Tangled Stitch

 You gave out little pieces of your heart, you gave them to the heartless soul, they took you on a wild ride into the soaring  heights of feeling wanted,  and then they shared your secrets and everyone else’s and then they dropped you to the ground without even caring.   But then you took your broken little heart and became the phoenix rising.   I started writing again and sharing pictures of my work. A word of warning I am a more reflective less wordy phoenix working on inner peace .

 Hi all!  Today was an indoor day, a little gloomy with the sun going in and out.  A little on the cold side with my condition making me feel quite cold so spent the day embroidering.  Today I embroidered the red mandala hearts on gold silk.  I am so enjoy the simplicity of them.  Very meditative.  Straight stitches and French knots.  Very relaxing.  The other red mandala ornament was made a few weeks ago for the same reason.   I love to meditate to them too.  I put them in my hand and sit very quietly rubbing the design gently with my fingers.  They are very comforting and soothing.  There are times since I got sick that I am just kind of overwhelmed.  Embroidering has always been my go to when stressed, even when I was a kid.  I guess it’s the focusing on the needle and the repetition.  Up and down up and down.  I framed a small art piece today but I haven’t decided whether I want to sell it on Etsy o...

When I wrote a couple of months ago I had every intention of making this a daily thing or maybe even a weekly thing but to be quite honest my life has become a moment to moment thing.  I was diagnosed with a rare lung disease back in August. It has taken my entire life and well made it tangled.  The only sure thing in my life right now is embroidery because my tangled life has me completely stressed out most of the time and my old friends, needle and thread, are the only things that seem to unstress me.  I planned on doing craft shows but we’ll that kind of went out the window when I ended up in the hospital in September, I planned on working at my part time job that I loved but that is gone too.  I’ve been in this place before several times and always seem to work my way out of it sooner or later.  I am just waiting for the sooner.   In the meantime, this is one of my new items available on my Etsy shop, my mandala heart ornaments.  I love them they m...

Peace.  It was a beautiful morning.  She woke up with the song Homeward Bound singing in her head.  She had always loved Simon and Garfunkel.  She watched the video on YouTube the concert in Central Park.  A lovely song in a lovely setting.  She pulled her hair back, put her shoes on and took Dixie out.  It was a warm but cloudy morning but it felt like spring.  It had been cold and snowy for a few days so the warmth and the lack of the wind felt good on her skin on this day. The birds were chirping, not just one bird but she could hear the songs of many different birds.  Silently she just listened to the sounds of the birds talking to each other.  Then she heard the ducks, she looked up to see two of them together flying overhead.  I guess they were on a special date.  Silently she just stood thinking how beautiful it all was.  How normal, how sweet, how lovely a morning it was. For a moment she forgot why it was so...

I’m gonna veer off the beaten path today and speak about Jo.  Jo was my mother in law.  She was such a vibrant, loving woman.  She was a collector of quilts and needlework and loved the needle arts as much as I did.  I think that is how we bonded.  She was not a maker but she really appreciated them.  It is because of her that I sell my art, she was so supportive of my talent.  I would make her Scarlet Letter Samplers, so much harder than my usual fare.  I would make her embroidered gifts long before I tried to express myself through hand embroidery.  I used to make christening outfits and she bought a couple of them too, she used to say even the princes of olden days wore christening gowns.  The longer the better.  She framed them and they were on her walls.  Everything I made she loved, she was so very supportive. She loved my son and my son adored his nana.  The sun rose and set on him.  She adored him from...

I have always said that my son is the reason I wake up every morning.  He is in love and happy so I’ve kind of kept my distance from him lately.  The realization of this virus and how deadly it could be put me in a panic yesterday.  The thought that I may possibly die(irrational maybe)without seeing his face in person made me walk in the rain and visit him uninvited.  Raising him was the greatest job I ever had.  Raising your children is an honor.  So when you are in close quarters trying to get your work done and trying to keep your children entertained remember it is a gift you have been given.  Some day they will move on to lives of their own and you could be very alone and have to live with yourself for a while.  I am ok I’ve been living with myself the last few months but I do kind of wish this had happened 15 years ago so I could be with the people I loved.  Be safe.  Please stay healthy and when all this is over hopefully we al...

Well it’s been a while.  And what a strange trip it’s been.  This lovely pillow is available on Etsy. https://etsy.me/2vscg6l .  Now for the strange trip so you can move on if you are only interested in my art. I had a short lived Grub Hub career.  Making money delivering food is both easy and very hard.  I had quite the adventure culminating in a weekend that saw me delivering food to a recycling plant with hard hats and trucks and backing out about 200 feet, driving the wrong way on a one way street in Albany and locking my keys in the car while in a desolate mobile home park in the freezing cold.  I kind of loved it anyway and can see why people do it and why I might still do it after getting commercial insurance policy.  You can’t make a claim on your insurance if you are a driver for hire in NY state.  Luckily it was dark and there was hardly anybody else on the one way street. I’ve been kind of putting my art and pillows on the back bu...

