Snowed Under

I think the snow has finally stopped after four straight days. We were buried in a beautiful heavy blanket of white, and I wish I could say I had been able to go out and enjoy wading through the drifts. But an allergy attack earlier in the week quickly turned into a bad sinus infection that has affected my entire system, and I was laid out on the couch for most of Friday morning. My head feels like it's stuffed with cotton, or maybe it's wool, and the words seem to be hidden away somewhere in that mass. So I'm going to be taking a few days off to recover and catch up on my life.

For a lyrical description of the snowstorm, and how one family enjoyed it to the fullest, check out A Measured Word, a blog written by my friend and neighbor, and accomplished writer.

N. weaves some beautiful stories, connecting tales of family, cooking, and memoir around a particular word. That description doesn't begin to encompass how widely N.'s posts range, and how many connections they make, so please do pay her a visit.

Spring Within

A usual February in upstate New York is gray and bone-cold; by contrast, this month has been filled with light. You can get a feel for its diffuse, encompassing quality from this post and this at Quince and Quire, whose author is a poet, calligrapher, maker of books and other finely crafted objects, and an actual real world neighbor of mine. She is someone I feel privileged to call friend.

The persistence of light has made this winter pretty manageable so far. It's warmed even the coldest days and made it easier to face going outside. And on the days when we've stayed inside because of illness, it has penetrated even the darkest corners.

It's so inspiring to stitch with the sunlight all around me. My crewel yarn has multiplied lately, as well as my embroidery inspiration books and my own sketch books, and the whole mess now fills up my dining room table. In the sunny dining room I have been stitching slowly but consistently on two Crewel Stones, and the sunlight has given me a little taste of the coming spring. It has inspired me to go with bold, bright colors for the Garden Matryoshka Stone. A sunburst flower glows from the center of this garden mama, generating curving vines and little clusters of sunny flowers. Holding her in my palm, I feel a combination of centeredness from her stone core and a rush of creative energy from the vibrant growth.

The Garden Matryoshka Stone is now listed for sale in the Haiti By Hand Etsy shop, and all proceeds from her sale benefit the Haiti By Hand women's artisan group in Despinos, Haiti. Textile artist Rebecca Sower is doing some truly amazing things to help get this new business off the ground, and you can read about all the latest developments at Haiti By Hand.

We're expecting a big snow storm tomorrow, so I'm feeling very grateful to have stitched a little spring into my life to carry me through the storm.

Dedicated to Art

Dedicated to Art at the Renwick Gallery

This post is my 200th, and in about a month I'll be celebrating this blog's second birthday. It's a good time to take stock of where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going with my online presence.


"In this blog I'd like to explore creativity and how to incorporate it into a busy life." That's what I wrote in my first blog post, and it continues to frame the posts I write.


What I have discovered (sometimes painfully) over the course of these two years of blogging is that creativity can't be fitted into the margins of my busy life. It requires a central place. Why? Because it nourishes my spirit. I don't really understand the how of it, frankly. But I know that it helps me look at the people in my life and the world around me with a greater sense of connection and wonder. It urges me to open my eyes and really see. Writing a blog piece or poem, looking through the lens of my camera to frame a photograph, finding the right stitches to realize the details of a sketch--all of these tasks force me to focus and attend. I can't tune out and sleepwalk through my life any more, much as I might want to. The pursuit of a creative life has given me a big kick in the pants, and it isn't always a happy feeling.

I have the tendency in this blog (and in my life!) to sound like I have all the answers. The truth is that this blog forces me to work through the tangle of my thoughts and feelings to find some answers. To marshal all my resources to keep it together. To count my blessings. To counter the occasional downward emotional spiral with something beautiful and positive and life-affirming, like recording in words and pictures the miracle of a fern's unfurling or a skunk cabbage's thermogenesis. And because I have recorded these things in this blog, I will remember them. They will shore me up when I need shoring up. They will remind me of life's rhythms, that the low points will come and go.

So where am I headed? That I can't answer right now, except to say that I will continue to explore creativity as an idea and craft as a daily practice. Since the beginning of the year, I have already written almost half the number of posts that I did in my entire year of posting in 2009. I have completed six handmade items and sold them. The quick explanation for this is that I am no longer working as a textbook editor. It took being turned down for a prestigious job and a year's worth of illness to finally make me realize that I am burned out with editing and need a change.

