(Still) Waiting for the Spring

Pollens abound, though they are mostly cedar and elm at present.  I have ceased to wonder how pollen can be out and about in February, but my runny nose is irrefutable evidence of this puzzle.

And more bulbs are pushing up— the early tulips, now, and daffodils that have been up for almost two weeks are trembling in their anxiety to swell their buds and burst into color.  Imagine the eagerness of the bulbs to open eyes upon the world!  Like little children learning the pathways that will store memories through the rest of their lives.

We are promised rain tomorrow, which will be good for these thirsty new beauties.

A Little Housekeeping in the Studio

That title is misleading.  I don't know how to do a little of anything!  I took one corner and began to work on it.  While the optimum way to clean is to take everything out and only put back what you want or need (or suddenly find a place for) there is just no possible way I can do that— not if I plan to survive and drag it all back in again.

There were a lot of choices of messy places, but after careful consideration, I started with the fabric cabinet.  The cabinet is very old, a seven foot tall oak thing that was originally in a hospital in North Georgia.  I've removed the six doors and have fabric (mostly fat quarters) on the upper shelves.

The lower part, also doorless, now houses my work (in plastic flat boxes), two crates of silks, and a large collection of scraps of cottons, and some odd weaves in larger pieces.  The scraps are useful when I need just a little piece of something.  Since I work in small scale, I don't need a great deal of anything, but I do need a lot of those anythings.

Going through the scraps to put them all in one large, rectangular basket, I found pieces from the blouses my mother used to sew.  She made all her clothes, and often re-created things she had seen in magazines or shops rather than make the purchase of a new item.  It was the challenge that inspired her.  She taught us to sew when we were little, and I was wearing clothes I made myself when I was in high school.  What a blessing to have learned that skill so young, and to have been taught by such an excellent seamstress.

Today I need to tidy things a bit— there is so often more mess from a large, serious clean-up than when I started— and take back the table tops!  Carol Warren is coming tomorrow to direct the hanging of the pictures in the house (no one on the planet does this as well as Carol; her house is like a very smart up-scale gallery), and we will, of course, visit the studio.  I would hate to hang my head in shame over its scattered, day-to-day condition.  Other parts of the studio I will sort and tidy on next week, until I've worked my way completely around the room.  I need to have one more piece of furniture to completely hold everything without the nine boxes stacked on a rickety shelf, but finding that is an ongoing project.  By the time I find it, however, I may have used up all the knitting yarn I had planned to store in it!

Today also offers me a chance to go to the grocery store!  I have progressed so well at walking that I can even make the rounds of the Kroger and Publix markets, and Charles' meager selections are now supplemented by interesting things to eat.  Charles is a good man, but he has yet to fully comprehend that there is life beyond meat, potatoes, and ice cream.

Waiting for the Spring

Last night, when I looked up and saw the moon through the bare branches of the trees, I was reminded of this embroidery.  The photo is part of a rug I made for a miniature house I found in an antique store sometime in the 1980s.  The resident of the house became Aunt Beulah, and she like luxurious textiles around her. This rug was for her living room, but when it was done, it was so vibrant the furniture simply disappeared in all the line and color on the floor.  She returned it to "N.Claiborne and Associates," the company she hired (because they were the cheapest) to make repairs on her house and to order furnishings for her.

I digress.

But last night, for some reason, I remembered that rug and the tangle of the trees and the moon against a grey wool flannel sky. . .

And when I was moving something today I came across this piece, from 2007.

It was made using my embellisher and dyed roving, with only the simplest of embroidery stitches to suggest the early spring.  The two embroideries, twenty years apart, express my feelings now of simply waiting for the spring to come.  Even if there is another roar of winter, I have seen daffodils pushing through to the sunlight, and Mary Kate, in New England has photographic proof of new, green grass under the semi-thawing snow, and Gail on the coast of South Carolina is enjoying the sun and her golf cart.  So, I'm waiting.

Couching Stitches

The Knoxville group is beginning a study of the Beaney-Littlejohn Stitch Magic next month, and I will be the leader.  In preparing for it I have been working on the first of the stitches Double Trouble takes up, Couching Stitch.

