Work or Play?

Sylvia's Stars

2011-01-18T09:06:00.001-08:00

Here's a look at Sylvia's Stars, the first quilt I made for my grandaughter. I started it as soon as I knew she was coming, before I knew who "she" would be. As I worked on it, every single patch, every strip, every stitch, was invested with all the love and hopes and dreams I have for this new person. Many of the fabrics are my own, which (since I am so stingy with the fabrics I dye and print and stamp) makes the quilt even more "special", at least in my mind.

Making a quilt for a new baby isn't what it used to be. Babies now are not supposed to have quilts (or bumper pads, or pillows, or soft stuffies) or any other loose bedding in their cribs, since it is believed that these may contribute to SIDS. God knows that I certainly would not wish a SIDS tragedy on any family, but I question whether a strong, healthy, vigorous full-term baby is likely to be adversely affected by having a quilt tucked over it.

Nonetheless, that is the recommendation that responsible parents follow. So as a responsible grandmother, you know that the baby will not have as intimate a relationship with this love-invested quilt as you might secretly wish; you of course are building a whole universe in your head, where the baby spends hours of its young life looking at all the shapes and colors, and bonding with the quilt, unable, perhaps, to even fall asleep without its warm & comforting presence, accustomed to feeling the love that seeps out of its fabric...and then, someday, unfolding it from wherever it has been lovingly tucked away and bringing it forth for its own first baby, telling that child how special the quilt was "when Mommy was a baby", and .... Well, you know it's not gonna happen like that - if the poor kid isn't allowed the comfort of a handmade quilt in its bed, you'd probably be better off just buying it a good book or something.

But you make the quilt, just as if its every stitch can actually bring all the love and goodwill you bear for the new little one right straight into her being. Quilters make quilts. That's what we do. Even if the quilt spends its life tucked away on a closet shelf, we are compelled to make it as if the child's survival itself depended on it. The making itself brings us pleasure, as it allows us to indulge in many happy hours of dreaming as we work on it. Whether or not it ends up snuggling the dear little baby is almost irrelevant - the process itself helps to make tangible our love, to solidify it in ourselves as we wait for the baby to emerge.

Besides, there are other uses than as bedding for a quilt. Here is little Sylvie, 4 months old, reading on a quilt my mother (Sylvia's great-grandmother!) made for her.

2010-09-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

Here's Miss Sylvia at 2 weeks, playing on her quilt.

The Happy Little Family

2010-08-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

She's Here!

2010-08-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Rose Bargar, named for her two maternal great-grandmothers, arrived safely in this world on Monday, Aug. 23, 2010, at 11:34 AM. She is my first grandchild, and the world is now an even more amazing place because she is in it. Sylvia's parents - formerly known as my son Matthew and his wonderful wife Naomi (you can see and read about the wedding chuppah I made for them just last year if you go back to June 2009) - are rising to this new challenge, working beautifully together with the baby to get their newly-configured family up and running; it is a splendid and strangely gratifying thing to see. Not to even mention ridiculously cute!

Isn't she beautiful? Seriously, is she not a most perfect example of perfect perfection? Every cliche in the book rises at a time like this: miracle, blessing, bundle of love, gift from god, joy, grace made whole in this world, and on and on. Strangely, I am free to experience these joyful feelings more at her birth than I was at my own children's births. Perhaps it is because I am not myself walking into the terrifying unknown realms of new parenthood this time around, or because I am not trying to do so while simultaneously recovering from battering labors, a twin pregnancy, C-section deliveries, and facing all the mystifying and almost-always at least temporarily uncomfortable changes in my own body; I have made that scary journey, and come out the other side with all 3 children safely, now healthy, strong, happy, and compassionate adults living their own lives. I was lucky; nobody starved, or was homeless or unclothed or broken, or fell into the frightening pitfalls familiar to all parents. Heck, they even still love their parents (although they've lived most of their lives with their parents in two separate-but-equal households) and each other - a bonus!

But Sylvia Rose is just a golden nugget of pure joy, who sits as happily and as lightly in my soul as a warm ray of sunlight. That she is in this world is pure miracle, and I am free to just enjoy her. I can make things for her and give her clothes and books and anything I am able to give as she grows, and plan fun outings, and dream of a happy future with her, but her survival is not dependent on me. I can make whatever crazy outfits I want to for her, but the pressure of having to be the sole provider of everything she needs isn't there. Her food isn't coming from my breasts. She has a safe car seat (her parents even have a car, unlike me when my children were little!); her parents have cribs and changing tables and bouncy chairs and swings and diapers unlike any yet invented when I was a young mother; she has onesies and footies and hoodies and crazy hats and all kinds of fun stuff both frivolous and vital; when she grows bigger and the Boston weather turns cold, it is not my job (though I will jump in gladly if I am needed) to be sure she has a toasty snowsuit. I have been the mother on whom all these hourly, daily, yearly, needs fell, and I know how much weight the needs can bring and what it can do to a soul. But here I am now, "just" the grandmother, with not only the joy of seeing my child's child but with the lightness of spirit that comes from knowing that Sylvia's parents will do exactly everything that needs to be done. I proved competent when it was my job to be the parent, though it was certainly never easy and the outcome was never assured, and now I know that Matthew & Naomi will do the same.

I know, I know, all the threatening, scary dangers are still there, as they were for my own children, as they are for every soul born into this life; the faces of those dangers may vary, depending on the circumstances of any given child's birth, but there is no shortage of perils to be faced, no matter how privileged or well-loved the child. But Sylvia has arrived, safely and lustily, equipped with a perfectly-functioning set of baby-skills: she is unbelievably cute, she has a perfect suck-swallow reflex (sorry, I was a lactation consultant, so it's the first thing I assessed), she wakes and opens her eyes and acts adorable, she nurses regularly with great gusto and proficiency, she poops just like she's supposed to - in other words, the evolutionary survival skills that make babies acceptable despite their frequent loud needs and utter disruption of the formerly-known world are all working in her favor. She is born into everything she needs: the unquestioning love of a rather large family (the first of the next generation!), highly competent parents who are amazingly financially stable (unlike my own children, who were born to loving but unemployed hippies), a strong network of support with a wide variety of skills & talents (artists, medical personnel, computer wizards, librarians, social workers, many others), in a country where freedom, liberty, and justice are at least theoretically prized values, in a socioeconomic class where most Americans aspire to be...in other words, she's got it all. I think of Paul Simon's lyrics:

Never been lonely, never been lied to,
Never had to scuffle in fear, nothing denied to,
Born at the instant of church bells chiming,
Whole world whispering "Born at the right time"

So there sits little Sylvia, the focus of so much good stuff. And here I sit, with the thought of her warm little weight perfectly resting in me, and I know that it is good. She is equipped to make it - no, to triumph! - in this world, her parents love her and will do whatever they need to to keep her safe and healthy and happy and maybe even wise, and I have nothing more to do than love her. This is joy!

