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.

This is from a photo my friend Hannah took last summer while camping in the White Mountains. The picture has a bonus pit bull in it, but I don't think I can do her justice.

I think I must have taken this photograph from horse-back, because the background is blurred with motion, and the end result is dreamy. I was experimenting with getting some of that blur in the background using a layer of silk organza.

I'm not sure I can describe how much I love this fabric, and how hard I use it to help indicate depth. I need it for the layers of snow falling in winter, for mist between trees during the melting season, for distance in summer, and to hold layers of turning leaves in fall. I realized a couple years ago that water is almost always depicted using silk, and atmospheric water is apparently no exception!

I decided it was summer, because it is summer and my imagination is heavily influenced by what I see when I look out the window. Which is why I had to put a winter landscape on hold, because it melted while I was dithering about it.

I went to a friend's house this morning and tried to dig out an old, well established lilac bush. The lilac was having none of it, and remains firmly rooted. I did a great deal of digging, and brought two baby lilacs home to see if they might like it here, but the main lilac itself remains aggressively in place.

I worked on this piece this afternoon, but I stopped after I sewed my finger. It isn't bleeding, it just sliced through the skin and startled me, and then everything felt funny so I stopped.

Another big piece finished. This one will be 16"x20" when trimmed and mounted.

I started this lst summer and halted because I was unhappy with the center of the piece. I think mostly I was feeling frustrated with the difficulties I was having reaching the center of the piece with my sewing machine – the Bernina 1630 I use regularly has a fairly short throat, or harp, and I have to roll things up to get at the center in any detail. I managed to overcome that, and finished the detail work this morning. It felt lovely to sit down and sew after a week of strenuous garage clearing and renovations.

I've already started the next piece, but had to stop because I can't decide if I want to set it in the fall, when I took the photo, or the spring, because all I can think of right now is spring and summer!

I know – what with a massive clear-out and deaccession of unused fabric and objects, it seemed like time to start making things again.

I've had the photo for this one for a while, I know I got permission to use it, but I cannot remember who originally took it. If it was you, tell me, and I'll send you a print of it, in thanks!

The clearing out continues apace!

I had two large halted-projects bins – those have been consolidated to one, and a lot of projects recycled. I've finished with the bin of batiks. Some extremely ugly ones are gone, and the rest are sorted by color and filed into two bins. (I decided if they were that important to me, I should give them a larger space allotment.) That is the end of the fabric bins.

I'm facing the cabinet of catastrophe and chaos next. It contains some paint (more paint is in the kitchen where I actually use it, but it takes up space the cereal used to have, until I realized we don't actually eat cereal here) and the buttons, and the beads, and all the rubber stamps including the ones from my youth, and a lot of random things.

Many things are easy to decide about, but I have a little doll suitcase with a doll and all her clothes inside it – the weird thing is that she doesn't mean much to me now, but she did? I think? I dimly remember playing with her, but not to the extent that I remember playing with the small bears I installed in the dollhouse my dad and I made. Or the model horses I was obsessed with from third grade on.

On the whole the clear out feels lovely – there is space to breathe, and fewer unfinished things are glaring at me when I walk in. It opens up mental and physical space for new ideas to bloom.