Tag: Maps

Getting there

~ Liz A ~ 12 Comments

The challenge prompts came easily, much like the journey from working life in Virginia to retired life in Texas …

Today I played with map grids and my our newest toy …

Coloring in places I traveled to or through during my 35 years in Virginia. It was stunning to realize how much I didn’t see or do …

But that chapter of our lives is done and in the books …

Then it was on to Acey’s Day 4 Collage Challenge to “plant a tree.”

I started with a little 4×6 inch landscape created last June during a workshop with Nan Henke, my first serious encounter with watercolor …

and I pulled out yet another book cover (I have three cartons-full from my the years working at the Texas State university library, so they are my go-to resources for now) …

I tore away “faith” and “religion” (yes, that had a real life resonance), leaving “instinct evolved endures.”

Having very much liked the look and feel of Grace’s collage bits, I tore the watercolor into tiny leaf-like crumbs …

then started puzzling through the pieces and glue-sticking them down, until they were mostly gone (now wishing I had taken pictures as I went along, but I was too in the groove to think of that) …

It feels done, although I confess to wondering if I should fill in the “instinct” letters or just leave well-enough alone …

Any thoughts on that?

US II

~ Liz A ~ 14 Comments

I’m calling it done, with thanks to Don for touching up the frame …

the cloth now named US II, a tribute to our 40 years together.
It was originally imagined in a much simpler form, but after the spare outlines were stitched, it began to tell its own story of the places we have called home.

First in Virginia, where we raised our kids … rivers running through it …

but a faded outline compared to the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras …

long my heart’s home … where I’ve walked many miles by the sea, watched storms roll in, and caught the last rays of sunlight to the west where sea oats bend in the unceasing wind …

And “can’t you just feel the moonshine?”

How perfect then, that we found kindred grasses growing a thousand feet above sea level in the Texas Hill Country …

prairie grasses that sink deep roots into limestone bedrock formed millions of years ago at the bottom of another, more ancient sea.
We share our Edwards Plateau home with abundant wildflowers … bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and countless little yellow ones… all interlaced with timeless rivers …

And I dare to say the stars at night are big and bright, here inspired by Hazel and stitched on cloth from a long-worn nightshirt …

Lastly the sun … on a bit of Jude Hill indigo (as are the other two) … a smoldering memory of the 2017 eclipse as seen in St Louis …

because our hearts live there, too.

The cloth with no name

~ Liz A ~ 16 Comments

This is where I am today with the (still unnamed) cloth I began last month as a 40th anniversary commemorative …

It’s been a journey from my original plan, which was to make a new-fangled sampler …

I even got so far as to stitch the lettering on the bottom half, seen here photographed with one of my new clip-on iPhone camera lenses …

But even though I was happy with the clouds, created by loosely backstitching marks on the hand-dyed cloth …

the lettering just didn’t feel right, so I tore it out. 
Then, while looking for something else entirely, I came across a long-lost envelope of Jude Hill’s indigo-dyed “planets,” which sent me running off in an entirely new direction …

I’m still not 100% sure about the frame, but considering how the size seems near-perfect, I’m thinking it’s meant to be.
Addendum: As I waited for this post to load, it occurred to me that the cloth has become an un-sampler … US