Paper Chains of Steel

I've decided to post some of my poetry here. Please leave a comment saying whether or not you enjoyed the poem and whether or not you'd like to see more. This is one I wrote about the empty suit, or how we sometimes allow ourselves to accept the words of others without thinking for ourselves, and how living in the past prevents us from having new experiences.

The Nightengale

I've been participating in the Facebook Art Chain, posting pictures of my artwork for 5 days and nominating a fellow artist to do the same each day. Here is more on my Day 4 post, which is some more of my old fiber work.

This wall quilt depicts the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Nightengale (his spelling), about a Chinese emperor who finds a nightingale singing so beautifully in his garden that he is moved to tears. The nightingale enjoys life in a fancy cage at court and delights everyone with his songs until one day a package containing a mechanical nightingale comes from another emperor. It is covered with jewels and everyone is so taken with it that the real nightingale is banished from court. Eventually the mechanical bird breaks and can only be played once a year. A few years later, the emperor becomes deathly ill and longs for the nightingale's song. The real bird hears of his illness and appears in his open window and sings him to sleep. The emperor awakens the next morning, fully recovered, and wants the nightingale to stay forever but, valuing his freedom, the nightingale says he will come and go as he wishes, but will sing to the emperor in the evenings to give him joy and tranquility.

I constructed the quilt to fit the requirement of "three layers held together with stitching" so that it could be entered in a quilt show, but each of the nine blocks is crazy pieced and embellished, with each of the blocks having a portion of the story that I printed on fabric in the center. Each of the cornerstones is embroidered with a different bird, and the sashing is quilted with an Asian fan design. "Hans Christian Andersen" is quilted across the bottom, and "The Nightengale" is written across the top in seed beads below a bird embroidered in redwork style. There are 34 quadrangles in shades of red, orange and pink at the corners and the seam embroidery on each of the 30 seams is different.

Oh my, dear blog how I've neglected you! To bring you up to date, I just returned from my second year of workshops at Hacienda Mosaico in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Hacienda Mosaico is owned and graced by the presence of bubbly artist "Sam" Leonard. As you can see, it's a beautiful place but what you can't see is how much I learned about metalwork, and the fun I had doing it. Richard and Jane Salley and Robert Dancik all had so much information to share!

Did we have fun? Did we learn a lot? You betcha! I can hardly wait for next year...

Serendipity

I'd carefully selected beads for a project and placed them in the depressions in one of those artists' palettes when I was overcome by a fit of klutzivity and dumped the whole lot. OMG - what a mess! But wait... while I was picking them up, lightening struck! Wahoo!

I needed to make a ring for the Ohio Beaders' "ring along" and a piece of flat peyote for the ArtFire Beadweavers' peyote month; so using my accidental "bead soup" I made a ring on a peyote base. Now no one can even talk to me because I think I'm absolutely the cleverest person in the world. LOL!!!

Here's my ring - hope you like it:

You can check out the ArtFire Beadweavers Guild here, and here, and you can see all the Ohio Beaders ring along challenge rings here.

Alive and Well Underground

Gee it's been a while, hasn't it? I've been all kinds of busy this past month and had cataracts removed from both eyes (and doing well, thanks ;-D), but did manage to get a few things made and join the ArtFire Beadweavers' Guild swap challenge. Each swap participant has a swap partner and they exchange beads, then each makes something from the beads they receive. Here are the beads I received:

Wow! That's a lot of red, eh?

And here are the beads I'll be mailing off tomorrow - I hope my swap partner, Krafty Max, will like them:

Here's my favorite of the things I've made since the last time I posted. It's a pendant and I hope to get the rest of the necklace finished soon. So many projects, so little time... sigh