What is the sun, the moon and the stars? It is the beckoning of a greater force, Greater than all of us. Looking up into the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars beckon us, the great unknown, They unite us. We all look and see the same things for a day, a week, a month, eternity. They guide us when we are lost, they give us direction, they illuminate the sky They keep us company on a day at the beach or a dark night of the soul. This piece is available on my Etsy shop.  You can find it here. https://etsy.me/2OVsMSR

Sometimes in our lives we ask God or the universe what we need in our life.  We go inward and meditate and ask for answers.  Sometimes the answers are painful memories which he keep us stuck in a place of lack.  Sometimes the answer is opportune people who show up in your life to give you meaningful messages.  I have become very aware in the last few months on the limitations I have placed on myself due to my opinion of my self.  While meditating I uncovered horrible truths which I realize have affected my outer world but more importantly my inner world. I have spent years on a spiritual journey and have learned to accept people for who they are or who I thought they were.  I concentrated on the good and forgot the rest and somehow managed to have a bunch of people in my life who love me more than I love myself who I love dearly.    On the other hand I have squandered a hell of a lot of money, been unable to find love for myself in the process...

She stood at the top of the hill.  It was a sheet of ice, a scary undertaking for any young girl, but she was a little different, she was afraid of everything.  Maybe she was in the third or fourth grade.  Hungry from no breakfast going home for lunch.  She probably had a hard morning at school, she was teased a lot.  Kids can be cruel.  She had lost her brother, her father and her mother in a way.  All in one full swoop, in the middle of a six month period. So she stood at the top of that icy hill and she cried.  She couldn’t make herself walk down the hill.  I guess perhaps she was afraid she would fall or she would get hurt or she would die too.  She just stood there and cried until finally her neighbor came along and gently took her hand and walked her down the two tremendous icy hills to her home.  Step by step.  By the time she reached home she did not have time for lunch and had to walk back up the icy hills becaus...

Infinite Love is my latest piece.  It signifies a love that is unending.  It has no beginning and has no end.  This piece features two hearts brought together by an infinity sign in the middle.  There are 6 French knots on either side.  Six is the number of Venus and it signifies completeness, beauty and high ideals.  That says it all.  The completeness of finding a love that compliments you and makes you feel whole instead of broken.  A love that is beautiful enough to withstand the trials and tribulations that life brings and the high ideals that with the right person by your side anything is possible. This piece is available on my Etsy site.  It would make a great wedding gift for the perfect couple.be it at the beginning of their time together as an engagement gift or after many years of a happy marriage.  It is something I’m hoping for in my remaining years.  This piece can be found here in my Etsy shop.  https://etsy....

This is my favorite work in progress.  It started as nothing and now it is something.  Isn’t that the way   God made the world?  He started with nothing and made this beautiful mosaic of colors and textures from the tiniest bird to man to the largest elephant.  All of us beautiful in our own way.  The beauty of a tree in a breeze with its leaves swaying to and fro.  The beauty of a cardinal in the tree.  The beauty of a young couple in love walking by the tree.  The sound of rippling water of a creek whose water feeds the tree.  To me embroidery is that tree.  This piece is all connected by thread on black fabric bringing light to the darkness.  Bringing me peace to my all too active mind.  Being love.  Being safe.  Being alone but not alone.  Being thankful that something can bring light from my darkness.  A gentle breeze rustling through my tree.

Merry Christmas!  This is the latest piece I’m working on.  It’s coming from a place of colorful flow. Moving forward bit by bit adding a new color or a new stitch.  No plan seeing what develops.  I feel that way about my life too at the moment.  Moving forward in a direction I’m unsure of.  I am looking for answers that are too vague at the moment to pinpoint a solution so I’m being a hand embroidery artist which is what I’d really like to be anyway. At the moment I am waiting to go to Brian’s so more time to embroider.  I knitted a Christmas gift which although was made in love did not float my boat enough to go back to designing knitwear.  It turned out lovely and had a slight pattern to ward off the boredom but by the time it was finished I knew that isn’t my path anymore.  I had a little time picked up my hoop and a couple of strands of beautiful thread colors and my heart was singing.  Embroidery has given me peace the last few...

