Search Results for: mother mary

I’ve been worrying over the shape of my Mother Mary.  The lace framing her face and the shape of her shoulders was off.

But today I just kept sewing on lace till I got it right. Now, much of the top of her body, is done. Tomorrow I’ll finish it up and begin working on the lower part of her.

I had stitched my conch shells under the moon that Mother Mary is standing on today.  Then I started sewing down the lace.  I’m also doing that by hand and I’m figuring it out as I go. I have a lot of lace already dyed, but I have more in my stash that I can dye if I need it.  I’m not sure how much I’ll need, but I don’t want to run short.

Knowing I have more allows me to use the lace exactly in the way I want to. That’s now always the case with my materials since they are limited to what I have on my shelves, which people have donated, or can buy in a thrift store.

I was just about to start sewing the blue lace on my Blessed Mother Mary when I realized that if she’s standing on the moon, I needed to get that in place first.

As I contemplated how to attach the moon I had made to the old quilt backing, I came to see that what I really needed to do, was to make the moon right on the backing.

So I used the moon I made yesterday as a guide and recreated it directly on the old quilt using matte medium.

I wanted the piece to be able to dry laying flat on the floor, so it wouldn’t pucker.  This means sewing the blue lace would have to wait another day.  Instead, I decided to make the conch shells.

I found the perfect piece of fabric in my stash.  The color remarkably close to the weathered conch shell I used to make my drawings from. It also has a nice toothy texture, which “feels” like the shell to me and will stand out from the other fabrics in the piece.

I did a simple outline in marker to get me going, then stitched the rest of the shell freehand looking to my drawings and the original conch shell as I worked.

I used two shades of blue to make them.  I was having so much fun, I made one and an extra one.

I still have a little bit of work to do on the moon, but I need for it to be completely dry first.  I’ll do that and sew on the conch shells tomorrow.  After that, I should be ready to sew on the blue lace.

Waiting for the moon to dry.

I got right to work on my Mother Mary today.  My plan was to start by cutting the batting and making the loop to push a dowel through to hang the piece, but I got sidetracked with making the crescent moon that will be under her feet.

I cut the moon out of a piece of canvas then used yellow scraps of fabric and matte medium and attached the fabric to the canvas.

I tried the moon out, but it wasn’t quite right.  So I went over it with an orange oil crayon and some orange paint to finish it off.  Then I did a couple of quick drawings of the conch shells to see what they’d look like with the moon.

In so many of the images of Our Lady Of Guadalaupe there are angels holding up the crescent moon under Mary’s feets.  I thought the conch shells would work nicely for my Mary instead of the angels.

By the end of the day I had the loop done and the batting attached. I pinned Mary to the backing and pinned on some of the blue lace on too to get a feel for how it would look.

Tomorrow I’ll start sewing.

I got to my studio early this morning and looked at my Mother Mary and the birds, both on the floor next to each other. I wasn’t sure which to work on, so looked some more and waited.

It only took a few minutes for me to decide.  It was time to work on  Mother Mary’s hands and paintbrushes.  I always get a little nervous when it’s time to do a major part, like this, when I’m working on a piece.  But there also always comes the time when I find I’m ready to do it. Or maybe it’s just that it doesn’t feel right avoiding it anymore.

I did her hands first but forgot to take pictures of the process.  I didn’t forget when it came time for the brushes.

Once again I pinned my drawing of the brushes onto the fabric I was stitching on.  I chose a piece of muslin, it felt like the right color and texture. Then I stitched over the lines using red thread.

In the photo above you can see how I started to peel the paper away after sewing over the lines.

Then I sewed over the outline adding some details.

Next came the brush hairs…

…then the  paint on the brushes.

Here are the brushes in the hands.

Now that I have her face and hands and brushes I can start putting Mother Mary together.

I don’t have all the details with her feet worked out.  I want to put conch shells and a crescent moon, like Our Lady of Guadalupe has at her feet.  But that will come.

Next, I’ll cut some batting to size and a backing that I can stitch through when I sew down her face, hands, brushes, and all that blue lace.

My plan was to start some potholders today.  But it wasn’t working.

So when I got back to work after lunch, I shoved all the rejected fabric I had pulled out of my shelves to the side and began working on my Mother Mary’s hands and her bouquet of brushes.

This is where I landed today.  With a few adjustments, I think they’ll work.

I’ll stitch the brushes separately then sew her hands over them, onto the backing,  using another piece of linen the same color as her face. The brushes will be fun to stitch, I imagine them covered in dried paint which will give me the opportunity to make them colorful.

Since she’s not sewn down yet, Mary got a little messed up when I moved her to work on my quilt which is why it looks like she’s caught in the wind.

I knew it would come to me if I was patient and didn’t think about it too much.

And that’s just what happened this morning as I was piecing together my Shibori Hankie Quilt. I had the idea that a flower should be growing from my Mother Mary’s praying hands.  But which flower? That was the question running just under the surface of my consciousness.

Then it popped into my head, Indian Paintbrush.  Perfect because of the paintbrush reference connecting Mother Mary to Sue Silverstein’s art room.

I stopped what I was doing and googled Indian Paintbrush finding its proper name to be Castilleja.  Then I dug deeper having a feeling that the name “Indian Paintbrush” like the name “Wandering Jew” for the spiderwort houseplant,  was derogatory.

(Jon recently bought me an Inch Plant, which I knew from my childhood as a Wandering Jew.  I had the same feeling about the name of that plant when I said it out loud to Jon. When Jon researched it he found its origins were anti-Semitic ).

I found a bunch of different myths telling the story of how Indian Paintbrush got its name, but none of the writing seemed to be by Native Americans. Then I came across a blog post on Broken Walls and Narratives addressing the racism of certain plants and flowers. “Indian Paintbrush” and “Wandering Jew” were both there as well as some other plants I was unfamiliar with.

The author, (whose name I couldn’t find) wrote….

“…it could easily be called Paintbrush plant. Using the word “Indian” invokes something wild, mythical, or even something silly (such as literally using the plant as a paintbrush).  It reduces Native Americans into an idea about something primitive, whimsical, or even non-existent rather than actual, living people, with actual uses for plants.” 

“There is also a colonizing tone to these names, as these are not the names that Native Americans themselves gave the plants but imagined names from colonizers and their descendants.”

This makes sense to me,  it’s just the kind of thing I had been thinking without knowing the origins of the name.  And not something  I want to propagate.

So I decided flowers weren’t necessary.   Instead, my Mother Mary will simply be holding a bouquet of paintbrushes.

This morning I walked into my studio and knew it was the day I’d stitch my Mother Mary’s face and hands.

The drawing of the face I made was so “right” I just pinned it onto the doily and stitched over the pencil lines.

Then I tore the paper away…

The rest I did freehand on my sewing machine.  I used three different colors for her eyes…

Then I started working on her hands stitching over a drawing I made of them as I did with the face.

But when I got them done, they just didn’t look like the hands that would go with her face.   I kept drawing them over and over again but it just wasn’t working.  I’ll try again tomorrow.

Maybe I have to think of them in a different way than I am. Even if, right now, I have no idea what that might be.

Yesterday I washed the lace I’ll be using on my Blessed Mother fabric painting.  Today I dyed it.

I used Rit fabric dye and did it in two batches because my pot wasn’t big enough to hold all the lace at once.  I let each one soak for an hour. Just boiling the water took a while.  So while I waited, I did three months’ worth of bookkeeping.

I didn’t expect this to take all day, but it did.

In a way.

I took a walk at three after feeding the animals. And soon after that, it was dark out.  I just can’t seem to get myself to do much work after 4:30 so far this week.  Once it gets dark I lose my energy.  I know it will pick up again as the winter moves on. I also know from years past that this is one of those quiet, slow weeks.

Lots of people are away, off from work and school, and getting ready to celebrate the New year.

So I’ve decided not to fight it but take advantage of it.  I’m not exactly on vacation, but I’m taking it slow and easy.

I started working on a new fabric painting today. I’m not going to write about it a lot tonight, mostly because I’m too tired.  Even though it’s only 5:30 it feel like it’s a lot later to me.

I did figure some important parts of the fabric painting out today.

I got the right backing and cut it to size. I also figured out the scale of the image, which is my version of the Virgin Mary, or Blessed Mother, as Sue Silverstein calls her.  I mention Sue because it’s her way of believing in Mary that has rubbed off on me and made me want to make this piece.  But I’ll write more about that another day.

By the end of the day, after much experimenting, I decided to go with my first idea of making Mary’s hair, which will also be the traditional blue robe she’s wrapped in, from lace that I’ll dye blue.

The idea to make her hair and gown one comes from an 18th-century wood sculpture of Mary Magdelene.

I’ll stitch her face on the doily in the top photo  (her eyes will be bigger than the ones I drew in with pencil) and stitch her hands from another doily similar to it.  But that’s all I know about it right now.

As usual, once I start working with the materials I’ve chosen, I’ll have a better sense of how I’ll put it all together and what it will look like.