This post feels oddly disconnected from the work I did manage to finish back in the early part of the year.

I started a new series of very abstract river pieces, much larger than I have been working previously.

With the interfacing I use, I can only work on pieces smaller than 16″ square with my machine. I imposed shamelessly on the goodwill and patience of the local quilt shop Notion to Quilt and test drove (extensively) the sit-down long arm machine they have there. While I enjoyed the experience, and I love the machine, I think space and financial constraints will keep me working on smaller sections using my current sewing machine.

Since the final pieces are bigger, I had to experiment with ways to slice the work, and then connect the sections. The connections became a part of the design of each piece, and I can see that going in different and interesting ways.

I have had more time away from sewing this year than in the last decade, and I tried to take some of that time to experiment. I took a bunch of acrylic paints around town and on vacation, and tried to paint what I saw. I took a class in screen printing on fabric with Esther White at Zea Mays Printmaking and learned a lot about a process I had not tried before. I took a class in encaustic and mixed media with Lorraine Glessner at R&F Handmade Paints, and learned a lot about wax, oil paint and layers of imagery. I also fell in with a remarkable collection of women taking the encaustic class, and I hope we manage to stay in touch.

If you are unsure how to spend a quiet evening, check out these womens’  work: Cheryl Holz, Sally Hootnick, Ann Breinig, Meg Tweedy, Victoria Sivigny, and Valerie Zeman

Terri and Sheri, you guys have to get websites organized!

I’m heading into 2017 with some new tools, new friends, new techniques, and ready for some new things.

Many things changed for me over the summer. Big things, but good things. One daughter graduated from college with a degree in math. One daughter graduated from high school with her sanity intact. The math daughter found work in Boston working with giant piles of data, which is making her cheerful and earning her the beginnings of a living. The still sane daughter started at the university in September, majoring in Geology like her mother, her maternal grandmother, and following her great grandmother’s interests. (She jokes about being maternally doomed in the major department.)

My sainted mother chose to sell her house and move to assisted living of her own volition, and under her own power. That took more months than either of us expected, but she seems to be settling in with a whole new view. I made some paintings of her old view before she left, because it was gorgeous, and changeable, and vital.

The house feels both oddly empty and randomly full of people, as daughters return between semesters or on weekends or holidays. I find I have to count in my head, how many people slept here last night, and think about breakfast.

All of my sewing work was on hiatus over the summer, and seems to still be on hiatus now. I have been flailing with new techniques, to see what speaks to me, but even with fabulous teachers and interesting work, I think I am still drawn most strongly to fiber, fabric and stitch.

Next year, 2017, marks a decade since I started the Postcard a Day project, and five years since the daily circle project. I think it is time to undertake a new daily project, but it is not yet clear to me what – your suggestions are welcome!

copper river

Copper River 12″ wide x 27″ high, burlap from coffee sacks, collected purple fabrics, cotton and metallic threads, linen twine, copper washers. 2016.

I feel like I have been looking for tiny copper washers since before Christmas. Al kindly provided me with several boxes of large washers with different finishes, but I had my mind set on copper, and small, and I started looking online. They were not readily visible online unless I was willing to order them made to my specifications, with a minimum order of a couple thousand. Since that seemed excessive I let the whole process lie for a while, until I asked someone in aggravation and they recommended I look in the local hardware store because that kind on thing is basic. And sure enough, it is. So I have cleaned the local hardware store out of small washers in the three smallest sizes, and I shall go around to the less local hardware stores soon, because I am not done with this!

Shorter Blog: Copper washers are at your local hardware store. They are more expensive than other washers because copper is expensive these days. Copper paint does not work.

I am waiting to hear back from three different exhibits with all of my current work allocated to one or another. If I want to enter anything else I have to make something new.

The trick with a website and a blog is keeping the website up to date!

The blog updates when I have new work to post or something to say or something interesting to demonstrate, but the Welcome page and the galleries can get stale and old without a little attention on a regular basis. I added the new abstract rivers to the galleries, and changed up the images on the Welcome page. Let me know if you miss a favorite and I’ll put it back.

Shell River – whole and detail:

Sunday afternoon Red Kate brought her lovely camera and useful but wimpy tripod (with a crank! so steam-punk!) and she took photographs of the river series on white backgrounds. I needed different a background to enter a different competition. The multiplicity of requirements for submitting work is exhausting. On the plus side, I have lovely pictures of my most recent work.

I just finished Black Stone River, but haven’t gotten photos of the whole of it yet:

That is linen background and coffee sack (from Esselon, one of my favorite places on earth) with smooth black stone beads stitched down on it. I got the beads because they made me think of the beach full of smooth black stones on Hurricane Island off the coast of Maine. We stopped during a sailing trip when I was a teenager, and I still have a handful of Hurricane Island stones that I picked up off that beach.

Alice is on a school trip to Rome and Athens, including a fair number of ruins, some Latin to translate and at least four ferries. She included this her most recent email “Far and away, most of the things I have acquired this vacation have been pebbles.” Which means it is apparently hereditary. My mother does this, and grandmother did as well.

