Tangled Stitch

This is just a little inkling of my handmade gifts for this holiday season. There are hand embroidered and hand knitted and hand stitched and even a couple of hands thrown in there this year. I'm still in the process of figuring out which home they will go home to. Some are no brainers and others require a bit more brain then I have at the moment. I'm a last minute Molly so I probably won't know a couple until I am ready to deliver them. There is a big push this year for handmade gifts and I personally hope it keeps going. There are always gift card years, but I don't think this is one of them. Our economy and our spirits are broken, this is the year to buy something that comes from the heart and is made with love. Be it a beautiful hand embroidered hand or a beautiful wooden train, or a lovely crocheted scarf. Crafters and artists do what they do because they love it, so every hand made gift you give means you are giving something that someone loved enough to...

I was going to use my black hole called Hope for my Inspire Me Thursday entry but decided that my current project with a hole prominently in the middle of the hand(which will permanently stay there)is even better. First off this post is an homage to Drea from Drea Dear who has delighted me every weekend with her works in progress. She's a fabulous stitcher so go take a look. The name of this piece is circular hand and it was inspired by the most perfect watercolored bullseye right in the middle of the palm(thence the hole). It was always going to be a handful of circles but it's not very often when the fabric has something to say about the design and sure enough it was Kismet to have that circle right where it is. I guess I've come full circle myself since the first time I shared this hand. Another day another crafty artist show thing. No sales but something remarkable happened anyway, people commented and admired the work I want to do. Now an $85.00 embroidered hand ...

This is the definition of warrior as per dictionary.com 1. a person engaged or experienced in warfare; soldier. 2. a person who shows or has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness, as in politics or athletics. Some days when I embroider I feel like a warrior armed with my embroidery needle. Looking to find peace and joy with my needle. Trying to escape those things that make me feel like a different type of warrior. Some days I think we all feel like a beast or a warrior, willing to fight with anyone about anything. Those kind of days are so difficult that we all need some sort of outlet to fight against those negativities. For me the answer is my embroidery needle. It never fails to bring me peace(and no not by sticking the other person with my embroidery needle). It brings me back to my center stitch by stitch by stitch. It's meditative and puts my attention on the one thing that will calm me down. I'm one of those people that picks up whatever energy is in ...

Petals! What lovely fragile parts of a flower. When I think of petals I see them falling softly to the ground after the bloom has gone. I think of rose petals on the bed(from television not my own life too much cleanup). I think of their lovely scent and how fragile and quickly time flies and they are gone replaced hopefully by different blooms and different petals. My friend Mendofleur had a beautiful petal jacket on her blog a while ago(a truly great submission for Inspire Me Thursday, so you can find it at http://mendofleur.com/2009/04/14/petal-jacket/ for yourself if she doesn't share it). It captures the petal just perfectly and is a real work of art so please go and see it. I love it and I know you will too. It reminds me once again how we are all a part of a whole and connected and yet we are petals that have fallen off the flower and have blown away. Her work is lovely. As for my own petals, this is my handful of flowers. It is one of my favorite hand embroidered ha...

This is an essay no pictures for Inspire Me Thursday. Today I am pushing myself to blog as I woke up early this morning, went to a car dealer, found a beautiful car and am amazed that it is sitting in my garage tonight.(It's a lovely royal blue Accord, it's beautiful). Push, when I think of the word so many things come to mind. How I push myself to work(which brings me great joy a little guilt that I sometimes do have to push myself) that I can be pushy on occassion. That I don't like to pushed around. Lots of things most of them negative so I think I'll stop dwelling on push or pushing myself to come up with something positive to say about it. I did Tai Chi for a while, I really have to get back to it. One lesson I learned very easily was that you can push somebody and knock them off balance with very little effort. Just a slight movement of the legs putting your weight in the right one can do it. Once I was getting groceries out of the back of my CRV with my hu...

I am a tangled stitch. I am a hand embroidery artist. I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a daughter. I am on a journey that I don't know the destination of. I am a believer most days. I am happy to be alive most days too. A few more words then one but I guess if I had to pick one it would be a Tangled Stitch. The piece I've chosen is called Lucinda. She is a lovely lady I do not know in any way except inspiration and tangled threads and stitches.

I love the topic of swirl. I love the swirl of the embroidery thread being used by big strands of thread, little strands of thread all swirled together into a solid piece of embroidery. Some broken, some whole, some tangled, some loose, all together in a swirl. A meditation using thread from the skein or piece by piece. A mosaic of thread. A mosaic that brings my life together in a constant use of metaphor. Starting, finishing, knotted together each little stitch every single day.

Finally a prompt I don't have to use my imagination for as I used my imagination a while back to create Blue Moons. This piece is one of my favorites. All the planets were aligned and it worked as a project, I found the perfect backing to mount it on without having to even manipulate it and it looked beautiful framed. I had a place where it was supposed to go in my imagination but liked it so much it is still sitting on my wall. Sometimes a piece just works, it comes out better then even you could imagine. It kind of makes up for some of those projects that sound great in theory but work better in our own mind. Every artist has them. Those projects that you follow through on, in my case putting every stitch on the fabric and then you end up with what? Lately I've been reworking some of those pieces, I'll add them to my gallery when completed. But the Blue Moons was just a joy. I hope you find your inspiration some night out amongst the moonbeams. Keep stitching.