Terra Cognita - finita!

2010-03-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

Finished - unless I decide to re-do the binding; I am trying to pass it off as an "organic" finish for this most organic of pieces, but in my heart I know it's just the worst job ever. This serves to demonstrate the eternal truth of the wisdom that says "never undertake any even moderately dicey sewing job when you are sick and not thinking well". Next time I will just live with my impatience and put the thing aside for a better day! But I like this little piece anyway - it speaks to me of land and earth and growing things, and certainly imperfection is the ultimate in organic growth!

Terra Cognita

2010-02-16T11:15:00.000-08:00

An exercise in curved strip insertion turned into a strangely familiar landscape. We are such creatures of this earth, I almost think it is impossible to create anything, any image, that is not largely inspired by it.

I have not yet quilted this little piece - this is just the start. Its wintery cousin is currently in the works: snow, peeks of sky, trunks standing stark against the white, two flashes of red that might be cardinals.

For my brother John

2010-01-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

It's way too easy to forget that the menfolk deserve to be honored with the work of our creative hands and minds; I rarely find myself thinking, as I'm making a quilt or other fabric piece, "Oh, my brother (or father, husband, son, etc.) would love to have a bright, festive, handmade objet d'art , made just for him, by me, with love in every stitch!" I don't think I'm much of a sexist, but I usually think more along the lines of something useful as a gift for the menfolk, with a function beyond mere visual delight or - god forbid! - sentimental value. I guess a part of me places both fabric and sentiment squarely in the realm of women - wrong again, I know...

But here it is, a small art quilt made just for my brother. (A very badly photographed one, in this case - you gotta trust me, this baby is rich and beautiful in the flesh!) The photo transfer in the center is an old B&W shot of me, the big sister on the left, and my little brother John, the dazed-looking little guy in the muddy snowsuit. Probably around 1957 or so. I remember the day this was taken, and I can still feel the weight of responsibility that settled like that navy-and-white houndstooth checked scarf over my head as I was "in charge" of my dopey little brother, probably for all of 5 minutes or so while my mother wrestled the stroller in or out of the front hall. I can still smell the faintly animal must of wet wool snowpants as they dried later, draped over the radiator, and taste the icy slush I sucked from my wet woollen mittens. Remember that chapped red ring you'd get around your wrist, where no matter how well mittened and cuffed you were when your mother wrapped you up & sent you out to play the cold snow would seep in anyway? Clearly, I grew up long before the days of polarfleece, goretex, or moisture-wicking long-johns! Our snow gear was wool, our boots were rubber, our underlayers were cotton, our skin was inevitably cold and wet and chapped, and we didn't care a hoot - we assumed that playing in the snow was fun, and so it was!

I hope John won't be offended by the rather saggy, droopy depiction of him in this photo - it wasn't his fault that his baby-green snowsuit (hand-me-down, of course) was filthy - he was still at the wallowing on the belly stage of life. Hell, I had probably dragged him up & down the patchy front yard on his stomach and told him it was a special treat - I was just that kind of big sister!

I love this picture, because to me it captures something true and touching about our childhood. This little quilt is embellished all over its surface with bright metallic threads, stitching, and beads, but none of that shows up well. Much of the fabric is my own hand-dyed and -printed cloth, which I am trying to learn to actually cut up and use in my work, instead of just hoarding it in ever-more-glorious heaps and piles. I hope that John will like it, because I dearly love him, even though we like to pretend we're all gown up now. (Well, in the reality of my family, we don't actually try too hard to be grown-ups - and we're all the happier for it.) I will give it to him this weekend, when "all of us" - me, my sister, and brother, and my parents - will gather to celebrate my mother's 80th birthday. Which is a whole 'nother blog posting, one I will no doubt be too lazy to write.

Liberated Log Cabin

2009-08-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

And here's another one I'm working on - Liberated Log Cabin, per Gwen Marston's method. I think this will be a pillowtop; I added a 2" solid dark purple/blue border all around, to rein it in a little, and now am busy procrastinating on the part I don't like, all that business with getting it backed and finished, with enough overlap so that it doesn't come busting out of the velcro or buttons or whatever. Simple, huh? But I've come to really dislike the "drudge" part of making quilts!

Making pieces like this one and the previously-posted one is, I'm sad to report, how I "clean up" my sewing space, which is why these two pieces have so many of the same fabrics in them. They come about by a combination of serendipity and an obsessive-compulsive-like fervor to use up ever-smaller bits of fabrics. I wander into my sewing room and see the exciting heaps of scraps, and before I know it I find that I'm sitting at the machine and "just sewing these little bits up to clear off my work area". Hours or days later, I emerge from the mess with a bunch of crazy looking blocks and strips and chunks, and an even-smaller pile of tiny scrips and scraps. Usually, I just put the newly-pieced creations away in what I like to rather grandly think of as my "Parts Department" (a la Gwen Marston & Freddy Moran), rarely to see the light of day again. But, like all true fabric nuts, it makes me feel happy to know they're there, a resource safely stashed away just waiting to be used some day when I "need" them - like what, the day I run out of fabric??? Not bloody likely, at least barring a major act-of-God-proportioned disaster, in which case the loss of my fabric supply will be the least of my problems!

"Are There Hummingbird Gardens in Gee's Bend?"

2009-08-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

So here's a very rough shot of what I've been working on this week, unfinished and still up on the design wall. Its working title: "Are There Hummingbird Gardens in Gee's Bend?", because the colors and general wild, bright layout are inspired by my own hummingbird garden here outside of Ithaca, NY, and because it is done in a very spontaneous and not-straight-line manner of construction. A little not-too-straight cut with scissors here, a little curved line piecing there, a little Nancy Crow meets the quilters of Gee's Bend meets Gwen Marston.

It's not that easy, when your mother has spent your whole lifetime training you in the skills of precision and exacting measuring and cutting, to force yourself to throw off those careful habits and sew things crooked on purpose! And by no account would I claim to have mastered the free-piecing skills of the Gee's Bend and other traditional African-American quilters, but I'm trying.

Matthew and Naomi's Wedding Chuppah

2009-06-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

First, the Disclaimer: the color in this picture seems, at least on my monitor, a little off - the border, for instance, looks turquoise on my screen, but it's not, it's more a deep medium blue. Other colors are similarly skewed in the direction of too much yellow. I don't know how to correct it, or I would.

