sop and i both have photographs in this:

womens art center

two weeks ago, i ‘won’ a print washer on ebay.More specifically, i bought a Cachet EcoWash (low water usage for the mountain west) 11×14 print washer. OhBoyOhBoyOhBoy. Last week was spent anxiously awaiting its speedy arrival from CA. But Friday came and no printer. Possible, sure. Monday came and went, i had the day off and opened the door approximately 1200 (+/- 3) times, hoping that it was MY day, but no.

Tuesday i contacted the seller, asking if he had a tracking number. He replied with the tracking number, but said it showed that it had arrived Monday. What?! How did i miss it? Did they take it to a neighbor while i was in the shower? I would have answered the door! Naked! Sigh.

Nervous, i checked paypal. Thought i’d better see what address was sent to the seller. I have bought about 3 items with paypal since i moved and all have arrived at my doorstep, but you never know… Sure enough, in paypal, my primary address has switched back to my last address. Sigh. I know it was right a month ago when i bought christmas presents, but oh well, at least i know where it is, right?

I talk to my old landlord and he says i should just stop by and ask the new tenant. Her name isn’t the same as the person who signed for it, however, and he doesn’t know anyone with that last name, but it could be the neighbors.

So, at 6:00, right after work, i head over to the old house (which i love by the way) and ring the doorbell. A woman comes to the door and peeks out of the curtain. I think she might turn on the porch light, but i am wrong, so i call “i think a package may have mistakenly been delivered here yesterday. I used to live here.”
“No, there wasn’t,” she says.
“Did they maybe leave a note?” I ask.
“No, there is a magazine in the mailbox that is not for me.I don’t accept anything that’s not for me, i leave it in the mailbox.”
“No,” i call, “it is a package.” I indicate with my hands that it is fairly large.
“I would have noticed a package!” She yells, imitating the size motion. “I am not an idiot!”
“Um, i didn’t mean that you were an idiot, i just thought you might have seen something. Do you know someone with the last name Sheppard?”
“No!” She yells.
“Okay”, i call, “thanks”.

On that cheerful note, we went back home and i looked at me ebay account. Primary Shipping address - correct. Primary Billing address - Correct. Home address - correct. Then, at the bottom of the page was a link to “list all addresses”. Click. New list of addresses with the Primary Shipping address being my apartment from 6 years ago. Grand. The name of the person who signed made sense then, though. Hopefully, i could reach him.

He wasn’t in the phone book, and i had lost his email address in a machine migration where all my emails were transferred without their senders, but maybe i could find DeeAnn’s number… An hour later i left DeeAnn a message and 40 minutes later she called me back. She didn’t live in the same building, but she’d leave a note under his door for me. We had a great talk, by this time i was convinced that all this happened to force me to keep in touch with people (i am really bad at that). DeeAnn told me she thought i might be the christ and we agreed to meet for tea sometime.

Fast forward to last night. Fresh from fun shipping experiences, my enlarger bulbs were not delivered yesterday, but this was left on my door on the grass next to the porch:

paper leaf

Taped the whole thing, leaf and all, to the door this morning and admired this (picked up last night):

coming soon to a basement near me

Oh, and today, the UPS picked up the signed leaf and left me these:

Let the weekend begin!

as mentioned before, this month i plan to create something using the shibori technique described in IK Fall 2005. To that aim, with my long-weekend plans smacked down with a massive flyswatter, i set out to do test swatches this weekend. The goal was to find out more about shrinkage ratios in the fulling process and determine how applying shibori to said swatches would alter shrinkage as well as final product characteristics.

Not having any bulbous objects in the house, i used coins to create little bulbs in the knit fabric, bound off with elastic bands. Let’s just say that, at a guage of 3 st/in, dimes do not work. Well, dimes to not work from the get-go. In truth, pennies, nickels and even quarters did not fare so well. After the first wash, three bulbs had lost their pennies and nickels; after the second wash, one bulb of 2 quarters remained.

notice the texture on the bulb where the contents survived?

interestingly, i think i like the bulbs that tossed their coins best, and so i’ll probably try replicating it by using all pennies, or empty bulbs, on the final project.

You can see that the overall shrinkage was not affected much; the stretchiness of the swatch was. The shibori-ed swatch was a lot stretchier than the plain-fulled one. I also plan on marking where i want the bulbs to be on the final project BEFORE making any bulbs. I had hoped for a less symmetrical pattern, and thought i had less symmetry as i made them, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Now, what to make… i have a couple ideas, so we’ll see what happens.