Off to Camp

I just sent my oldest off to sleepaway camp for three weeks, and I am alternating between excitement and anxiety for her. It will be an intense adventure, and I'm sure she will be opening new doors of experience and discovering windows that shed light on her inner strengths.




She will be learning on her own how to balance her work and play time.





Most of all, I hope, she'll be aspiring to new heights creatively and intellectually.


I wonder if growing up is harder on the parent or the child?

Articulate Threads

"Let threads be articulate . . . and find a forum for themselves to no other end than their own orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on, only to be looked at."

Anni Albers (1899-1994)

The Past Returns

The past returns as I stitch. I guide the fabric through the sewing machine and wonder at its vintage. The piece of linen is silky, with a soft drape. It has been cut from a set of linen napkins I bought at the Salvation Army. Frankly, it was the embroidered mushrooms that had caught my eye. They are not kitschy or psychedelic; in fact, they're almost naturalistic in form. Now each mushroom is a framed rectangle I have appliqued to a small art quilt.

As I smooth the deliberately frayed edges of the linen on the quilt, I think about the moment in time that someone--perhaps a bored but artistically inclined housewife--decided to stitch her own linen napkins and embellish them with these mushrooms. (Why is another questions altogether.) The smooth, unstained linen speaks of frequent use and careful laundering, so I imagine back to a time before "stay-at-home mom" became a post-feminist choice, when housewifery was a fading but still expected norm. When the union of utility and DIY design was valued. I'd guess the '70s.


I cut out another piece of the linen, this time for the soft silhouette of a mermaid's torso. The edges ravel softly and I vacillate between leaving it untouched to move freely as a mermaid would through the sea and tacking it in place with a simple whip stitch. I decide to stitch the edges in place, molding the mermaid to the felted wool background. I use the smallest needle in the package of sharps and thread one strand of embroidery floss through its eye. My newly purchased reading glasses allow me to hold the needle close and begin the tiny stitching.

As the needle glides through the wool and catches a single linen thread, I feel its fragility, as if its wispy weft threads are ready to dissolve like cotton candy. This was a good choice then, to protect the mermaid's soft outline. Each stitch feels like a spell I am weaving for her protection, and perhaps for mine as well.



And as I go back and add a satin edging around the mermaid's arms, the past returns for me in a different way. "La Sirena" on the Mexican bingo card, the image I look for as I am searching for a lucky card. The "kitty" is a bowl full of pennies in the middle of my grandmother's formica table, and all the chairs in the house are crowded around it. The voices of my cousins, aunts, and uncles fill the living room-turned family bingo hall. My father, the family clown they call The King, turns over the top card from the deck, holds it up, and calls out the name: "El Borracho" lurches by with his bottle in hand; "El Catrin" fascinates in his formal cutaway suit. "El Sol" and "La Luna" fill my card with pennies, a row with only "La Sirena" to fill. And, because she is my talisman, she does indeed swim to the top of the deck of cards. My heart races. I squeak out, "Bingo!" before anyone else can claim the full kitty, and the pennies form a rusty pile beside my card.



My mermaid's hair is the color of those pennies, a braid of copper sewn with vintage crewel wool. Three happy starfish whirl beside her, soon to be embellished with embroidered spirals. I am happy with her, how she has formed--her quilted tail, her blanket-stitched net of a top, her sweetly curved arms.

But back to that question I evaded asking of my resourceful '70s housewife--the why? Why am I sewing this little talisman? She is not a useful item like the linen napkin I have ruined to make her. And surely my time--as a "work-at-home mom"--could be taken up by completing any number of tasks: I have images to edit for a work project, dinner to make, a hamper full of soiled cloth napkins of my own to cycle, homework to check, clutter to clear, a child to tend.

Yet I focus on the sewing so that the past can return with each meditative stitch. Not only the textile past that I am rescuing--the beautiful piece of linen and hand embroidery labored over long ago--but those little threads of memories that come back to me to be stitched in place.

Water, Water Everywhere

The rain hasn't let up for days, and I'm feeling the June Gloom. Earlier in the week, however, my son and I caught a glimpse of the sun and mostly blue skies and headed to our favorite creek for a picnic lunch.

We admired the tadpoles, probably already more than a month old, as they swam amongst the rocks. Some kind of water snake poked his head and part of his body tentatively from beneath a boulder in the creek, but I didn't manage to photograph him before he retreated.

