London and the Brick

Once more the ghastly spectre of a professional exhibiting category versus a strictly amateur one has raised its hollowed-eyed head. I am a long-time opponent of separating the exhibiting categories into these two factions.

The Sandia Mountains and Turquoise Trail committees for Albuquerque Fiber Art Fiesta have decided to do just that--to make another subdivision in all the categories for awards. So there are ten more categories, all of which need a professional to enter them.

The AFAF is now open to all fiber artists in the USA--not just members of the supporting guilds. Consequently the Fiesta will be advertising nationally to bring more artists to exhibit. This is really a wonderful idea. The AFAF is a tremendous venue for us to see such a huge range of fiber art and meet fiber artists. The vendors are spectacular with their huge variety of wares that we rarely see in one place all together.

Admittedly I am a little late to put to put my 2¢ in, but I have written about this before. And it may seem self-serving that I, as maybe the only professional who enters the embroidery categories at this point, make this protest. On the other hand, if I am the only person in the categories, maybe I will win more ribbons. Maybe. But this is not my point.

My point is that a person can best improve her skills and creativity by exhibiting against the best there is. If professionals are the best (and separating them out from the amateurs seems to confirm this belief), then the amateurs have no real goals to achieve except to excel as second-best.

A long time ago in a city far away, right after I joined the EGA, I was in an exhibit put on by my chapter, the now disbanded Creative Needlework Chapter in Collingswood, NJ. We were a young, very active chapter who could get nearly 100% participation in a show. The exhibit was held in a large department store that gave us space in some upstairs rooms with glass cases on the walls. We had an embroidery teacher come down from Princeton, I believe, to judge the show. There was no professional category, just original and non-original in the various types of needlework. I was the newest member and really didn’t expect to win anything, but I did original work at that time, almost exclusively. I had entered a needlepoint-covered brick doorstop. It was an ocean scene with crashing surf and beach with sea creatures crawling on it. Someone in my family still has that brick. I was delighted with it, but I knew that I still hadn’t mastered the medium.

A woman by the name of Sherry London was also in the chapter and she was a professional. She had published a book and she had designed several kits that sold at least locally. Her needlepoint was of a lion with a mane of bullion knots. It was cute thing. She won. I was not disappointed (there were no second and third prizes--only best in category), but I had several women come up an actually apologize to me about my “loss.” They felt that I should have won just so that I would be encouraged to keep working originally. My work was good, but in a show where technique counted for three points and originality counted only for two, Sherry was bound to win. I did not begrudge her the win. But she never beat me again. Second best should not win: only the best should. It was a valuable lesson to me.

I know as a professional that I cannot devote the time to stitching that an amateur can. In the past year I have been writing classes and my embroidery output has dropped enormously. Everyone needs to practice to keep up skills for exhibiting. In the last Fiesta I did not win three blue ribbons for my three entries. An amateur has every opportunity to study as much as a professional, to work as hard as a professional, and to practice hard. What is magic about that? What is the difference? I personally know of several people right here in Albuquerque who are better at some needlework skills than I am. The way to win blue ribbons is not to exclude people who may be better than I am from the categories, but to include them, so I can hone my skills for next time and bring home the blue!

Day One--the Blackwork Extravaganza

Intense Pattern, Friday the 12th. Mary and I arrived at Jane's house at 8:15 for the 9:00 class. I had to set up everything, so it took most of the forty-five minutes. I brought enough baggage that it looked as if I were moving in for a couple of months. Within minutes of our arrival other members of the class starting arriving too. Everyone was very punctual which is a Good Thing.

We started right at nine o'clock and after a few minutes of my explaining about the obligations of a piloter in a pilot class, we got started. I was one set of photos short, but luckily I had tucked another set in with my teaching materials so everyone had a full set. After going through the kit and explaining what we were doing--giving them a choice of either a sampler or a notebook--we dove into the patterning. First were the basic manipulations: translation, rotation, reflection, and glide reflection. Some people got off to a rocky start. Three or four of the eleven students were convinced that they were in way over their heads and that they could never do this. As I could see frustrations levels rising, I did some one-on-one with the troubled ones. Slowly they caught the gist of graphing the patterns. We were into the glide reflection when we all caught on. Glide reflection is the hardest of all the concepts in the whole class. It took me several days, when I was teaching myself, to become comfortable with it. I hope I helped these women over that hump. There was a little stitching in the morning--we needed the rest from the brain work!

Then all of a sudden it was time for lunch. We sailed through a morning break. By 11:30 we were tired. I ate my Braunsweiger and Swiss on rye sandwich, munched on my carrots, and desserted on two mini-muffins that Jane had brought in for the occasion. After a short rest, we were at it again.

In the afternoon we started on the basic networks: block, brick, half-drop, and diamond. These are easier in some ways than the others, but none are completely trivial. After I explained these, we stitched the rest of the class time until 3:30. At that time we had show-and-tell for people who brought in some of their past blackwork. It was an exhausting, but pleasurable day.

I need to explain the graphing a little more for the July class. I had made the assumption that everyone knew how to graph and I was wrong. About one-third of the class had no idea what I was talking about. The pace was about right. We did the concepts slowly, but thoroughly. Things will go a bit faster tomorrow.

One student who was busy scribbling and scribbling said that she was finished with the graph of the concept, but she had so many ideas that she was hurrying to get them all down. Another student said she could imagine the patterns she could make from the basic tools she learned. She also could see blackwork with her own patterns. Everyone completed all the graphing--and I hope they understood it. We went over several things that were harder and I had more individual time again in the afternoon. I believe that everyone is up to speed. I am amazed at how much everyone seems to like the class.

I personally could drop from tiredness, but I will not go to bed until after nine. Discipline!

Christmas Eve

Ibis

mixed media, beads, applique, and surface work

from the collection of Kathleen Weston

Thermophilia

Mixed media, surface work, beads, organic matter, netting,

and acrylic paint on velvet and canvas.

From a private collection.

Christmas Eve, the fourth day of the Winter Solstice, Yuletide. Today is the last day the sun stands still on the horizon at its southern most point. Tomorrow it begins its journey north!

Life can never have too many Christmas Eves--a day of delightful anticipation. The journey is greater than the destination.

