Category: Art

I found the neck of the broken bottle under Ed Gulley’s wind chime.  Before the snow today an early flower was leafing under it. When I went to look at it I found the broken bottle.  So I tied it onto my Blue Bailing Twine.

After that I tied on the bone.  I found it in the woods a few days ago, hollow as a pipe.

It seemed too big to hang like I did the other bone, so I attached it to the gate post instead.

How I struggled with my Meditation Tree yesterday.

I tied strips of fabric into knots and sewed them on.  I was halfway done, and it wasn’t right.  The knots were heavy and dense.  The weight of them daunting.

I only felt better when at the end of the day, I cut all my stitches and the leaves fell to my studio floor.

But what to do instead kept me up last night. I finally fell asleep with the help of a relaxation meditation from the Calm App.

It helped me to keep a clear mind even when I woke in the morning and went to my studio.

It didn’t take me long to see that my tree wanted branches not leaves. I pinned on the fabric and on the first try it was just the right size and created just the right shape.

I spent the day sewing the branches down.

When I was done I pulled out the strips of silk that I’ll use for the earth energy spiral.  I pinned it under the tree, but I’m still playing with the size and placement.

I have a feeling that once that is sewn down, I have a better idea of what to do next around the branches of the tree.

I’ll be dropping off my latest batch of potholders in the mail this morning.  Suns, scraps, moths and butterflies.  They are all sold.

Theresa ordered a Heron Magnet with hers.  “Hard to believe it was the one magnet I didn’t have.” she wrote me.  And Gail left a message saying “I want people close to me get a little piece of your art.”

I see the reviews many of you leave in my Etsy Shop.  I’ve never figured out how to respond to them.  It’s one of those things that continues to stump me. But I like reading them and appreciate each one.

Everyone gets a Raven postcard or Zip notecard with their order.  And I just got some stickers with that photo I put up on my blog a while ago of the laundry in my washing machine.  It’s just a little thing about 2″ round but it looks like a whole other world to me.  I put that or a sticker of “My Truth Has Wings” on the outside of the package.

Jon and I joke about my shipping station.  He imagines it growing with employees packing up my work and sending it off.  But I’ll never be able to make so much work that I can’t ship it myself.  I can’t create that quickly.

So for me it’s my printer and labels,  mailers and boxes, cards and stickers, tape and markers, in the empty but busy bedroom upstairs in the farm house.

That’s the hand stitched quilting on the back of my Meditation Tree that I am painting in the photo above.  The paint will bleed through the stitches onto the front of the piece.  The paint is a suggestion,  spotty and inconsistent.  But the pattern of the hand stitching is undeniable.

The paint adds color and deepens the texture of the backing.

But before I started painting, I experimented with making leaves for the tree.

I figured this out, with the fabric and all while I lay awake one night, not able to sleep.  I was a bit surprised that I liked the way it looked when I actually tied the fabric in knots and sewed a few on.

Often when I come up with an idea in the night it doesn’t work in the daylight.

You can see the paint beginning to seep through to the front of the quilt in the photo above. Much of it will probably be covered up by the leaves, but it will still add another layer to the piece.

I still have lots more leaves to knot and sew on. I’m thinking of adding some beads or buttons to the tree top too, but I’ll see how that works as I go.

I did find the perfect fabric for the Earth Energy Spiral.  A ball of strips of silk tied together.  It is made of colors similar to the  variegated thread I used on my small Meditation Tree wall hangings.

The colorful scraps from my Moon and Sun Eclipse Potholders  didn’t not want to go to waste. So with them I made something from very little.    Unlike the strings too short to tie, these scraps were not too small to sew.

I used the scraps all up and with a help from the other fabric in my stash made my Scraps of the Scraps Potholders.   Each one has a little bit of the sun peeking out.  A wink to the eclipse, and bit a of the universe.

My  Scraps of the Scraps Sun Potholders are $25 each + $5 shipping and you can buy them in my Etsy Shop, just click here.

In the attic of my mind I have a box labeled, That Thing About Short Strings.  I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the US, of a certain generation or maybe more than one, collecting string that is “too short” is a “thing”.

I got this message from Susan today…

“Your post today about your *scraps from scraps* potholders made me smile!   I love the idea of even using the scraps from scraps to create yet something new again!
    When I was growing up…..my Father told me a story of when his grandmother died…..and they had gone through her house, clearing it of her belongings.  In her attic….they found not only two boxes full of balls of string (which she knotted together and apparently used often)……and yet another box carefully labelled *string that is too short to use otherwise*.”

Poet Donald Hall wrote a book called “String Too Short To Be Saved” about his memories of summers on his grandparents farm.   My friend  Mary Kellogg wrote a poem based on a box of string she found in her mother’s house that was labeled “String too short to tie.”

As for me I do have a string collection, but it’s in the category of Susan’s great-great grandmothers first two boxes of string that is long enough to roll into a ball, even if it’s only a small one.

Although I do have a plastic baggie in my studio filled with “scraps too small to sew“.

String Too Short To Tie  By Mary Kellogg

fiber of life
kaleidoscopic
twisting and turning
unraveling spears of time
in concert with out souls
stepping into our days and nights

decisions are made
cementing lasting friendships
if severed the cut is deep
never to be tied again
it is unraveled
to roll about in nebulous thoughts
prodding conscience with questions

another fiber swings into place
a misplaced fiber
strong remembrance
short of life
anchored
we choose to remember

I do it often, but  didn’t realize it until I was standing in front of the Larry Rivers painting at the Williams College Museum yesterday.   The painting is large probably 8’x10′ if not bigger.   It’s an abstract of one woman painted in three different outfits.

I look at the brush strokes, the shapes, lines  and other marks made on the canvas and I imagine painting them.  I can feel what the bush feels like on the canvas.  I can feel how wet or dry the paint is. It’s like I’m tracing the painting with my mind. It’s so visceral I feel like I know what it was like to paint it.

I do this with certain drawings too, tracing the lines with my mind to understand how those lines give the illusion of a three dimensional figure or object.

It’s a way of entering the piece of art, or knowing it on another level.

Then there are installations, like Maya Freelon’s that anyone can enter in a completely physical way.

Freelon’s installation, made of tissue paper and ink, is part of the exhibit called Emancipation. 

Maya Freelon said about her art….”As a child, I spent my summers with Granny Franny, and she taught me how to make something out of nothing, how to make a way of no way, and how to make quilts one piece at a time.”

To see more the Emancipation exhibit, click here. 

I didn’t take many photos because I just wanted to experience the art in the moment.  But I couldn’t resist taking a video of Freelon’s installation.  All of her pieces touched me

We are fortunate to live so close to a museum like the one at Williams Collage.  It is free (they have a donation jar) and has an every changing permanent collection that is a great mix of historic and contemporary art.  And  because it is small, I can spend as much time as I want looking at the art and still see it all.

The museum also has a reading room, a quiet, meditative space that is as nourishing to Jon as the art is to me.