We walked to the pond and fed the koi and the growing goslings, still with their fluffy head feathers, while another feathered friend looked on in frustration.

And today's all-day drizzle made it just right for sitting inside and putting the finishing touches on the WaterStone. The mermaid is curled around a felted stone, and her body is fashioned from a vintage linen napkin and thrifted vintage fabric scraps. Her braided hair is vintage crewel wool, and her collecting bag is crocheted from vintage variegated crochet cotton.

A Day of Remembering

Today is a day of remembering. Remembering those who lost their lives in combat. Those who lost their lives caught between forces beyond their control. Soldiers as well as civilians. We honor their sacrifice and grieve for their suffering.




Remembering is a necessary process, so that we can learn from the past and move into the future with purpose. But with remembering comes sadness, sometimes even anger at what could have been. Somehow we must weave compassion into those memories--for ourselves and for others--so that remembering becomes a blessing, like last fall's leaves decaying to become fertile loam for this season's blossoms.





The process of making a series of felted covered stones for Margie of Resurrection Fern is my attempt at remembering--preserving a perfect April day with her and encompassing what Margie has meant to me in this last year of healing for me.




Margie's blog--her storytelling, her photographs, her art, her deep appreciation for nature--opened me up to what I needed just at the right time in my life. It has been an elemental friendship, calling on the forces of air, earth, fire, and water.




Through her inspiration I have reconnected with the natural world. It has helped me to heal.




I have learned to stretch my wings and take tentative flight.

Photograph by Margie of Resurrection Fern

At the same time I am trying to remain grounded.




I am learning to work with the fire inside of me, focusing on letting it blaze but not burn.




And I am trying to follow the natural flow of life, like the riffle and pool of a stone-lined creek. This last stone has yet to take shape. In my mind it keeps flowing from one form to another.




Through Margie's generosity to a friend, I have been reminded to reach out to others. That one act of kindness has enlarged my circle of friends and enriched my life. Thank you, Rane, for giving me added inspiration for the FireStone. And thank you, Sonia, for your inspiration for the format of this post. Through it I honor your parents and grandparents and the sacrifices they endured in a time of war.

Gifting

Covered stones on one of Jude Hill's "Spirit Cloths"

In the storytelling post I touched only briefly on textile artist Jude Hill's work. I've struggled for the last two weeks to put into words how her stitching has inspired me, and I finally realized this week that it was going to take more than one post to capture what her work means to me. With Jude's permission, I've included some quotes from her blog that have helped clarify and extend my own creative process. I hope that they will inspire you as well.

I admire how, stitch by stitch, Jude tells a story through her quilts. She seems to follow a thoughtful but open process that allows each quilt to reveal its own story. The time that she takes for each quilt allows for meanderings and intuitive leaps. "Funny how things come together," Jude writes. "I think it is a combination of intent, mistakes. . . , technical necessities and the evolution of thought during the execution. hand sewing is so slow that the project has time to transform in my head before i reach the end of a seam." (Jude Hill, Spirit Cloth . . . Quilting a Story, February 7, 2007)

I also connected with Jude's layering technique. (See her "layers" post from November 13, 2006 for her note to herself on this aspect of her work.) The layering of meaningful fabrics, applique, and embroidery gives each quilt block a texture, an emotional landscape of sorts. She achieves this layered complexity over countless hours, putting time into her art on a daily basis. (She has devised some innovative techniques so that she can quilt on her daily train commute.) It's inspiring to see how each quilt block gradually takes shape and then eventually gets formed into a complex whole.

Jude seems to approach each quilt as a gift to a particular recipient. As she sews, she is thinking about that person in a truly connected way, considering how to both represent them and communicate with them. She recognizes that she is receiving a gift at the same time that she is creating one. "for me the gift giving process is a centering process," she explains. "i am ever healed by giving a true gift. i consider the ability to appreciate an artists intention as a gift received." (Jude Hill, Spirit Cloth . . . Quilting a Story, November 22, 2006)

These three aspects of Jude's work--her storytelling, her layered approach, and her process of creating a meaningful gift--helped me clarify some of the goals of my own work.