Today is a good day to write out an Embroiderers’ Christmas List. What is nearest to my heart, art, and craft that I want Santa to bring me? First of all, I want a book called A Pictorial History of Embroidery by Marie Schuette. A very rare book, but I would love to get my hands on it. It is a book I ran across in my time in England and which I have wanted a copy of ever since. Also, if there is a copy of Medieval Embroidery kicking around the North Pole with no one much interested in it--it would find a permanent home here in Albuquerque.
I would like a complete color wheel of Splendor silks. Splendor is the silk thread that comes in twelve strands and has the most marvelous colors. Carole and I (well, mostly Carole) have come up with the twelve numbers of the colors that best match the twelve-part color wheel in our Individual Correspondence course called Rainbows Bend. The complete set is so sumptuous and stunning that I get a real kick every time I see it.

Rita Curry-Pittman has made one of the best needle books I have ever seen. It contains two or three needles of every kind that a hand-embroiderer might need. She has decorated it with cunning machine stitches and it has pages of labeled needles from the largest to the smallest, both sharp and tapestry. It is a handy tool that every stitcher should have.

I want the old plastic and metal spring hoops back. These were the first generation hoops from the late 70s and early 80s that had plastic rims with springy metal inner hoops to hold the fabric drum tight. I can’t remember what they are called, but I have one left that is repaired with thread and glue. It is the best. I have second-generation hoops that are similar, but are pale imitations of the real thing.

My wool threads are in a series of plastic bags stuffed into a larger plastic bag which in turn is stuffed into a specially made (yes, I can use a sewing machine) tote bag for them. What I want is a system for keeping these wool yarns pristine without plastic, and yet in see-through, protectors so that I can see them as I work. Wool moths are bad here in NM--my forty-five-year-old turquoise rebozo is quite holy now (I do love Christmas puns; well, any kind of pun actually) from the little angel-like moths that visit it every summer.

What would I like to give for Christmas? There are certain women of my acquaintance that I would love to give a full set of DMC six-stranded cotton--Mary Analla, Alice Lucero, Marlo Lucero, Ethel Lucero, Barrett Lucero, and Jerry Stremsterfer to name a few.

I want Ann to have copies of all my blackwork papers so that she can continue her journey into the great realm of blackwork embroidery. (This is one wish I can probably bring about sometime soon.)

To everyone who does cross-stitch exclusively to any other stitching technique. Get a life! Let me show you the beauties of whitework, blackwork, crewel, Hardanger, and most anything else besides the lowly cross-stitch.

To the women of Mrs. Finley’s classes at the Grants Women’s Prison. May embroidery give you inner peace and serenity to continue life’s hard, hard journey.

Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, and may your New Year be bright and bountiful.

Answers

1. Ayrshire
1. Bullion
3. Crewel
4. Deerfield
5. Embellish
6. Farthingale
7. Guilloche
8. Hedebo, Hardanger, Honiton
9. Kelim
10. Jane Bostocke, 1596
11. Hungarian point, Bargello, Florentine
12. A palace, a prison, and then a museum
13. A metal spangle used in blackwork.
14. 1910 or 1920, either year is correct
15. Queen Elizabeth I (Tudor), Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick, Cavendish) and Queen Mary of Scots (Stewart).

Clear as Mud

Papaver Rubens

Counted work done on perforated paper that was printed with a digitally altered photograph by the artist. The threads are a silk-wool blend of a single plied yarn.

St. Columba's Wreath (detail)

Surface work done on kimono silk ground that was painted with acrylic paint and oil pastels. The threads are single and double strands of 12-stranded silk.

How are you doing with the quiz in the previous post? Answers next week!

I was talking with Carole Rinard, as I mentioned before, after the Sandia Mountain Christmas party. We almost always settle at my kitchen table for a cup of coffee and an hour of talk before she heads back up to Los Alamos after the meetings. This time we talked about the frustrations of a crumbling of preciseness of words within embroidery. In my purview, it started with the naming of canvas embroidery as needlepoint. Needlepoint is a type of lace. But someone a hundred years ago or so started calling canvas embroidery needlepoint. Now the lace is eclipsed and has faded into the huge world of canvas.

The words that Carole is principally worried about are floss, thread, fiber, strand, and ply. Floss originally meant fly-away filament silk that is very hard to handle, but which has a wonderful satin sheen when stitched and laid correctly. An example is the old Ping-Ling silk. Flossie is a name farmers gave to milk cows in reference to their silken tails. But in modern parlance floss is used as all-encompassing word for stranded cotton, or stranded silk, or even stranded linen threads. Well, this is just wrong and also can be very confusing.

A strand is one/sixth part of six-stranded cotton. Or one/twelfth part of twelve-stranded silk. A strand is made up of plies (ply in the singular) of the particular fiber it is made of, whether wool, silk, cotton, linen, or polyester. When we speak of four-ply wool, we are talking about one strand of wool made up of four plies of (weak) spun wool that are not made to be pulled apart and used singly. A thread of strands is made to be pulled apart and used singly or in bunches that are fractions of the stranded thread. A thread is what goes into the needle to be stitched.

So my needle is threaded with a thread that is one strand of twelve-stranded silk made of several plies of filament silk twisted together. The fiber is silk.

Or my needle is threaded with two strands of six-stranded cotton, each of which is made up of several plies of cotton. Cotton is the fiber.

Wait until we start talking about evenweave in fabric.

Christmas Party and Quiz

Yesterday was the Christmas party for Sandia Mountains Chapter. We had a wonderful time. It was at Bert Kroening’s home which is ideally suited for this sort of thing. Her walls are covered with needlepoint that she has done over the years. There are over a hundred pieces on display. And at this time of year, she has her holiday decorations out plus, a tree done completely with hand-made ornaments. It was a delight to be there.

At the Christmas party we conduct a minimum of business, have a silent auction whose proceeds benefit our scholarship fund, and we eat. The party is also an excuse for a killer pot luck? Once again, I was not able to taste everything--there was just too much. And it was all so good. We could have stayed all afternoon and then eaten supper.

We had some guests with us too. Bev Goetz’s daughter Reenie came. She is always most welcome. Jenny Wilson’s neighbor, Kay, was there. She is a delight. And a special guest, Wilcke Smith, came. Wilcke is a nationally known fiber artist and teacher. She has work hanging in the Albuquerque Museum; she has been in 27 books; and she is friends with nearly everyone in the fiber art world. We are lucky to have Wilcke living in Albuquerque.

The whole party was a blast for a bunch of dames who are handy with a needle and a cooking pot.

I don’t know yet how much money we made for scholarships, but we did see currency exchange hands. Anyone who is a member in good standing and who has been a member for a year or two is eligible for a scholarship. These scholarships are to be used in furthering your needlework education. I received one two years ago this month that enabled me to attend the 2008 national seminar in Louisville, KY.