It's been a long time in the making, but Matthew & Naomi's chuppah is finally ready! (Good thing, too, since the wedding is next Sunday, June 14!) As I look at this simple photo of it, it really doesn't look like that big a deal, but what this chuppah really is is a physical repository of all the love and dearly-felt good wishes I hold for Matthew and his bride: it holds the slightly bewildered amazement of a mother that her firstborn child, that glowing round-cheeked baby boy, has grown into this lean, sensitive, funny, creative, brilliant man who has the wisdom to choose for his wife a woman that seems like his perfect counterpart. It is made "with love in every stitch", as we always say in my family, with deep, dear love in every stitch and brushstroke and bead and dye-swath, and with hope and joy, and even with some stabs of pain at other loves that didn't turn out the way I'd planned. This childish assemblage of silk and paint and thread and beads holds it all, as well as my hopes for a future as filled with joy and abiding love as any soul dares to aspire to. No limits: no limits on my love for my son as he has been since the moment I was gifted with him, and no limits on my wishes that he and his beautiful Naomi will make a strong and happy future together. Past, present, future - it's all in there.

OK, enough sap - now for the details. Including the border (which is cropped in this photo), the finished size is around 58" x 76", more or less. The fabric is silk on the face you see here, and cotton on the back. The background (earth, water, sky, and golden sun) is hand-painted with (mostly) Setacolor transparent fabric paint, with occasional touches of shimmer (all right, it's glitter, but don't tell the bride & groom that!). The entire process of painting on silk was new to me, and I spent a lot of time practicing and testing and generally fiddling around, with the result that now I have a big pile of painted silk to cut up and play with in the future and a whole lot of new methods in my arsenal. The scribbly, sketchy grasses along the water and at the base of the tree were added with permanent fabric markers and I think there's a bit of Shiva paintstick in there too. It's hard to see in this picture, but the water has waves done with paintsicks and rubbing plates. And, trust me on this, the whole thing is much more beautiful in person - I'm not just saying that because I made it, but because the luster and play of light on the silk just doesn't carry through very well in pictures. The border is hand-dyed as well, of the same silk/cottonj fabric. I haven't yet attached the beautiful "tzitsit", the fringes that observant Jews have on the corners of their prayer shawls (tallit); they are made, in this case of a very soft ribbon-type yarn, by tying and winding the yarns prescribed number of times in a specific sequence. Often the groom's or an honored relative's tallit has been used as the chuppah or wedding canopy, and my addition of the tzitsit is to honor that tradition.

Inside the "circle of the sun" (a reference, by the way, to a song that my folk-singing friends and I have been trotting out at every birthday and wedding and change of season and any other occasion, momentous or not, for most of my children's lives -Matthew "gets it") stands a Tree of Life, laden with shimmering leaves and fruits. 18 fruits, to be exact (well, if you count each bunch of cherries as 1 fruit), because 18 is an important and lucky number to most Jewish people, including the bride. The leaves & fruits are cut from all different bits of silk & cotton, many of them my own handpainted & printed & stamped fabrics; they are fused with MistyFuse (as is the tree itself), and then hand-embroidered and embellished in whatever ways the spirit moved me or necessity dictated. I tried not to get too carried away in my addition of small beads - as much because I figured the chuppah didn't need any extra weight pulling it earthwards as for artistic reasons.

The Tree has 6 strong roots, as Matthew & Naomi have 6 strong and loving parents (Matthew has 2 "bonus parents", that lucky boy!) Just like life, just like their marriage will, the Tree bears many and varied wonderful fruits - their future children, the work they produce together, their many creative endeavours, the joy they generate, the offspring of their minds and spirits and bodies, are there in those crazy-looking fruits. Along the water's edge on the left-hand side is some Hebrew script, a quote from Proverbs3:18; it says "It shall be a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and all who uphold it are happy".

About that Hebrew script: I don't know Hebrew. Hell, I'm not even Jewish! Naomi chose the verse, which is lovely. After a whole lot of internet navigation, I managed to find & order a set of Hebrew alphabet rubber stamps. Just the letters, not a stamp with the words all put together. Got a copy of the Hebrew text (actually, many variations & varieties of the Hebrew text...) Spent many long hours making sure that I selected the right character for each letter, hoping that the final outcome would not end up saying something like "It shall be a pillow of bacon that blows a blue balloon to the jug of vinegar" or anything nonsensical like that - I really hope I did get it right! Check in with me next week to see if I managed to offend anybody! I had great help with this over the phone from my friend Debra, who is Jewish & has recently had 2 kids in Hebrew school; we went over it letter by letter, so I'm fairly confident, but I'd be lying if I said I was 100% sure about it!

To support the canopy, the couple will be using strong wooden poles and weighted bases made by Naomi's grandfather. Both her grandfather and her father enjoyed working with wood, and so the Tree of Life motif seems to suit this wedding well. I feel very proud that my son has chosen so wisely. I am a realist in the sometimes-grubby world of marriage and relationships, but I feel that these two have a far better chance than average of making a long & happy life together - I certainly wish it for them with all my heart, and there's not much more I can do for them than that. And if all else fails, I'm pretty confident that I've managed to impart to my son a sense of the great adventure that life is, with whatever it brings us. Above all, I hope he and my daughters will always know that they have always been and will always be loved beyond all my powers of expression, that their presence in my life has been a gift of pure, undeserved radiance to me; I hope they know that. Beyond that, their lives are their own - they are grown now, and it's up to them to trample out their own pathways!

Bamboo and the Deep Blue Sea

2009-02-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

More Playing with Paint. A very ugly bit of pink & purple cotton that resulted from an earlier experiment with scrunch dyeing, stencilled over with Shiva paintsicks. Still ugly.

The blue and green fabric is silk, painted and manipulated into folds while still wet, then sprinkled with coarse salt. I've never had much luck dyeing with salt, but this is almost OK. It has a wonderful feel, since it's a very luxurious 11.9 mme silk charmeuse. I'm really getting hooked on working with silk! But what to DO with it, once I've dyed & painted and stamped and stencilled my little heart out on it - I still hate sewing with its squirmy, slithery self!

Pomegranates and Pistachios - a Visual Feast?

2009-02-24T08:15:00.000-08:00

Here are 2 little bits from my Playing With Paint class (Quilt U, Lyric Kinard). The assignment was printing with fruits & vegetables, so I dutifully made a nice vegetable soup and carefully saved various stumps & interesting little pieces and set them aside to dry. Next day, they're nowhere to be found - my dear sainted husband had foolishly considered them compost, and off they went to enrich my garden. Hmmmm, there's a song in there somewhere - no, wait, it's already been done, perhaps by Pete Seeger...And I know, I know, how much complaining can you do when the man is tidying up the kitchen, eh?

Anyway, not being in the mood to embark on any further cooking when I was in printing mode (what, again with the dinner? I don't think so!), I was left with a dried out old pomegranate and some pistachio shells to print with. The base fabric is some previously hand-dyed cotton that was loitering around in the vicinity of my desk. I used at least 2 closely-related colors to print with, one of them a "shimmer", but you can't see that in these pictures. The purple "smudges" in the green piece are very fine prints of a shell I found in the Bahamas - they show up very well in person; I guess this is a crappy low-res scan. Also better in the flesh: the repeated but barely visible print suggesting wild grasses that I mad a long time ago by glueing some leftover slivers of fun foam on a piece of box cardboard.

