Zoe's Here Working

We've been lucky this month...Zoe Sheehan is back for three weeks of intensive project work...she's here on her winter semester break from her teaching job at Baruch College in NYC to help us get a complicated plate design made for a new fabric embossing job. So we have the exquisite pleasure of enjoying her rapier-sharp wit and intelligence, while we spend hours poring over photographs, surface design books, and the computer, extracting the visible pattern from original fabric belonging to the drawing room collection of the US State Department, and then working with our design motifs to create camera-ready art to go off to our plate manufacturer.

But that's not all she's here for...in between bouts of computer work, she's been playing with an indigo discharge print of a standard bandana paisley on cotton fabric, and setting up and weaving off sixteen yards or so of cotton canvas for a dropcloth. Just that. (She's ambitious about the most off-beat kinds of things - during previous visits she's been known to weave reproductions of 49 - cent Ikea dishtowels, fine cotton twill tape to bind a cotton mop head with, samples of 3/1 twill indigo denim, and to single-handedly skirt 300 pounds of raw fleece.)

Our visits with her seem always to go by way too quickly. She's been here since January 3rd and will be leaving on the 24th...three weeks disappeared in the blink of an eye. It's a great way to get through a big chunk of winter...we have a pile of fun and get a lot of work done...because she's such a great studio person.

Thanks for everything, Z. We can't wait for you to come back.