One of the highlights of the party this year was a trivia quiz of fifteen questions that I gave out to teams of two or three. In the end no one answered all of the questions, but Carole Rinard missed only one. We had some other winners too. One team answered nine questions and another answered eight. As you can tell, this is not some panty-waist quiz. Here it is below in its entirety. I will post the answers in a week or so. Any one can send me the answers, say by Christmas, to test your knowledge of history and current use in embroidery. Good luck!

Education Matters


1. What embroidery technique starts with an "A", is named after a Scottish city, and is a type of lacy pulled work?

2. What word starts with a "B" and is the name of both a stitch and a metallic thread?

3. What embroidery technique starts with "C" and is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning wool?

4. Which American town, starting with "D", has a "blue and white" embroidery named after it?

5. What word, starting with "E", is used in embroidery as enrichment of fabric, and can also mean the enrichment of truth?

6. What piece of Elizabethan underclothing was used to hold skirts away from the body? This piece of fashion, which starts with "F", was invented first in Spain.

7. What stitch is normally done in three colors thread that is also the name of an architectural motif?

8. Name three types of embroidery that start with an H that are lace or have lace insertions.

9. Starting with K, this is a stitch named after a Turkish tapestry technique in which the front and the back are identical.

10. What is the name and year of the earliest, dated European sampler?

11. What are three alternate names for flame stitch?

12. Bargello before it was the name of a technique was the name of something else. Do you know what it is?

13. What is a paillette?

14. In which century and decade was the Embroiderers’ Guild in London founded?

15. Name the three most well-known embroideresses in England from 1550 to 1600.

Bonus Question. What were the last names of the three embroideresses above?

The Fellowship of the Needle

Cross-stitched Cloth by Mary Analla

More Cross-Stitch by Grandmother Mary

Today was Cloth and Canvas, a monthly stitch-in of Sandia Mountains Chapter. We meet at member’s homes, and spend the morning stitching and talking. We eat brown bag lunches, talk some more, and then scatter. Today there were seven of us: Jane, Ellie, Cindy, Patricia, Bert, and me meeting at Rita’s home.

The fellowship and the sense of belonging among this group are very strong. Our topics of conversation range from grandchildren to Hollywood stars, to word origins, to EGA business, and then onto vacations, and Christmas preparations. It is a lively group with teasing and laughter. We do an informal show-and-tell right after everyone arrives. We pass around our current stitching and then pass around anything else we bring to show the group. Today Ellie and Bert were working on Christmas stitcheries. Jane was working on a class that was just sponsored by the chapter. Cindy was doing a needlepoint. I was working on my cross-stitch tartan. We have a couple of members who sometimes come just to talk and don’t bother with the stitching. But frankly, my cross-stitch is so boring that I need the stimulus of conversation just to get any of it done.

Stitching is my way of overcoming stress and tension in life. If I can get a needle in my hand and sit quietly with my work, my troubles seem to dissolve like salt on meat. This pleasure coupled with the conversation of old friends is my stillness and center. There are few finer things in life.

The two pictures I am including in this post are work done by Mary Analla who is my new son-in-law’s great-grandmother. Mary also belongs to a stitch group in the tiny village of Paraje on the Laguna Pueblo. Mary stitches for her church, doing altar cloths, clothing for the saints’ statues, and other ecclesiastical work. I am putting these two pieces in the post to show you that not everyone finds cross-stitch dull and boring, and not everyone hates it quite as much as I do.

Old Teachers and Crewel

My first teacher in embroidery was an anonymous instructor at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, CO. Well, she probably was not anonymous to her self, but I cannot remember anything about her except that she was a she. I was put into the class as a substitute for another class I had enrolled in that didn’t make the numbers. The class was a revelation to me and opened up to me the rest of my life. It was a needlepoint class that lasted six or eight weeks. We were to make a tote bag out of the embroidered canvas after we were done. Mine never got that far. As I remember it, we stitched on a rectangle of canvas--it must have been 13 count--that was about 20” X 12”. It had ten panels on it for the various stitches. Mine was in reds and blues. I was thrilled with it. And I was very good at it. Unfortunately that piece was used by a cat as a scratching post. The cat was Genghis Poosey, intrepid hunter, bon vivant, and seasoned traveler. That was in 1976.

The next year we moved to New Jersey. But in the meantime I started designing my own work and had done a couple of small canvases and a rug, plus I had taken my first step into blackwork. In New Jersey I had the great good luck to find the Embroiderers’ Guild in the Creative Needlework Chapter. We met evenings once a month in a church basement in Collingswood. In NJ right there, all the towns are contiguous with only the name change of the main roads to tell you which one you were in. I doubt that Collingswood was twenty minutes on a bad traffic day from my house in Cherry Hill. It was a newer chapter--they all were back then--with young women as eager as I to learn everything we could. The chapter members taught me a lot, were very encouraging, and made me want to stretch to gain their respect.

One of the first teachers I had whose name I remember was Betsy Lieper. She was an itinerant crewel teacher from New Hampshire. Every month she got in her VW Microbus and made a two week teaching circuit with Merchantville, NJ as her most southern stop. I had never done crewel and in fact had only dabbled at surface work; as I said, needlepoint, a counted work, was my forte. She had us all work on a large piece of twill with what I now know was a Jacobean-inspired design. We worked in Elsa Williams wool yarn. I was surprised at how good I was at it. So was everyone else, surprised, I mean. I was especially good at French knots and satin stitch. She taught us about a dozen different stitches, including long and short and shading. I knew crewel wasn’t for me, but I was glad to learn to do it. The way I learned it and the design I learned it on were way too staid and old-fashioned for me. I love crewel and its fascinating stitches, but to this day it is not something I do in its classic form.

Why am I remembering this and telling it now? Tomorrow is a stitch-in for Sandia Mountains Chapter and I have been asked by a member to show her how to do crewel. I am more than happy to do that and to pass on what Betsy so lovingly gave to me those thirty-odd years ago--a passion for the stitch.

Practice: Moons and Pomegranates

Moonwoman

a drawing I did four years ago, practicing drawing and composition simultaneously

5" X 7" colored pencil on paper

Still life w/ half eaten pomegranate

One of my earliest sketchbook drawings, a good practice piece

So say you want to be more creative in your endeavors. And say that your endeavors include design and composition. And say that people who should know tell you to practice, practice, practice. Well, how do you get all that practice? After all, embroidery is an almighty slow medium to work in. A large piece could certainly take months of constant work.