And then, because everything looks better with a little sparkle, I whisked a little "shimmering pearl" and/or some very diluted metallic gold hither and yon over the whole thing.

I have to admit to loving the little pistachio shell prints - so clean, so shapely, so available, so free of any preparation other than eating them! I predict that they will be making future appreances in my work. And I learned something useful about pomegranates, too: even when they appear to be all dried up past edibility, the seeds inside remain juicy and fully, edibly, tasty. Handy to know, huh?

More Playing With Paint

2009-02-19T13:17:00.000-08:00

Or "Evolution of a Colonoscopy"... after I ironed out this piece of scrunched & painted silk , I noticed that it looked like, well, something best not seen outside of a gastroenterologist's office. So I tarted it up with Shiva Paintstick rubbings over a couple of my hand-carved rubber stamps and a little piece if plastic needlepoint mesh that was lying around. Because it is silk, it has a nice flow and drape. Still don't know if I like it, but it's growing on me.

Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on creativity

2009-02-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to one of the most amazing talks I've ever heard:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

Unlike many artists, I am amazingly bad at talking about The Creative Process. What is creativity? Where does it come from? "Where do you get your ideas?" - now there's a conversation-stopper, at least when it's addressed to me! Why do some people "have it" while others "aren't creative"? (heinously not so, in my understanding of the way things work, but a surprisingly ubiquitous view).

And why am I so mute when someone tries to engage me in conversation on the subject? ME! A normally bright, funny, opinionated, articulate person, and certainly not loathe to blather on about almost anything. Whether or not I know anything about the subject at hand! Yet when it comes to the topic of how/why I do what I now spend my days doing, about all I can manage is a self-disparaging "Oh, I just make stuff. Small art quilts. Surface design. You know, fabric..." Well, nobody's too sure what that means...must be code for "Beware - Flaky Artist on the scene; better get your crystals out and align your chakras!"

I could go all mystical: "I don't really know - things just happen. I just like to play." (Kinda true, but incomplete, inadequate, insufficient.) Or I could go cerebral, launch into long theories and "process" talk, most of which leads directly and in short order to the kind of pompous, self-congratulatory mental masturbation that drives me right straight crazy. Or there's always the time-honored Tortured Soul route - that's an archetype that our society has a definite place for. (And how come, by the way, we have no tradition of the Cheerful Artist? The Gleeful Soul, who creates for the sheer joy of being in the Universe?...Ooops, I see that leads right back to The Flake!)

Mystical Flake, Fatuous Narcissistic Ass, Tortured Artist: surely the creative life deserves more! Gilbert comes closer to expressing my own experience and understanding of creativity and the artist than any I've come across so far. I'm not going to recap what she says here; just, please, if you're interested in the subject at all, take the 19 minutes and watch this video!

And then let's talk!

"Playing with Paint" class

2009-02-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

While not particularly lovely pieces of fabric, these are the first 2 in the class I'm taking through Quilt University, taught by Lyric Kinard. Couldn't figure out how to send them to the class gallery, so I'll just put them here. (I'm inordinately proud of having figured out, for the first time all by myself, how to get the pix out of the camera and into the computer. Maybe tomorrow I'll progress further!) The first cloth is done by drawing the tree-ish lines on white fabric with plain ol' Crayola crayons (I broke a whole bunch of them in the process; good excuse to go buy a new box, since I find broken crayons very disturbing!), then washing over the whole mess with fabric paints. I used various mixtures of blues, and you can't see it but there's a little pearly sparkle going on. I was too impatient to wait for it to air-dry properly, so I zapped it with the heat gun for a while, then ironed it between clean newsprint (all right - it was kinda dirty newsprint), and voila: the fabric dried, the wax came out into the newsprint, and the color stayed in.

Second piece: just swashing color around on damp cotton, then scrunched up a bit to dry. But again I was too impatient, so I ironed this one dry rather than waiting. I know if I'd just let it sit there till tomorrow, there would be more contour-type lines, but oh well...

It struck me as I looked at these two side-by-side that they reminded me of November (or December, or January, or _____)in the Bahamas and the same winter months here at home in upstate NY. Guess which is which!

OK, I'll play: 25 Random Things About Me

2009-01-24T08:45:00.000-08:00

1) Some days I spend hours just communing with my little cat. Some days, she's the most "human" contact I have.

2) I love to handle fresh produce - fruits, vegetables, berries, roots: Bring them to me!

3) I consider myself to be shy, although invariably anyone who knows me bursts into hilarious laughter if I say that. Maybe my social friendliness & interest in you lets me avoid revealing anything much about myself - ever think about that?

4) I am deeply ashamed of how badly I sucked as a step-parent. It still baffles me, how that could have happened, but there it is. (But girls, if you should happen across this, I love you all, and value your presence in my life very much! It's all better now. And it was always about my issues, never about you.)

5) I had no idea when my first husband & I started out together those many years ago what wonderful strong, smart, kind, creative, interesting people we would create. Who knew? I stand forever humbled in the face of those 3 miracles! Start with little babies, and end up with fine, full people - who could believe it?

6) I will read and take an interest in almost anything. Except for a few things that are dead to me - techno, vampires and elves and unicorns, mathematics.

7) I read the Tarot cards sometimes. I dream of creating my own deck one day, but that's a lotta cards, and I have lots of other stuff to work on. And I also am good at interpreting dreams (It's a Pisces thing...)

8) Speaking of dreams - I LOVE my dreams! Such a fabulous source of entertainment, and occasionally wisdom and insight as well, arriving all unbidden and FREE to boot - how could you beat that?! I love my daughters' dreams, too.

9) I have an almost supernatural sense of smell. I can tell by the way the bathroom smells which kid has last used the toilet. I have detected dangerous hemorrhages in patients just by smelling blood as I whisked down the hall past their rooms; I've diagnosed liver disease in newborns by smell alone. And on the lovelier side, I hoard essential oils and yummy-smelling soaps and bath & cleaning products voraciously. I believe in and use aromatherapy.

10) But why, given all the all-natural all-organic cleaning and washing products I use, does my house always smell of burnt coffee when I walk in the door? This bugs me, every time.

11) Some days I think I am just lazy, rather than disabled and in pain.

12) But most days, I just WISH #11 were the case. Maybe both things are true...

13) It turns out that I have not been a good friend to most of my friends, even those I love dearly. I am not good at "reaching out"; I don't call or write, even though I often think of them; I am much better at listening than I am at offering up my own troubles. I often can't even show up at gatherings, due to my physical limitations, and I don't share about myself very well. It feels like the chronic pain issues have built a wall around me; I don't like to be seen when I'm not at my best, and I sure as hell don't want to moan or whine. Oy, such angst!

14) Some days I watch Court TV (now called In Session) all day. Well, listen to it, while I do other stuff.

