The Center for Creative Works serves people with intellectual disabilities by helping them to achieve their creative potential. CCW started as a sheltered workshop model in the 1970’s and evolved into an arts program where participants could gain art skills, and sell their art.
You can support this wonderful organization by making a purchase from their online gift shop.
I have to admit that the prospect of free food where I don’t have to go out with some creepy guy has always held a measure of attraction for me. So when I met the women pictured below at Art for the Cash Poor,
And saw the tasty baklava, and kolwashkor rolls stuffed with pistachio nuts, I was sold.
Seriously, they were there representing the Arab American Development Corporation which has a branch in Philadelphia. Aside from tasty desserts, and a henna tattoo on my hand, I came away with a better understanding of the Arab American community in my own backyard.
Their web site contains an abundance of information about Arab American identity and culture. Take a look. Below are some links to posts I’ve written about Arabic contributions to the arts.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to smooth the bottom of bisque fired pottery. Simply take a square of 80 grit wet-dry sandpaper and affix it to your wheel head with a glue stick. Hold your pot bottom to the sandpaper and spin. This will kick up dust, so you might not want to do it in a shared space. You should also wear a mask. You can sponge a little water onto the sandpaper to unclog it and to cut down on dust. When you’re done, just wipe off the wheel with a towel and it’s clean again.
Here’s a video I just came across on YouTube with some great pointers for sanding safely. Try dipping the bottom of your pot in water before using the wheel. I think this would be more effective than wetting the sandpaper on the wheel.
I did something different today. I wrote a letter. A real letter, not a card. With a pen. In cursive. On notepaper. And I addressed it. And put a stamp on it. There’s a mail box on the corner across from my house. I fought my fear that there were corona virus germs on the mail box handle. I pulled the handle down, and dropped the letter through the slot.  And then I looked across the street toward St. Paul’s church and saw this.
Actually, St. Peter is the one in the picture. How do I know? Peter’s the one with the keys to the pearly gates and I think the big book he’s holding is where all your transgressions are recorded. You die, you go to the pearly gates of heaven,and St. Peter meets you like a bouncer at an exclusive night club and decides whether you get in.
How do I know all this? Twelve years of Catholic school. That and the fact that I had a mother who had a hard time allowing herself to relax, and enjoy something like a nice outfit or a yummy dessert without feeling guilty. And when I got older, I would ask her, “Why tease yourself? It’s not like there’s a prize for the person who suffers the most. It’s not like St. Peter’s gonna meet you at the pearly gates with a ******* Kewpie doll.”
St. Paul is down at the end of the block out of camera range, and he is wearing a mask too. And he’s holding a sword to smack the heads of passers by who might not be wearing a mask or observing proper social distancing. Which is why I did not go down there to take his picture. Because even though I was wearing a mask, I knew he was down there waiting to see if I would screw up. Twelve years of Catholic school will do that. I’m scarred for life.
Try something different and see what happens. It just might spark your creativity.
Stay safe and well.
My friend Gladys Glass operates the Woodstock Trading Company with her son Seth and husband Harvey. Woodstock specializes in vintage one-of-a-kind Rock ‘n Roll memorabilia. and Rock ‘n Roll oriented gifts, clothing, incense, posters and novelties. (Their store is closed because of the Coronavirus, but you can shop on line. They ship anywhere in the US. )
Until the coronavirus stopped all that. It’s been hard not just for business, but also because of the loss of social interaction that people really need.
Gladys was recently commiserating with her friend Suzanne about how difficult the isolation and social distancing can be, and suggested the idea of stringing beads of “hope” to mark the days in isolation. She thought that sharing the beaded creations with like-minded people would be a good way to stay connected. A few days later, Suzanne called Gladys back to tell her she and her friend Galen had created a web site so people could do just that. It’s called Safe-String.Com.
Safe-String.com is a free site whose purpose is to help its users “navigate stress, panic, raw nerves, uncertainty, and loss during one of the most challenging episodes in human history.” And it uses beads to connect people to one another.
The Safe-String.com site offers a forum where its users can share their creations and ideas. The forum topics are not limited to beading. One asks, “What expectations of normal are you letting go of today?” Another asks, “Who have you checked in on today?”
If you are interested in joining the forums but need beads, you can buy a kit from Woodstock which contains 31 random beads, spacers, string, and ending finial as an ornamental bead stopper. Also included as a bonus is a hand-painted card, gift bag, and instructions.
But you don’t need to buy a thing to participate in safe-string.com or to join the forums. You can make beads from cloth. You can make beads from paper and old magazines. And you can string anything with a hole it it.
Stay well and keep washing those hands.
Most of us are stuck at home and the more fortunate of us are merely apprehensive or bored. Not knowing what’s going to happen is a scary, but think about it-when did we ever know what the future held? And if we did, who among us is smart enough to know what to do with it? With brings me to today’s question:
Should we wear face masks to protect ourselves from the coronavirus? Here’s one point of view.  Here’s the other.  This link goes to an article that says that DIY face masks can offer protection from coronavirus. I am not prepared to debate this with anyone because I simply don’t know the answer. I have resolved this question for myself with an “off label” application of Pascal’s wager.  I know that wearing a face mask does not offer immunity or an excuse to dispense with hand washing, etc. But if you are already taking all the precautions you can, how can it hurt? That leaves the question of where to get face masks. They have become a precious commodity.