Yesterday I spent several hours in my studio making Christmas cards. In about an hour and a half’s work, I designed and made six unique cards. For an embroiderer that is incredibly fast results. It occurred to me that it was a very good exercise for design and composition. I make all of my greeting cards anymore. It kills me to make any two just exactly the same (the artist in me shining through). I have made some to sell too, but the work and materials I put into them just won’t justify selling them for $3 a card. So I don’t do that anymore.

What other ways are good practice for design and composition? Sketching and drawing is also a pathway. Since good drawing skills are essential for a top-notch designer it is practice, practice, practice for me in drawing. Each of those drawings that I can finish in an hour or two of work is another way to practice the two skills together--drawing and composition. You could do that too.

What about scrapbooking? I personally do not do scrapbooking, but I have seen some very creative pages. If the pages are not merely bought and then assembled following the directions slavishly, then composition enters the picture.

Something close to scrapbooking techniques that I do is making books from cover to cover. Look into some of my previous posts for glimpses of the books I have made. The twin books that Ann Erdmann and I made together remain the epitome of my book-making skills.

So practicing creativity and composition is not something that you have to put off because you are not designing a magnum opus (or magna opera, in the plural), it is something that you can do on a daily basis--easy and fun, with a product at the end of it. Try it and you might really love it.

The Great Divide

Several ways of achieving value in blackwork

from Blackwork: Compleat and Unabridged.

It seems to be as I get older that the divide between the artists in needlework and the purely craftsmen in needlework is becoming greater. And yet as I say this I can think of many instances of people I know making the great leap between the two. Peggy M. of Sandia Mountains Chapter helped Karen Schueler with two books written for the chapter, Santos for Embroidery and the New Mexico Wildflower Book in the mid-90s. Karen is one of the great mixed media artists of our time and I have no doubt that she was an artist before she was an embroiderer. Peggy really did a tremendous job along with Karen. And to my knowledge, Peggy is not an artist, not even, as I am, a self-proclaimed one.

More recently I want to mention Lores K., also a member of Sandia Mountains. She is a great researcher and is interested all types of embroidery. She was not known as an artist, that is, an innovator who designed her own work. About four years ago she took a short class from me called The Button Sampler. She took the information I gave in the class and developed at least two samplers on her own. They are beautiful work. Then Lores became interested in darning patterns and pattern darning (ask Lores to tell you the difference) and she again created a lovely sampler from her studies. The colors and the design are meticulous. She has jumped the divide.

I have already mentioned in another post Ann E. in connection with art and embroidery. She continues to amaze me with her dedication to excellence, both in modern blackwork and in modern colcha.

Patricia T., also a member of our chapter is beginning to explore blackwork as an art. She has talked about using the Santos book as the basis for turning them into blackwork pieces. She has also expressed interest in taking my class Intense Pattern that explores pattern theory within blackwork--a class for people who want to do original work. By the way, Peggy M. and Ann E. also want to take that class.

So why do I say that the gap is widening between the artists and the technical people? Because I do very few classes taught at the regional and national levels that foster pure creativity and design. Doing a needlepoint in class with a choice between red roses and purple roses may be a “choice”, but it is a scanty, dull choice. Give us classes we can sink our teeth into--classes about design theory and color theory. Not classes on how to stitch a rainbow in all the colors of the, uh, rainbow. Give us classes that show us how to do original work within the great embroidery categories. For instance, tell people that klosters within Hardanger are based on 4 stitches + 1, so that the count stays even no matter what the artist elects to do with them. Tell people that blackwork can be shaded and given value in about eight ways--and then show them! Tell them to write down all the “rules” to classic needlepoint and then to discard two or three and show them how to start designing from there. Tell people colors don’t have to match, that designs have to be unified, that they can dye their own threads and fabrics to get exactly what they want. Tell them there are no limits.

A Fish Swallowed My Pencil

Morning Glories

colored pencil, 5" X 7"

for sale for $25

Creativity comes in many guises. Creativity in art is just one

of the ways, though it is a very public way

Creativity comes in many different guises. Just yesterday I was talking with a friend from the Sandia Mountains Chapter who said that she just wasn’t creative. This is untrue. It is one of the human conditions to be creative. But creativity can lurk in any corner. I have used my sister Albie as an example before. Albie is a wonderful stitcher--canvas embroidery is her forte. But she chooses not to be at her most creative within it. It is creative enough for her to choose her own stitches and yarns for a painted canvas. What she does is grease the wheels and surfaces of one of the largest corporations on the globe. She helps divisions of Boeing get along with one another. It is a huge job and she is very successful at it because she is very resourceful (read: creative). As it happens we have a first cousin named Sharon who works as a health counselor in eastern Colorado. She has recently been asked smooth out the tensions between several departments in a new hospital near the Kansas border. This is exactly the same thing that Albie does. Sharon denies being creative, but she just “knows” how to reconcile the people. This is a type of creativity that I will never choose to exercise.

What I have is a creative bent for art. And creativity in art is much more public than most other types.

My friend Ann in Cheyenne, one of the people I love most in the world, is exercising her creativity in art, something that she was only able to engage in sporadically throughout her life. But now she is splurging with it by taking blackwork into new realms. I am awed and amazed. This is a case of a woman determining to see how far she can stretch herself and her craft. And then doing it. I will see if Ann will allow me to put her newest blackwork on this blog. It would be fun to show it off a little to our friends.

When I teach creativity, as I am going to do in a pilot class in Cheyenne and then later at the 2010 EGA national seminar in San Francisco, I usually teach it as some kind of design theory. Design theory is the apex of creativity in art. In learning D.T., a person can really stretch her creativity to its furthest. The class is A Fish Swallowed My Pencil.

Design theory sounds like a dull subject, but it is not. It is really a large plan and puzzle for the creative part of the mind to learn and then solve for itself. It is nothing to be afraid of; in fact it is something that may change your perception of yourself and of your world. It can make dull things sparkle and dead ends lead on to new paths. Try it, you might just love it.

Star in the Firmament

In the last two weeks I have been honored to have met and broken tortillas with a wonderful artist. Wilcke Smith has always been a bright star in my fiber arts universe. Wilcke, like me, never went to school to study art. but she learned on the job as a journalist in advertising layout departments of a couple of eastern newspapers and then in an advertising firm. She worked for five years as a designer in a large interior design firm in Texas. In 1954 her husband's work took them to Albuquerque where she struck out on her own as an artist with already a reputation as a creative designer.

