Strong Women of the World, rise up, unite, and rejoice!

The Quilt Mavericks are this wonderful, supportive, loving caring group online;  I am fortunate to be a part of it.  Recently, one of our members shared something about her personal life for the first time ever (after living with a horror for 20 years) and asked us for strength and white light… you have to understand that Mav Power is a force to be reckoned with!   When all of us get together, we can conquer and save and love the world.

A number of the members in response shared similar tales of difficulties from their lives, and one of us (who was it?  OK.. it was Leslie!) said we should have  A Strong Women’s Day.  Once it was spoken, it came to be!   Let’s start a movement!

When I first heard Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon / A Prairie Home Broadcast 20-plus years ago, I chuckled at the humor in his closing:  “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where the men are good looking, the women are strong, and all the children are above average.”  Of course, that was the point of his humor…. the play on conventional expectations that the man is strong, when in fact it is women who are the ones made of steel and love, who endure the trials of life and still love and care and cope and rejoice.

Fellow Mavs Leslie blogged about strong women, here, as did Deirdre, here and Margi, here, and Cindy here, and Julie here, and Margaret here.

I’d like to choose my friend Linda Wauchope as my strong woman this year.  She died more than a decade ago, but in her final months, she showed me courage beyond anything I have ever seen or touched in my life.  Liver cancer took her when her children were a bit younger than mine are now (mine are 11 and 15); she and her husband were building a new home that she never got to live in.  He accelerated his retirement plans so he could be home with her for the final months of her life.  Watching her waste away with each passing visit was offset by watching her strength of spirit endure to the very end.  After her memorial service at the reception at their old home, I noticed the calendar in the kitchen:  Linda had left notes of when to get the furnace serviced, when to renew this or that policy, annual chores to be done, on every month.

To this day, I often think of her, her irreverent, sassy sense of humor, and think “gee, Linda would get SUCH a kick out of this.”  So Linda, here’s to you my friend!  (The photo above is from about 1990 when we both lived with our husbands in Libreville, Gabon.  We were both US Foreign Service officers, but on leave without pay so our hubbies could pursue their careers.  Her husband was the Ambassador, mine the Deputy Chief of Mission (deputy Ambassador)…  long ago and far away.)

I wrote about Linda two years ago when my quilt, The Tree, was donated to and auctioned for cancer research.  The quilt was dedicated to three people in my life who suffered..and two who died from… cancer:  Linda, my brother Charlie, and Daddy.  The photos got moved out of order when we migrated the blog from blogger to my website, but that post is here.

A few days ago I shared part of The Frayed Edges May meeting, including the pages Kate and Kathy made for our “round robin book” exchange.  Today I thought I’d share the pages I made for Kate, Kathy and Deborah—Hannah’s is still on the drawing board (which means fully formed inside my mind, but not fully formed anywhere else!).

Kate’s theme changed from hands to hearts.  I am NOT much of a heart person, so I asked if we could sssttttrrreeettttccch (stretch) the concept…so the piece above is “The Heart(h) of the home,” since many say the hearth IS the heart of the home.  When we visit at Kate’s we eat in the kitchen/dining room, which has a good old fashioned wood stove and some comfy chairs.  The stove pictured here is Kate’s (or very close), the chair is the rocking chair and stool in my sewing room.   The fabric for the floor is one I made in my last Carol Soderlund workshop; I took some “dog” hand-dyed (some fabric I had previously dyed and was UGLY), overdyed and dye-sketched with the black.  It was perfect for a wood floor!

The reverse side of Kate’s page is a stretch for me… I don’t do much surface design (and for the most part am not wild about a lot of the “surface design” / “art cloth” pieces that I see, which often look like a mish-mosh).  But I wanted to see what I could do.  So I took a piece of nearly-solid leaf green fabric I had dyed some time ago ,sponged on some color/texture, and  created freezer paper stencils (and boy did they ever take time to cut…. I printed “I Heart Art” onto freezer paper… and it took at LEAST two HOURS to cut those letters out!) and stencilled I Heart Art onto the cloth.  I also cut stencils for hearts.  For some, I filled in the inside of the heart; for others I ironed the heart on and painted a halo/glow on the outside of the shape.

When Deborah last came to Maine last September we had a wonderful sleepover down near Kate’s house (blogpost here).  It was a GLORIOUS and rejuvenating getaway for us (and Kate’s mojitos were memorable!).  At that time, we exchanged journal covers; Kathy has been lusting after the one I made (Which Kate drew in our “grab it out of a pillowcase” method of exchange), so I made her a page with the seal in the kelp:

And one of my favorite sea creatures, the sea turtles–the background of this one, by the way, is one of my all time favorite batik prints, from Princess Mirah/Bali Fabrics:

When hubby and I were were young, well-employed and kidless (and pounds lighter in weight) we went to a resort on Saint John in the US Virgin Islands.  We would snorkel at least once a day, and I fell in love with the tropical fish, especially the parrotfish, and the turtles.  It was so soothing that when asked to visualize something calming for childbirth, I set myself snorkeling, imagining the gentle waves rocking me as I floated and paddled above the coral reefs.

Deborah’s pages were actually the first ones I did.  I was stumped for ideas, since the next pages in sequence were numbers 9 and 10.  So off to google!  Nine quickly brought up the nine planets (I refuse to de-planet-ify Pluto!), so I made the nine planets around the sun for page 9.

Deborah has done some wonderful work with illumination and published an article on her process in February/March 2009 issue of Quilting Arts this past year.  When Google reminded me that the Byzantine Empire was at its peak in the 10th century, I new I wanted to use the mosaics from the Byzantine churches.  A second google search yielded photos of Christ Imperator from Hagia Sofia.  Following instructions from Lesley Riley published in a Quilting Arts e-Newsletter (more info here), I applied fluid matte medium to Lutradur, which I then ran through the printer.

