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

The Trouble With Red-Violet

The Twelve Part Color Wheel

starting at the top and going right is yellow, yellow-green, green,

blue-green, blue, blue-violet,violet, red-violet, red, red-orange,

orange, yellow-orange

While working on my previous blog post about the color brown, I was reminded of another color that has some interesting properties, red-violet. Red-violet is the warmest of the violets. Remember that the sun side of the color wheel is red, orange, and yellow, while the cool side is green, blue and violet. Red-violet is the warmest of the cool tcolors because it lies between red, certainly the color of the setting sun, and violet, the color of an evening sky, tender spring flowers, and the ocean in one of its moods.

The color wheel is based on the color spectrum, which is the rainbow that we see every summer. When light from the sun, called white light, passes through a prism, such as water droplets, or a special piece of glass, that white light is broken up or refracted into its component colors. So we see a rainbow divided into about seven hues: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Red is always at the top or outside of the rainbow and violet is always at the bottom or inside of the rainbow. Colors are actually wave lengths on the radiant spectrum that includes radio waves, microwaves, gamma rays, and cosmic rays. Red is about 700 nanometers, the longest of the wavelengths of color, while violet is the 400 nanometer range. Above red is infra-red and below violet is ultraviolet. There is no space for red-violet, an "impossible" color. And yet we see red-violet in the color of fuchsias. lilacs, and water lilies. It's a mystery to me.

By the way, violet is that beautiful color between red and blue, while purple to me is a very dark version of violet. One of my favorite colors is blue-violet, an elusive color. It is one of the colors I look best wearing. When I was a child, I was the brown-haired, brown-eyed child, while my sister was the blue-eyed, dark-blonde. She always got to wear blue and I always got to wear brown. To this day, I do not like to wear brown and have only a jacket of that color in my wardrobe. Now I dress in blue, blue-violet, and red-violet. And my little sister? She still looks great in blue.

Brown Story

---for Karen---

In color theory brown has an amazing role. Before my study of color, I thought brown was, well, just brown. The color of dirt, of baked bread, of autumn leaves. It is all that and more. Brown is not just one color, but many.

Brown can be made by shading, that is adding black, to yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, and red. Simple enough.

Betty Edwards in her book, Color, uses the humble paper bag to illustrate brown as a mixture of three primaries. Her paper bag starts with a mixture of yellow and red in a two to one ratio to make an orange. She adds a lot of white. Then she adds a little blue and we get the tan of a paper bag. This tan is low in chroma, that is it has less pigment than the color wheel primaries. And it is low in value, that is it is lighter than any of the primaries. So brown can be made with all of the cool colors (blue, green, and violet) as well as the warm colors (yellow, orange, and red).

Tones--gray added to a color-- are many times a brown. If a lot of light gray is added to orange, we get a brown tone called beige. Beige is very low in chroma and very low in value, but still its hue is orange.

Other descriptive words for brown in addition to tan and beige are rust, khaki, ecru (a very light beige), sepia, and umber, just to name a few. Brown has meanings beyond the mixing of colors. Brown can symbolize gloominess and earthiness. Brown in the political arena of the thirties and forties was represented in Hitler's Brown Shirts. Brown is the color of baked bread, roasted meats, coffee and chocolate--very savory indeed. Brown is the color of November as fall slides into the whites and grays of winter.

Brown is one of the English "color words," the eleven elemental words that name colors. Those words are: Red, blue, yellow, green, blue, orange, black, white, gray, pink, and brown. Brown is the Everyman of color, useful and full of paradoxes.

Locked doors and Stonehenge

Traveling and teaching can be quite an adventure. And adventure while traveling and teaching is never what I look for or appreciate at the time.