15) I would like to break into this blog-world thing, but whenever I try I feel like I have nothing to say. Or more precisely, why would random people be interested in what I might have to say? Love to write, will write about almost anything, but go mute when faced with a blank computer screen. Maybe I need an assignment, like in school.

16) I am one of the only people I know who has a simple, uncomplicated, and loving relationship with my family-of-origin. Happy childhood, even happier adulthood. No unfinished business with my parents & sibs - I just love them and appreciate them. It's all good!

17) I may be the only person in America who does not feel over-stressed, overloaded, torn in too many directions. Been there, done that, didn't like it. In one of those good-things-disguised-as-a-bad-thing twists life brings, the injury that took me down also allowed me to step off the crazy merry-go-round.

18) I meditate. Quite a lot. I love it!

19) These are my favorite things in this life (besides my family & friends, of course): music, color, singing, the beauty and awesomeness of nature, the ocean, the mountains, the sky. Trees. Flowers. Well, and the babies, of course.

20) I don't know how the creative process works, or where it comes from. I don't even know where my own best work comes from.

21) Apparently I am a pacifist. I can't seem to find any war I can get behind, so I must be. "C'mon people, smile on your brother, everybody get together and try to love one another right now". Or at least - People: let's use our brains and our words to solve these problems!

22) My secret talent? I am a Sex Goddess. (Don't laugh! Saying "eeewwwww" may be appropriate.)

23) Goals? The word gives me hives - I don't like to be told what to do, even by myself! But I am working towards developing more productive work habits (it's hard when your "work" is equally your "play"), and towards building practices that will lead me towards better health. And world peace... (picture little winking emoticon here - I don't know how to make them).

24) Not only do I love my kids, Liddy, Molly, and Matthew, beyond measure, I admire them tremendously, each for different reasons: their humor, their passion, their willingness to engage with life as it is, their tender-heartedness, their creativity, their brightness of spirit as well as of intellect. But that's probably no secret!

25) I am so empathetic that it's often painful. Too much of other-peoples' energies rushing in on me. It's why I hate crowds.

Now, is there something further I'm supposed to do with this thing? Is there a game I don't know about going around? Clue me in!

1969 - Again!

2008-07-26T06:44:00.000-07:00

I know I posted this in an earlier blog entry (Saturday, October 6, 2007, if you want the full five-part harmony song-and-dance), but I just popped it up here because it was relevant to a current and amusing discussion on the Complex Cloth group. Made Back in the Day - ah, the heady smell of melted crayola crayons, paraffin wax, and Schaeffer Permanent Black ink for fountain pen...! My first so-called batik - and the only one from that era of Rit dye and paraffin wax that is still around, as far as I know (the tye-dyed Carter's Spanky-Pants that my mom and I cooked up are long since gone to their reward!).

Fun Stuff!

2008-03-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

I'll stop posting these here quite soon, I promise - there are dozens of them, though, and all still sitting around waiting for me to decide what to do: add more layers & techniques? cut them up & combine them with their cousins, or with unrelated co-inhabitants of the fabric shelves? or embroider and quilt and embellish them and call it "art"? or keep them as they are as records of my processes, or...? Anyway, for now they feel like something between a heap of riches and a flock of worries on my shoulder.

More handmade fabric pieces -

2008-02-25T12:17:00.000-08:00

Now what the heck am I gonna do with them? And there are many more from my current batch of spending way too much time amongst my playthings!

more hand-printed & dyed cloth

2008-02-15T13:45:00.000-08:00

Another piece from the same batch of experiments. This one is monoprinted over hand-dyed muslin, then printed with my own hand-carved stamps. I like this piece a lot; it seems much more useable than some of my more far-fetched pieces (which of course I can't show you right now because of the previously-mentioned computer issues).

Some Complex Cloth (well, not too complex)

2008-02-15T13:44:00.000-08:00

I've been playing with layering monoprinting, stamping, fabric & dye-painting in various combinations for the last week or two, making what Jane Dunnewold calls "complex cloth" (http://www.complexcloth.com/). Some of my experiments are coming out as murky disasters, others as appealing if sort of odd bits & pieces. Whatever - it's the process that's utterly addicting.

Here's one of the simpler pieces: monoprinted with green & blue dyes, overpainted with diluted Pebeo fabric paint (the yellow), and stamped with my own hand-carved stamps (the leaves) & a chunky foam stamp from Michaels (the dark bird-shapes).

I'll post more results as my technology allows; currently, it is all in revolt. Both of the computers I use for creating, saving, and sharing my stuff have given up the ghost, or at least are entering a prolonged rebellious stage. Too frustrating - better to go back to my dye & paint pots until Mercury comes out of retrograde, or the resident Wizard has time to fix it all!

Prayer Flags - from my daughter's wedding

2008-01-23T16:57:00.000-08:00

When my daughter Liddy & her husband Chris got married in 2004, I and my mom & my other daughter Molly - Liddy's twin) made dozens of what I thought of as "prayer flags" - like the brightly-colored Tibetan Buddhist flags that carry prayers of thankfulness on the winds to the Buddha - to surround them with the love and blessings of all of us who love them so dearly as they walked into this next stage of their life.

The wedding was held outdoors, under the long covered pavilions of our local Farmers Market. No, silly, it was in the evening; all the local cabbages and brussel sprouts and apple vendors had gone home. It was magical - we transformed the space with hundreds of candles and Chinese lanterns and locally grown (from Market vendors) fall flowers, all in the marigold colors that they had chosen, and handmade tablecloths, and the whole scene just glowed with home-made love and celebration. Not to mention Hippie Chic! I strung dozens of these flags, all carrying messages of love and hope and blessing, some meaningful, some rich with quotations from the songs that surrounded Liddy as she grew up, some just plain goofy, all along the sides of the pavilion, with the intent of surrounding them with all the love that followed them in their journey.

So...it was all very beautiful and meaningful, but after the wedding most of the flags got packed away in my basement studio, and of course in all the excitement of the wedding I knew they hadn't really had much of a chance to take them all in. This past Christmas, I finally got around to doing something that had been on my mind all along: I joined 4 of them together, added just enough more embellishments to make it seem united, and added hand & machine quilting in a beautiful copper metallic thread (it doesn't show up that well in the pic, but ooo-la-la baby!), beading, and a few doodads here & there, and gave it to them to put up in their place in Philly. I hope that every time they see it, they will remember how much love they are cradled in - and also that some of the thoughts of love that are expressed in it will help to remind them where they started through those married-life days when the troubles sometimes make you wonder "what was I thinking?" You know what I'm talking about!

So that's what this funky thing is. The picture in the upper left corner is a little painting Chris made for Liddy on their first Valentine's Day together, and they used it as their wedding invitation. Doesn't that kinda melt your heart?

