The nomadic lifestyle is coming to a close. After 5 years of uprootedness, Marc and I will be moving to a new home for 1 February 2011. We have signed a year lease on a sprawling apartment in Cambridge, Ontario. The apartment is a portion of a 120 year old stone mansion and will give us the much needed grounding and the sheer volume and area of space needed for larger, more ambitious works of art.
In the meantime, for the month of January 2011 we are house sitting in our old university town of Waterloo, Ontario. It’s in the snow belt, oh yes, it’s very peaceful and quiet.
I have been balming my impatient pangs of biding time in a transition space by sewing up and embroidering one Happy Sleepy after another.
It’s quite soothing because it’s focused work that can be meditative if I pay attention, and I have finally seen a jump in the quality and ease of my embroidery on the eyes. About time! It was quite the learning curve, and I notice with relief that my stitches are getting to be more and more like a machine. I’m amused that this is my standard for quality craft work of this type – that it should look so neat and precise as to bring incredulity to the fact that it was done by hand!
I am very much looking forward to being able to set up a proper and permanent photography studio, too. In the meantime, I took some photos in the bright winter sunshine, bracketing my exposure. Clicking through the resulting series of images still on the camera, Marc was struck by the silent film quality of the flickering images.
So here is a bit of flash, several of a new batch of Happy Sleepies flickering through the transitional times space that was January 2011 in Waterloo.