Without much of a plan, I'm going to continue to use this blog to help me develop my own voice and my ability to communicate clearly. I hope you'll stick around to see what I create and to read about my journey, mostly for selfish reasons. It helps me to know that I'm not alone, that others are documenting their journeys in a similar fashion, looking for ways to use craft to learn more about themselves and to connect with the world around them in a meaningful way. The fact that this blog is fostering a deeper connection with the real world--that's an irony that I am definitely embracing. (These guys understand!)

OK, and my one definite goal for this space and my crafting? To have FUN with it. Like this guy, and this guy. And this one. To play and to give AND have fun at the same time!

Milk Glass, Mother of Pearl, and Metal

In my sewing room, the blue glass of the Perfect Mason jar glows in the snow-reflected sunlight, just as I imagined it would. It holds more than a hundred years worth of simple utility: buttons made of milk glass, mother of pearl, and metal.

This finely curated collection of buttons was put together by Lisa of Lil Fish Studios. Lisa calls herself a "button nerd," though Button Queen would work just as well. She creates artful button bouquets, among many other handcrafted items, and her tutorial for a Vintage Button Bouquet is featured in the book, Button and Stitch: Supercute Ways to Use Your Button Stash, by Kristen Rask. (Margie, the Button Queen of the Resurrection Fern Kingdom, is featured in the book as well.) (See Lisa's vintage button collection here; a glimpse of Margie's here.)


I try not to be greedy when it comes to objects, I really do. When I see something I love, I give myself a little pep talk to convince myself that I don't have to acquire an object to appreciate it, that I can be happy just knowing it exists. But when I saw this perfect jar of buttons featured in Lisa's Etsy shop, lil fish extras (her DESTASH(!!) site), I couldn't resist. Knowing Lisa's fine eye for craftsmanship and her knowledge of button history, I guessed correctly that I would be purchasing a collection that is a work of art itself.


The bone buttons, my favorites because of their shading and what look to be hand-drilled holes, date from the Civil War era.

Lisa reports that the milk glass buttons are from the mid-1800s, while the mother of pearl buttons are likely even older than that.


The metal buttons, stamped with curious patterns, date from the 1930s to the 1940s.


As I sifted through the buttons with my sons, we picked out ones that caught our eyes--diamond-shaped mother of pearl buttons, buttons with metal shanks and flat fronts, bone buttons rounded smooth with holes that looked like wide-open eyes, milk glass stamped with a machine-made pattern. Secreted away at the bottom of a sewing basket or in an old jar, these buttons were treasured for their utility. But put together in a collection by an artist and detached from their originally intended use, they have become mysterious and beautiful artifacts, their carvings runes that convey a lost language not easy to decode. Such a collection becomes a pathway to wonder, concludes art critic Michael Kimmelman. "A collection of things, even everyday things, promises wonderment, . . . as these things become no longer everyday, having been enshrined by a collector,” he argues in his book The Accidental Masterpiece; On the Art of Life and Vice Versa.

Lisa explained it best when she wrote to me about the appeal of this collection for her. "It's curious to me," she muses, "the things we collect and surround ourselves with. I think a lot of us crafty types have a bit of magpie in us. After organizing my workspace it was clear that my personal magpie favors patina, texture, and history above all else."

What a beautiful thought that the lowly, useful button can come to hold all those qualities. What collection holds a similar wealth of associations for you?

***Added later****

There is so much button love to explore on the web. Here are a few more links:

Sister-Diane's heirloom button collection from her grandmother. Be sure to search "buttons" on the CraftyPod site for a wealth of great crafty tutorials featuring buttons. And check out Sister-Diane's gorgeous book, Kanzashi in Bloom (book+kit=bliss), exploring the craft of kanzashi, a traditional Japanese flower craft made of fabric and buttons. Tutorial here!

Artist/illustrator/stop-motion video animator Hine Mizushima's buttons collected for her camera and iphone cases. Mizushima is also a contributor to Button and Stitch.

Button it Up, a site devoted to button crafting and the book of the same name. Check out this amazing button collection. You could get lost for ages following the button links on the contributors page. This site is a great model to follow for other crafters promoting their books--Susan Beal's passion for her craft is evident in every post.