The coolest thing about using the lutradur instead of fabric was being able to made sharp fiddly “cuts” using the heat tool (I have a tool for cutting stencil plastic).  I placed the Lutradur on a piece of glass (an 8×10 piece from a frame, edges taped) and “cut” with the tool.  Initially, I wasn’t going to use the bits of wall and extra pieces, but when I went to move the areas surround Christ’s head and halo to the side, I loved the echo/shapes.  It reminded me of how parts of the mosaics have fallen away from the church domes leaving the plaster showing.

As with Kate’s piece, I cut stencils to “write” Byzantium, 10th c. AD on the 7×10 inch page.  Talk about FIDDLY!   I would gladly pay a small fortune to buy a thermofax so as not to have to cut stencils like this!  But…this may be one of my favorite pages that I have made.  I don’t know yet how I will incorporate

Here is a link to Deborah’s blogpost about my current pages for her book:  Deborah’s blogpost.

As you can tell, we have FUN!

Hand on mug

One of the next exercises in The New Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain is to draw your own hand using the “window.” (more on this in a sec)  PS–pictures in this post are (well…should be…) clickable for a slightly larger view.

The drawing above is one I worked on about six weeks ago (and haven’t had time to do much drawing since!).  I didn’t look at my old workbook prior to doing this exercise, which wanted you to hold something in your hand.   What a hoot… here’s the first attempt from 2003 (eeks it was THAT long ago?):

The Window is a piece of plastic with cross-hairs on it.  You make a cardboard frame to make it rigid, then look through it to divide the object being drawn into quadrants.   Doing this helps train the eye to see the foreshortened object, in this case hands.

Here is a picture of a foreshortened hand done using the window this year.  I left the wash-off pen markings on the clear plastic window, on the left side, for you to see how placing your hand underneath allows you to just trace the outlines–presto, one of the hardest thing to do (foreshortening) made easy!:

And here is the same exercise from 2004 ish–I used a different background technique in 2009 than this one just to see how it would look.  I like the dark background better I think…..

Basically, I think I just need to draw more….Here is one last exercise (I’m doing more of them this time as I KNOW I need the practice):

I like the cross-hatched (with eraser) background on this.  My hand is in the “figa” …with thumb tucked between the fingers.  I did this naturally as a toddler; we lived in Spain at the time and it is considered good fortune if one naturally makes the figa.  I hope so!

A couple Mondays ago my mini-art-quilt-group got together, this time at Hannah’s house down the Harpswell peninsula.  It was a lovely quiet day, and a much needed respite from our insane daily lives….   When we first started our group in 2005 (OMG HOW has it been so long? ), we worked on various new techniques or projects in our meetings, and we decided to do a round robin of art books. Instead of doing a round robin quilt, we would instead make pages for each other.  We were each free to pick the size of the book and theme (or lack thereof).  Deborah chose numbers, Kate chose hands, Kathy chose the sea, and I chose Isabel’s fruits (Isabel Allende wrote a book called Aphrodite:  A Memoir of the Senses, which is about supposedly aphrodisiac foods….folks could pick anything from her book, or anything they considered aphrodisiac).  Here’s a link to an older blogpost about my book.

When Hannah joined us about the time Deborah was about to move to Texas (SOB, yet again) , we talked about doing another round on the books so we could get Hannah a book, too. Well, at long last we have begun to make and trade pages!  The photo above is of Kate continuing to work on one of Kathy’s pages.

For this round, we gave ourselves the option of changing themes.  Kathy, Deborah and I kept the same ones (the sea, numbers, and Isabel’s fruits), Kate changed from hands to hearts, and Hannah selected Mothering.

Here is Hannah, being a mom with her youngest daughter, sharing her first ever page for her Mothering book:

Kathy made these two pages.  The Peter Rabbit is, I believe, a transfer which Kathy free-motion stitched and decorated.

The second page is based on a painting by Gustav Klimt and is glorious:

Kate worked on Sea pages for Kath, including the jellyfish one in the photo above, and this one which is a quotation from Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea:

Kathy made two GLORIOUS pages for mine; both Absinthe and Lavender are on Isabel’s lists….   The absinthe page is a transfer onto silk with decorative threadwork, and I adore it… I wish the luminescence of the silk showed in the photo:

And here is the lavender; my dear late father-in-law lived in Sequim which is home to many lavender farms, plus there was one on San Juan island where we used to live, and this is exactly how they look:

Aren’t I lucky to be amongst such talented and wonderful people?  In a post soon I’ll share the pages I made for Deborah, Kathy and Kate (still working on Hannah’s).

And no post would be truly complete without the meal:

YUMMM!

Albeit LATE spring…..   I took some photos the past couple weeks and thought I’d share with you all:

The fiddlehead ferns are the true sign that spring is well underway…this was about two to three weeks ago:

I’ve never actually eaten fiddlehead salad, which is the unfurled buds/tops with vinegar.  I am told by Mainers that it is an acquired taste, and one best acquired in childhood (presumably meaning it’s not so good later on).   And here, the wider view of the ferns–and yes, there is a fiddlehead quilt in my future…I keep thinking it would be cool to ghost a real fiddle into the background:

In spring, with the runoff, the small Megunticook river rises.  It literally flows under Main Street (which is one block long), under the businessess, and down the falls into the harbor.  On the up-river side of the street there is a bridge area which is lovely…. I love the angles in the siding and balcony and supports:

Here is a wider view…it’s not as good as a photo, but gives you the context for the one above:

And here are the trees:

Eli took this photo, and we think it is a flicker of some sort up in the branches: