Illustration Friday - multiple

cotton fabric, acrylic ink, acrylic metallic paint, found object paper, mulberry paper, stamped letters, printed, transfered letters and gel medium on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

I wanted to celebrate the spectacular lunar eclipse that we watched earlier this week. I stamped and transferred luna on a batiked fabric multiple times. The Luna moth is cut from a child's vintage textbook that my friend Julie let me choose pages from recently. Of course, I picked pages with insects.

Collages for Fiber Art for a Cause

Yesterday I finished up three collages to donate to Virginia Spiegel's newest fundraiser for the American Cancer Society, Collage Mania II.


Fiber Art for a Cause, her brainchild and passion, has donated over $140,000 to ACS in the last couple of years and I'm delighted to be a small part of it.



Our shop's art quilting website, Flourish!, is donating a $100 gift certificate in a random drawing from among those who have donated $50 or more toward the purchase of Virginia's beautiful online book, Art, Nature, Creativity, Life. This book is such rich inspiration and reflects Virginia's abiding love of nature and art in rich photographs, and pensive essays and haikus.

I am in awe of Virginia's dedication and commitment to this cause. She has put aside her work time and again, and logged countless hours in her drive to make these fundraisers successful. It is truly an honor to know her and to help support her efforts.

por Juan, que te echo de menos

Illustration Friday - theory

cotton fabric, cotton thread, acrylic ink, metallic paint, found object papers, stamped image, gyotaku and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

Boy, theory is a topic you have to think about. I've got music theory in there as the sheet music, the theory of evolution in the fish, plus a veiled reference to Darwin in the fortune. I might re-visit this topic in a month to see what else my subconscious has to say about it.

The chop of yú in the lower left corner is one of Fred B Mullett's Red Pearl stamps. He sent lollipops with the order (gotta love that) and his written personal guarantee is the funniest, most subversive decree I've read in eons - almost worth an order all by itself!

Rhyme

The word prompt for my fiber postcard group this month is "rhyme". I had a plan for this piece that went awry. I started out with a haiku by Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet:

How reluctantly
the bee emerges from the deep
within the peony

then it drifted into a pun, 2 bee, my bee turned out to be a wasp, and there's no rhyme in sight. I guess that's the way it goes sometimes. I like it anyway.

Today's incongruity: shoveling three inches of snow in the pouring rain. I'm talking cats and dogs, literal buckets of rain. I couldn't have been more wet if I had taken a shower fully clothed. The driveway's clear though. Gotta love February.

Illustration Friday - choose

cotton fabric, cotton thread, acrylic ink, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

I'm not sure what my thought process was here. "Choose" brought to mind menus and choosing a meal (of course the fabric has recipes on it, not a menu, but it represents a menu in my head), plus the either/or, positive/negative embodied by the half-and-half flower. I stamped the word "go" over everything as I often have trouble coming to quick decisions, finding myself thinking, and re-thinking and over-thinking instead of just deciding or choosing and moving on. So, I'm GOing with this as choose. Ha.

Waiting for Spring

Every year around Christmas my mom gives me an amaryllis bulb. I plant it in a pot and place it on my kitchen windowsill and forget about it, aside from the occasional watering. It usually starts blooming at the very moment when I am completely and totally sick of winter and the cold, and can't wait one more second for Spring to arrive.

Three of its four blossoms have opened and this morning I moved the pot to the dining room where the sun danced through the petals beautifully. I can almost pretend that spring is upon us and it isn't 9 below zero, with the wind chill factored in. Amaryllis = the perfect panacea to the winter blahs.

Thanks, Mom!

¡Feliz cumpleaño!

Happy, happy birthday to my love!

Carlitos at the beach near Miraflores, Peru, -- what a cute little guy.


Ed. note: okay, I'm behind on this post, it was a few days ago, but there's been a lot going on. And I couldn't find this picture. Sam and I did take him to dinner on the actual day. And we had his favorite cake.

Illustration Friday - blanket

cotton fabric, hand-dyed wool thread, cotton thread, acrylic ink, printed mulberry paper, embossed cotton rag paper, nori paste and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

Not my favorite word as a fiber artist. However, I made an abstracted version of "patchwork" with various-sized squares of heavily-embossed paper and used a fabric that's "blanketed" with words as the background.

You know you want to...

You can't complain about the results if you're not part of the process. We're making history today!