Embroidery—New Works

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A Crocheted Poem

The pot in the illustrations is titled "In the Teapot", crocheted and knotless netted, 2-3/4" x 5-1/4" x 4-3/4", 2009.
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Crochet—New Works

See Renie's other Crochet Works.
Read her essay "Totally Looped".
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Vegimals—Beary Medley

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Ro & MeliMation: Drama in 2 Frames

The Cast:
Woman who wonders.................Romayne
Sneaky woman..............................Melinda

Romayne, enrolled in a fiber workshop at
Arrowmont School, so enjoyed the attentions of
her teacher, Melinda Barta, that she enrolled in
another workshop with Melinda at Penland School.
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Love Poem

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AnnaMation or The Kiss

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Flying Vegimals

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Vegimal Welfare

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Essay & Lesson—Lucky Houndstooth

See my 3-D houndsteeth— "Walking Houndstooth", "Houndstooth Nutcakes" (walnut and pistacchio with raspberry and lemon-butter drizzles), and "Tea on Houndstooth". See houndsteeth in decorative frames, e.g., "Blank Page, Mental Buzz", "Tea Time". Look for them in pictures— "Point of View", "Child's Bib", and hidden among a myriad of crosses, checkers, and Zs in "Kitchen Cloth". There's a teensy yet dynamic one in "Klatsch in a Box Rotating". Can you find it?

Related Articles: "History of the Swastika" and "Houndstooth".
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Essay—I'm an Animal

We don't ordinarily identify ourselves as animals. The word "animal", when referring to humans, is usually not used as a descriptive term, which classifies without judgment, but rather an insult reserved for the morally bankrupt, dumb, big and ugly, impolite if not crude, or simply different. Are animals, other than humans in the grip of their judgmental concepts, any of these things?

Non-human animals in my pictures often stand up and take on a human persona and commingle with humans as a reminder that, in the neutral sense, we are all animals. Like the humans, the other animals in my pictures play roles somewhat removed from the basics of life and perhaps from their truest attributes and inclinations. In "Animal Act" you see three animals in the roles of a visionary, a pretty woman, and a juggler. Reminding myself that I'm an animal (in the neutral sense) is remembering the most basic part of my identity.

See animals as dancers in "Mixed Revue" and "Blue Birds of Happiness", —and guests and diners in "Tea Time", "Call of the Wild", "Swinging at Club Mood", and "Vichysswans!". See a chicken come of age in "Fare Well, Sky Chicken" and "Sky Chicken Sprouts Power Wings".
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A Kosher Vegimal

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Essay on Crochet—Totally Looped

See Renie's full article "Totally Looped" in Issue No. 6,
April 2008, of Dora Ohrenstein's informative and inspiring
online magazine, Crochet Insider.
See all Renie's Crochet Works.
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Poem 2 from Up North

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Pattern Swatches—Vegimals

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Poem—Mr Frog

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Essay & Lesson—Serendipity

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Vegimal Sightings

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Poem—The Exercise

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Vegimal Sampler

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Vegimal Cousindry

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Essay—Cubes and Tablecloths

I remained cheerful during faculty meetings by practicing writing backwards, upside down, and upside down and backwards, with both hands and the high hope of reaching perfection. I also doodled a checkered cube repeatedly to a point of wretched excess. I enjoyed filling in every other little square, though I was never able to alternate the colors of the checkers with complete success.

Is it possible to checker a cube completely? I think checkers of the same color will invariably meet at four of the cube's twelve edges. (Fig. 1 shows one of these flawed edges.) I've discovered, however, two ways to steer clear of this problem:

You can insert a gusset (fig. 2). This enables the colors to alternate and, as a surprising consequence, suggests a tablecloth providing the opportunity for domestic elaborations. The transformation from cube to cloth is explored in "Tea Time" and "Tea'd Cube".

Or, if you're drawing a picture, you can simply eliminate the checkering problem by lopping off the offending checkers (fig. 3). This surgical method is used in "Blue Checkered Cloth" and "Spot of Sky".

As a way of circumventing a 3-D pattern problem, my
checkered tablecloth stands for an intuitive and comic leap of the imagination. In the final frame of "How to Checker a Cube", I'm looking through the window into my own imagination.
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Essay—Thinking about Bananas

I like bananas for how expressive they are and how easily they morph into other things: a crescent moon, a tornado, a nose, a boomerang, etc. And I like the banana's graceful form. A banana is an arabesque in the round, challenging to draw, though I doubt we ever drew one in art school.


 In Basic Drawing, we rarely drew fruit of any kind, and never a banana. In Life Drawing we drew human beings in every conceivable (and inconceivable) position but never in relation to any other objects, not even clothing, much less bananas.

Our Life Drawing professor once told us, "If you can draw a woman's breast, you can draw anything." It was exactly at that moment that I began thinking about bananas. My very first thought was, "au contraire, if you can draw a banana you can draw anything".

I often want to draw a banana. In my works, sometimes a banana isn't just a banana but a compositional device, a trick, or an icon. Examine the bananas in the following pictures and decide for yourself:

"Banatmosphere", "Through the Window", "Stormy Banana",
"Lunar Drift", "Banana Moon", and "Epiphany".

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The First Vegimal

For an alternative pronunciation of the word "catato", see
"A Battle of Wills".
Click "Catato" for a three-dimensional view of this vegimal.
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Poem from Up North

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