Poor, maligned stitch!  In their latest video, the pair asserts that a stitcher might take up a single stitch and study it the rest of her/his life and still not know everything there is to discover about that stitch.  That may be the most important thing they ever bring to their teaching.  I have experienced that realization as I worked— and continue to work— on my experimental sampler of the humble couching stitch.  As the stitch is a line stitch, one very similar to a drawn line except the medium is thread rather than paint or pencil, I am not sure if all the permutations actually help the line or simply decorate it.  Whatever the "official" take on all this experimentation, it has not been a task, but more of a delightful treat for myself.

The sampler is being worked on scraps of linen fabric that have been stitched together to form a surface of irregularly sized and placed blocks in cream, olive, beige, and white.  The stitching uses, primarily, shades of green.  It isn't a finished sampler yet (and may never be), but the journey is so interesting I hope the destination and finish is in the far distance, yet.

Aren't these little guys neat?  Fly stitches with a little extra spice added for punch:

The waving lines above are from spools of cotton weaving thread (I have a full cabinet of these wonderful cones) that are stitched down, a single line at a time.  My holding down thread is a linen so fine it would be quite passable in my sewing machine!

More stitching to do on it-- I see a wonderful place for French Knots above the altered Fly Stitches . . .

February Spring

When I was a little girl we had snow in the winter in Atlanta.  Only once.  It was polite snow, it covered everything neatly, then it melted and went away and our winters returned to being mildly chilly staging points for the spring.  And now there is talk of snow plows in the region's budgets, of pickle brine to keep the streets de-iced— Wow! What a change from the charm of the 1950's snow women we made with my Grandmother's cast-off hats!

Today, however, the spring slipped in and brought a 70˚ day!  Maybe a gift, after all the snow, ice, rain, extreme cold?  If so, my thanks for the gift!

Colors of the Soul: A Tree

This little piece began from a scrap of fabric I over-painted in the studio, and a bag full of incredible yarn and silk thread I bought at the French Knot, in Savannah.  It is a tree, and the thought behind the embroidery is that all the colors of a lifetime might still be in the tree, buried inside like a pallet of watercolors waiting for the water that brings them to life.

O.K.  I just lost anyone stumbling over this blog, I'm sure.  But think of it-- the leaves, the seasons, the mosses, the rains and snows and brilliant sunshine that all go into the life of a tree are lovely colors.  And I could not give the idea up, once I saw the scrap of fabric laid against a rectangle of brown linen.

Most of the stitches are some form of a Chain Stitch, a Bullion Knot, or Straight Stitch.  The different weights of thread give its dimensional quality.

Some close-ups of the tree.  Enjoy!

 I left the ravelling threads in place, as they seemed a part of the wabi-sabi nature of the piece.

As the stitches are layered in places, the texture is really stand-out.

Artist Trading Cards

ATCs are little artistic gems, the size of baseball trading cards. It is always amazing to me to see what can be done with 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" of surface.

The Freestylers are having a Valentine's Day ATC exchange at our February meeting, and I've been working on my card.  And there are others to be given ATCs as well, so the ideas have been popping up right and left as I ply my needle at my embroidery table.

I assembled five of the hearts for an exhibit in Knoxville this weekend for the Heart Association:

Peggy was kind enough to pick them up as she and Bob passed through Atlanta on their way home from Florida.

These are some older ATCs I've made and kept simply because I like them.  The first was cut up from a large piece of black fabric I found in the 1980s and used as a place to play with needle and thread:

Fabric suitable for free-style embroidery (i.e., non-evenweave fabric) was much more difficult to come by then than now.  The next two are a pair, a sort of winter-summer look at a stem and its foliage.  Leaves springing from a curling stem will always make my heart light.  They seem so ready for something, anything at all, to come their way.

  

I will continue to dig and find the others I've set aside for myself.  The idea that this tiny format can hold beautiful ideas is fascinating, isn't it?  But then, I suppose the collectors of baseball cards feel a bit like that, too, don't they?