Beech Trees Journal Quilt

Back when I was taking photos of urban scenes to adapt as decorations for a local after prom party, I also took a number of pictures of beech trees.  They live in Brookline, just a street over from Beacon Street, and they are truly magnificent.

This quilt is small, about 8 1/2 x 11″.  I used the bucket feature in Photoshop Elements 3.0 to change the background colors, which transformed the branch patterns into something resembling stained glass.  I changed threads at least three times quilting the piece, which is a departure from my generally lazy approach to thread.

I’ve recently been back to visit these trees and have come to the conclusion that they are most beautiful when the branches are bare.  This time of year, leaves are plentiful, obscuring the muscular structure of the trunks which I so love to look at.

Read Full Post »

Journal Quilt from Summer ’09

9" x 7.5", quilt

This small piece was composed after an unusually grey June.  Here in Eastern Massachusetts, we had one of the least sunny Junes on record — not the wettest, but the greyest.   And, it did rain A LOT.

When the sun finally came out, I made this piece.  I was eager to get gardening, get outdoors, get digging.  The background toile features an antique plow or wheelbarrow.  The waterlily has the feel of a summer sun.

I added the strip of vintage lace and the disk of organza after many weeks of following Jude Hill‘s work online.  I encourage you to take a peek!

Read Full Post »

The dilemma — to finish or to move on?

8.5 x 11", collage

(Notes and collage from last week):

Well, after many days working outside at a garden site and shuffling school forms around, calling guidance counselors, dropping off forgotten track items to the high school, ETC.!! , I have been downstairs, which is to say, in my studio.

I just made three things — none of which I set out to do, all of which I like very much, and all of which make the pile of things UNDONE even bigger.

So, what to do?  Force myself to finish before I play?  Just stop binding my pieces?

That last option is not a bad alternative at all.  Arlee, whom I discovered both in various flickr pools and in this month’s Cloth Paper Scissors, showcased a beautiful quilt with texture galore and unfinished, tattered edges.

The collage above was one of the pieces I made when I perhaps should have been finishing other things.  The text is printed on linen and on fake vellum — both fed through an inkjet.  They are scraps from my quilt, “Valentine to Iraq” (below), made some time ago.  I made the off-white paper with newspaper inclusions while teaching a UU religious ed class a couple of years ago.

Quilt, about 3.5' x 20"

This quilt was coming together as the American death toll in Iraq reached 3,000.  I originally planned to stitch 3,000 “x’s” on the quilt, representing the final kisses of mothers to their never-to-return soldier children, but stopped at a little over 1,000.  It gave me a sober appreciation for how large a number 3,000 is.  And now, of course, the toll is much higher.  And we’re not counting Iraqi deaths.

This is a chop-and-rearrange piece — some areas, therefore, have as many as six layers of fabric.  I’m not sure this is technically a quilt, because there isn’t batting behind every single square of this piece, which is mounted on felt.

The X-stitch-kisses at times resemble sutures.

Crucifixes found their way into the piece, representing the enormous sacrifice both the soldier and his mother make (and his father and other family members/or her — forgive me, as a mother of two boys, this piece references our genders).

Here, half a heart is depicted, meaning what it is — a broken heart.

The original statements, which I fractured and reassembled, were:  “All mothers of sons want them to live,” and “I now have sons and I want them to live,” and “I want all wars to end.”

Another heart fragment, covered in kisses/sutures.

I wanted some of the embellishments to take on the look and feel of maps, or again, the edges of wounds.

Here you can see how the varying thicknesses relate to each other.

Read Full Post »

Earthwatch plus Gloom = Earthgloom

Another cheery set of images — but I am soooooo excited about what I’m learning, that it somewhat counters the content.

Making SoulCollage® cards (or anything, for that matter) depends to some degree on synchronicity.  I suppose this element of creativity is heightened with SoulCollage® because your palette is comprised of magazine images.  It stands to reason, in other words, that your collages will serendipitously depend on what images you can lay your hands on.

Well, that’s obvious, right?

THIS card started out as the sherpa from National Geographic, an EARTHWATCH magazine cover, with a few blooming baptisia from a gardening journal thrown in.  If I were a reader of Vogue, People, and Harpers, this would not have emerged.  (The red script on the right side is a snippet of another card — “Intuition”).

Lately, I have not been adhering the collages, necessarily, to a foundation.  So, when I flipped this collage over, I found the beginnings of another collage on the other side!! This clearly is less consciously designed, i.e. more synchronous, than the reverse (Sherpa) side.

It was almost spooky to see how the feelings evoked by the flip side very much correlated to the other side.  I call this one “Gloom”.

The oppressive issues of Global Warming as well as our seeming incapacity as a species to truly rally around them as challenges in need of direct, urgent attention induce a very deep gloom, indeed.

Standing at the color copier, I wondered what would happen if I integrated the images.

I may not be utterly pleased with the integrated version, but it certainly introduces a whole new element into this process that I find exciting.  What, for example, would happen (both visually, but more importantly, psychologically) if the front and back sides were totally dissonant with each other?

My collages are bigger than the 8×5 size of my cards and sometimes I want to frame different sections for separate cards.  I officially give myself permission to do so — even if I include the entire image in the deck as well!

PS  The EarthWatch card was an example of a time when the words were so much a part of what emerged that I felt that keeping them in the final product enhanced rather than limited its meaning.

To learn about this remarkable process, go to SoulCollage.com, where you can find out about Seena Frost, who developed SoulCollage®. Or, dive into the amazing work and teaching of Anne Marie Bennett on her website, KaleidoSoul.  Anne Marie’s passion for this work is evident on her site.

Read Full Post »

September 11 eight years later

9/11/06 Quilt, about 18" x 11"

My older son does not remember, which means my younger one doesn’t either.  Cary was seven at the time.  Danny was five.  It was a startlingly beautiful day with the kind of blue September sky that makes you ache with joy.  The schools here made the decision to not disclose the news, and to keep the kids for the full day — although it was an ‘early release’ day, here in Newton.  Parents told their kids the news later.

I was meeting with a fellow gardener in her home — planning updates to the foundation beds at Bowen Elementary.  Her husband called and said he was coming home and to turn on the news.  And we sat and we watched, dumbfounded, shocked, in horror.  I’ll admit it was the first time I’d ever heard Osama bin Laden’s name, which my friend uttered as an early and correct assumption of blame.

I watched the towers come down in real time.

When the kids were in elementary school we did not watch the news for the usual reasons — so those endless loops of footage that many people watched in slack-jawed disbelief  did not air  in our house.  We went camping in Western Mass. that weekend, imposing a further media blackout (though Ken and I sat in the minivan with the radio on a few times and drove into North Adams to get a newspaper).  So it is no wonder they don’t remember… but still, it shocks me a little.

But of course, not as much as the events themselves.

This week for social studies, Danny had to write about a historical event that happened in his lifetime.  He has three giant ones to choose from:  September 11, President Obama’s election, and the financial meltdown of ’08…  At this age (13), they don’t quite realize how big these things are.

Sadly, they will.  And even more sad to me, I suspect that the longest lasting effects (at least in those families that did not lose a family member on 9/11) will spring from the financial meltdown.

Read Full Post »