This is my entry for Inspire Me Thursday's prompt of Silver. It is a piece of Ivory silk, 2 skeins of silver embroidery thread and 2 skeins of black. Now I hope I can find an inspiration as to what to do with it. Sometimes these prompts are so easy and sometimes you really have to think out of the box. Silver is probably very easy for some but for me it's not really because I don't wear jewelry. I wear my wedding ring and my cross necklace and that's it. I used to wear my mom's platinum ring with blue sapphires but one of the sapphires fell out and I figured it was safer to keep it as a memory. For a short while I was into marcasite jewelry but even that became too difficult. Broken chains, lost stones, knots in the chains you name it. Kind of ironic that I can get just about any knot out of thread but when it comes to the chain on a necklace I'm a bit clumsy at it. Can't get them out no matter how hard I try. So I never take my cross necklace off...

I love to crochet lace patterns using bedspread cotton. There was a time not so long ago that I could lose myself with just a ball of cotton and a small steel crochet hook. Hours after hours just crocheting beautiful lace patterns. What a wonderful way to get lost for a few hours or days! Very delicate and beautiful. If you look at my flicker photos you will see a few examples of christening outfits and purses that I crocheted in another lifetime. Maybe writing about them will inspire me to pick it up again. Thank you Inspire Me Thursday. See you soon.

This is my entry for fold. Recently I had an order for wallets that easily folded up and closed. I didn't have a pattern so I worked out a template and made a couple. This was one of my favorites when I was making it but for some reason every time I folded it, it was a bit lopsided. It still is lopsided so it's mine. I don't usually share my mistakes but fold sort of took over and I kept passing the wallet on my work table. Finally I put the two of them together and came up with the idea that so much of our lives is spent folding things up and trying to keep them neat and tidy and that no matter how much we try sometimes life isn't neat and tidy and things cannot just be folded up. Life is good but in reality I am a little lopsided and a little less neat and tidy then I wish to be. Now it is time to accept that I am like the wallet and move on with it. Keep stitching!

Two posts in one day. I decided to comment on the dress prompt because of the irony. Myself an artist who makes pretty lovely purses which I hope people will wear with their lovely dresses despises the dress. Never liked them even as a child. I can name my favorite dresses on one hand(well maybe more then one hand we'll see). I liked my communion dress. It was a lovely lace like dress which was a mini which was the style when I made my communion. There is a picture of me somewhere in it standing with my brother who has a big gap in the middle of his bangs as he decided to cut his hair because he was jealous of my hair cut. Probably the cuteness of him is why I look at the picture and remember that dress. Then there was the red dress I wore on my first date ever. A Christmas dance with a boy on the cross country team named Mike(I think it was his first date also as he let me out of the car across the street in the snow). It was a red clinging dress with spaghetti straps an...

This is an open thread on Inspire Me Thursday so I thought I would share one of my latest pieces. It is called The Light Within. It's another one of those pieces that just popped into my head. It seems like a good time to remember the light within with the exciting news and the idea of optimism that a President Elect Barack Obama brings. The last few years and especially the last few months have been a little dark but a new president especially with one with the message of change is fresh and exciting and light. Perhaps he will be able to turn our collective ship around. The Light Within is a hand embroidered piece, starting with varying degrees of yellow on the inside, then varying degrees of orange and then varying degrees of red. My work shines the light within no matter how dark the outside is. My life is abuzz in changes. My son is looking at colleges and he got his driver's license. One of the galleries that showed my work has closed and with the economy in the ...

Well the topic is glass. Several thoughts go through my mind. Could it be through the looking glass. Through the heart of glass. Glass half empty/glass half full. Stained glass. Well how bout we say my glass runneth over. It seems the last topic for Inspire Me Thursday inspired me to come out of my comfort zone just a wee bit too much. After days and weeks of my glass running over as a metaphor for my words running over I seemed to block myself for a short while. It didn't help that I was stuck making a crocheted table runner that I had to do but sad to say didn't inspire me. Although after I get it back from my class I think I'm going to add some interesting appendages. My last inspire me thursday post said a lot of things about my work that I usually keep to myself, but being inspired meant not thinking about my inspiration before I shared it. I had so many lovely responses to it so thank you very much if you happened to comment about it. But it's kind of ...

The topic at Inspire Me Thursday is Beyond Your Comfort Zone. Since I don't really have a problem expressing myself while I'm working I thought I'd talk about the the rest of my life which is beyond my comfort zone. I have always stopped just short of my greatness. I've exercised and dieted off hundreds of pounds just to reach a certain weight and go backwards. I've created beautiful art only to have it sit unframed or tucked away in a drawer. I've been wanting to get my work published in a magazine but submitted one scarf pattern to a crochet magazine, it was rejected and I never tried again. I've had dozens of crummy jobs and worked in retail(which I love) but yet I have a hard time selling my own work. I have an even harder time putting myself out there to find someone else to sell my work. the coop was a lark, one of those things the universe told me I had to do. I guess it counts as going out of my comfort zone but the universal feeling I had w...

I wanted to give visual interest to my goals and thought a butterfly/dragonfly purse was as good a visual interest as any as it is very cold and they remind me of summer. 1. I wish to find a shop in my area that will carry my purses and framed pieces. 2. I wish to start selling on either Ebay or Etsy and start my own website. 3. I wish to do work that is more self expressive. 4. I'd also like to push myself just a little harder to get out of the box that I have embroidered and knitted myself into. I found over the last year that the more I pushed myself to be more original the more successful I was. 5. I'd like to have the words hand embroidery artist slip off my tongue just a wee bit easier(on my trip to Joann's I had a hard time saying the word artist again). 6. I intend to keep reading other blogs that inspire me to be an artist and help me to find better ways to market my work. I have really become a fan of blogging and look forward to it a great deal. 7. Oops I forgo...