Monthly Archives: November 2009

Gratitude List

beechs-reach

I am grateful for trees, for sunlight, for November’s melancholy, for shapes and shadows and cameras.

anniversary-gift

I am grateful for anniversary gifts (above), Julia Child, my husband, 19 years of marriage, the task of raking, the smell of fallen leaves, flannel sheets, darkness to sleep in, sleeping, and coffee.

Halloween-water-break

I am grateful for my boys, for teenage boys in general,

boys-being-girls-TWO

and for the high jinx of Halloween.

I am also grateful that I am mothering teenage boys and not trying to partner with them — which is to say, I am grateful to be 52 and not 14.

I am grateful for some new cyber friends, for the thread/cloth/fiber community I am slowing becoming a part of, for the way blogging forces a certain kind of accountability, and a tracking that is useful to someone like me with a sieve brain and short attention span.

I am grateful for the way my mind works, even with its gargantuan gaps in organizational skill and memory. I am grateful to all those people wiser than I who have taught me how to surrender (once in a while, accompanied by some form of Grace or other).

Surrender

I am grateful to SoulCollage® and Tarot cards and the abiding power of images.

More on Surrender when Newton Open Studios is over.

Quilting Moonlight with Recycled Shirts

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Still working on the Full Moon in Taurus quilt. Here’s what I did instead of the lace/tulle treatment —

Better-moonlight

This is more in line with what I want for this quilt than the lace I initially placed.

lace too bright

tracing to define house shadows

shiny tulle for moonlight

better than just lace, but --

When I saw one of my prize new thrift shop purchases —

bub-shirt

I saw moonlight and shadows all over it.

Other things on table this week —

studio-table

I love the unintentional symbol of financial demise created by the shadow’s traced edge placed over the bull.

I have made a couple of journal quilts expressing my outrage at the greedy, stupid, short-sighted, ridiculous laissez-faire-AynRand-Republican-lessgovernment/regulation-is-godly types (though Democrats played their part) that created the financial catastrophe of ’08.

I am not done expressing my outrage.

A recent Vanity Fair with photos of some of the big players (all the back-door dealings with billions flung at institutions to ‘save’ the economy also make me crazy, even IF it was the right thing to do)… will provide fodder.

Journal Quilt, March 2009

This is one of my Economy quilts — if you look at the brown and white toile of a harvest scene, you’ll see that I blotted out the peasant slaving away to earn his bread with a big black square. (Since then, I drew the figure back with some thread)… You’ll also see a precipitously declining zigzag representing the crash, as well as a Hawaiian deep indigo palm print cut and rearranged to create a feeling of a hurricane. The little house in the upper right remains relatively untouched. I suppose that could represent the fact that I am in my home, we are paying our mortgage, and the housing market where I live is relatively stable. This is a huge blessing, but does not quite counter the ten years of savings that we lost.

I want to stop feeling like that peasant. No — I want to stop BEING that peasant.

Quilting a Full Moon in Taurus

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Fern-Village

I THOUGHT I was going to bind and be done with this. But a few influences (later on those, perhaps) got me to wanting to add a moon and moon shadows.

To make the moon, I looked in some unlikely places, underlining my rule about COLLECTING UGLY FABRIC.

who knew I'd want this fabric?!!

Disk and batting to start —

I won't use a backing -- but there will be two top layers

I love sheers for layering to create depth and a one-of-a-kind surface —

sheer shirts and scarves layer well

This shirt has shown up in other places lately — a self portrait, for one… Its scenes of New York resonate to a child of parents who haled from Brooklyn. THIS particular full moon was in Taurus, and so, while my initial impulse was to make a quilt about money, the difficult transitions to fall/daylight savings, and the painful nature of attachment… now it had also to do with my father (b. May 19, 1929).

I like to use dissimiliar threads top and bottom for more texture

After stippling the craters, I flipped one of the lighter edges over the top (making a third top layer) because I thought the moon was too dark, and the fabric was there.

fold-edge-to-TOP-first

Then, because I wanted to make progress and because I knew I didn’t want to attach the moon to the quilt with a loose satin stitch, I machine-stitched the lunar edges under. (BTW, do you see those two men in the foreground of the grey landscape?!! This reference to the “man (or men) in the moon” not only affirms my love of visual puns, it does direct homage to my father, who was a true Master of the Pun.

tucking-under-on-machine