Wilcke didn't always embroider, but like a lot of us learned some stitches as a child. It wasn't until she moved to Albuquerque that she started putting embroidery into her fiber art. In Celebrating the Stitch: Contemporary Embroidery of North America by Barbara Lee Smith (one of my teachers and another star in my pantheon), you can see a short blurb and picture of one of Wilcke's works.

In July I was asked by a friend of an acquaintance (Cheryl Sharp and Carole Dam respectively) of mine to interview Wilcke Smith and take some photographs for an article in Needle Arts. In July I was nose deep in preparing emotionally for 100th birthday parties (not mine!), for weddings, family reunions, and wedding receptions for my only daughter. I was not prepared to do the leg work for someone else's writing. I had never met Wilcke and didn't want to disturb her (or me). But I got through the most emotional period of my life since 2003 and got on with life. I called Wilcke (she is listed in the phone book just as mere mortals are) and I asked to meet her.

I went over one Tuesday morning. I interviewed and photographed. She showed me her smallish studio in her smallish apartment. And we started really talking and laughing. We hit it off. It was great. We talked about her early life, her early career, and we talked about art philosophies. We talked about stitching. I went home, wrote up a short three paragraphs to add to the article and emailed them and the photograph to Needle Arts.

A week and a half later (last Sunday night) she came over for dinner. She met Mike whom she seemed quite taken with. Even Cosmo the cat fell in love with her. We talked about collecting other people's art. We talked about me! She was most generous in her appraisals of my work. She called my work rich and textured with hidden depths. We sent her home with two meals of Mike's white chicken chile and chocolate cake in a doggy bag.

Wilcke is 90 years old (or thereabouts) and looks and acts about 75. She lost her husband of over fifty years two years ago. She lives in a sumptuous apartment in a sumptuous assisted living complex, and she is eager to talk to another artist who understands what she says. Go Wilcke!

Pilots, Fish, and Pirates

Collage for the cover of the instructions for

Intense Pattern

It has been most of a year since I last logged on and blogged. Three people have commented that they miss my blogs. With a huge, worldwide audience like that how can I be hard hearted? Thanks Barrett, Ann, and whoever that third person is.

With the bottom fallen out of the art market and only old dust motes in my change purse, I have changed my focus from doing art to teaching art. Consequently I have four new classes coming up. An EGA IS (Independent Study) called Rainbows Bend with Carole Rinard as co-author. An EGA ESP (don't you just love the acronyms? In this case, Extended Study Program) called Intense Pattern of four days length that I have talked about before in this blog series. An EGA 2010 San Francisco national seminar course called Pirate's Gold of four days. And a 2010 EGA national seminar class of two days called A Fish Swallowed My Pencil. I have been hard at work on these for almost a year now, researching, studying, and stitching for them. Am I a little OCD for this much trouble over them? Well, maybe. But I guarantee you they will be the best I can produce.

Pilot classes for the last three were troubling for me to set up. I was embarrassed and insulted by someone in a position to help me who basically said I was taking advantage of her position to even recommend chapters within Rocky Mountain Region to ask to pilot. I saw it as giving smaller chapters a chance to have a national teacher at a basic cost. At any rate, I did not ask any chapter to do so, even though I know there are several pilot classes going around for other teachers within the region.

[What is a pilot class? It is a pre-class taught by the teacher to "practice" for the real thing. All region and national classes should be piloted. A teacher waives her teaching fee for the privilege of having a gang of students helps out with any glitches that may develop. The teacher gets all transportation, room and board, and kit fees, but must teach the class for free.]

Rainbows Bend, a color class taught by mail, will be set up for piloting by the national committee that handles such things. Carole and I will have little to do with it. Intense Pattern, a master blackwork class, will be taught here in Albuquerque in February at Jane Moses' house. The students will have no fees but the kit. A very good deal indeed, considering that if they took the real class they would have to travel to Louisville, KY and pay for their own hotels and food, plus me. Pirate's Gold is being taught at Rita Pittman's house in March (not interfering with Mardi Gras or Easter.) And A Fish is being taught in Cheyenne, WY by my dearest friend, Ann Erdmann, who is setting up a private class among her friends. I am lucky to have such friends as Ann, Jane Moses, and Rita Curry-Pittman.

So I am all set up and now I must finish writing the classes, gather all the stuff in the kits, gather my wits, and I am off to the trembling edge. It would be good to fly after falling off and not land with a meaty splat!

Wasatch Chapter and Certification

In 1984 our family of four was peaceably living in Cherry Hill, NJ and I was attending the Creative Needlework Chapter which met in Collingswood NJ, just a fifteen minute drive away. It was that year that Mike asked Unisys if we could transfer out west to Salt Lake City. It sounded good to me--another adventure in life. Little did I know how much that move would change my life. The Creative Needlework Chapter was a wonderful chapter. We had fabulous teachers both locally, from the other coast, and from points in between. The big needlework teachers back then just itched to come to the east coast around NYC to teach and make their reputations. I had been teaching professionally for about two years and had even taught at one National Seminar--I had gotten a taste of what could be. But I was a mountain-west girl. I longed for open space and open skies that were bright blue.

We moved to a nice house on the side of a mountain in Sandy, Utah. I put PJ in the local high school and found a preschool for Barrett, then went looking for the local shops and EGA chapter. I found a mint: good shops and the Salt Lake Needlepoint Chapter. This was early in 1985 (we had moved over Christmas) and I was an ambitious stitcher. I thought I could fit right in to the local groups and get on with stitching. But I was wrong. Salt Lake had a different way of doing things, both the city and the chapter.

The move to Utah was just as hard as the move to NJ, culture shock, a different way of doing things, outsiders were not always welcomed with open arms. And I must admit as I look back, I had an attitude. I had just started the process of EGA National Teacher Certification and so was pretty full of myself. I was just in from the east coast, had lived within that magic circle of EGA that surrounded the then-national headquarters in New York City. I was certainly god's gift to SLCNC.

Well, there was more to this than just my attitude. The SLCNC was operating under two charters--one from EGA and one from ANG. A thing specifically forbidden by both national organizations because of the complications with the money and the IRS. But in Salt Lake City things were done differently, as I have mentioned before. Instead of being a sweet team player and just attending meetings, I turned activist. There was a powerful clique running the chapter. It was those four or five who held the offices and made the decisions about who would teach, what would be taught, how we spent the money, etc. One lovely spring afternoon, I gave fair warning to the ringleader and told her I was going to write national EGA about this whole mess.

