Sibling Problems

Bethy is, by Bill Cosby's description, the family "Informer."  And she informed on Ethan last week.

After the dust had settled, Bethy was fine, but Ethan was still cogitating over the fracas.  He thought about this for an evening and most of the next day, then told his dad,

"Tattletales don't turn into butterflies like caterpillars do.  They turn into frogs."

Well-spoken, when you consider that he will not be five for two more months!

Couching Favorite

Besides Bullion Stitches, I am very fond of couching.  Couched Linen Thread is a stunning texture, but even the humble cotton floss can be impressive when the couching is tiny, tight, and rather close-packed.  This is a small section of a much larger work.

Rug-Style Embroidery

This piece was laid down as a series of stripes, a sort of modified log-cabin quilt block.  With some poetic license.  From the stitched frame, you may deduce (correctly) that I am overly fond of Bullion Stitches.

This is what I call "Rug-Style" embroidery, because the surface is completely covered.  I believe this may be a piece I stitched during several church services many years ago.  The organ was in a pit, behind a low wall, and surrounded by choir members-- too tempting!

No, the Devil did not make me do it; I am perfectly capable of discovering temptation without any outside help.

Woman's Work

One idea, two ways of seeing it.

The first is the feeling my way through the idea, of putting the shapes together.    Stitched on a rough linen ground with cotton threads:

After some weeks had passed, I reconsidered how I felt about the work of women.  The second piece is worked on a silk broadcloth background with silk floss and perle.  Smile at the beads over the cloth/rug being shaken.

This is the finished piece.

From 2000.

It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood!

Still digging through boxes of old work.  Still finding things I'm so glad I kept!  This one needs some work-- stretched on sticky board, the acid residue is yellowing the linen.  Poor little neighborhood!  Cleaning this one and re-stretching it properly will be another hair-puller.  I am to the point I want to do my own stretching before I hand a fiber piece to the framer for matting and mounting in the frame.

The piece is stitched in the round.  More pix to come after pulling it away from its *@%$## backing.

Note to the Autumn

Welcome, Autumn!

Although we thought you'd lost your way and would only find us some time after Christmas, you've put in brief appearances these past two weeks.  Acorns everywhere.   Crumbled and wrinkled leaves like old parchment, turning by slow degrees to colors in the warmth of an evening's fire.  Overturned pots where the squirrels and chipmunks have been unpacking the latest trip to the grocer.  Seed Pods collecting in low spots of the garden, drying and waiting to sleep deeply and dream of the spring . . .

So glad you found us!  Come in.  Stay a while.  Remind us of how beautiful you can be.

Waving and Curving Lines

The very best part of a basket of threads is the potential there.  The colors are lovely, the textures are varied, and nearby is a pin cushion full of needles of every size from a huge size 1 down to a barely-visible beading needle.

I have been thinking about waving, curving lines these last few days.  This is a group project for our November Freestyle meeting at Marcia's house.  I suggested that we all try to make a sampler, large or small, using wave-ish lines, not straight ones.  Any stitch.  Any thread.  We will make a collection of Freestyle samplers and display them at the April Chapter Meeting of the Knoxville EGA.  Unlike most of the neat and tidy samplers made by chapter members, the lines and stitches will roam in our display.

When I stitch lines that are allowed to wander where they may, my entire brain shifts into another gear.  I reach for a sketchbook and jot something there, even if it is only a few words or a very rough sketch of an idea to try when this project is done.  Everything about me loosens up, and I even smile as I stitch.  When I'm working this way, the ideas seem endless.

But in stitching straight lines, however, I stitch myself into the proverbial box that I should be thinking out of (I won't even mention how many rules of grammar were smashed in that sentence).  Instead of loosening up the way I do with curving lines, I tighten up— my stitches, my shoulders, I even clamp my arms to my sides.  Pathetic.  Really.

Which brings me back to the basket of threads.  I have some lovely hand-dyed threads that have been calling to me for several weeks, now, and on Monday I put a large group of these autumn-colored hanks and skeins in the play-with-me basket, and have been stitching lines on a piece of discharged linen since then.  The linen's original color was pumpkin orange, but it has been reduced to a melon that is not so hard on the eyes.  The body of the waving line sampler is almost done.  Once the main bones are in place, I can go back and stitch in and out and around these lines.  I will share the sampler with you when it is more of a finished work.

Meanwhile, I stitch a little, reach for the sketchbook, go to an old Doodle Cloth or book of stitches and flip through until something interesting pops off the page at me, and I start working on a way to curve it across the melon linen . . .

I can't imagine what I would do for fun without the studio!

You want WHAT for dinner?

Fixed HOW?

Uh-hu.  Well, you just sit there and pray over it.

Oh, no.  YOU killed it.  You take it outside and cook it.

I said, OUTSIDE.

No, sir.  Not in MY kitchen you don't.

