Tangled Stitch

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...

Eric Clapton said today that he is going to tour until he’s 70 and then stop.   That is remarkable in so many ways, it shows that the road can call you for oh so long and then one day it just stops and you want to find peace and tranquility.   Something tells me though that the road will still call him even with his best intentions maybe not so far like Europe or Asia but maybe New York and California?   Once you are a journeyman you are always a journeyman. It’s kind of like an itch you can’t stop scratching I would imagine.   You might really want to chuck it all and become an organic farmer but in the end perhaps there are some that are meant to be 9 to 5ers and some that are meant to be dreamers. Clapton also personifies the man who has found his genre, the blues has allowed him to keep his career thriving and moving upward as the blues are so conducive to a beautiful aging voice.   It is far more forgiving than say Bon Jovi singing Living on a P...

Passion Watching the Grammys last night I was struck by how much one has to give up to do something they love, nobody embodies that more than the musician who spends years on the road away from their families and their things and the people they love to provide us with music that soothes our soul and becomes the soundtrack we live our lives to.   Even the overnight success doesn’t get there by picking up an instrument and playing, there are years of practice and growth and learning.   There are years of leaving their parents, their spouses and their children.   Some are lucky and they get to do it in luxury but for the most part it is a path filled with traveling across the country and the world dealing with drunken people at 2 in the morning.   It is the emptiness of coming home to an empty hotel room or giving into the all too available vices which probably add to the loneliness and heartache.   And yet they do it, day after day, year after year...

A new tote for Valley Artisans Market It’s been quite a week, opening myself up to life again that is.   I went to the love Art in the Public Eye event in Glens Falls on Thursday.   There was a band and good food provided by Samantha’s Café and beautiful, beautiful art.   I met a lovely mosaic artist who inspired me to get back to work, a lovely woman who is making a beginning making scarves and baby blankets which reminds me of my roots, and a lovely photographer who made me look at the ordinary in an extraordinary way.   A new beginning inspired by art, a call to remember the things I know I love and maybe open up to a few new ways to express myself. Friday I went down to Albany to work the telephones at WAMC fund drive.   Public radio is really the only place where some can find those subjects and music that can’t be found anywhere else.   It was so much fun, the food was great and it felt wonderful to be doing something helpful for the ar...

I picked this piece to illustrate my point as it is filled with french knots, lovely time consuming, meditative french knots, which can only be done the old fashioned way, one french knot at a time. We are in an exciting time of technological breakthroughs and we are able to listen to music on our phones, see art on our computers, read books on our Kindles and reach out and touch people through YouTube.   But yet I can’t help thinking that we have lost something very important with all these technological breakthroughs.   We’ve lost the simplicity of watching Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan from the waist up, we’ve lost the feeling of going to a museum and seeing a real Picasso, and we’ve lost the ability to value the real thing. Our schools are getting rid of art programs left and right, books and book stores have moved on to the more digital age and   I would imagine the school trips to the Metropolitan Opera are now a thing of the past too.   It seems perf...

This funky soul is Lucinda.  She is currently living at Valley Artisans Market looking for the right man or woman to take her home. She is hand embroidered. I am the authentically funky soul today.  No earthly delights seem to be working on this funk that goes way down to the soul day.   Perhaps it's the clouds, perhaps it's the temperature, perhaps it's just a day to remember so I can rejoice on a happy soul day. Funky is a cool word.  You think of Funky Chicken and you smile.You hear a funky tune and it makes you move and if your soul feels in a funk you try to protect yourself a bit.  I fit into that last category so I'm listening to Mozart cos I'm a little too sensitive for words at the moment. I'm working up at VAM( my favorite place on earth), hand embroidering,(my favorite thing to do) and listening to all kinds of music which usually rocks my world and soothes my savage beastly soul.  But today nothing is really doing it, not even Aretha Fra...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sswg6xH56Lk I don’t really have an answer to that question but it is a lovely song by Johnny Mathis.  Since anything I can write today about myself will be pretty pitiful I’m going to write about music.  I love music.  I love to dance, I love to sing. Music has the ability to pick you up and drop you off in any destination you wish to visit.  It transcends life.  Whether it is the voice of an angel like Andrea Bocelli or the bluesy grrrr of the Black Keys, the music picks you up and carries to a place you might like to visit. I love to listen to Chopin and imagine myself a child sitting next to him on the piano bench totally enamored of the beauty of his piano. It really is amazing to listen to the fingers going through all those keys so quickly and so beautifully.  I imagine myself sitting in a room with Mozart just closing my eyes and letting the beauty of his music take me away, there is such a lightness and ...

It takes the same amount of time to live an inspired life that it does to live an uninspired life.  The difference is the focus you give to it.  If you dwell on the have nots you will have not.  If you dwell on the beauty of a birds song, the loveliness of a Mozart composition, the words of a philosopher or the work of your fellow artists you will be inspired. We are always searching and reaching for the brass ring right out of reach instead of getting lost in the moment of inspiration.  I must admit I never thought I was much of a classical music fan but my inability to concentrate with the words of just about every band I used to listen to has left me with empty headphones.  I filled them up with silence(just inspiring) and classical music.  My favorite at the moment is Mozart.  His music is just beautiful and transports me back to a simpler time.  A time when  an artist could just close their eyes, use their imagination and create....

Every day we use our hands to show where our heart belongs.   When we are children, our parents hold our hands while we cross the streets. Our hands are held with another in young love.     We offer our hands in marriage.   We shake the hands of the people we meet. We hold the hand of the loved ones who are dying. We use our hands to eat, to greet, to love.   The touch of a human hand is the most important gift we can give to each other.   It can console, it can love, it can caress.   We can wave hello or wave goodbye.   We eat with our hands.   We hold a book in our hands.   We embroider with our hands. We never give a lot of attention to all the things our hands do.   We do most of these things without even realizing the important of hands, touch, and movement. I am a hand embroidery artist.   I give a lot of attention to my hands and the hands of other people.   You can tell a lot about the hands of anot...