Little Art Quilt

2008-01-13T07:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a little art quilt I made for my mother for Christmas this year - I'm quite infatuated with it, actually. The background fabric is my very-first-ever venture (well, my first intentional one, anyway, not counting various bleach spots on favorite jeans over the years!) into discharging; I think it was discharged using Palmolive dishwasher gel, painted along the fold lines of the fabric. Or maybe Soft-Scrub with bleach, or possibly a Clorox bleach pen - anyway, you get the idea - not anything too high-tech or artsy! The circles are Dupioni silk, fused to the cotton background. The little piles of squares & rectangles are watercolor paper, variously painted & stamped & ripened in the box where I throw all those things for future use; they have a beautiful metallic sheen, and are very lovely, if I do say so myself. They're secured to the background by some of my handmade paper beads, which are also very special. (Well, at least my mother and I think so...) Then came both machine & hand-quilting, done in gold Kreinik thread, and various random beadings.

Too bad I don't have something more profound to say about it. It just started out as a little sampler, to see how Thing This combined with Thing That. As it evolved, I kept thinking of how my mother is always telling me to "just hang it on the wall and call it art", so that's where it ended up!

Too much Pain

2007-12-31T11:15:00.001-08:00

I haven't spoken much here about my fibromyalgia and the pain that goes with it - not where/how I want to spend my time & energy. But a constant Fact Of Life nonetheless, and I do belong to a Yahoo group for fiber artists with fibro, called, logically enough, Fibro Fiberartists. Here's the link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fibro_fiberartists/.

I was thinking about what I wanted from this group today, and here's what I posted to the forum:

"As others have said, while I really appreciate a community of
fellow "fibro-fiber artists", I personally don't really want to focus
so much on the pain & disability here either...There are other forums for that, and I have chosen to stay away from them most of the time, because too many people there seem only focused on their pain & disabilities. I refuse to define myself by my pain!

I do believe that in order to move ahead it is necessary to acknowledge the pain, the anger, & all that "stuff" that goes along with having fibro, and to mourn what we have lost, and I think that this is a legitimate place to share whatever comes out in our art
from that process, if that is of value to you. It isn't gonna all be pretty, that's for sure!

If there's anybody here who's familiar with
the SoulCollage process (http://www.soulcollage.com/), I made this card for Pain.

One of the gifts fibro has given me, in a roundabout sort of way, is the gift of time. Because it forced me to just plain STOP everything else for a while. Because it has taken me right off the formerly all- consuming treadmill of working-doing-going-being-it-all and plopped me right smack into my SELF. Because the pain and stress has led me into techniques of healing breathing, meditation, ways to calm myself inside so I can see what's really there. Because it has changed so many of the things about me that used to be so central in my life, so that what is truly the ME inside me can actually shine more clearly for me.

So those are some of the things I like to focus on, and my creative work seems to be all coming from that place of illumination. I might not have found or really appreciated some of these inner places if it hadn't been for this fibro."

So I'll ask anybody who is interested: what are some
of the better things that have come to you as a result of having
fibro? Be honest and tell the truth!

Ragged Cloth Cafe musings: What makes textile art unique?

2007-11-05T06:36:00.000-08:00

In a recent article on Ragged Cloth Cafe (well worth reading & thinking about! http://junomain.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/interpreting-art-chap-6-interpretation-and-medium-photography/) Jeanne Beck posits the question: "Are there attributes that are as unique to textiles as selectivity, instantaneity and credibility are to photography and if so, what might those attributes be?"

I guess that the attribute that to me makes quilts unique as an art form is softnes/flexibility. Not softness as in "comfort", with its implications of warmth and caring, but the tactile experience of the quilt's traditional medium of fabric. Fabric is soft to the touch - even relatively scratchy fabric - and flexible in the hands of the maker. You can stretch it a little if you need to to make it work. Its edges won't scratch or gouge or splinter. It has give and ease. You can fold it, scrunch it, drape it over the back of your chair, spread it on top of whatever mess of random items might lie beneath. Even in the more cutting edge art quilts (ha! see, that's what I mean - cutting edge meaning literally "sharp") that incorporate numerous materials and elements other than fabric and thread, I still think of a quilt as being essentially soft, flexible, bendable, sometimes even limp.

This is an attribute that perhaps is experienced more by the maker than the viewer. I do fabric, I don't do steel beams. Hell, I don't even do rust, though I see that it's the hottest thing going right now. In the eyes of the viewer, I think people still do associate quilts, even "art quilts", as being made of fabric, and I think, though I can't really know because I can no longer see these things with the eyes of a non-maker, that this quality of softness and flexibility is still part of the perception of what makes an art quilt a quilt as well as a work of art.

For me, coming from a background of sewing, embroidery, weaving, and other skills working with fiber, I naturally gravitate to the medium I am most comfortable working with. I don't do hard-edged things - wood, metal, things that don't give, or that your can't fudge by "easing" a little here or there. I have ventured into mosaic work, the one exception to my otherwise soft-core endeavours, but it hardly counts because of the spaces between the bits of glass - plenty of fudging-room there! And mosaic work is essentially piecing & patchwork done in glass. Similar design elements, different medium, different feel. More cuts & slivers. Lots more difficult to be accurate. And I don't think I could enter a pieced glass mosaic into an art quilt show, even if I did contrive to have it meet the "three layers bound together by stitching" rule.

Lots to think about with this question, though. What do others have to say?

Bead For Life

2007-10-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

Today, while randomly following my nose down down the rabbit hole into the Wonderland of the internet, I came across a site that moved me deeply. It is for an organization called Bead for Life; now, normally I skip right away from anything containing "for life" in its title, fearing either an anti-choice organization, some rabid fundamentalist religious cult, or yet another site infested with the dreaded symbolic pink ribbons and sappy phrases meant to sustain hope in those fighting breast cancer. No disrespect to any of the above, most particularly to the breast cancer awareness people, whose work I respect highly and whose services I earnestly hope I never have to call upon - it just seems to me that something with more "oomph" than is conveyed by watery pink ribbons and little plucky words written in a flowing yet somehow unconvincing script on a banner held by bluebirds or bunnies is needed for the cause.

Anyway, back to my new discovery: http://www.beadforlife.org/. This is a group of women in Uganda who are working together to try to improve their extremely difficult lives through making & selling paper beads. The beads are colorful and beautiful - also very light weight, which is an important consideration for those of us with fibromyalgia and other chronic pain conditions, for whom most jewelry is too heavy to wear - but, perhaps even more important, the struggle is so great and the stakes are so high, and this is one way to provide a tiny bit of help. When you learn that all of the beaders and tailors (all women) in the cooperative are supporting themselves and their families on less than $2 a day, and that 93% of money raised goes directly to the women for their families, and you think about how far the $15 or whatever you decide to spend on their products can go in this nation struggling under the three curses of poverty, illness, and war, I don't see how you can fail to want to help - and do a little Christmas shopping at the same time!

