A beaded trophy

In my family, we're serious about our cards! As far back as I can remember, playing cards was a part of family gatherings on both my mother's and father's side. The games were never for money, but were still quite competitive. A year or so ago, my father, aunt, brother and I formed a sort of card club, in which we get together on a regular basis to play 500. My brother Rick is our official score keeper, and he has kept a running record of all the scores from every game we've played.

So a few months back, when I was thinking what I could make as a sample project in which to learn bead embroidery stitches, I decided the perfect project would be a first-place trophy for our 500 card club. It would be something we could award to the winner each time we played, and transferred like the pro wrestling championship "big gold belt" each time we met to compete. Since the Joker is so important in the game of 500, I came up with this:


It was officially awarded the first time to Dad, when he won our November 10, 2009 game. And although everyone loved the trophy, simply winning it wasn't enough for Dad, he wanted his name, score and the date engraved on it, too! So, I had to come up with something for that...

Rick helped me out, by printing up two cards to go along with the trophy: the first is a list of the top 10 scores ever, of all our games, and the second card is a running list of the winner, date and score for all the games we've played since we've had the trophy. Luckily, I won the next time we got together, and so had the chance to make a beaded frame for the "Top 10 scores" card and to permanently attach it to the Joker trophy. It hangs from a beaded strap, and can be flipped to the front of the trophy when one wants to display the scores, or flipped to the back of the trophy to display the Joker.

A beaded cuff

I'm playing around with different bead embroidery and bead weaving techniques, and this beaded cuff is the result. It appeals to me on several levels, the foremost being that I made it using only found or recycled items (with the exception of the beading thread). I have a prejudice in my respect of art that has been made using materials the artist has at hand...it seems more honest and real to me, somehow. I'm simply more impressed by art from common materials, like a basket woven out of native grasses or an image painted inside a cave somewhere in France...I may be wrong, but I think it's a lot easier to make something beautiful when one goes out and purchases the best materials to work with, and I feel that such art is done less for art's sake and more for mercenary reasons...not that that's a "bad" thing. I just see it as somehow less spontaneous and pure...

Not that I feel there is any inherent purity in the beer bottle caps I used in this piece, however! I used them because I wanted to learn how to attach cabochons with beaded bezels, but was lacking in cabochons and so substituted the caps. I did end up having to devise my own method of attachment, as the usual beaded bezel method did not work well with the caps. Overall, I'm pleased with the final result...visually, I think the beading pattern is reminiscent of shock waves and so compliments the "shock top" of the caps, and developmentally, I learned much in the process.

Some beading projects

My Ode to O'Keefe

This project has had me at odds with myself, it feels like yin and yang the way it's been pulling me in opposite directions. I felt as if I had managed to sabotage my original concept the moment I began working on it, but now I wonder if I accomplished my intent supremely in the beginning, and am now only working my way away from it...

The idea was to re-create the image in pieces, of impressions of color, shape, light and shadow and not in defined parts of leaf and petal. I had wanted to do it in stitchery with perhaps some beading, but couldn't surrender myself to trust in stitchery alone and so began by painting the panels to help my stitchery along. I used only two colors, red and green, along with white for highlighting, and worked section by section, not the image as a whole. It was at this point that I felt that I had sabotaged my intent, because I had painted a picture of a poppy, when I had only meant to provide some background for my stitches. So, at first I was dismayed, until it occurred to me that I accomplished with the painting what I had intended to accomplish with the stitching. Written out like this it seems absurd, but I really did surprise myself!

I have to declare this project a success, if only for all the thoughts and ideas it's provoked in me about how I wish I would have done it! If I had world enough and time, I would tackle this idea in several different ways...as it is, I am giving myself permission to deviate from my original intent with this project, and see where it leads me. I can feel that disciplining myself to keep to my original idea at this point is only paralyzing me, and will end up forcing me to abandon it altogether. And as far as the original concept goes, it has already demonstrated the foregone conclusion...that the pieces of life our brains assemble, an incomplete knowledge of people, places and things, enriched with bits supplied by imagination, although in truth is an imperfect assemblage, for all practical purposes it can still be a close enough approximation to what is "real"... I amuse myself to recognize that a truth so fundamental to living a human existence (because as humans, possessing a perfect and complete knowledge of anything, even ourselves, is impossible) should be so surprising to me when applied to art...

Seeing takes time...