Slow Cloth and Mail Art

Don't you love it when you find a term (or two) that perfectly captures what you've been trying to find the words to explain?

I've just found out about two such terms: Slow Cloth and Mail Art.

Slow Cloth is the art textile equivalent of the Slow Food movement (website here). The Slow Cloth approach fosters a deep appreciation for the history and cultural context of the fabrics used in creating a piece. It values process and contemplation, and the slow accumulation of skills to create a piece whose quality the maker can be proud of. It builds community, encouraging the sharing of knowledge and skills. It focuses on green practices. As a whole, it emphasizes the joyful and spiritual nature of creativity.

I didn't learn the term until recently, but I've absorbed the basic tenets of this approach by reading Jude Hill's blog, Spirit Cloth, which presents an essential primer on how to make Slow Cloth. Elaine Lipson coined the term, and along with Jude Hill and Glennis Dolce (Shibori Girl), sponsors a Facebook group for Slow Cloth. Lipson has written a manifesto on the movement, which can be found in this article at Hand/Eye Magazine and on her blog, Red Thread Studio.

It's definitely with joy that I've thrown myself into creating the Crewel Stones. For me, they are all about how the materials--stone and wool--come together and create a remarkable little landscape of curves to work off. With each piece I have improved my stitching and expanded my repertoire of stitches. There are times when the process is meditative and flowing, but many, many other times when I am frustrated by the huge gap between what my fingers are able to accomplish and what I want the stitches to express. (There's lots of ripping out and do-overs, especially with the matryoshka's eyes!) As strange as this sounds, it feels like I'm in a constant dialogue with each stone as I try to translate a sketch or idea onto the three-dimensional surface whose form dictates how the yarn will flow.

As I was wrapping up the last two Crewel Stones to send to Antonella in Italy and Jenn (A Trinket Treasury) in Canada, I was thinking of all of the lovely packages that I have received from Etsy sellers and blog friends. How the wrapping of each item is so carefully done and beautifully presented, an art form itself. How creating a collage of items with a specific recipient in mind is itself a customized piece of art from the heart. How the opening of the package can become a form of performance art. Those are some of the things that the term Mail Art encompasses. You can learn more about it at Jenn's From the Letter Love Files blog.

My kids are on winter break this week, and the snowstorms in Washington, D.C. last week foiled our vacation plans. So we have a full week of a whole lot of nothing planned--the best kind of vacation, really. I hope to be back next week with more posts.

Snow Day Walk

A kiss and a hug (xo) from my snowy walk yesterday in the arboretum.

I had the entire arboretum to myself yesterday. My footprints were the only ones I saw. The roads are not being maintained during the winter, and yesterday was quite snowy. Consequently I think most folks stayed home snug and warm in front of their fire.

This is my favorite tree in the arboretum, sweet Tilly. Her low branches create a green cave in the summer time, sheltering birds and other wildlife. I love how messy and sprawly she looks.

I had never seen the horses active at the Equine Genetics Center barn, but two of them seemed happy to see another creature out in the snowy weather.

I wanted to share a very inspiring quotation from The Accidental Masterpiece; On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, by Michael Kimmelman, which has helped me to open my eyes a bit more to the accidental masterpieces I see around me:

"Art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully. . . . Creating, collecting, and even just appreciating art can make living a daily masterpiece. . . . Everything, even the most ordinary daily affair, is enriched by the lessons that can be gleaned from art: that beauty is often where you don’t expect to find it; that it is something we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is also richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas. And that it is always good to keep your eyes wide open, because you never know what you will discover. The drive to live life more alertly being an instinctive need, whether you are an artist by trade or by desire, the art of seeing well is a necessary skill, which fortunately can be learned.”

I'm going to keep trying to keep my eyes wide open!

Eye Wonder

Holding our eyes open in wonder, let's take a leisurely walk through time--on a geological scale--and traverse some continents as well. More than 385 million years ago, before the dinosaurs enjoyed their brief moment on earth, a shallow sea covered much of North America. Its warm waters fostered a continuous chain of living creatures, who lived and died and then sank to the bottom of the sea. Sediments settled; pressure and heat turned bone and mud to stone over millennia.

The sea receded, baring the flaky gray shale to eons of wind and rain and erosion. The glaciers made their stately cruises south then north, scouring the earth and rock, gouging out long, thin lakes, like gangly appendages.