Please, please, take a look at the website: http://www.beadforlife.org/! As an artist, a craftsperson, a woman, or a human being living in the comfort and relative wealth of the so-called "first-world nations", I don't see how we can ignore our sisters struggling against such huge odds just to survive and raise, educate, and feed their children. Please read the information on the site - I can't explain it as well as they do, but I know that if you visit it and read the stories of the individual beaders as well as their community development plans (they are building a whole Bead for Life village, in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity!), you can't help but be moved to help in any way you can.

Now Here's a Funky Old Thing...

2007-10-06T06:14:00.001-07:00

In 1969, back in the Glory Days of all things hippie, I first decided to try my hand at batik-making. I was swept off my feet by the beauty and diversity of the "new" (well, maybe to this 16-yr. old American girl!) fabrics I was seeing - the Indonesian batiks, the tie-dyes, the exotic block prints and embroideries and sheisha mirrors, even the dreaded macrame. Of course I had to try them all! I'll spare you the results of my first adventures in tie-dye; suffice it to say that there was a lot of excited activity involving Rit dye, rubber bands, and white cotton Carters' Spanky Pants around the ol' kitchen stove...

Not too thrilled with the washed-out colors of those experiments, I moved on to trying my hand at batik - and this was my first attempt. As an impulsive and impatient young girl, I lacked most of the requisite supplies for making true batik - no beeswax, no tjantjing or tjap, and above all no patience for the complicated process of layers and resists and repeated ironing-out of wax from fabric. What I did have was good old Crayola crayons, paraffin, an electric skillet, Schaeffers Permanent Black ink, and one of my father's white cotton handkerchiefs, snitched from the laundry basket. Voila -"batik", American-teenaged girl style, 1969!

The piece lingered on my dorm-room walls for awhile, and then sank from view, as such things do, until the inevitable churning of household detritus tossed it up unexpectedly when we moved to our new house last year. Who knew the silly thing was still around? It's not like it was ever, even when it was first created, anything important; it was just my early doodlings with wax, color, and crackle, a Sunday afternoon experiment the summer before I started college. But still (or again), when it came to light again after nearly 40 years, it struck me as playful and spirited and worthy of a space on the wall, and I just stuck it right up there, in a public part of the house, for all to see.

Sophisticated art? Hardly! "Art" at all? Who cares? But there is something in it of spirit and fun, and of a part of myself that I am happy to be reminded of every time I see it. So maybe now I know how to batik and dye and block print and embroider and quilt the "right" way - but I still remember how utterly thrilling it was to lay down these colors of melted crayons on my Dad's stolen handkerchief: the suspense of waiting for the wax to chill in the freezer so I could crackle it up & give it its final wash of black ink, the pure burst of surprise in my heart when I saw how those black lines just made the colors pop right out - that joy was as honest & real as any I've gotten from any more mature, sophisticated, technically-correct creations since then.

And I don't want to forget it!

Ace of Clubs - or is it?

2007-08-29T06:19:00.001-07:00

Ace of Clubs
Originally uploaded by cathyb53

And another non-quilt item, just for fun. Last Christmas I made a set of playing cards, using a blank deck of cards & painting, stamping, transfer printing, & other fun techniques. To see the complete deck, you can look down my list of links on the right side of the screen, to:

My handmade playing cards-12/06, for Matthew

Maybe I'm the Ace of Clubs, releasing my 3 now-grown children into the world? But wait, it's a well-known fact that I'm the Queen of Hearts...except in this deck, I seem to show up as the Queen of Clubs, if you believe the images on the cards...Or maybe a person shouldn't delve too deeply into interpreting what comes off of one's work table at any given time!

In the Land of the Lotus Eaters

2007-08-29T06:03:00.001-07:00

In the Land of the Lotus Eaters
Originally uploaded by cathyb53

Not fabric/quilt art - this is a collage I made last winter while we were in the Bahamas, where there's a lot of flopping around mostly naked. Something about the indolent heat of August here in upstate New York brings it to mind.

Matthew's 30th birthday

2007-08-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

Wish I could remember to take decent pictures of the things I make before I give them away! This is my son Matthew, celebrating his 30th birthday, in Maine; he's holding the little quilt hanging (which you can't see very well - the best part is below the frame of the picture) I made for him. I know, pretty girlish present, huh? Anyway, the little quilt was made entirely (well, except for the black) of my own hand-dyed & printed fabrics; below the frame of this photo are the beaded-bead embellishments and the tiny "liberated" log cabin squares. The label on the back is a fabric-printed old photo of me holding him at about a month or so old, as well as some more piecing of my hand-dyed fabrics.

The point of making this piece was to force myself to begin cutting into my own dyed, painted, & printed fabrics and using them as if they were "normal" (commercial) fabrics. A small start, and a nerve-wracking one, but at least I did it, instead of just hoarding up my "special" pieces and admiring them as cloth. More to come!

Monkey-Mind

2007-08-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

I wish that I were more focused these days. I keep being pulled in so many directions, creativity-wise, that the end result is paralysis. Or the desire to start a new project leads me to frantically rearrange my workspace. Or to tidy my sewing space by stitching all of the little snips of fabric on my sewing table into other crazy little bits of improvisationally-pieced, slightly larger, pieces. Or to re-categorize and re-shelve my paints, beads, or other supplies. Or to decide that I simply must unpack the random boxes of stuff that have been sitting in the middle of my studio since we had the new floor put in a year and a half ago; of course the reason they haven't been unpacked & put away before now is that they're down to the "stems & seeds" of the household items - long-expired sunscreens & itch creams, Ace bandages that have disintegrated from old age, old mattress pads that aren't ready to be chucked but are no longer needed for daily use, linoleum blocks I carved in high school, cat "toys" that send my funny little cats scrambling out of sight in fear, the old notebooks filled with the pitiful household accounting and somewhat-impressive Scrabble scores from life with my first husband 35 years ago...... Good grief!

When what I really want to do, of course, is Make Art. Not just the stuff I know I can do already, but the fantastic, make-me-drool-with-desire work I see on the blogs & websites of other art quilters, beaders, and surface designers. It's fear, of course, that keeps me always starting to play with new techniques & materials but never quite pulling it all together. Because what if what I finally do put together just makes me feel ashamed that it's not "better"? It's so much more comfortable to think that of course I could produce work like the rock stars of the art quilting world, if I would just get around to it, than to face my own limitations.

Of course, this is just a form of the dreaded Block, or Resistance. Hey, I read the books, I know what's what! I even know what to do about it: just Go Do It. But which "it" should I focus on? If I'm working on learning new dyeing & fabric painting techniques, I'm not sewing. If I'm sewing, I'm not working on developing complex cloth. And I haven't gone near most of my beads for a year or two, and.........Not even to mention that the time I'm spending on-line seeking inspiration & knowledge is LOTS of time not creating anything at all. I truly don't know how so many people seem to manage to do so much!

