over.
#15 Darger
#16 Finn
I went to the flea market and here’s what I got for $6.50.
Finally back to ship building! This one is a little brighter and more translucent. I’m going to try to get another frame built today.
These are some key ship building tools- The clamps were a gift but I think they came from home depot. I don’t know what I ever did without them. They’re light and have little swively grips. And floral tape, I love floral tape.
thanks
Wow, thanks for all the comments and kind words. The encouragement really means a lot and the other great thing about this whiplash deal is all the great blogs I’m seeing that I probably never would have. Amazing, inspiring stuff. I wish I had discovered this community a long time ago; it’s an incredible resource in lots of ways. I had to go out of town for work and I’m slightly brain dead now from an overly packed day and long drive. Tomorrow I’m hoping to finish early enough to go on a thrifting expedition on my way back to NY and if I’m very lucky maybe a brief visit to Ikea (need shelves desperately).
I plan on making up today’s horse tomorrow ( just can’t do it in a hotel) and then I’m hoping to have a weekend of ship building.
I hate having a post without a picture so I’m including this little study for a ship.
Bird Style
A little bird party, some birds quite chic and others more comfortable in
something classic.
Find a sewing pattern for little birds here.
And here’s my first pretty much done ship:
It’s Monday, so I made a horse. That little plan is working out for me in lots of ways: I’m making 100 so there’s no fear of a mistake and even if I don’t like the horse
I make it usually generates an idea, no do-overs allowed so I can’t obsess endlessly, I think the discipline has been good for me and it’s a fine way to start the day.
I finished a ship
I had a great ship building weekend and finally, pretty much, finished one. I’ve been thinking about, and working on these for a long, long time. The do-overs became endless. I ran out of daylight today so I’ll probably post it tomorrow but here’s a preview of a couple sails, a silhouette and some stuff I got at the 3rd St. ( Park Slope) flea market .