A piece of the slate chipped off its source, tumbled down a gorged riverbed and into Cayuga Lake, where waves rounded its edges. The obstinate waves kept pushing, pushing until the stone reached the rock-strewn shore. There I admired its flatness and cameo-like shape and took it home to cover its contours with wool. I imagined an ancient sea plant drifting in the warm, shallow sea, at the end of its days coming to rest on the sea floor and imprinting its form on stone. A luxurious silk-wool blend yarn outlines the curving forms of fossil life on the covered Fossil Stone.

Now let's skip across time and continent to Europe, its northern Germanic tribes to be precise, during the early days of the so-called Dark Ages. There they coined the term wundran, to capture their sense of astonishment at the magic they saw in the world around them: perhaps the dragon prows of their strong-hulled ships slicing through the white-capped North Sea; white cliffs formed by eons of tiny sea animals a shimmer on Briton's distant shore.

The Scandinavian notion of appreciating the world's marvels came down through the ages to the English language, to our sense of wonder.

And that's the perspective with which I'd like to view the world around me every day--that each morning brings with it a newness, a sense of discovery, of magic and astonishment in the mundane details: the thin winter sun filtering through the sliding glass doors and glowing on my son's bent head; the lacy filigree of dead vegetation poking through a snowbank on the side of a country road; silk gliding through wool as it forms a smooth curve along a stone's contour.

If you'd like to have your own gentle reminder to notice the wonder in each day, consider purchasing the Wonder Stone pictured above. It is available, as well as the Fossil Stone, through the Haiti by Hand Etsy shop. Sale proceeds directly benefit a women's artisan group in Despinos, Haiti.

******Added: The Wonder Stone now makes its home with Jenn at A Trinket Treasury. Check out her sweet post about it here.

The Little Kikis; A Little Kiki Tale for Young and Old

I took a walk in the Kiki Forest one summer day.

The sky was bright blue. Aimless clouds made white patches on the sky.

Tree branches arched over the trail. They reached out to each other, meeting overhead. I was sealed into a deep green tunnel.

My soft footfalls on the pine needles did not disturb the silence of the forest. Only the wind whispered through the leaves, like dry hands rubbing together for comfort.

I stopped. I stood still under the tossing branches of a tree thick with leaves.

I looked up. I stared into the green. As I stared, I began to make out many pairs of eyes.

They were eyes alight with curiosity, drinking in the wonder of me, a stranger to the Kiki Forest.

I held still and watched the shy Little Kikis slowly emerge from the leaves.
They got used to my presence.

I watched the sociable creatures huddle together in groups of four or more on their branches. They chattered happily to one another. When they got especially excited, their feathers puffed up or their wings beat rapidly in the air, lifting their slight bodies off the branch for a brief moment.

I didn’t see her, but I have heard that the beautiful and benevolent forest spirit, Nanou Kiki, watches over the Little Kikis.

When their happy chatter gets too loud, or their wings flap too wildly, she sings a quiet song to remind the Little Kikis that the wind has a voice that wants to be heard, too.

When you hike in the pine-needle covered trails of the Kiki Forest, take a moment to be still and quiet. You will hear the wind whisper through the leaves. Look up, and you will see Little Kiki eyes alive in the trees, peering down at you in wonder.

****

This little story came out of a happy crafting time with my youngest son. It was inspired by Nanou’s Happy Nut creature (make one of your own here), and by working with the play clay Sonia sent us from France.

My son came up with the name “Kikis” for these little creatures, and I was intrigued by his tree with many eyes. I think I will have my son help me illustrate this story, so that we can read it together at bedtime.

(My apologies to Hayao Miyazaki for borrowing the concept of the forest spirit and the little spirits alive in the trees from Princess Mononoke, which he has based on traditional Japanese animist beliefs.)

Do you have stories that you have collaborated on with your little ones? I would love to hear about them!

A Wonderful Mail Day

I was in bliss mode yesterday around noon, having finally managed to grab some rare stitching time on a blood-red stone after a very hectic week of appointments. The mailman arrived with a stack of mail, including two very special packages and a beautiful thank you card/photograph. Whatever nirvanic state exists beyond bliss is where I floated after opening the goodies.