Wild Birds Art Quilt

2007-08-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

Wild Birds Art Quilt

This small art quilt was inspired by lyrics to a song by Jan Harmon; I sing a lot of folk music with my similarly-inclined friends, and this was a song I have always loved, especially when sung by my dear friend Jo Houghton. The chorus, part of which is the words on the front of the quilt, is:

"They're all dressed up in feathers with colors outrageous,

They soar from this earthly-bound kingdom of cages

On delicate wings, so small and courageous,

Thank heaven for wild birds."

I started it last fall, when the rich autumn golds and oranges and purples were all around me. I used my own hand-dyed fabrics, commercial fabrics, rubber stamps on painted watercolor paper (the birds) and fabric (the lettering), and beads. Instead of using the more traditional batting, I fused front & back on to Fast-2-Fuse (a stiff, heavy fusibile Timtex, the stuff the bills of ball caps are made with); this allowed the machine quilting to be purely decorative & free of the necessity to hold all the layers together evenly.

I admit it - I did get carried away a bit on the back! The frame around the "label" portion is a digital copy of a paper-and-scissors collage frame that I made 3 years ago as part of my daughter's wedding quilt - I'm quite fond of it, apparently.

Sadly, it was not accepted into this year's Small Art Quilts show at Main Street Gallery in Groton, NY. This was my first submission to a juried show, though, so I'm not too discouraged. And who knows, it may be accepted into another show - or I may just hang it in my living room, where I can see it every day!

And Another...

2007-02-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

Part digital, part real-world cut-and-paste. The Force no longer appears to be with me today - try as I might, I can't get much father in the (so-called) Digital Darkroom, so I just did a little of this, a little of that...and came up with this.

The background is two of Matthew's photos, digitally altered & layered. Then, the Spirit of the Photoshop having departed my presence, I just did a little rubber stamping on top of the print.

What does it mean? I don't know, it's just what I did this morning.

My First Digital Layering Attempt!

2007-02-15T05:26:00.000-08:00

Spent all day yesterday (Valentines' Day - a big snowstorm) knocking my brains out trying to figure out how to do some very rudimentary work in Photoshop, and this is one of my 2 results.

Since I've been working with various methods of inkjet transfers and getting very frustrated with the lumpy uncertain results I've been getting (still working on it though- it's lots of fun!), I thought I would try to achieve similar results digitally - the ol' digital darkroom and all that, dontcha know. Well, since I don't know the first thing about working in Photoshop (and I'm in an old version, 6.0), my puny attempts felt like reinventing not only the wheel but all of civilization from the original primordial grains of dirt. But I DID IT! (with lots of IM help from Matthew, who was most obliging and very patient with my ignorance).

So what is it? Well, I started with a really cool photo of a weathered, rusty culvert that I snitched from Matthew's Flickr photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/barge/), and I messed around with hue, saturation, and contrast till it looked pretty much nothing like the original, just a layer of texture & color. Then I took a scanned image of a very beautiful painting of a water lotus (someone else's work - don't know where it came from or who made the original), layered it on top of the altered image from Matthew's photo, and made it semi-transparent, so that the lotus flower emerges in a ghostly fashion from the background. I'm not entirely satisfied with the finished result - but I am supremely happy that I have made the first steps towards learning how to manipulate images digitally.

Sounds so simple, doesn't it? I'm sure it is very simple, for anyone who knows how to do it. Well, isn't everything pretty simple once you've mastered the skills necessary for each step? But I am a rank beginner, working with my usual scientific method of randomly pushing buttons whose names don't seem to have any relation to their actual function and are therefore utterly inscrutable to me, until something happens. Then, should I manage to achieve an effect I like, I am unable to replicate it since I have no idea of what it was I did. But I will continue to work with the digitals, stealing the incredible photographs done by my artsy kids and layering them with odd snippets and seeing what I can come up with. At least all this working in Photoshop doesn't get my fingers all gluey or use up my precious supplies.

SoulCollage Cards

2006-12-31T08:47:00.000-08:00

Yo! I did it again! Now I've got the Flickr.com thing down, and the scanning/uploading thing, AND the posting pictures to my so-called blog thing.

Now all I need is something to say - here's where I freeze up. Ever known me to be short of words before? Don't worry, it won't last long.

I remember now - I started this whole Blog thing so that I could share my SoulCollage (c) cards without hogging up space on the group website. Maybe the main purpose of this blog will be to share my work & processes with my fellow-minded artsy friends. I want to ask for genuine feedback, but I'm very new at this, and very tender about the whole business of "putting myself out there", as they say. I fear looking like a fool. Saying "Here - look at what I made" seems very arrogant somehow, or - even worse - as if it might appear arrogant. Like I'm all "here, look how cool I am, now you have to tell me I'm very clever or artsy or 'creative' or whatever" - when my real intention is just to share my work with others who are into the same kind of thing.

That's not what I'm here for. Nor do I have the currently-popular "low self esteem" issue; it's not that I think what I do sucks, it's just that showing others (family! friends! strangers!) what I do, in a field outside of my comfort zone (quilts, anything fiber-related - I'll show that stuff to anybody, anytime!), is new and nerve-wracking to me. So OK, I know what to do: I'll post another thing right up here & shut the hell up already!

OK. This is another Soul Collage card, called "Above and Below". I think I need to figure out how to put captions under the pics - probably there's a way to do that, right?

Let's try this...

2006-12-30T08:25:00.000-08:00

Hey, look at this! After 45 minutes of hacking away at the attempt, I've finally managed to post a picture! I am a brilliant modern woman of the 21st century after all - I was biginning to doubt myself, just for a few minutes there...

So this is one of the playing cards I made for Matthew this Christmas. I got a set of blank regulation poker cards (Blue Bicycle design on the back) from SkyBluePink.com and went to work with my special things - acrylic paints, Lumieres, and rubber stamps (the numbers/suits stamps also from SkyBluePink), using the expensive & stinky StazOn ink. There are more to come (51, to be exact, though I promise not to post them all!); I just wanted to use this scanned image (thanks, Matthew) to see if I could do it.

And now I see that I can!

Cathy Enters the 21st Century!

2006-11-11T06:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely clear exactly what a "blog" (what an ugly word!) is exactly, or what it's for, or why I should want one in the first place, but here I am. Hey, I'm a with-it kind of girl, I "show up", as we say in the New Age lingo.

I've created this blog because one of my Yahoo groups suggested it as a way to share pictures of our work - I guess the allotted space for that group is filling up fast. Pretty soon I'll figure out how to post photos & stuff. We'll see how that goes - first I'll have to figure out how to ever find this space again!

I might have a lot to say. I might get stage fright and clam up. Who knows? Odds are that before the new year arrives I'll have forgotten I ever created a blog. Or if I remember that I started one, I'll forget where it is. Gee, this could be a whole new variation on "hiding my own Easter eggs"!

Okay, I'll so-called "talk" to you later. And how do I put photos on here, which was supposed to be the whole point of the thing anyway...?