In September of 1990 while I was living in Denver, I was invited down to Sandia Mountains to teach. I had the good luck to stay with Barbara Scott and her husband, John, in their new and beautiful house in the southeast quadrant of Albuquerque nestled up against the upthrust of Sandia Crest. From their house all of Albuquerque was spread out to the west and south, while the tramway pylons and the trams could be seen to the east. I gave a lecture at the monthly meeting and taught two classes--advanced Hardanger and advanced blackwork. I drove down from Denver that warm late-summer day and arrived at Barb's place late in the afternoon. It was a hot day and my car was without air-conditioning, so I was nicely baked and sweaty upon arrival. After meeting John for the first time (Barbara and I knew each other from various region get-togethers and from being roommates in the 1987 National Seminar), I was shown to the guest room where I settled in. I decided to strip down, have a wash, and lie down to cool off and maybe doze for an hour or so before dinner. I pushed in the door lock, plied my wet washcloth, and lay down. Towards dinner time (we were going out to a local restaurant) I got up, got dressed, and opened the door to my bedroom. Only it wouldn't open. The lock was stuck. I knocked on the door and called for Barbara or John to help me out. No response. I heard the TV on quite loud. I knocked and shouted again. Then I heard the front door open and shut. I kept knocking. Again the front door opened and shut. Finally Barb came to my door. She had been answering the knocking at the front door. Well, John tried fiddling with the lock with no results. Then he told me to crawl out the bedroom window (it faced the front of the house on ground level). My crawling out of any window was ludicrous in anything but an extreme emergency--I am a large woman with a low center of gravity. Finally he decided to take the door off its hinges. That was really the best solution--I didn't want to have to crawl out of the window once, let alone several times in and out during my stay. So I was rescued, but John muttered to me that he didn't know why I had to lock the bedroom door. I had several other minor misadventures on that trip, but that was the one that Barb and I have laughed about over the years.

In 1995 I was teaching at the Denver National Seminar and the electricity for the whole hotel cut out. It turned out that there had been an early morning car accident where the car has crashed into a transformer knocking it out. The lights were out for eighteen hours. Luckily I was teaching in a corner suite with natural light coming in from two directions, so my class, Miss Shirley's Band Sampler, was barely impacted. Other teachers and other classes were not so lucky. In the evening after dark, since I was within five miles of home, I took some people back to the house so we could stitch. Luckily the lights for most of the hotel came back on that night. The next day we all sported T-shirts saying "I was at National Seminar when the lights went out."

Stonehenge

one of the embroideries I did while in England

blackwork, black silk on white linen, 10" X 14"

Wonderful things that have happened while I was traveling and teaching. In England I was hired to give a lecture and teach about blackwork. Just imagine my delight--to actually teach blackwork to the English! I was hired by the West Country Region of the Embroiderers' Guild. The lecture was set in the Salisbury Museum at Salisbury Cathedral. I was in a heavenly daze the whole time. Then the class was the next day and was held in a much more prosaic site. It was a building called the Boy Scout Hut. It was a long building set up for community classes, hardly what I would call a hut. One of the perks of being a teacher (or a tutor as I was called in England) was that lunch was part of my pay. I expect a brown bag with a sandwich, a banana, and a bottle of water, and in point of fact that is very rarely what I get served. This time at one end of the hut, a small table was set up with a cloth, and neat plastic dishes and cups for three. I was expecting the class organizer and her friend to sit with me, but no--two women from the class joined me, Belinda and Jane. The three of us were served an elegant little luncheon by one of the other women and all the rest of the class sat at the other end of the hut eating and talking. The three of us had a pleasant lunch, then we went back to the afternoon session of class. At the end of the day, after everyone was gone but the class organizer and myself, I asked her what was up with the lunch. Well, I had eaten lunch with the Countess of Caernarvon and the Countess of Montecute. I laughed all the way home.

I was in Salisbury quite a bit during our life in England. It was a hub of needlework with Jane Lemon and her group doing the huge needlework tapestries for the altars in the cathedral. But the best thing was that by going about five miles out of my way, I could drive past Stonehenge every time I drove south the Salisbury. One of the great things in my life was seeing Stonehenge at all seasons in all weather with a simple detour on the way to doing things that I love.

Conan & Cerro Grande

I have been lucky in that the last fifteen years or so when I have taught here in the west, Ann Erdmann has been able to come along occasionally. Ann and I have been best friends since the summer of 1957. Her family moved in across the street from my family and the friendship began. Our lives took different turns. She, her husband, and son moved to Cheyenne. My husband, son, and I stayed in Littleton until Mike's profession took us out of Colorado for years. After living in NJ, Utah, a short stint in Colorado again, and then to England, we settled back in Colorado and I started traveling and teaching embroidery. Whenever Ann could, she took off work, left her family in Wyoming, and went with me to exotic locales, like Casper, WY, Littleton, CO, and Los Alamos, NM.

One of the times we were in Los Alamos together, I was teaching a two-day pilot class called Millennium Technology. It was using computers and printers to print images on fabric and then to stitch on them. It was a fun type of class with a lot of bustle and movement. We were lucky to be able to have the class in the offices of a small computer server company. One of the people taking the class and her husband owned Virtual Los Alamos.

