Velma and Mountmellick

Aunt Velma is actually no blood relation to me. She is the older sister of my uncle who is married to my aunt who is my mother’s older sister. All of us in the previous sentence were born in Holyoke, Colorado, a little town of about 2500 that is the county seat of Philips County. Aunt Velma is aunt to all my cousins on my mother’s side. So to me she was always just one more loving adult in the long days of my childhood.

Aunt Velma in August celebrated her 100th birthday in what was to be a big party, but what turned out to be a stay in a hospital--her first. Velma fell in her garden while she was making concrete stepping stones shaped like turtles. She assured me that she was being very careful, but the bag of cement had a mind of its own and tipped over the wheelbarrow. Down she went breaking her shoulder.

Velma has done needlework in her long life. She knows about needlepoint and “pillowcase” embroidery. But she also knows about Mountmellick work. Mountmellick is an embroidery technique done in Ireland around the town of the same name. It was introduced as a cottage industry in the 1800s during one of the famines--a way to give housewives some extra money. It is whitework done on heavy cotton ground with thick cotton threads. The work is done in plant themes such as blackberry fruit and leaves and, in this instance, grape vines, tendrils, and leaves. Sometimes the satin stitches of the fruits are padded to give them relief. Everything about it is curvilinear.

Velma has a piece of Mountmellick that was done by her mother around 1900; see the pictures of it below. I don’t know where or why Elsie Biddle, Velma’s mother (I thought Grandma Biddle was one of my grandmothers too), would have learned Mountmellick, perhaps from a friend or even from a magazine. But she did this piece and then passed it on at her death to her only daughter, Velma. Velma told me on her 100th birthday that she was passing it on to me because she knew that I knew the value of it to the family. Velma did ask me what I would do with it when it was time for me to pass it on. I will donate it to the collection of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America, where it can reside for other people to see it and study it.

Mountmellick work done by Elsie Biddle c.1900

20" X 14"

Detail of the grape vine and leaves. Notice the laid work on the leaf.

The padded grapes with tendrils and the scalloped edge.

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.

The Bobby Pilling

Rune Speaker

Yesterday, Saturday the 10th of October, Carole Rinard came past the house loaded down with my stuff from the education exhibit at national seminar in Pittsburgh. Carole is the new chairman of the national nominating committee. Our good friend, Wanda Anderson, now living in Gunnison, CO, is the new Director of Education, a post that Carole just vacated. I love the way the power within EGA is slowly coming west. If we are not careful, we will have another national president from Rocky Mountain Region.

Along with my two blackwork samplers, my two models for A Fish Swallowed My Pencil and Pirate's Gold, she brought back my piece that won the Bobby Pilling Award this year, Rune Speaker. Ah, the Bobby Pilling Award for stitching outside the lines. I think a lot of the award was for explaining how I had stitched outside the lines.

Below are the words I wrote to the committee who judged the pieces entered for the award. There was some very good embroidery entered in the competition. But I thought I had a good chance because one of my private goals is to shatter some of the traditional styles of embroidery and make them, twisting and turning in color, break into the 21st century.

Thanks, Carole.

Rune Speaker

American non-traditional Hardanger doily
Linen ground with cotton threads
Decorated with a broken hand-carved wooden stamp with two types of gold paint.

I have long been exploring the very edges of Hardanger. What rules can I break and still have a piece have the look and presence of Hardanger?
The rules of classic Hardanger are old and strict. In this work I have broken four of them so that I have a piece that speaks of its maker. The first of the rules is about symmetry. All classic Hardanger work is formally symmetric in the placement of the motifs and areas of klosters. There is nothing that is formally symmetrical about this piece. All the klosters areas are randomly ordered. The second is that the shape of the work is random also--something that would never happen in classic Hardanger. Third is the use of paint and stamping to make it a truly mixed media work. And last is the use of color in a way a little different from the classic Hardanger’s white-on-white or off-white; different from the modern Hardanger of soft color with matching threads. I have used light lilac and metallic gold as complementary colors with the stamping dwindling away. To me the piece is like a piece of faded parchment with hidden messages and meanings long obscured.

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.

Heat and Destruction

Worm Tracks, Star Fields 4

velvet appliqued onto wool

this has a lot of beading

from the collection of Kathleen Weston

Art of Embroidery is meeting this coming Friday, the 5th of December. Normally we meet the fourth Friday of the month skipping December because of the holidays. But we like to get together and get on with stuff, so we elected to meet early in December, just two weeks after our November meeting. We are a group of five who study things beyond the stitch, like design and sketching, plus many other things. At this meeting we are exploring layering. Felice Tapia is leading the meeting with her ideas on layering stitches, something that I have not worked with very much. I am eager to see what things we can come up with.

Aldebaran: the Follower, Star Fields 2

wool appliqued onto velvet

from the collection of Mary Kircher

Layering that I know more about and that I love to do is what I call Heat & Destruction. I originally learned some of the the techniques from Jean Littlejohn, an English fiber artist who, along with her partner Jan Beaney, is top in the field. Then I added a few things of my own and developed my own style of work that suits me very much. So far I have done three bodies of work in H&D, plus many more solitaries, Burnt Offerings, Star Fields, and Holyoke/Holywell

I start with a tough ground fabric--artist's canvas, upholstery fabric, a heavy silk, or something of like nature. My first layer is almost always three-dimensional paint that I dab on in my chosen composition. I take my heat tool which heats to 650 degrees and I pass it over the wet paint, making it boil and bubble away. Sometimes the color of the paint changes a bit too. Over this I put a layer or two of nylon netting, smooth or rumpled, in one or two colors. I either stitch it down or I dab more paint on top to hold it in place. And then I melt most of the nylon away with my heat tool. This work as to be done in a well-ventilated area. I keep layering with different colored paint, and different fabrics. I heat them to melt them, scorch them, or merely to warp them to form a surface like no other surface in embroidery. Then I start stitching. Sometimes the needle is hard to get through the resulting surface, but never impossible. At this point too, I might add beads or other found objects.

Heaven's Tree
there is very little stitching on this one
artist's collection (still for sale)

When I work directly on stretched artist's canvas, I clean up the surface, do some more stitching and beading getting it like I want it, I sign it, and it is ready to go. When working with some of the other fabrics, if I have enough of it to pull around the edges of artist's stretcher bars and lace it, I will do so. In the case of silk or similar fabrics, I will get a stretched canvas, paint it a good background color, and then applique the finished surface to it.

Mab's Flowers there is thick layering on this with many meltings
from the collection of Laura Sandison

Depending on the amount of stitching and beading I do, a piece of work can be finished in as little as two or three days. Some of the more elaborate pieces take up to a week. It is important for me to finish these works quickly. These are the works I sell most often because they are fairly inexpensive compared to work that is pure embroidery. I like to do this work precisely because it is fast. My big embroideries can take up to three or four months to do. I work at embroidery only three or so hours a day. Anything more is too hard on me. But the H&D, I can work on longer. It is a more active process. Also I can work on two or three at a time--if I did that with embroidery it would take me a year to do four big pieces. I like that I can start, come to a middle, and see an end in just a few days.

Ibis

Beading with H&D

This one took a little longer because of the beading

from the collection of Kathleen Weston