At the next meeting of the chapter, it was announced that SLCNC was giving up the EGA charter and swinging wholly over to the American Needlepoint Guild. I had two friends to whom I had already talked, Sherry Gates and Mary Repola. At that meeting, I stood up and announced that we three were starting a new EGA chapter that would start meeting informally right away. The deed was done and I did not ever write to national about the charters.

Both Mary and Sherry moved out of Utah before the new chapter formally began, so I started Wasatch Chapter of the EGA on my own. We first met in January, I believe, of 1986 with enough members for a president (me), a program chair and vice-president, a secretary-treasurer, and a newsletter person. There were about ten of us in all. We were off and running.

Meanwhile I was having other problems. I was struggling with the certification process. This was supposed to take from one year to eighteen months. It was a series of six parts that had to be passed satisfactorily. I was a good teacher, I knew that. But I couldn't seem to please the east coast certification group with my embroideries. I had to do nine of them in nine different techniques of counted work. As always, I did original work, some times startlingly original. And this was the problem. The Certification Committee suggested that I quit certification (I had done about half of the parts successfully) and take some time to study more about the classic way of doing the counted work. I protested vigorously and wrote a letter to Rosemary Cornelius, the head of the committee--it was not she who had suggested that I quit. I told her that I knew I could pass this, that all she had to do was to send me detailed instructions for exactly what they wanted for each embroidery.

Rosemary was a wonder. She told me that from then on she was to be my mentor (before that my mentors had changed with each part) and that we would try this again. I still have the papers, the fabrics, and threads she sent me tucked away in my stash. I passed in just over eighteen months, in December of 1986 and was presented my rose in Parsippany, NJ in the fall of 1987.

It was an exciting time of life with adversity and struggles all overcome by hard work, persistence, and a little guile with the SLCNC. In 2000 after working for five years I got my second certification, my master certification with EGA: Graduate Teacher. No one questioned my original, outre embroideries then.

Just remembering this whole struggle makes me smile.

CO, NJ, & NM

Yesterday I gave an hour's talk to a local PEO group of about twenty women. The talk was about blackwork--I talked about the earliest types of blackwork and showed the most contemporary of blackwork through my own work. It was a lot of fun for me, even though it was a spur of the moment thing. I had been asked to do this about six months ago, but through mishap didn't get the date written down. I was given about twelve hours notice that the talk was the next morning. Not to worry--I can always talk about blackwork.

Blackwork Butterfly

after a motif from an Elizabethan sleeve

Jane Moses was the person who invited me to talk. She helped me along with several good comments and she even brought a piece of her own to show. The audience was receptive, lively, full of questions, and very appreciative. It was the best of teaching positions to be in.


Through hubris I started teaching needlework about six months after I started to learn it in 1976. I felt compelled, like a new convert, to tell the good news and scatter this wonder through the population. I feel that I was good at teaching, if not as knowledgeable as I should have been. My first classes were with two or three women around a kitchen table with hand-written, hand-colored instructions and illustrations of canvas work. This was before my introduction to the EGA, and when we were still in Littleton where I had basically lived all of my life.

It was in 1978 when my husband got a new job in Cherry Hill, NJ and we moved away from Colorado and the peregrinations of our married life stated. It was in NJ where I met the EGA later that same year. Also in NJ I "turned professional" four years later and started making a career of teaching within the EGA.


To me teaching is the most satisfying of all that I do. It gives me what I am looking for way down deep. What is that thing I want? I have little idea up here on the surface. The best part of teaching, though, is the ability to impinge upon people's lives in little ways and in big ways. I feel that I am a catalyst that can bring about change within a person.

My being a catalyst for change seems to happen mostly when I teach color and design. Many times, after a two-day or after my massive four-day classes, I have people come up to me to tell me that I have changed the way they look at color, or art, or embroidery. They tell me, they will never again feel they are strangers to design theory or feel uncomfortable with color. It is those moments that fill me with the bliss of my calling as a teacher.

Even in the hour with the PEO in the living room of a woman here in Albuquerque, I get that same sort of pleasure and contentment from a simple thing--standing up in front of people telling them of my love and life with blackwork or color theory or design theory or Hardanger. It is, of course, what I live for.

Binding the Knowledge

Most people who know me, know that I am a messy person. I like to have a jumble of things around me while I work. I know it's a failing on my part, but that is just the way it is.

I know a fiber artist in Colorado who had for her studio the tops of her washer and dryer in a tiny laundry room. She kept her few supplies in a desk where she also paid the family bills. She was able to put out wonderful works of art from this location. Organization was her middle name. I also knew a fiber artist in Haddonfield, NJ who was the world's greatest scatterer of worldly goods. Her messes spawned their own messes. Once when she was coming back to her home from a grocery trip, she saw the front door was wide open. Since it was winter, she thought she had better call the police before going in. The police went over, scouted out the house, and reported back to her that though nothing seemed broken, whoever went in there had torn up her house to the point that they could barely get through it. Never mind, she told them, I left it that way. Nothing was stolen and nothing was too far out of place, so she concluded that she had left the door open herself in her absentmindedness. Well, I am part way between Colorado and New Jersey in messiness.

Some things I do keep straight all the time are my notebooks. I don't know when or why I ever started this. I am not a compulsive saver or am particularly sentimental, but I started making notebooks of my stuff years and years ago. My biggest notebook is my series on blackwork. It started out as a 3" three-ring binder that held old instructions from my teachers and the projects themselves that would fit into the binder. It grew. Now it is five or six 4" binders that contain all of the instructions of blackwork I have ever written, all of the classes I ever took in blackwork, all of my practice pieces, and all of the research I have done over the years on the subject.

I also have a design notebook--a much smaller school notebook that is full of many people's ideas about design. I distilled all I have been taught, all of my research, and all of my own thoughts on design into one place. It is as invaluable as my blackwork tomes. I am now consulting both my blackwork and design notebooks for the writing projects I am currently working on.

I have notebooks on Hardanger, needle tatting, color theory, colcha embroidery, and two or three more on other minor subjects. I have used all of the notebooks at one time or another to put together classes and projects. It's as if I never have to start from ground zero to work up a new class or teaching project. I have in a neat confined space, most of what I know and what I have done on certain subjects. I never take my notebooks anywhere outside the house--the risk of losing them or damaging them is too great.

