Inspiration

Making Quilt Blocks gives me daily play with color, form, texture

  You are not struggling to embody a delusional state of perfection as it is imagined by other people. Rather, you are becoming an ever-more soulful version of your idiosyncratic self, evolving slowly but surely. You are not dazedly trudging along a narrow track laid down by thousands of sheep. Instead, you are lively and creative as you bushwhack a path for yourself through the wilderness. To celebrate this ongoing success, Pisces, I suggest you get yourself a new power object that symbolizes your inventive devotion. 
 

This was my last-week’s horoscope, and I take them seriously--only when they resonate with what I’m already thinking. I continue to stubbornly follow my own instincts about what projects to complete, what people and organizations to put my energy to. I’m tasting and testing all sorts of directions this year.

Collage in my Graphic Grannies book

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After seeing a wonderful wall quilt a friend had made, using Southwestern Native motifs and reading a book about the work of SW native artists, AND being offered two library opportunities to exhibit, I am thinking about doing a series of paper and fabric collages with images from my very own history. A journal with writing and drawings that I kept while traveling apart from my over-bearing husband in 1980 and all my writing from 1969-today…the images and words that have made me who I am. I have one or two boxes of memorabilia that I have been hauling around through various moves, and haven’t opened for the almost 9 years I’ve been here on the west edge of the country. I am tempted to open them and look, drift through layers of memory…but I’m holding out for winter, knowing how badly I will need projects during the dark days.

My Latest portrait: Jon and Clarence,more abstract

 
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As I was growing up, we moved every year for my father’s medical training in the army. My brothers and I found cancelled checks from his college years when we moved Mom into her current apartment. I feel the need to be somewhat more discriminating in my home, but there is the urge to keep it all…maybe hoping that by saving our traces, I save the whole family and all our history…until humans become extinct and our dust drifts across the universe.

I found a sort of poem I wrote when I drove from VT to Iowa and back in 1980…or took the train…one of my solo trips. Dad reached up to clean off my car window…we didn’t know he would be dead in seven years. My power object is a bit of shell or bone from the beach. I put it out in my yard, but re-discovered it, along with a fragment of pottery, a piece of one of my Great Grandmother's plates, rusty metal from Ediz Hook. 

Visions, a paper collage in the works

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I always wanted to live near salt water, and now I do, with many lowly-populated beaches to roam. On Friday at Ediz, I met a couple from LaConner, avoiding the tulip-gazing swarms…Interstate 5 at a standstill. She said I could see good pictures online and not have to experience it first hand.

I know that I’m more likely to write poetry by hand than computer. I realized long ago that my life would furnish plenty of raw material for a lifetime of Art Work…

Today began the next piece in my series of paper and fiber memoir…Talisman and Power Object: How I Got to Where I Am.

Today's Quilt block...Using the Good Stuff!