The King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1

This year, I decided to use the Neutral Milk Hotel record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as a starting point for some work. I was thinking about the Journal Quilt Project and how I'd like to try something similar. My start has been a little.. unsure, I guess.

There are eleven songs on the album, and I will focus on one song per month as my image/narrative resource. I'm not trying to totally decode the songwriter's [Jeff Mangum is his name] original intentions, or even really follow what I know he meant (via interviews and other research). This record means a lot of different things and takes me to a lot of different places mentally. It is crooked landscapes, half-smiles, stale bread, worry, ache, beautiful magic.. I have a huge mental list of things I associate here. It is impossible to explain. I put it on in my car and I can't take the CD out for the next three weeks. If I make it to my destination while the last song is on, I have to wait until it is over before I can get out.

Anyway. For everything it means to me, like I said, not a great start.
I only managed to eke out a handful of drawings, and most were very cartoony/prototypical. So. engh. (Some are here.)

One I did like was this:



So I redid it with my machine on some linen I dyed grey.



Details:




It's very similar in style to my Pop Shirt project (which remains woefully unfinished and in limbo, and Evan is going to hit me) - it's the same fabric (dyed different colors), black embroidery (this is machine, pop shirt was by hand).. It makes me want to revisit that plan and just take a big piece of fabric and cover it with drawings. I loooooove doing this type of thing..


Things learned:
-Feet are hard to stitch.
-Figure out a better way to stabilize.
-Spend less time thinking and more time just DOING.

I don't really know what to do with it now. January's over, and I am going to follow my rules and move on. If I do something I really like for the next month and finish early, maybe I'll revisit. Maybe it'll wait til December. Just a little drawing..