Some Complex Cloth (well, not too complex)

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

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

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

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?

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

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...

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!