Fiberart for a Cause

My friend and inspirational muse, Virginia Spiegel, has just released an ebook “Art, Nature, Creativity, Life” as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. Many of you may be familiar with Virginia’s Fiberart for a Cause postcard sales at the International Quilt Festivals in Houston and Chicago, and her annual online reverse auction of fiberarts for the same cause.  The ebook is a compilation of years’ worth of her e-newsletters, which I always found to be so inspiring and motivating. Please check out Virginia’s blog (http://www.virginiaspiegel.com/blog/) for information on the ebook and instructions on how to go about ordering your copy.  To date Fiberart for a Cause has raised over $130,000 for the ACS, and Virginia has hopes of adding to that total with sales of the ebook.  Great book – Great cause!

Sister Dream

I firmly believe that sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. Call it the hand of fate, Lady Luck, the finger of God, or a slap from the Universe, but sometimes things just come together and become much greater than the sum of their parts. “Sister Dream”, another of my pieces from the Sisters in Stitches: Sibling Revelry show, is one of those pieces.

This is the very first piece of hand felted wool that I ever made. It was a project that my sister started me on when I was visiting her while she was living in Anchorage AK in the fall of 2004. I had no clue what I was doing, and was not trying for a specific design when I was laying out the wool fibers; I was just laying out colors that I thought looked good together. After what seemed like years of scrubbing with the hot soapy water, when I layed it out flat to dry I was not very impressed with result. A couple of days later, after it had dried (need I mention that it is a very thick piece of felt…), I pinned it up on her design wall for one last look before packing everything to head back to Nebraska. There in the upper right corner, to my surprise, were four heads with white hair.  Thought that was rather interesting, but it was time to pack up so I didn’t do anything with it at that time. And of course when I got back to Nebraska I had a three week backlog of mail and gallery work to catch up on, so this piece went into the box with several other attempts at felt making.

Fast forward to the spring of 2007 when I was working to get things together for the September show opening. I pulled out the box of wool roving, and there on top was this piece. Thinking now in the theme of sisters, it all fell together for me: I have three sisters, it had a dream like quality to it – and Sister Dream was born. The moon was originally a yellow disc, but was needle-felted into a moon because that seemed more appropriate. The horse was also a “happy accident”; I was concentrating hard on the left side trying to find a way to balance out the sisters, and the maroon area looked an awful lot like a horse to me. So I needle-felted on a mane, added some lighter colors around the edges to give it definition, added dresses on the sisters, and it was complete.  Fate – kismet – luck – call it what you will, but it was definitely on my side that day in Alaska!

Sisters in Stitches

It was with a bit of sorrow that DH and I took down the “Sisters in Stitches: Sibling Revelry” at Prairie Winds Art Center last Saturday. I so much enjoyed being in my sister Susan’s first show – she has been my inspiration for quite some time. Thanks again, sis, for coming up from Texas to be in the show – and I’ll bet you didn’t realize how much work it would entail! Practically our entire family showed up for the opening reception, which is no mean feat considering the distances some of our siblings traveled. The only sib not on site was younger brother Bob, who stayed home to be with our mother who had just had shoulder surgery.  With a family as large as mine (7 kids), we were a crowd in and of ourselves and had a wonderful time together.

It was amazing to me that Susan and I created so many pieces that had tree themes, because we did not discuss what we were creating for the show and certainly did not have any kind of a theme.  Our two feature pieces were Susan’s “Sabinal Sunrise” and my “Lovely, Dark and Deep”, and I think they illustrate my point.