I already have some N 95 respirators that I use for enameling and metalwork. But you can’t wash them and they say to throw them away after one use. Who knows how long the pandemic will last? I need a better face mask option.  For me, the option is to make some face masks. Will they offer any protection?  As you can see from the chart below,  certain materials offer more protection than others.
I don’t have many vacuum cleaner bags, but I have many dish towels (a more accurate description would be old fashioned tea towels-a closely woven cotton fabric made for drying dishes and glass ware). Here is a link to the kind of tea towels you would use to make face masks. I would not use terrycloth or micro fiber. You have to breathe while you wear the mask.
There are many sites with directions for sewing face masks. Most of them use two or three layers of material. The tea towel fabric is tightly woven, however, so you will have to adapt any pattern you use to make it work for you. A single layer with a thin cotton fabric as a liner might be best. I plan to experiment.
Here are some links if you are interested in making face masks.
Medical Mask for cancer or COPD patient (including child’s masks)
Hand-sewn mask
And here is some helpful advice from Ana Belchi
Since I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, the CDC has changed its no face mask position. Â The CDC now advises that wearing non-medical grade face masks might help to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Â For instructions on how to make a no-sew face mask, press here.
I start off with a confession. I am horrible at following patterns. I am not making this up. OK, I can follow sewing patterns because they are all flat on the table and you have a basic idea of what you are supposed to come out with. But I could never pull off a paint-by-number picture when I was a kid and my first attempts at origami went into the trash can. I can, for the most part, follow simple beading patterns. (In fact, one of my first published articles was a beading project.) But unless I can count beads easily, I am lost. This means I am mostly ok with loom graphs, Cellini Spirals, bead crochet and flat peyote graphs. So I learned how to make a peyote triangle with little trouble.
When I began to salivate over beaded kaleidocycles, (you can read all about them and download a free pdf from the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork website here) and wanted to try making one, I hopped over to YouTube to learn how to make peyote triangles. ( VPBiser has an excellent video tutorial here.) But for the life of me I could not figure out how to make anything more interesting than a two-color basic triangle and I wanted some more exciting variations for my kaleidocycles.
After making a few peyote triangles, I began to notice some patterns emerging.  I figured out how to make a three-color pyramid! (See chart below. I am assuming you already know how to make a standard peyote triangle).
You can use the same reasoning to make a two-color pyramid. If you simply alternate colors for each row, you can make a striped pattern.(See kaleidocycle picture in the bottom row.
You can see that for some triangles, I merely beaded rows in different colors much like you would crochet granny squares.  For the triangles in the bottom left-hand corner, I started the triangle with white Delicas for the first two rows and began adding red Delicas in the third row. From then on, I added a red Delica whenever I could see that it would be totally surrounded by white Delicas. This gave me a lovely chicken pox pattern.  If you double click on an image, you can view it full size.
I realize this might not be clear to some people, but the real aim of this post is to encourage you to find new ways to solve problems even if you think they’re over your head. That’s the only way we learn. Now that these peyote triangles make more sense to me, I think I’m ready to start tackling some more complex designs.
Last month I visited the Bok Makerspace which was on the South Philly list of participants in the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours (POST). Â
Bok Technical High School was a vocational school that opened in South Philadelphia in 1938. Thousands of students passed through Bok’s doors learning trades like brick laying, plastering, plumbing, machine building, tailoring, and hairdressing until the school closed its doors in 2013.
The Bok building is massive. That’s a cardboard model in the above picture. It takes up an entire city block and the interior is 340,000 square feet.  The surrounding neighborhood is made up of mostly residential row houses.  The residents were understandably concerned about what would happen to the building.
They need not have worried. In 2014, a developer named Lindsey Scannapieco proposed converting the former high school into a space for creative entrepreneurs. The neighborhood liked her ideas and her efforts were lauded by Inge Saffron, the Architectural Critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Read more articles about the transformation of Bok here and here.  Â
While Bok is thought of as a space for artists, it is really so much more as I learned on my visit for the POST tours. All of the artists I talked to came from the surrounding neighborhood and almost all of them were business people in creative fields.Â
I hope to profile some of the artists I met during the tour and show you some pictures of their spaces.
My husband is a silly man who often claims, when I ask him a question, that I am “grilling him like a salmon.” But he is a good sport. After all, he married me, didn’t he? So when we were in Pittsburgh last year for the opening of Into The Forest, he agreed when I told him I needed to make a stop at the Construction Junction. He even opened the door for me!
The Construction Junction is a nonprofit used and surplus building material retailer. It accepts all kinds of donations-construction materials, old appliances, electrical supplies, plumbing supplies, tools, lighting, building materials and many other things too numerous to mention. This keeps stuff out of landfills and gives it a second life when it leaves in the hands of a customer to be used in a new project.
But the construction junction is also a mecca for creative types. I found some embossed tiles there that make perfect polymer clay texture sheets. I got some brass pipe and metal parts that I will recycle into jewelry.  If I wanted one of the vintage stoves that seem to be all the rage these days, I could pick one up at the Construction Junction and restore it to working order.
The place is HUGE, the staff is friendly and there is plenty of parking. Check it out if you find yourself in Pittsburgh.
Ornamento 