Tangled Stitch

I have added more one of a kind ornaments to my Etsy shop.  They have both been quite popular at craft fairs and at Valley Artisans Market where I sell them year round.  You really have to see them all together to recognize how different they are.  I look at them as little separate works of art.  Thanks for looking.  Deb 

I guess I don't have to tell you that my art and my writing has been sort of a slog lately.  For the last two years to be exact, I've been kind of lost in a world of loneliness and then overcompensating not to be alone.  Grateful to have met many good friends on the path of not wanting to be alone.  But it has interfered with my work, an artist really needs to be alone and ok with the isolation and loneliness that being an artist sometimes can bring.  I'm really trying to get used to that feeling.  Thanks in advance for reading this post hopefully it will be the first of many in my new life. Yesterday I went to the opening for the Fences Select Show in the Art Center of the Capital Region where I have recently rented an art studio and where Primal Scream was selected as one of 50 out of 300 entries.  It was very exciting and very humbling.  When it comes to meeting new people and carousing I am the life of the party.  When it comes to to...

There is a parable in the New Testament about talent.   God gives us talents and he expects us to use them.   He doesn’t want us to die with our light still undiscovered within us.   He wants us to take our skills, our strengths, our passions and build a life with them. A life in which each person cooperates in the bigger picture of life and stands strong and firm with others   to bring our world to a more perfect union. We seem to have forgotten this parable somewhere along the way and appearances of wealth and class and stature seem to have taken over the day.   Our ancestors survived for centuries without computers and IPhone yet it seems like these are necessities this day to do just about everything.   Including using or selling your talents and that is probably God’s plan for the IPhone and computer too. I am a hand embroidery artist, a writer, a talker and a listener (except it seems when it is advice being offered to me).   Hand e...

 March 17th came into my mind today and I wondered why so I thought I would see what came up on that day and why it popped into my head.  I'm sorry to say I think it popped into my head because of the dreams and life I expressed an interest in on my blog on that day.  My art and my idea for a business. I kind of let it slide .It wasn't really that I didn't intend to follow through, but my mind wasn't quite ready for such a big dream at that time.  I had just crashed and burned in a plane that  I didn't know how to fly.  I know that I am ready for that dream now.  But I've added a few passengers. I'm going to take christening outfits with me.  I love to create them and they are inspired by the divine.  I don't use patterns, I just kind of make them up as I go along.  I made quite a few and I have pictures so I'll share one soon.  I  don't have a picture of the one I'm currently making as to be quite honest they don't look like...

The name of this piece is Dancing and it is in the private collection of my friend Cheryl.  Dance With Me is a song by Chaka Khan with a great video on Youtube for you listening and seeing pleasure. Music has the ability to transcend time and distance.  Every day millions of us are listening to the same song at the same moment somewhere in our great universe.  I just listened to the fabulously fabulous Aretha Franklin on my Zune Player.   Thirty songs of greatness all wrapped up in one collection of some of her greatest hits.  What an inspirational and empowering couple of hours that was. Who cannot be inspired by Respect which should be the freakin anthem for every single(and married) woman out there in the universe.   I was inspired to hand embroider a piece this morning which is already coming along and I can't wait to see how it turns out. Somehow I think looking backwards at music is a great place to start to find inspiration.  A lot of...

A Dozen Roses is available on Etsy. Have Love Will Travel is my favorite song by The Black Keys. Their music was the running soundtrack for my happy little life when my mornings were filled with embroidery and music.  Somewhere along the line I lost the music and stopped embroidering all the time.  I still embroider but not as much as I used to and frankly I haven't been living the happy little life either.  But today that all changes. All I know is that before I started to think about the Black Keys in the human sense, my soul was pretty freakin happy.  Yes happy.  I laughed, came out of my little turtle shell and frankly had a ball. Lost weight, started moving my life forward, even had the urge to Twitter remarkably funny non rock stars.   Every single day I woke up with a different Black Keys song in my head. Somewhere along the way I started to travel a different road, unhappiness with my current life and the burning urge to move on created a tr...

Hand of Tree , a photo by DebraAnn813 on Flickr. This piece is called Tree Hand. It's currently available at Valley Artisans Market in beautiful Cambridge, NY. Thursday I worked up in the market and had just a marvelous time. I love to work there and Thursday was a total embroidery day. I worked on my latest project and brought my Christmas gift embroidery books with me and of course met the coolest people. I always meet the coolest people when I'm there, maybe because all that beautiful art by so many different artists just brings out the artist in all of us. Sometimes I just have to pinch myself when I think of how blessed I am to have my work in so many wonderful places and all the wonderful people I've met on my artistic journey. There are just too many of them to list each one but I think each of the artists I've met and the shop and gallery owners I work with all have that one special thing. The love of art. The love of music and literature and interest in...

Yes it's my friend the cardinal once again. I figured with Christmas next week, the cardinal's days are numbered so I thought I'd give him one more look as my Christmas icon. This has been such an incredible year! It started out great with being accepted to Valley Artisan's Market and ended with an incredible holiday shopping event at Samantha's Cafe where they are carrying my ornaments and scarves and soon my little framed pieces(not to mention the fantastic food, try the Thai chicken salad). So exciting. The Katbird Shop is celebrating it's triumphant 6th anniversary and the Albany Shaker Museum has had a great year too. I hope all this good news is a harbinger of good things to come for the arts and the artists. My family is well too. My hubby is doing great and happy in his job. My son had a great year in college and completed his first job. My dog is reasonably healthy and life is good here too. I had lots of fun driving all over the upstate region ...

I'm amazed today at just how little it takes to make me happy. Yesterday and today I have been getting ready for the big holiday show at Albany Shaker and so I decided to make a few holly and berry pillows. Well I was embroidering and listening to Andrea Bocelli and I felt wonderfully peaceful and wonderfully happy. I had forgotten just how little it takes to make me peacefully, joyfully happy. Somewhere in the last year I lost the joy of embroidering and it makes me sooooooo happy to have found the joy again. That is my quest now to work with joy and happiness and peace. I also finished my circle hand which is going to visit the Katbird Shop shortly afterward(the most wonderful shop in Schenectady with unique gifts in every(and I do mean every) price range). I still have to frame it and then I will share it. No mats to my amazement so it will have to wait till a trip to Michaels so perhaps later in the week. I'll let you know when it is in it's new home and share a...

Today was a joyful day. I started my next embroidery project on blue watercolored fabric(which I will share a photo of tomorrow), went car window shopping with the husband, started reading Eat, Pray, Love(thanks to Painter of Blue for if I had not seen the lecture of the author on her blog I would have never took the book out of the library), and while I was trying to organize my very messy studio I found a very unorganized clump of embroidery thread in the most beautiful spring colors. All the while I was listening to the beautiful new age relaxation cd Spring and Joy just overtook me. Joy is embroidered in green outline stitching, with pink, blue, lavender and orange lazy daisies and french knots. All of my favorite stitches. The back of the Joy pillow is this lovely light green fabric. It was a spur of the moment collection of Joy. I enjoyed making it a lot and I sat down with no intention of doing it. Kismet. I started the blue watercolored piece too but am only doing the ou...