Ann and I were staying in Wanda Anderson's house while Wanda and her husband were in Albuquerque looking after their grandkids. I had often stayed with Wanda, so we were well acquainted. While we were there we were to look after her cat, Conan, a big steel- gray neutered tom.

So Ann and I drove to Los Alamos that fine May Friday and tootled up to Wanda's house, watching an ominous-looking smoke cloud in the sky looming over the western sky. The US Forest Service had started a "controlled burn" in the national forest up above Los Alamos a couple of days before. It had been dry and windy, and the burn had gotten a little out of hand. But no one was to worry--the US government was taking care of the situation.

Saturday morning we started the class. We were in the front part of the offices surrounded by computers and computer equipment. The class went well on some levels and not so well on others. Just keeping the equipment running was taking away from my teaching time. On Saturday afternoon after class was let out, Ann and I listened to the news reports--and they were not good. The fire had grown and was spreading, though there was still no danger for Los Alamos. Helicopters and fire bombers were in the area taking their ten of thousands of gallons of water and retardant to the fire. Meanwhile Ann and I took care of Conan, went out to supper with the girls, and had a good night's sleep.

The next morning, Sunday morning, we woke up to the slight smell of smoke in the air. The atmosphere had a bright hazy quality that turned everything a yellowish tint. We turned on the news, but the stations were still saying that Los Alamos was not in danger, that the wind has just shifted the blowing smoke, but we were all going to be just fine. So Ann and I petted Conan, ate some breakfast and went back to class. All that morning all we could talk about was the fire and the smoke that was obscuring half of the sky. At noon, when we went out to lunch, we saw many people standing outside with binoculars and cameras looking west. The planes and helicopters, there seemed to be dozens of them in the sky, continued to drop fire retardant and water on the mountains directly to the west of town. We could see the flames on the crowns of the mountains.

In the afternoon, ash started dropping on the town. We heard it clearly on the metal roof of the building we were in. So far the ash was cool. We continued with the class. Some of the people had good designs that they were stitching on. Ann had an image of a palacio in Venice that she had photographed the year before. She was embellishing that image with colored threads. Very nice. Another woman was working on a scene with a pelican and and a dock, and some others had family pictures. We sat and stitched, smelled the smoke, listened to the planes, and heard the ash fall on the roof.

The class was out at about four-thirty. Several people in the class made a date to meet at 6 to have dinner. Meanwhile we could see higher flames coming down the sides of the mountains definitely traveling east towards us. Aircraft were still rumbling back and forth between the mountains and the airport east of town. It was beginning to get pretty scary. Evacuation plans were starting to be discussed.

When we came out of the restaurant, The Hill Diner, after dinner, the western sky was quite dark with a bloody sun barely glimpsed through the smoke. The air was sometimes choking with the drifting smoke. And alarmingly the noise of the airplanes and helicopters had stopped--it was now too dangerous for them to approach the fires--the winds were whipping along the flame fronts.

Uneasily Ann and I went back to Wanda's house. I was exhausted and the prospect of driving out that evening was not a pleasing one, so we decided to stay as long as we could. Maybe we could drive out in the morning, sticking to our original plans. Besides we had Conan with us. But this was not to be. At seven we got a phone call from a woman I had not met. She said she was a friend of Wanda's and knew we were there at the house. Her husband was head of the one of the evacuation teams and we should leave as soon as we could. Just after the phone call, the TV said that the evacuation of the northeast part of Los Alamos was in progress. That, of course, was where we were. We called Wanda in Albuquerque, ninety miles southeast of Los Alamos. She said that she was on her way back to Los Alamos and we were just to put Conan in a closet, make sure he was comfortable, lock the house, and leave. She would be there in about an hour and a half. So we packed the car--it was now almost dark, called Carole Rinard, our good friend in Los Alamos, to let her know what we were doing, and drove off.

Three thousand people evacuated Los Alamos that night, all from the same area where were were. The lines were long. We had no trouble getting onto Oppenheimer Road, but it took more than half an hour to get down to Trinity Drive where we turn left to leave town. Meanwhile to our right the flames and smoke were an eerie wall and backdrop. Ashes were dropping more steadily than ever.

We finally made the left turn and were heading down Rt. 502, the knife-edge highway--all other routes in (well, the other two) were blocked by the fire. Just as we were getting to the place where there were no buildings on either side of us, there was a pause in the traffic. I had been white-knuckling the steering wheel and my heart rate was high. Just then from the car in front of us, we saw a small flame being thrown out of the window into the underbrush at the side of the road. We gasped and then oddly, we started laughing. It broke the tension. Imagine someone starting a forest fire to the east of Los Alamos the same night--just a careless smoker.