I would like the stories that I write and the pieces that I craft to have a strong narrative element. A narrative, to me, feels like the necessary current that carries a reader or viewer along through a piece of fiction or art. While it carries them along, though, they also have to stop and admire the details. Although I love the sleek lines of modern design and art, I also appreciate work that has exuberant details that fill the entire frame and that cry out to be examined in depth. There is so much emotion to capture in this way, and these kinds of work force us to slow down and really LOOK. Finally, I agree with Jude's notion that making a gift provides a therapeutic sense of connection with one's own creative process and with the gift's receiver.

I read Jude's story of the making of the "Listen to the River" quilt (this post is a good place to start reading the story) just as I was working on a gift for a friend. In a future post I'd like to share how Jude's story pushed the piece in a new direction. It involves navigating the tricky terrain between inspiration and imitation and expressing one's own voice while still representing the gift's receiver.

Have a great weekend!

EarthStone

Storytelling

Jude Hill's "Moments Quilt Block 5"

My richest moments of connection with my kids have involved storytelling. The stories become windows into each child's development and inner life. I tell my youngest hero tales set in our own backyard, with Nessie the Lake Monster and a friendly troll who lives under the rock bridge at the creek. My middle child is drawing simple ball characters and giving them names, powers, and stories like the Pokemon characters. My oldest, who will soon go off to sleepaway camp for three weeks, is now fascinated by stories about me and my husband in college and graduate school. Those true tales would make most people yawn, but I think she sees in them glimpses of her future independence.

Detail of Jude Hill's "Moments Quilt Block 5"

I am not a natural storyteller. My inherent shyness makes it difficult to perform a story. This stage fright blocks my creativity as well, making it hard to access the stories I know that I have inside of me.

Playing Tic Tac Toe with my Covered Stones and Jude Hill's Circles

But storytelling with my kids has forced me to get over some of these hangups. When I hear, "Mommy, tell me a story," from my youngest, it no longer creates a sense of panic in me. I choose an event from his day or a fear he is working to overcome and launch a story from there. I never know where these tales will end up, but somehow they manage to engage his emotions and imagination.


Telling stories establishes a close connection between me and my kids. When we're like this, the words seem to wrap us in a warm embrace. I think that this embrace is even larger than the two of us. It makes my kids feel a special part of a larger community, helping them learn the values and skills for navigating the sometimes difficult terrain of life.


I've been reminded lately that we all have stories to tell and a deep need to share these with others, to make connections through our words and images.


I have been entranced with how Flickr has created a new form of playful, communal electronic storytelling. A bench becomes a stage for bringing together the props of our daily lives to tell a homey story of our day or reveal a colorful fantasy.


Blogs provide another wonderful forum for sharing our stories--some whimsical, some deeply personal, and some purely poetic.


Utilitarian objects also have their own stories to tell. Quilts in particular capture narratives in patches of cloth and thread. Textile artist Jude Hill stitches, weaves, and appliques intricate stories into her quilts, which she calls "spirit cloths." I have been enchanted by her quilting experiments on Flickr for a while now. But it was only recently that I explored her blog to learn more about her materials and methods.

What an incredible narrative I discovered by going back to her first post, in October 2006, and following the story of her two-year journey of creating a quilt for her brother. The quilt, called "Listen to the River," is a complete and varied landscape that captures the spirit of her brother. As she stitches each detail, the cloth comes alive with the conversation she is having with its future owner. The quilt evolves with each new block constructed and detail added: a meaningful talisman is tucked in a secret pocket, an animal familiar appliqued on a block peers out fearlessly. (You can follow the quilt's construction through Jude's Flickr collection here.)


Let me leave you with a profound quote from Jude's "Quilting for Answers" post on May 14, 2007. I think it summarizes perfectly the practice of crafting as storytelling; how crafting a story in fiber or other tactile form feeds our creativity and fulfills our needs to understand the world and communicate these discoveries:

"sometimes i get the feeling that developing and practicing a craft has far reaching implications in our personal development as well... a window of sorts. an edge and a meeting point between the inside and the outside.... all things being similar, the patience to understand your material, the thought process involved in problem solving... the quiet determination that perfects a thought... the research to connect the dots and make a vision materialize.....

to understand just one thing through and through answers so many other questions for me, and it would culminate in the ability to share that feeling... my never ending quest to answer my main question, is communication really possible?

and so my craft has come to reveal itself to me as a symbol of this personal quest to understand and communicate something, which would be my greatest gift."