The Space Between is where you’ll find me if I get to go.  What does that actually mean?  To me it means the somewhat more focused spot in the center of the swirling chaos of threads and life.  I’ve been meditating a lot lately and I can find complete and utter peace somewhere in the middle of my meditation and then I open my eyes.  This piece was very meditative.  It was made during a very chaotic time of worry about where I fit in the world. I’m still not exactly sure but I’m moving in the right direction. I had a very traumatic childhood and meditation has brought a lot of the trauma hidden under the surface up to the top.  So many things I didn’t really remember that have given me a lifetime of shame and self esteem problems.  An underlying sadness stuck between the beautiful optimistic smile other people see.  What that has done has reminded me that for most of my life I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop afraid of my shadows. ...

Sheep are simple animals that have symbolized  benevolence, honesty, nobility and peace. I think that sums up their place as my favorite animal to hand embroider.  The simple pleasure of dozens of French knots for those times when honesty and commerce meet.  They have always been my favorite thing to embroider and a favorite among my customers.  They are scattered in the mountains of Upstate New York in far lower numbers than their living counterparts. The holidays are a wee bit of a struggle for me as both of my parents died the first week of January a very long time ago.  I’m determined this year to be a bit different and sitting down to embroider some sheep with just a little background noise was just what my soul needed that day.  They are just so simple.  A little circle, a head and some black for the bottom of their legs.  But they give me hours of enjoyment as we all know French knots are the stitch that makes the tangled stitch heart go pi...

What is perfection anyway?  This hand embroidered vintage motorcycle kind of encapsulates my understanding of the word.  It’s a metaphor for how one careless word or hundreds of them can slowly chip away at ones self esteem until there is nothing left but rebuilding the pieces.  I made this motorcycle several years ago, I was still married then.  I looked at a picture of a vintage motorcycle and tried to embroider it meticulously bit by bit as my embroidery needle is a better illustrator than a pen.  It took me weeks and I was oh so proud of it.  My then husband took one look at it and said it was awful as the tires weren’t round enough.   He was probably right but I was shattered nonetheless.  It was during my get out of my box phase.  His one remark which by the way wasn’t meant to hurt me ,just an observation, made this art piece a devastating  failure.  It’s probably why I still have it today. Perfection is an illusion.  It...

Hi All!  Its been a long while.  I figured its time for me to express myself again and restart my blog again, hence the title of this blogpost.   My Etsy shop has been up and running for a year now and I've made 50 sales.  Quite an accomplishment for me as in my previous attempts I was not as successful.  I am still a waitress.  I passed another milestone birthday.  I'm still single although much more happily single than I was in the past.  I've been embroidering up a storm it's still the one constant in my life. Speaking of embroidery since that is the point of this blog, the piece above is a custom order for my friend Clif.  Its a lavender garden made completely of French knots in lavender(of course), green and eventually blue.  It's a work in progress.  It's my second attempt as my first attempt wasn't really working that well,  sometimes life gets in the way of embroidery.  The world and my life have been a bit u...

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner and The Beatles swimming in my mind I thought I would share my latest piece.  I have been working a bit more at my day job but still adding hearts and pillows and art to my Etsy shop.  I am loving the peace, tranquility and meditation of my fingers and the needle moving and the colored thread being left on the fabric.  I am trying to remember simpler days when a great tune and a block of several hours used to be my favorite thing and it seems to be working, I’m embroidering again.  Not so much to music but to Netflix instead. My son is very happily in love as are some of my friends and I am rekindling my love of the stitch so all is good in the world.  I am so enjoying my job as a waitress and am very happy to have landed where I have.  My embroidery work is fun again too.  It’s been a weird(very weird) winter and well being an empath in the current days has been a challenge but thankful to escape to a resta...

Happy New Year from me and the squirrel.  Hope this blog post finds everyone happy and healthy.  This little guy is available in my Etsy shop(www.etsy.com/shop/debstangledstitches).  He is also a new design.  I made a lot of new designs in 2018.  Many more to come also.  I found my inner critic and I’ve silenced her so I take a few more baby steps out into the real world.  I made a promise to myself to add a blog post at least once a week so here is this weeks.  If you think of something you might like to see me conquer send me a comment.  I’ve added some lovely new pieces to my Etsy shop, a peace heart filled with pastel color French knots and a butterfly.  Have a couple more coming tomorrow so take a gander.  Keep on stitching!

Well the holidays are upon us and peace is sort of elusive at the moment.  Too much to do, not enough time, not enough sleep.  It’s a bit tougher with a day job too.  But I try.  How do I try?  I make peace pillows and ornaments.  This is one of my new designs.  A bittersweet wreath heart pillow.  It can be hung on a door knob after Christmas to remind us all that this too will pass.  This ornament is available on my Etsy shop.  Hit the link.  https://etsy.me/2KGoIT9 . Keep on stitching.