A friend gave me a giant collection of buttons from her grandmother. I think the grandmother had lived next to a button factory, or worked in it, because there were a lot of not-quite-fine shell buttons, in sizes small, large, and larger. They were not useful for garments, so I have been saving them for some large decorative project.

When I made a background of all the white and off white fabrics I could find, I liked the buttons on them, the variation of sizes, and adding some of the weird singleton shell buttons that seemed to fit in.

I finished sewing the buttons down on Sunday. I need to figure out how to photograph it at home, but it is done. I am proud of it. Also I think it is voluptuous.

I have started the next piece already.

I spoke to the Northampton Modern Quilt Guild yesterday, and it was lovely. I was originally contacted to talk about Surface Design, but since it seemed like the definition of surface design is so broad as to be functionally useless, I wound up talking about my path to … whatever it is I do. The members were delightful; appreciative, attentive and with good questions.

Towards the end of my allotted time, I talked about various creativity manifestos that had inspired me to keep working. I went looking for them today, and found so many I couldn’t tell which ones had been important to me at the time and which ones had been only so much noise. Of course, after reading more than two or three of them, they all turn into more or less noise. It looks like many of them are more about exhorting the writer themselves to  better working and thinking habits, and then they were published because publishing on the internet is nearly frictionless.

So I made my own manifesto:

1. quantity first, sift for quality later
2. lean into the stuff that pleases you
3. “if you love something, do it again. if you hate something, do it again” (I can’t remember whose manifesto this came from, but it has been extremely useful.)
4. leave the stuff that leaves you unmoved
5. figure out what drives you, and follow it*
6. do not worry about what to do with the results from your process, something will become clear

*This is where I say something about following your bliss or finding your passion except I am a reserved New Englander and I am deeply dubious about both of those as motivating forces. I find I do some of my most interesting and useful work when I am pissed off about something. I work well from aggravation. I know this, and can follow it. Know what emotions drive your strongest work, and see where they take you.

So? What does your manifesto say? Should you edit it?

The first several days on Monhegan the weather was foggy and warm, an unusual combination. Sitting still was not so bad, although the fog tended to bead up on my glasses making seeing a problem, but walking anywhere became a sauna-like proposition. We were renting a house near the top of the hill, and saw nothing much farther than the trees at the edge of the lawn for a couple days. Sometimes Manana would appear, only to vanish again when the fog came back.

I started the painting project in this foggy weather, and some things about it really spoke to me. I like the idea of veils showing and hiding things that are normally in view, and the shifting fog was very explicitly veiling the distances. I love how the fog intensifies the colors that are close, and mutes those in the distance.

My favorite painting of those first couple days started off as more of a tantrum. I was trying to get a glimpse of Manana, and fog kept shifting. Finally I added a wash of white paint thinned with medium every time I got exasperated, and in between fits of frustration I painted what I could see. The result makes laugh every time I look at it – because I remember the aggravation, but I see the shifting veils of mist and the spikes of pine trees and the skeleton of a dead tree at the edge of the property. I’ll see if I can take a decent photo of it, but you might just have to visit me to see it.

Originally the title was “more ruination” but really it is more experimentation or stitching or something a little more positive.

This was one big painting. Well, not that big – 9×12″ – but I lost interest in the lower left corner, and after staring at it for a while I realized it would be better as two smaller works, so in a fit of courage I cut it up, and finished the edges of two smaller pieces. One is 6×8″ the other 5×7″ and I still have some small pieces left over to practice techniques on.

Next up – take on the foggy pieces, which I like better and am having larger issues with stitching. But they deserve it as much as these did. So.

I might have mentioned that I took a handful of acrylic paint on vacation to my brother’s island (not that he owns it, but that he lives there year round, unlike the cascades of artists, birders and other tourists that arrive in summer) this past summer. It was a surprisingly intense learning experience. I made a point of painting every day, as much as I could before I felt I was missing something important. Learning new ways of seeing and representing things is exhausting. I’d work in the morning, come home for lunch and a nap, do some more work in the afternoon, and then sleep hard all night, frequently with dreams about paint or brushes or trying to paint with a sewing machine.

I brought these home and left them alone for a while.

When I experimentally added stitching to one of the pieces I was unsure about, something interesting happened. So I added thread to a few more of the small pieces, but I was “saving” these larger ones for something, until I decided I wasn’t. So now I am experimenting with adding thread to all the painting I did last summer. It is related to the work I’ve done before, but it also feels really different.

I can tell I have dozens of things I can experiment with. I could paint on softer fabric, more like the cotton I usually use for stitching. I could use fabric paint instead of acrylics for canvas. I can alternate paint and stitch and see what happens. My head is whirling with possibilities.

My hope is to learn something from stitching into all the paintings from the summer. They aren’t important enough to keep the way they are, and I am learning a lot while working on them. so they have become fodder for the next step, the next thing to learn.

If I leave them alone, they’re still not finished. If I can ruin a couple, I’ll have a better idea of what to do the next time