Author Archives: Stephanie Kozick

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

Making Toast

 

Making Toast

Making toast is gathering up fabric, searching for “sewable” ideas, conjuring up images of the large-scale domestic space sculptures of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and all the while craving hot buttered toasted bread. Visualized text from Nigel Slater’s Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger and thinking of ways to represent those visions in fabric made the adjective “burned” problematic. Slater’s recollection of his mother’s practice of burning toast kept me from moving forward with the project. But then, while listening to Edmund De Wall’s “Sunday Sermon” Tact on the online site of the U.K.’s The School of Life (http://www.theschooloflife.com/library/videos/edmund-de-waal-on-tact/), I realized that visualizing text is my representation and if fire and fabric just did not go together for me, then so be it.

I have a domestic space devoted to sewing projects; the tiny room includes a closet with a fabric collection. All attempts to keep the fabric collection sorted by color and texture have failed, but I was able to find a nice “toasty” bolt of fabric. I have plenty of notions collected after years and years of sewing projects, “ah, that bundle of soft raw wool will work well as the “doughy cushion of white bread” that Slater referred to.

In my effort to weasel out of re-typing the text of Toast for the project, a virtual “light bulb” of the mind blinked on, “this iMac might have speech typing”, and so it did. After figuring out the system, dictated text magically appeared on the screen. The next step was to print the text on fabric, which required a special process of preparing cloth to move through a printer. Of course the oversized piece of toast fabric would not fit the printer, so an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of the fabric was cut—the problem of fixing it to the larger piece of fabric would have to be solved later.

As separate pieces of cotton, linen, thread, and wool became united, the boxy object resembled a pillow more than toast, but cutting away a bite to expose the “doughy cushion” that lies inside the crust offered a suspension of belief that just might work. The project moves on to butter. After a futile attempt to sew yellow rip stop nylon into a block of butter in a shape imagined to be 1960s British butter, I tossed the construction aside and sewed a rectangular stick of butter that looked more realistic. Slater writes “I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it,” but since I have tempered the image of burned toast, my bits in the butter will be brown—stitch, stitch, French knot here, French knot there. I need a butter dish. I need a plate for the toast. Come together visualization of toast!

 

 

 

construction no.3

P1020343 P1020344 P1020345 P1020346 P1020347 P1020349 P1020351 P1020352

Construction no. 3

The inspiration for this construction comes from visualizing text in Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life (Hanh & Cheung 2011).  The authors are centered on the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as “a guiding light that already exists inside every one of us,” (7) “a way of living that has been practiced over twenty-six hundred years by millions of people to help them transform their suffering into peace and joy” (34). The authors suggest a simple exercise that is particularly suited to living in the Pacific Northwest.  Their “Apple Meditation” exercise calls for mindfulness applied to eating an apple.  According to the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA), Washington accounts for 60% of US apple production (http://agr.wa.gov/AgInWa/).  And serendipitously, the WSDA site offers a culinary agritourism Itinerary called .

So, lots of apples to taste, but the question raised by Hanh & Cheung is, “Are you Really Appreciating the Apple?”  The text in construction no. 3 offers the steps to really appreciating the act of eating an apple.  The apple is such a luscious fruit: color, crispness, sweetness and the promise of good health if one indulges every day is irresistible.  Good thing, since we have so many wonderful apples available to us, and mostly at reasonable cost.  When I was living in Japan for a time, apples were so expensive that it was never appropriate to munch a whole apple—no, in Japan, the practice is that an apple is cut into several pieces and the family group each takes one section as a dessert at the end of meal.

Last week I had the notion that a shadow image of myself would be a good starting point for the construction of images that might represent the steps of eating an apple with a sense of mindfulness and appreciation.  Students in my critique group took this on: a light source in a darkened room projected my profile on a wall, the shadow was traced on paper accordingly—but the image was large and not crisp enough.  Chantay, the eternal photographer that she is, offered to take a picture of my shadow and send it to me—digital ready.  Perfect.  The next weekend, a Portland friend stopped by after attending a workshop on fabric arts held in Port Townsend.  She walked me through the process of making fabric rigid enough to go through a standard home printer.  The idea emerged to use that technique to make pages for each step of savoring an apple.  Making the pages took hours of PhotoShopping, experimental printing on paper, and playing with sizing.  Then it was time to use the fabric sheets and six pages of shadow images and text were printed.  The favored part of this construction was designing the tiny fabric apples secured to each page.  My fabric scrap basket offered a profusion of possibilities—I started with leather and that remains my favorite—so smooth and rigid.