A dream come true

~ Liz A ~ 19 Comments
May 7, 2021 – A torn and tattered heart reimagined

I scrolled and scrolled to get to this post in Mo’s blog and her reply to a comment …

The rest is Kindred Spirit history, beautifully documented on Mo’s blog through the tag I dream of a world where love is the answer and in an online catalog of her resulting Artsite Gallery exhibit.

It was the online catalog that led Andra Stanton to send me an email inviting me to contribute to a book she was writing for Schiffer. I confess to being skeptical at first, but she included the title of her book, Dimensional Cloth, which convinced me to explore further.

Many emails and two years later, Andra’s latest book, How Art Heals, has now been published …

and the oddment from Mo’s exhibit, first written about in my original blog …

appears on page 156 (where credit is incorrectly given to me for the first photograph, but was actually taken from Mo’s online catalog) …

All of which I find most amazing. So thank you Mo for making this possible … on so many levels. And to Old Man Crow for the words and music that carried us through. May we all continue to dream.

At long last

~ Liz A ~ 14 Comments
June 6, 2021 – Stand in

Over the years both Meg and Meliss have tried to convince me to get a stand mixer … as in “I’d like to get you one for (fill in the blank) Christmas/Mother’s Day/your birthday.”

Always I’ve said “thank you, but no thank you … I don’t have enough counter space and really, my hand mixer is all I need” …

After all, my mom did just fine all those years without a stand mixer. Well, except when she first married and had a Mixmaster like this one …

Which, come to think of it, was kinda fun to use.

And I have to confess it has been getting harder to make batches of cookie dough these days … well, except when I’m at somebody else’s house and can use their stand mixer …

So when Meliss asked again last month, she “won” the maybe-I-can-convince-Mom-this-time lottery. Which is to say, I finally said “I’d love it.” And I might also have suggested it be a combined Mother’s Day/birthday gift … because, you know, me being me.

Thus it was, in a fine bit of perfect timing, a brand-spanking-new Kitchenaid 3.5 quart mixer arrived midway between Mother’s Day and my upcoming 65th. Turns out I actually do have room for it on the counter and am currently auditioning potential locations …

just in time for Cowboy Camp!

But that’s another story …

Destin(ation): a story of sand and sea and sky

~ Liz A ~ 8 Comments
June 1-5, 2021 – Walkers on the beach

For as long as our girls can remember, our family has gathered together toward the end of June. Most of those years, we went to Avon, NC, but our 30+ year string was broken in 2020. We still gathered together, but in Austin rather than the beach and will do so again this year.

But the beach … we all miss the beach … the nexus of sand and sea and sky that is the very definition of heaven.

And so Meliss and Jake packed the kids into the car and headed for Destin, Florida, their second trip in as many years …

Pictures were sent and FaceTime calls were made …

which was the next best thing to being there ourselves.

As luck would have it, Deb Lacativa sent a gift of cloth and thread this past week … dyed by her hand and just what I needed to patch together the arc of time that our loved ones spent on the Gulf Coast …

From sundown …

to afternoon …

to midday …

to morning …

ending at dawn on Saturday, as they headed home to St Louis …

And I tried not to overthink the patches, just went with the impressions of color and light that the pictures evoked, finding cloth and thread to match the feeling, the imagining, of how it must have been.

Letting it all come together organically …

Then using a new-to-me Instagram link to trace the paths of the sun and the moon.

Deciding in the end to let the individual patches be seamlessly joined …

as the very best times are wont to be.