I just finished this one tonight – it is a great deal of black and navy blue, and silver thread. Those are real constellations, if you choose to stare at it for a while. The reflections were … trickier.

What I am realizing is that taking time off to think or gather chi or inspiration doesn't work for me. I gather inspiration from effort expended. Each piece I finish leads me to think about something different, or how to show something in a new way. Each thing leads to a next thing. A break is counterproductive. Which is a good thing to know about oneself.

I finished the moon and stars this morning, and then re-reading the poem Janet wrote I realized I had drawn from my memories of a night on an island looking at stars and the moon, and hadn't actually rendered the imagery that Janet had put in her poem.

So this is my moony night, and I started another, moonless night, after a second, closer reading.

Inspired by a poem by a friend of mine, I'm working on a night sky over the ocean. I know the moon wasn't out in her poem, but it was in the image I got in my head.

It is possible to see the threadwork in the lighter parts in the center, but as I said yesterday, I didn't do so well at the abstraction part.

I'll try again – harder!

A couple days back, Els said she was interested in seeing how I got to abstraction, because she generally failed on the side of realism. And as yesterday's post showed, so did I on that piece.

(You should totally click on that link, because she just finished an amazing felt book, and is working now what looks to be a crown with a story.)

On this one, I thought I had some good abstract stuff going down, and then the river went in, and it feels like I could, with a little effort, pinpoint this valley on the globe. Which, I hasten to add, would be tricky because really I was working hard to keep it simple and not representational at all!

I can try again, maybe smaller. But first I have to finish this one.

Every time I say someting I'm working on is big, Timna snickers at me, because my stuff is always, always small compared to her sizes. This one is 12×24" showing a fairly realistic view of the Connecticut River Valley from Hatfield to the Holyoke Range. North is to the left, which can confuse those who live for maps. It could probably hang either way; north up or east up, depending on the comfort levels of the individual who ends up owning it.

Below are two details from the above, one of the Hadley penninsula, some of the msot amazing farmland in the state, and one of the Northampton Meadows, a very similar texture of farmland but used quite differently.

For some reason, when I show the river, it is always brown. It shows up brown  or black on true color satellite images, which I worked with for a while, a long time ago. It shows up brown when I fly over it in tiny planes out of the local tiny airport. It looks brown (with some green) when I go over the bridge to and from everything. And yet every cartographic instinct I have tells me that water is always blue. It is what we call a cartographic convention. And I am so torn!!

Above you can see my lovely brown river (maybe it was from hearing the Just So Stories involving the great, gray-green, greasy Limpopo River) and while I love it, I also think it is not quite correct. 

So I tried an experiment overlaying a dark and sparkling blue organza over that brown. It looks like so:

Since I am not at all sure, I thought I should maybe let it rest until tomorrow, when I will have had sleep.

Five a.m. is for the birds.

Timna Tarr invited me to participate in an exhibit she is curating at a gallery in Holyoke. The exhibit is "Texture and Substance: Contemporary Fiber Art" at Paper City Studios, 80 Race St, Holyoke. (I'll probably say that a couple more times before it happens!)

I wanted to experiment with a larger size, and a more abstract feel. While I started with a fairly detailed aerial photo, I realized the detail and the idea of precision was making me nervous and unhappy. So I'm headed towards abstraction, give or take.

This is the base layer of fabrics. The piece gets some stitching now, to make sure everything stays in place. Detail is added with cut fabric pieces and more stitching.

I delivered five pieces to Grow Gallery on Friday, and on the way home realized I had failed to photograph the last one when I finished it. I'll have to drag the camera back to Shelburne Falls and accomplish that – can't have pieces escaping into the wild unphotographed! I was going to show you a picture of Lesley in the middle of her wonderfully curated space, but she demurred, so you'll have to follow links to see her and what she has there besides my work.

I did start a new piece today, and I am taking a certain amount of pleasure in the look of the linework on the back of it. It looks like a map from Tolkein, all mystery and winding river and odd little pictograms. I was thinking about landuse and how I might show that on the front, but having gotten the info I need transferred to the back, I was halted with indecision. A couple days away will, I hope, bring the ideas into better focus.

detail of the river –

I had to compose the piled up rocks that make up the left edge of the image separately, because they were a bunch of complex and overlapping shapes. So I located the parchment paper, and started sticking down the rock pile, bottom one first.Each of the pieces has fusible web under it, and the overlaps help hold it together.

It looked impressive when I was done! And then I peeled it off the parchment paper and ironed it down to the piece. I'll stitch the details of the big rocks tomorrow, and then spend more of the day stretching and framing the pieces I've finished lately.