Time Marching On

I can't believe it's March, which means autumn is beginning here in Australia. In six weeks we'll be back in the northern hemisphere, enjoying a Vermont spring. It all strikes me as rather strange even though we've been doing this for a number of years. But work continues, wherever I am and whatever the season.

I've been working on two pieces that will take a long time to complete. The first one uses round teabags, many that I brought with me this time around. I'm folding them in half and stitching them together into what will (hopefully) be a long snake-like form. It's taking a lot of teabags and a lot of patience to do this, so I hope the end result will be okay.

The second piece uses standard flattened teabags that I am adhering to one another with gel medium. Here's the vision: a large (about 8 feet by 10 feet) sort of curtain that I will paint with many coats of shellac when it is completed. I envision hanging it in a window as a sort of curtain and hope to shape it so that will will be a bit 3 dimensional. At this point I am creating long strips that I can transport and assemble completely back in the Vermont studio.

I've put some of the strips on my studio floor here to see where it is going:

So one project is quite small, the other certainly the biggest piece I've ever made. If it gets too tedious to work on these two I'll start something else (?) to bring in a little more variety.