– Closing the book on Close Your Eyes 2

March 14, 2015 ~ Liz A ~ 14 Comments

The second edition of Close Your Eyes is complete …

Since I created links to the previous posts on Close Your Eyes and Close Your Eyes Too, I decided to just show the final two page spreads in this post, A-sides and B-sides …

I did do some design mending (Jude Hill’s very apt term) on the front page. First I removed the metal snaps (which were too large and too strong), then I removed the double-strand, multi-colored split backstitch lettering and replaced it with a simple single-strand backstitch which is more my style and balanced better on the B-side …

Of course, the part I agonized over the most ended up being the part I liked best: the canvas photograph of Meg and Griffin hiding behind a window of rust-dyed muslin, bordered with a frame of asemic orange stitch …

which is revealed on the B-side as the opening lyrics of Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend (the first cut on James Taylor’s album Mud Slide Slim). It was only as I wrote out the words that the phrase “close your eyes” jumped out at me … a serendipitous echo …

So, Close Your Eyes 2 is now signed, sealed …

and delivered at last …

– Getting closer: Close Your Eyes 2 nears completion

March 9, 2015February 10, 2019 ~ Liz A ~ 4 Comments

Two more page spreads have been completed on Close Your a Eyes 2, A-sides and B-sides …

I’m particularly happy with the moon rising through the trees, which was started by loosely sketching some live oak branches off the Internet (with thanks to Mo for her recent advice), then roughly cutting the shape out with kitchen shears (which explains the fine job I did ) …

The branches were then traced onto the B-side and filled in with some of the lyrics from James Taylor’s Carolina in My Mind …

back stitched with a single strand of floss …

then filled in on the A-side with needle weaving, seen here with the top two branches complete and the bottom two branches still showing traces of the lyrics from the B-side …

Don has been busy, too. Initially he was working on a new tile …

and came up with a neat twist on the sun center …

But somewhere along the way, the sun migrated onto another piece of wood …

So he now has two pieces in process, I guess.

Then there’s this coffee table Georgia O’Keeffe In the West (Knopf 1989) that I found for a song at a used book store, now airing out page-by-page under our laundry room fan …

Which is to say, we’ve been keeping busy.

Last, but not least, here’s another Mondegreen moment, Griffin-style this time …

Meg sent us a text this morning (gently edited to protect the innocent):

I just asked Griffin if he did something and he said “No.”
So I asked if he was lying. He roared and said “I’m a lion.”

– Working both sides: Sunset to sunrise

March 3, 2015 ~ Liz A ~ 6 Comments

I alluded to a middle-of-the-night brainstorm at the end of this post that ended up on the sunset page of Close Your Eyes 2 …

The back story (pun intended) relates to the James Taylor album Mud Slide Slim, on which You Can Close Your Eyes originally appeared. Released in 1970, that album became the soundtrack of my high school years.

So it wasn’t surprising as I stitched Close Your Eyes that music and lyrics from other songs came drifting back (especially Soldiers, which was mentioned in this post-Christmas reverie). Soldiers came back to me once again the other night, but this time it was the opening lyrics that stuck in my head. They seemed like a perfect story-starter …

It was just after sunrise and down by the sea
Down in the sand flats where nothing will grow
Come drumming and footsteps like out of a dream
Where the golden green waters come in … (what comes next?)

Then it hit me. One of the hardest things for me to do is stitch irregularly; I get into a rhythm and the stitches just fall into regular patterns. Not so my handwriting, which is about as irregular as my stitches are even. So what if I took advantage of my wonky handwriting for once?

That’s how I came to write the sunrise lyrics from Soldiers onto the back of the sunset page. Thoroughly enjoying the freedom of writing less-than-perfectly, I then backstitched to my heart’s content …

Which resulted in perfectly irregular layers of sunset-lit clouds underlain by a grassy meadow composed of the closing lyrics …

I remember quite clearly when I got out of bed
I said “Oh good morning, what a beautiful day.”

I asked Don what he thought about the basting stitches … leave them in or take them out? His first thought was that the vertical lines above the sun looked like buildings, so … Perfect! The whole idea of the B-sides is to prompt new stories. Who knows where this one might go?

The second of six two-page spreads is now complete, A-sides …

and B-sides …

I’m pleased enough with the end result that I’ll be going back to the James Taylor catalog for the B-side of the rising moon page.

Any guesses? (Hint: this time I’m not using Mud Slide Slim)