This is part of an occasional series about objects that live in my studio.

Very early on I was working with thread.  I was always looking for spaces, things that had space that could be woven three-dimensionally.  Basically filling space.  The thread has faded a lot over the years. It looks better in the sunlight:

So this is made of just chicken wire, like from Home Depot.  And nylon sewing thread. It’s just kind of a cloud now I guess, but it used to be a lot more blue. 

Basically I put the edges together with wire, wrapping it around.  And then I just started going to town with a long wooden dowel and thread.  I’d shoot the dowel through, like a long needle.  I figured out–I think I taped the thread to the end of the dowel, or had a notch in it, or something.  But I would just shoot it through, and wherever it ended up, that’s where it ended up.  And then I’d shoot it back through…

It gets hard to shoot through–that’s one problem.  The other problem was it’s very complicated to tie them off.  So actually it takes a special tweezers, these bent-nose tweezers, to get the thread back around.

I worked on it intermittently for months.  It was very tedious. It takes a long time to build up that much density.

I did this when I was in Northeast Minneapolis, in my studio there, so it was in a couple of open studio events.

studio