I knew from an early time that I was going to be a teacher of embroidery. Almost from the first time I picked up a tapestry needle seriously I knew that I would have to pass this wonderful knowledge on. So I am lucky to have the work I have done over three decades.

Pleasures of the Stitching

Today I have done something that I have not done in a long time--started a sampler. For a long time my stitching life has been devoted to bees and other works on perforated paper. Now don't get me wrong, I love perforated paper. No finishing required, about 1/4 of the stitching required for a linen piece the same size. Also my yarn of choice on perforated paper is Impressions, a silk/wool that is soft and and very colorful. But there is nothing like linen.

This is a red letter day because of the sampler. I have been doing research for the past month or so since I signed the contract to teach the Master Class in Blackwork in July of 2010. I have a stack of books that I have been browsing through, taking notes from, and generally hauling around the house to where ever I am reading at the time. (Okay, I confess. I am a reader in bed. Sitting up and reading a book is not something I like to do. Of course if I am taking notes, then I have to sit up. Bummer.)

But today I started the sampler that goes with the class. Like most of my major undertakings, I have to think about it for a long time before starting. In this case I have been thinking about it for several months--from back when I first got the idea for the class, way before I proposed it to EGA. It has been only in the last two weeks or so that the sampler itself had begun to gel in my head.

The class is about patterning theory--how to make patterns for blackwork embroidery. The sampler will be a workbasket sampler or as I like to call them a working sampler. This will be a sampler not for display but for consulting over a lifetime. It is a sampler that will never be framed but will reside somewhere handy to look at when planning blackwork.

I chose a piece of linen from my stash of about the right size and count. Then I washed it and wrapped it in a towel before ironing it while it was still quite damp in order to take the creases out of it from being folded. I let it rest spread out on the ironing board while I chose some black silk threads, in this case Au Ver A Soie and Chinese silk.

When the linen had dried completely I took black cotton sewing thread and stabilized the edges with a simple whip stitch. And I started basting. I know that for finishing the piece I want to do a nun's stitch or a picot edging so that the edges will be permanently stable. But that takes a long time to do and wanted to divide out the main body of the piece before I decided exactly where I wanted the edges to be. So I left an inch and a half on all sides and basted a rectangle. Then I basted the vertical center line and two more lines, the quarter lines, parallel to the center.

I was ready to take the first real stitches. I was pretty tired by this time sitting at my work table concentrating hard. so I just did simple running stitches in the Chinese silk to outline the first box. As I say, it was a pure pleasure. So I am off and running on this sampler in black thread and am most satisfied with my progress.

Patrice, Martin, and the Moons

The Moon Eclipsing the Sun

colored pencil

I have an Internet friend named Patrice. She had a question about mixed media fiber art once and pulled my name off the Internet to ask. Ever since we have been in correspondence. Patrice lives in Louisville, KY, and she graciously came to the opening of the 19th National EGA Exhibit at the tail end of August this year so that we could finally meet in person. Patrice is a teacher and an artist. She teaches children special topics in art around Louisville, especially in miniatures making, gourd work, and mixed media like quilts out of recycled materials.

In Patrice's current letter to me she talks about creativity, about being a creative person, and how she deals with certain aspects of it. Thanks, Patrice, for writing me about that, by the way.

I believe that creativity is innate within everybody, that it is a human condition. But certain people are overwhelmed with constant ideas than most others. Patrice says that she is so swarmed by ideas that she can sometimes not sleep at night. That she wakes up with ideas and goes to sleep with new ideas in her head. I know that feeling. Getting ideas is not my major stumbling block. Honing them down and homing in on the ones I want to actually execute is the hard part.

Part of my own creative process is day dreaming. I like to take a part of each day, especially in the late afternoons, lie down, and just think. It's true that sometimes I fall asleep, but in the last couple of years I more often enter a meditative state where I can explore my mind. What do I do next on my current project? What colors go best with with yellow and black (my current bee theme). How else can I put together this bee sampler? Where do I go next? What else can I add to my work on my Color ICC? What has happened is that I have taken the mass of ideas that constantly bombarded me and have channeled them in this meditative state. Now I am a little (okay, a lot) older than Patrice. I think I have finally tamed part of the beast.

The Moon Asleep

I saw an interview with Martin Scorsese about creativity in artists once on PBS. It changed my world view. All of what he said made sense to me. But what I came away with is that an artist should follow where her ideas take her. This is sometimes scary because it leads to uncharted territory. I heard the interview at night one summer in 2004 and sat right down to work on stuff that had been teasing my mind for sometime. I was holding back on this work because I thought it might be too frivolous for me. But he made me realize that it was me. It was my moons.

The Moon and the Solar Wind

Right now I am on the cusp of finishing two projects. I am almost done with my Bee Book Sampler. I will certainly be done with it by Sunday morning when I next blog. And I am putting away my color theory books and dragging out my patterning theory books. Lesson 1 of the Color Correspondence Course is done and has to be sent to EGA Headquarters for approval before Carole and I can do the rest of the lessons. Now I get to work on my Master Class in Blackwork Patterning for a month and a half.

An artist gets better with time, no matter what the medium. A creative person never retires. from it.

AoE and Personal Abstraction

Yesterday, the fourth Friday of the month, the Art of Embroidery met for its organizational meeting. The Art of Embroidery is a special interest group within Sandia Mountains Chapter. We study things that are connected with embroidery, but we rarely study just embroidery. This coming chapter year, from September through May, we are looking at drawing and sketching, at patterning, and at layering. I realize that each of these topics deserve a year each, but we are having just a taste of each.

I am leading the drawing and sketching, while Felice Tapia is leading the layering. and Carolyn Bivens is leading the patterning. In other posts I have talked about the importance of being able to draw in order to be an artist. I am glad that I was able to arrange having some drawing sessions with AoE.

A Page of Illustrations

Drawing, illustrating, and sketching. I wish I had better terms for what I perceive as the differences between them. Drawing is certainly the formal and basic way of getting information down on paper. Drawing is where images are recorded as faithfully as possible including shadows, textures, and the environment of the subject. This what I learned to do in Drawing 101 I took while living in Colorado. This is what I would like AoE to practice at. Illustrating is just getting a few lines on paper to show stitches or the outlines of designs. This takes a lot less practice than drawing.

Pear & Red Teapot

An abstraction

What I term sketching is really two things to my mind. The first is rough images suitable for an artist's journaling. And the second is my own interpretation of an image in my own drawing style. My own interpretation is an abstraction not only of image, texture, and environment but also of color. Obviously I do not have the correct vocabulary for that personal abstraction.