Continuing along with the idea of reality being an unconscious assemblage of things known and things imagined, I wanted to intentionally try to deconstruct an image into pieces, reinterpret the smaller bits, and see how my mind reacts to the reconstructed image...will I still see it as before, or will it be transformed into something new?

I've chosen an image of a poppy that I took in my garden earlier this year. I feel a special affinity for poppies, an affinity grown from roots deep in my childhood, planted when Dorothy, after a long and difficult journey, saw the Emerald City "closer and prettier than ever", but had to first pass through the deceptively beautiful and deadly field of poppies before finally reaching it.

That Georgia O'Keefe choose the poppy as one of her floral subjects drew me to her, and my photo of my poppy is reminiscent of O'Keefe's paintings. O'Keefe felt that art should not capture photographic realism, but should express the artist's personal ideas and feelings. She is quoted, "Nobody sees a flower, really - it is so small - we haven't time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time".

So, I have endeavored to take my poppy and look at it closely, but by division, not dissection. I had hoped to disassociate my mind from the vision of leaf and petal, and reduce the image to shapes of light and dark colors fitted together. I am hoping to capture these shapes in a sort of non-literal translation, to see what my mind will make of the reassembled, reinterpreted pieces.

I began the work by dividing the picture into nine equal pieces. I am new to the techniques of embroidery and beading, and have felt this lack of stitching expertise in previous projects, and so I have thought this project, as conceived, would be well-suited executed as a sampler, in which I could learn new embroidery stitches. Having the goal of practicing stitches would help disconnect my mind from trying to literally represent petals and leaf.

At present, I have cut nine squares of cotton material, one for each of the nine sections of the photo of my poppy. In the photo below, I show a sample piece of fabric, which I have painted prior to stitching.

Novena, A Self-Portrait and Tree of Life

Completed Novena and Tree of Life. They're really much prettier and more striking than they appear in the photo, I think it's the reflection of light off the white silk background that makes them so hard to photograph. Although there are a couple of technical issues that I'm chalking up to "live and learn", I'm satisfied with the finished result. Here is a photo of them installed:



I rather like how the light from the window illuminates them. The Snow Angel flies in the heavens, above the trees, and she reminds me of the peaceful quiet that only a cold, heavy snow in the dead of winter brings, a quite period of hibernation and rest that precedes the new life of spring.

Still Untitled Novena companion

I've read recently that the human mind forms memories by collecting bits and pieces of information, that it assembles like a jigsaw puzzle to make a complete memory. The mind doesn't have all the pieces of the puzzle, however, so it invents reasonable things to fill in the empty spaces and make a complete picture, much like the way an eye functions to fill in the blind spot. I wanted to symbolize this in my 'Tree of Life' (hmm...I may have just named the piece?), thinking about my family and friends and the people in my life. It occurs to me that we 'know' people in the same way, in bits and pieces, and we imagine the rest to create the whole of the person as we believe them to be.

In 'Tree of Life', I've collected pieces around the base of tree. They are hidden under the snow, waiting to be uncovered and discovered, to be assembled to create an impression of the people we 'know' in life, assembled into an impression of how they 'know' us.

Novena: A Self-portrait

In January of this year, I went outside after a heavy snow to take pictures, my adult version of "playing in the snow". Remembering what it was like to play in the snow as a child, I amused myself by falling backward off our deck into the snow to make a snow angel, something I hadn't done since I was a kid. Doing it made me giggle like a little girl, and I loved the angel...I took her picture and showed it to everyone, calling it a self-portrait.

At the same time, I was musing over an aspect of my personality that I'm not particularly proud of, and had the thought that I'd invite God into my meditations about this troublesome trait, via a novena. In the Catholic religion, in which I was raised but haven't actively practiced since I was a child, a novena is a series of nine straight days of prayers for a special purpose. I thought that during these same nine days, I would work on a fiber art rendering of my snow angel. She was stitched on white silk, using silk and cashmere threads and embellished with beads. I like that the angel itself is a 'negative space', and the beaded snowflakes surrounding her could also be stars in the heavens, which is also a suitable setting for my angel.

During those nine days working on Novena: A Self-portrait, I conceived of a companion piece, that I began shortly after completing Novena but had set aside until just recently. Using a similar background and materials, I'm stitching a tree in winter. I've always been fascinated with the beauty of the architecture of trees, and how apparent the branching structure is in winter. I love when snow accumulates on the tops of branches after a fresh snow. In conception as a companion piece to Novena, where Novena is a representation of myself, the tree is a representation of family and friends, and of all the people one comes into contact with during a lifetime, and how we are all interconnected.