Ann and I drove on down the knife-edge road laughing and carrying on. The flames were whipping at our backs. Smoke was dense in the air. Where the intersection splits off to the north towards Espanola, we were the only car from the thousands on the road to take it that direction. All the rest of the cars headed towards Pojuaque, and on into Santa Fe.

After more adventures trying to find a hotel to stay in Espanola, we wound up at Ohkey Casino and Resort for the night, on the north edge of Espanola. It was pleasant enough. Curiously the desk clerk had heard nothing of the fire or the evacuation of Los Alamos. A strange thing to us. The next morning we got up and headed on north. It was a hazy, sunny, and warm day. The winds were whipping tree tops as we drove on up the Rio Grande towards Taos. Just north of Taos, the weather changed and as we trundled on into Colorado the rains started. We were wet all the way back to Denver.

In the aftermath of the fire, part of Los Alamos was destroyed, The flames came within twelve feet of Wanda's house, obliterating and sterilizing her back yard, but the house held with its tin roof. Conan lived through the evacuation and fire, but died a week or two later, possibly from the stress of the ordeal. I knew several people who lost everything. Now the government no longer calls them controlled burns--they are prescribed burns. And if the wind is high or the vegetation is dry, there are no burns. How sensible.

I never taught the class again--it was too complex for me and too charged with emotions. Ann and I did again meet in Los Alamos where I was teaching last February. The class was again a pilot. We were in an old meeting building right on the edge of one of the mesas that make up the town. Halfway through class, smoke began curling up over the canyon wall. We could see it and smell it. Deja vu all over again. It was nothing--someone burning wood trash below on the canyon floor. There was a fire truck standing by. We were safe. Ann and I smiled at one another and we continued the class.

The Three Kings and JFK

The Three Kings

designer unknown

A blackwork kit done in about 1976, my first attempt at blackwork

Today is the 45th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was a senior in high school, sitting in civics class, when the announcement came over the loud speaker at about 12:45. People were stunned and then some started crying. Classes were dismissed, but the buses were delayed a bit. I can remember it was a dreary cold day of mourning, a day of confusion, and tears. There has been some comment over the Internet about what JFK meant to people, to the nation, to the world. His death three-quarters of a life time ago and its aftermath has certainly become part of who I am and what I do.





This morning as I was thinking about a topic to write about, thinking about JFK and what he left behind, I was reminded of something I spoke about at the PEO meeting I spoke to earlier this week. This might be a far stretch from JFK, but he brought it to mind. I had brought many things to show the group, samplers, finished works of art, half-finished models all of blackwork. Some of this work was in frames, some rolled up and protected by cotton fabric, and some merely folded in a notebook inside plastic page protectors.





One of the women commented that the folded pieces were being damaged just by being folded and put into plastic. She was absolutely right. Some of my stuff I do not expect to last beyond me, for instance, one piece of the Three Kings. I did this kit in the first year I was doing serious needlework. That first year of embroidering, I did as many kits as I did original work. And one of the kits was a multi-colored piece about twenty inches high and about fifteen inches across of gorgeously gowned and gifted wise men. It was my first attempt at blackwork, though I did not realize it at the time. I had done a tree skirt about five years before from a Lee Wards kit of the wise men. That kit was half sewn and half glued. It was full of sequins and plastic jewels. So when I saw this all-embroidered kit I was attracted to it from the very first. The gowns of the wise men were all brightly colored counted patterns in rayon threads. The sleeves and collars were done in crewel. I really loved it--I guess I still do. It was complicated, but not difficult to do for me even though I was a neophyte. Even then I had an affinity to the complexities of blackwork.





The Three Kings I have folded up and stuck in a plastic page protector because I do not think of it as part of the things I will leave behind me. I loved it and it was a wonderful introduction to a type of embroidery that wasn't canvas work which was about all I had done previously. But it is not one of my works. I love it as a reminder of what was, but I do not expect my children and grandchildren to take car e of it and find a place for it in their lives.





It is the framed pieces and rolled that are my own work, done from my own essence and my own spirit that I want to live after me in this world. Not some $12 kit or some half-finished experiment that were just by-products of the process. I will not have the world-wide impact or the many deep emotional ties of some people, but I do want to leave something of myself that is true and bright in my spirit.