I think this is the house next door to mine in my imaginary neighborhood: The Gardener. Here lives someone who has such a passion or fetish or deep and abiding respect for gardening that it has taken over everything. Absolutely everything!
This one was "built" a number of years ago, another "find" in the studio boxes. It was made by laying pieces of wool fabric on a base of wool and heavy linen, then sewing the blocks down to form a rough patchwork of wool over wool. Next, the pieces were cut apart and re-assembled. This new, re-assembled piece became the fabric the house shape was cut from before decorating with cotton prints, embroidery, beads, buttons-- anything bright and flowery, including a little pewter watering can!
Above Boone, NC, there is a terribly winding road that connects it to Banner Elk, Cranberry, Spruce Pine, Little Switzerland-- small, beautiful Western North Carolina towns. In one of the curves of this road is the smallest cabin imaginable. In the late spring, summer, and early autumn, it is so suffused with flowers it can take your breath way. The cabin is not so much a house as a frame for the hanging pots, planters, flowers and vines that are climbing and draping every small space! It is an excess of beauty and a testament to the love of growing and nurturing plants. I have never seen anyone stirring in the yard or on the porch, but I have often thought I would be able to sit down and have a long and deep conversation with this gardener-- like the gardener who must live in my little embroidered house.
2 comments:
Nancy, when you start a piece like this do you plan it out and know what you want beforehand? It looks so effortless and imaginative and whimsical...just beautiful. :)
No. I let the house tell me what it wishes to be. I was in a garden state of mind when I did this one, and I remember that everywhere I turned in the studio some little garden item seemed waiting there for me to include it. I like to have a really dense base to work with, including linen to give it shape, and then I start laying down pieces of fabric and thread and beads and buttons and the next thing you know, the house sighs and wishes to be left alone for a while. I bow out and wait to see if I'm needed again. Sometimes a house refuses to talk to me, and I set it aside for another time when the house is more communicative.
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