A hand-addressed green envelope immediately caught my attention. There was no return address, and I couldn't read the postal stamp, deepening the mystery. Inside was a photograph of a winter tree from Peggy, who now owns the Snowglobe Stone, with the sweetest thank you note filled with snow confetti. I feel such a thread of connection between us, with my stitches held dearly in her hands. Thank you, Peggy.

The two packages were the fruits of a bit of post-Christmas Etsy shopping I did for myself, which felt like such a splurge. But I'm so glad that I did.

Lisa at Lil Fish Studios has the eyes of a naturalist and the sensitive fingers of a seamstress. She creates felted items that explode the distinctions between nature-made and hand-made. (Check out her latest mushroom terrarium as one example.) In the brooch that I now wear, a fulled, off-white wool sweater becomes a patch of snow or ice. Within it a wee felted acorn floats. Fine stitches form a series of eddying ripples around it. Wooden beads suggest nature's remains--stumps of felled trees, animal tracks or even scat (!). Thank you for warming my winter, Lisa, with this brooch!

Like Lisa, Sonia of Cozy Memories Shop and Cozy Homemaking blog, is a master stitcher. I treated myself to some of her delicately crafted items, and what I received was an assembled masterpiece of made and found items. I cannot begin to express how wonderful this package was. When I opened it, the delicate scent of lavender wafted out. (I'm glad that nobody was around to see me with my nose buried in the box, as eager as a cat after catnip!) Inside the box were the most delightfully wrapped packages, something for each member of my family; the wrapping paper was upcycled map pages and crinkly printed bags, all wrapped in twine with Sonia's carefully printed tags.

I set out all of the packages on a table, and the collage of items was a piece of art in itself, a definite visual feast that I quietly enjoyed. When the kids came home later that afternoon, we had a little present-opening party. They were so delighted with this special event, not connected to any holiday and such a treat because of its unexpectedness. All of the goodies were exclaimed over, and the sweets immediately devoured.

What I admire so much about Sonia's work is the care and precision of her stitching. The stitches are so tiny and fine and approach the exactness of machine-stitching. But rather than feeling mechanical, they express tenderness and an unapologetic sentimentality. There is a series of seven red cross stitches that tack down a cream-colored piece of French lace on a cuff that Sonia stitched that encapsulates the richness of her approach.

It was a photo from Sonia's Flickr photostream, of her delicate hand stitching, that inspired me to pick up needle and thread again to hand-embroider on wool. Thank you, Sonia, for the inspiration, and for your friendship!

I think it was an altogether fitting morning, as I was stitching "WONDER" and thinking about its many manifestations in my life, that the postman delivered such a large dose of it to me!

Encountering Miro at the Tate Modern

Last month I shared a bit about my perspective-changing trip to London over the holidays. Part of my radically revised way of looking at my creative life comes from the encounters I had with art at the Tate Modern, Britain's (arguably the world's) preeminent museum for contemporary works. The museum's broad-ranging and somewhat quirky collection is housed in a converted power station, a fitting vessel to contain such intense creative energy.



Standing on a footbridge in the cathedral-like Turbine Hall, it's immediately apparent that the architects didn't just use the structure as mere backdrop for the art displayed. The building has its own spirit and presence, as if it's whispering soft dialogues with the art pieces.

I had an epiphany about abstraction as I admired one of Joan Miro's paintings on the Friday evening that my husband and I visited the Tate. Miro developed a personal vocabulary of symbols that he used to populate his paintings, and the full emotional force of his invented landscapes hit me all at once. I felt overwhelmed with the delicacy of his painted lines and the tenderness with which he approached each shape and its placement. Somehow he seemed to have pared down communication to its essential coding of shape, color, and line.

The sweetness of the shapes in Miro's painting reminded me of appliqued quilts, and in particular Amy Karol's quilted miniature scenes. It didn't matter that Miro's materials were those of the formal artist, while Karol's are more commonly associated with domestic crafts; both express such childlike wonder and joy, such intuitive and essential truth.

As I've worked on the felted embroidered Crewel Stones this past month, I have been trying to free myself to enter into such a playful and creative space--a meditative space of freedom and intuition and color in which the dialogue between the form of the rock itself and the caress of the wool fibers allows a narrative of colors and shapes to unfold. I am allowing myself to play and learn as I do so, and it's profoundly scary and liberating at the same time. I definitely recommend it!