Re-imagining the Book

I'm going to Tennessee.  Arrowmont Arts and Crafts in Gatlingburg, Tennessee specifically to take a workshop called "Reimagining Books."  Below is an example of the instructor's work.

So beautiful and so cool.  Coincidentally, I want to learn how to weave.  The course aims to marry form and function.  And so I think I'm going to take The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn Iggulden to read on my flight and then literally and metaphorically de-construct it and make some statement about toxic masculinity.

Sashiko Stitching: Wall Quilt Sampler

I've fallen in love with sashiko.  Below is a sampler called Cool Water Surface that I stitched on pre-printed indigo linen I bought from Fancy Tiger Crafts, and I'm already working on a second one.  However, I don't want to stitch these into small pillows and plan on making a sampler wall quilt instead.

I also want to integrate some other linens in the blue color palette below and have already seen light medium and dark blue as well as black linens at the fabric shop on which I want running stitches.

"dusty" blue, azure, bilberry, black, blue-gray, bright blue, bright cyan, color matching, cool shades of blue, dark cyan, heavenly, light blue, monochrome blue color palette, monochrome color palette, pastel cyan, shades of blue, silver blue.

Below is an example of what I want to do with my completed Sashiko samplers.

Ceramics: Design As Subtraction or Addition

Lately I've been obsessed in ceramics with making cylinders and then making lids or bottoms to turn them into basically what is a round box.  And isn't that what design is?  The arrangement of shapes in a composition?  

Above are the salt and pepper cellars I made while playing around one morning with round cookie cutters and some sculpture mix.  I made the lids to the containers by scoring and slipping co-centric circles together to fit into the top .  What stirs me is design at its simplest or its basic geometric form.  I injected contrast into the pair with color: Jim Bob glaze and Stormy Blue glaze.