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the willow leaf in question

<p>When all the other trees are just getting green and solid, willow trees have been green for a week or more. This is a leaf from a trio of willows next to the bike path just across the river.</p>

<p>Process for this sounds complex, but isn’t really! First I printed the leaf using the oil paintsticks onto soluble stabilizer. I stitched all the veins and around the outside, making sure they overlapped and locked together. The places where I have loose threads is where that failed. Then I ran it under water to dissolve the stabilizer, dried it and stitched it to the circle. There is still some stabilizer in the thread, making it stiffer than plain, clean thread.</p>

<p>Today it rained, almost all day. I took advantage of the indoor time to cut a bunch of new circles, order stabilizer and frames for works that are going into the gallery, and putz about making space in my room. Happiest news all day? My dad is feeling a little better! Second happiest news? Someone called and wants to buy a piece that is on exhibit at the Cup and Top Cafe! I am delighted!!</p>

All of April's circles, plus a bonus picture of Alice in the plane.

I am ashamed to say that in the flurry of mailing and giving away I managed to give away several circles my mother was hankering for. So I made this one for her specially, and I will mail it tomorrow. I swear!

We've been having absurdly dry, hot weather. The forecast I heard for today said "surprisingly sunny". Well, actually it didn't – it said "mostly sunny" and I must have laid my own surprise over the top of that. Once it rains, or fogs, or anything, you'll see it in the circles. Had you noticed they've all had blue skies so far? Except yesterday, which was cloudy but no rain.

I think I remember a tradition of poetry on February 2. Happy Groundhog Day, Happy Imbolc, Happy Brigid's Day and Candlemas…. have a poem:

Some would distinguish nothing here but oaks,
Proud heads conversant with power and glory
Of heaven's rays or heaven's thunderstrokes,
and adumbrators to the understory,
Where in shade, small trees of modest leanings
Contend for light and are content with gleanings.
And yet here's dogwood: overshadowed, small,
But not inclined to droop and count its losses,
It cranes its way to sunlight after all,
And paints the air of May with Maltese crosses.
And here's witch hazel, that from underneath
great vacant boughs will bloom in winter's teeth.
Given a source of light so far away
That nothing, short of tall, comes very near it,
Would it not take a proper fool to say
That any tree has not the proper spirit?
Air, water, earth and fire are to be blended,
but no one style, I think, is recommended.
Richard Wilbur
A Wood

I find I am missing the creativity and discipline of making something every day. The last time I did was in 2007 (the birth of this blog in fact, which makes this a five year anniversary of sorts) and it is high time to do it again. The biggest issue in committing to something like this is to decide what I can make more than 300 of. I mean, I still have postcards from 2007 languishing around the house. But the knowledge and skills I gained are worth a lot, and I think it is high time to do it again. 

So: a circle a day, for 2012.

The rules:

• Circles will fit into the Trader Joe's tins (about 3" in diameter) and be attached to ribbons for each month.
• Each circle must have a front, back and finished edge. 
• Each month will have a color, and a second constraint to be determined. 
• When the family goes on vacation, so do I.

Month colors, and second theme if I know:

• January – red & thread
• February – PINK
• March – black and gray
• April – yellow
• May – green
• June – orange
• July – anything & ocean
• August – blue & feather
• September – brown & leaf
• October – purple & scary
• November – metallics 
• December - white & old

Other goals for 2012? Call my mother more, ride more horses, tell people more often how fond of them I am. Those should all contribute to the general happiness quotient. 

Out with 2011, in with 2012! let's see what we can make of it!

A broader array of things than I remembered. 

I was thinking about things I have accomplished this year. The list feels short, but there were some good milestones. 

The biggest ones had to do with getting better at selling my work. I was accepted into an art show and sale for the Trustees of Reservations, met a gallery owner I need to communicate with, and participated in two craft fairs just before Christmas. I executed commissioned work (portraits of two Chickens for Bob), and talked with another person about the possiblity of commissioning a piece. 

Artistically speaking, I had a gloriously fevered month working with my feelings about and reactions to the El Anatsui exhibit that I visited and revisited. I had a different but equally glorious month working on various chickens, feeling out the ways I could depict feathers and mass on a surface. I got a chance to actually make the first few of a series I have been thinking about for ages – the pond pictures across the seasons of a year. 

For stuff that I didn't do so well: I missed a couple opportunities to sell myself and my work, and I think I should work harder on that next year. I need to get better at finding venues, organizing myself, and telling a story about myself and my work. Mounting and framing work needs more refinement. While I did well enough producing work steadily, I could use more time in the studio. I also did better with this blog, talking to you all more regularly than in some previous years, but that still leaves room for improvement!

If I were to grade myself, it would be as follows: 

artistic endeavors: A+

taking advantage of sales opportunities: B+

steady presence in studio: B+

ongoing education: A

Year overall: A-

Aerin is working away on college essays (working well to deadline, as we say in this family) all of which are due before midnight December 31st. She started writing about the hole in the ceiling of the kitchen, and the more we talked about it, the more I realized it was a connection between the important parts of my life, as well as a kind of magic portal in hers. 

This hole is there by design, not accident. It is meant to let heat rise into the second floor, from an era when there were no radiators there. It has provided the children years of pleasurable gravity testing, dropping things on my head, or onto the floor to be retrieved and dropped again. (The pompoms were substantially less painful than the rain of legos.) It allowed me to talk to Alice, when she inhabited that room, and I was required in the kitchen to produce food.

But now it connects my art space with my cooking space. I can put something in the oven and retreat upstairs sure in the knowledge that the smells coming through the hole will warn me when it is done. I can eavesdrop on people in the kitchen, which I tend not to do except to listen for tone of voice. People there can ask questions of me while I work on my art, and I can answer them without leaving a particularly finicky bit of stitching. 

The hole in the ceiling connects the two most important parts of the house where I work; the kitchen, where I work for the health and amusement of the family, and my studio, where I work for my pleasure and sanity. 

While I know, intellectually, that the earth spins on its axis daily, and rolls around the sun on an annual basis, it feels as though the sun swings, back and forth across the equator, forming seasons. There is the elegant knowledge of the tilt of the earth's axis, demonstrated over and over on the equinoxes and solstices at the Sunwheel in Amherst, and there is my own certain caveman knowledge that we need to light candles to make the sun return. It is a curious, binocular vision through which it view the world.

In a valiant effort to come to grips with this, I've written dozens of attempts at poetry. But they all come down to this:

hover, and swing
hover, and swing

the sun swings again across the equator to
hover, breathless in the heat of summer
we wait to exhale and then
we are tumbling down, across the shortening days
swinging across the equator again
to hover, cold and shivering in the dark
we band together, candles lit, singing
to call again to spring
the lengthening days, the brightening sun
the fast swing across the equinox and then we come again

to hover
and swing

Aerin tells me this is a peculiarly adult way to see it. She can remember when seasons lasted so long it wasn't really possible to remember when it had been different. And then they started to speed up. But this is how it feels to me.

So:

Happy MidWinter Hover of the Sun, and may the returning of the light bring all possible joy to you.