Either cook it or bury it.

OUTSIDE.

Rational Thought and Travel To Asheville

We left Knoxville on Wednesday afternoon for a day of shopping in Asheville, then up the Parkway to the Folk Art Center, Big Lynn Lodge, Grassy Mountain Bookstore, Penland, Burnsville, Celo, back to Asheville and to Waechter's, to Dillsborough. . .  Four days away from the sanity of home, and it was so beautiful I couldn't think rationally.

Somewhere in the trip, my brain got shaken up.  It might have been when I was photographing a beautiful dead tree beside a Parkway overlook and as I backed, then began walking away from it, a bear popped up from the hillside, loped across the road about 50 feet away, looked at me and decided I was too much trouble to be an afternoon snack and then disappeared into the hill above me . . .  It was probably that moment when everything got discombobulated and my marbles started rolling around in the big, empty place that passes for my brain.

The marbles were still rolling around trying to find a new spot to come to rest when I heard a voice telling me, "A Quilt!!!  You are making a quilt, Nancy!"

Instead of my usual gulp of fear and immediate quelling behavior, I smiled and began to really like the idea.  In fact, I bought fabric for this project.

It was when I was standing in Waechter's looking at the lovely soft cottons and planning my hand-painting of the pieces to be applied to the soft linen ground that whatever had been shaken out of place in my loose brain began to rattle back in its niche.  I couldn't decide on a fabric.  I couldn't begin to make the quilt I had dreamt up.  I was standing there holding the most lovely white cottons I have seen since . . . when?. . . and I couldn't move.

When I got home, I was exhausted (riding for hours on end wears me out, sets the replaced bones to aching and then to screaming) but I crawled to the computer and e-mailed Jill an SOS for intervention.

The call I got in response to the e-mail was a calm, perfectly collected voice that said, "You are not going to make a quilt.  Stop thinking about it.  Go into your studio and make little pieces that are over in a few days and you can move on to your next idea."

And it worked.  No quilt, but several small pieces in the works, now.

Thank you, Jill.

Oh-- I offer this photo of the bear as proof positive that I saw what I saw and did not even exaggerate.  Scouts Honor.

Restoration of a 1988 Needlework Project

There were all sorts of problems with this piece, "A Child's World," that I worked on in 1988-89.  First, it had been stitched in separate parts and appliquéd to a pink-striped cotton background, but it had not been attached properly.  So, it was sagging a bit.

The stars and moon seemed too heavy for the fabric.

And here, in the black space under the blue trees, there should have been a white cloud.  All that remained was bits of white wool roving and empty white cotton stitches, thanks to the diligence of a moth or a moth army.  The photo shows it after I had removed all the stitches and the tiny bit of remaining wool, very carefully lifting the white fragments from the black linen:

Beneath the cloud, there were little streamers of couched floss representing streaming rain.  The moths had sampled one, which meant they needed to be removed, as well.

But how to fix all of this?

First, I added tiny 15˚ silver seed beads to the starry sky, attaching the fabric more firmly to the ground.  I also stitched around the several layers of appliqué (invisibly, using a beading needle), which further held the center portion in place.  I will admit to taking a long time at this while I handled the piece and tried to re-familiarize myself with the fabric and the stitching problems there.  As I discovered, those problems were legion.

Foremost was the need to re-design the unfortunate main-course cloud.  I decided on satin stitches, which required a smooth surface— the pink striped background was anything but smooth.  So I had to think of a way to even out the bumps in the fabric before I could re-stitch the cloud.

After some thought and a cup of tea, I decided that the best thing to do was to slit the back of the ground fabric in two places and remove some of the heavy-weight cotton that defined the stripes.  Bringing myself to take embroidery scissors to the back of this piece took a great exercise of my powers of persuasion.  I talked to myself the entire time, giving myself instructions and praise as the scissors snipped the fragile threads holding everything together.  Once I had removed them (you can see how fat the yarn was in the picture, below, upper right), I had to slip a piece of soft linen between the black linen where the scene was originally embroidered and the backing fabric.  I then replaced the fat strips of yarn with smaller yarn (I used a cotton/linen yarn) and did a rough job of re-weaving the openings.

The resulting embroidery is this— a lavender and magenta cloud with streamers of new metallic-thread rain (hoping both threads are not tasty to a moth):

Below is a picture of the restored embroidery— this took two days of quite intensive work!  You can see in the stars and the "comet" were the beads were added, and the cloud and streamers of rain are replaced, on the right.

Below is a closer look at the stream that springs from the base of the mountain— flower thread with wooden beads attached!

It was too beautiful to not repair and restore it.  I will take this to the framers for mounting in the next few weeks.  I almost hate to put it behind glass, it is so beautiful to touch!

Poor little piece!  But "A Child's World" has been restored, finally.  I wonder if The Adorables will enjoy it?