While on vacation for the past week I made several sketches and several of my own personal abstractions. The assignment for AoE for October was to do several sketches--every day if you could manage. Of the six of us in AoE four of us are quite experienced. But practice does only good. I was glad to see that everyone tried and came up with something. Drawing can be scary: fear of making a mistake and fear of not being as good as the person sitting next to you. I know because I have experienced all of this.

Moonset 1

A personal abstraction turned into an embroidery

Jo Morris, Patricia Toulouse, Felice Tapia, Rita Curry-Pittman, Carolyn Bivens, and myself are the current active members. I can only congratulate all of us for coming to the edge and with a little encouragement jumping out and over in an effort to broaden our horizons.

Tumbling Deltas

I wasn't able to get into my studio much for the last couple of days--I was busy preparing for vacation. I really miss the time spent there. In my very first post to this blog I spoke of the casita and of my just moving in to inhabit the place. That was the summer. Now we are well into another season and the situation in the casita has changed a bit.

I get more natural light this time of year. The sun is lower in the south and so my two south windows are bright most all of the day. But it is colder in there. The floors are all tile and painted cement and there is no central heat. I have no doubt that in deepest winter it will take at least half an hour to heat up the air to where I want to sit, take my mittens off, and work. But that is do-able.

In the main room I have tall steel shelves along the north wall bracing the north window. Taking up much of the center of the room are two large tables--my work top. I also have a beading desk and a small stand handy near where I normally sit that holds my cassette/CD player. The walls are hung with some unsold art. I am surrounded by my threads, papers, books, paint brushes, paints, dyes. I am very happy with that room.

A Fall Progression

I took this photo in November of 2004 outside the local library.

I have brought in the indoor plants and three of them sit on a small desk under one of the south windows. They should be plenty warm through all of winter unless we have a terrible cold snap. The plants which are in the second room give the place a nice homey feel and brighten up the white walls and floor. Also in the second room which is actually the dining room / kitchen of the casita, I have my sewing machine and ironing board out where I can reach then at all times. Very cool.

This is after several iterations or changes I made on the computer.

The red leaf on the left is essential to the design.

But speaking of the casita, I saw Viviano Herrera the other day. He was up from his son Juan's home in la ciudad de Chihuahua. Viviano is the man who moved into the casita in 2004 and transformed it from a half-garage into a whole little house. It still had a garage door on the north side, an industrial heater in the roof, and an oil smell deep in the floor. Viviano moved in and redid the garage door into a wall and window, he fixed the roof, he removed the car grease from the floor, and he painted the walls. Already there were the kitchen and bathroom in working order. Viviano lived in the casita until March of this year, exactly four years, before illness overtook him and he had to be cared for by his family. But when I saw him on Monday of this week, he was hale and well. He had come up to visit his friends here in ABQ and then to go up to Colorado to visit two more of his sons, Carlos and Indio. It was good to see him.

This is one of the final designs.

It looks like little fishes to me and diatoms in the sea.

Because of Viviano, I was able to realize my dream of a studio--a place of my own. And I am forever grateful. The studio means so much to me. I think it is a prize that I have finally won after years of service and study. It is a space deep inside me that I can go to when I tell my stories of life and dream. When I am working in the studio I lose track of time. Hours can pass so quickly that I can barely remember them. I go into another zone, another type of time. Is it the fugue of creativity? Meditation with Delta Waves tumbling around me?

This is Bouquet Salpicon from the same iteration.

The threads exactly match the red leaf.

This is a type of very modern blackwork.

I am on vacation for the next week. I will have my computer along and so will post when I can. I will also have along all my drawing stuff--pencils, paper, colored pencils, pens,--and I will draw. Drawing is another thing that puts me into my other zone. Don't bother wishing me a good time--I know I will have one.

Scholarships and a Judge

Rita Curry-Pittman phoned the other day to tell me that the program presenter for the Sandia Mountains Chapter November meeting had cancelled and could I do that meeting. Rita herself was going to be absent and needed some help. Rita is Vice-President Programs of Sandia Mountains, while I am president.

The October meeting is this coming Tuesday, the 14th of October. Jane Moses is doing part of the program. She received a scholarship from Sandia Mountains (as did I), for the last national seminar and now is pay-back time. Now let me just say one thing. I object to have to "pay back" a scholarship. A scholarship in the wider world is not paid back. I would much rather name the monies we give people for classes and other personal enrichment a grant or even a supplement. I think the word scholarship muddies the waters of the language.

But to get back to my main point: Jane is going to do part of October's program as the pay-back for her scholarship. That is good. I was going to pay back my scholarship later in the chapter year. But now it is going to be November. The scholarship program is a good one. I would venture to say that most chapters and regions have scholarship funds for members. Rocky Mountain Region has the Jody Gergens Memorial Scholarship Fund available for specific needs to anyone within the region. Sandia Mountains has a nice little fund that we award from once or twice a year, depending on the amount in the it.

I was awarded both a Jody Gergens and a Sandia Mountains so that I could go to national seminar. I am eternally grateful. Without those monies I would have been unable to go. And so November is pay-back time, probably for both scholarships.

My classes at seminar were the judging class and a class about making frogs--those sewn on fasteners for clothing. I have decided to do a program on judging for Sandia Mountains. The judging class was a revelation to me in at least one aspect: team judging. I have done a little judging in my time. Seven or eight times I have been asked to judge at county fairs, at SCA events, at a local photography show, and at local shop exhibits. In all instances but one I was judging alone. When I lived in Sandy, Utah, I had the opportunity to judge an embroidery show put on by a frame shop. The owner had three judges come in and we judged in a team. It was a very good experience. Each of us had areas of expertise and we could talk and make group decisions.

The judging class at national had us judge on our own and in groups. Once again the group judging was the better way to go. I want to give the chapter that same experience of judging. So Carole Rinard and I are gathering up ten original works for the chapter to judge. Unfortunately Carole can't be at the November meeting either. I will just have to soldier on by myself. So after introductory remarks, I am going to split the chapter into three- or four-person groups and have the groups judge the ten works on different merits. They are to choose a first, second, and third place for their particular merits. And then we will have a group discussion on those merits and choices. Sounds like fun to me. And I hope the chapter will begin to understand how judging works.

The ten original works of art will be mostly from Carole's fine collection contemporary embroidery art. I will contribute two or three pieces of my own work. It should be a first class art show (well, most of it) in addition to a good way of introducing tough judging to the group.