trying...

I missed posting last weekend, and very nearly missed posting on this one

events of the world have had me in their grip and while they still do, I am making an effort to look beyond what fills my head and heart and try to spend some time each day on things that are absorbing and also have the capacity to remind me there is still good in the world 

nature does that so beautifully

I have been walking outside again, almost daily... it's a neighbourhood type of walk, through residential streets, alongside farmland, past an elementary school and a short zig-zag through a small park tucked into the middle of an extra-large block... all of these things remind me of the good there is and the children spilling from the school, as children do everywhere, give me hope and a much-needed smile as their chatter fills the air

I'm in the midst of a couple of online classes and I'm working with the same subject in both of them, Marsh Lake, with each course feeding the other even though the work I'm doing in each is quite different

you've seen work from the one with Karen Ruane (Contemporary Embroidery), the little collages...

the other class is hosted by Fibre Arts Take Two and is taught by Tara Axford, a mixed-media artist in Australia

Tara gathers leaves, twigs, flowers and such during her walks near her home, calling them pocket-finds (when I was young we called them pocket treasures) and then she arranges them in wonderful vignettes

the coursework progresses from doing that to colour extraction which is the stage I'm at right now and though all the other class participants whose work I have seen did theirs using apps on their smartphones (the course is mixed media, namely painting and collage), I have started with thread... of course

but I'm getting ahead of myself...

here's my first pocket find - it was still the dead of winter ten days ago, with lots of snow on the ground so all I found was some rosehips from last fall, a fallen bit of evergreen and some birchbark

but when you look closely at things it's amazing the colours you can find...

my sketchbook just arrived so I'll be sticking everything down soon and adding thread numbers

I'm also doing a cloth version of the wraps using my hand-dyed fabrics and tomorrow I'll tackle another  with watercolour paint

I like this all very much but it's rather Christmassy and I want Marsh Lake so I tried again, this time using dried flowers and grasses I picked up north a few years ago

a bit of dried plant from the roadside the other day, a shell from Marsh Lake and a pice of birchbark from here in the Shuswap that has been glued to bit of painted watercolour paper... a tiny pink flower and wild grass, all from the Yukon

these are the colours of the lake... the water, sand, trees, wild roses... they're all here, except the greens

this vignette isn't what the work itself stems from though it will hold influence - in colour, shape and texture

and in the meanwhile...

in Karen's class I've been working with driftwood... thinking of it's journey from living tree to what I hold so gently in my hands

a close-up of one piece yields wonderful marks and texture

I doodled them on paper to get the patterns into my head

and then I doodled them on cloth

they look like ancient writing, which I suppose in a way they are

has the water revealed the story of the wood... or does it write it's own on the once smooth surface after the bark has slipped away?

a bit of paper with French knots... a sprinkling of sand

thinking about driftwood always has me thinking of water so I tried some textural stitching to emulate the ripples of the sand underwater

this first version is on cotton with a silk chiffon laid on top - the cloth is a mottled beige and the silk a blue-gold in the softest, muted colours of lake water

the next one is the same silk chiffon laid on top, the underneath is pale gold silk cloth, again gathered with kantha stitching to create the ripples

next was a dark blue silk chiffon, gathered irregularly with tiny stitches to look like choppy water and tiny bits of lace stitched here and there to look like wave foam

I've stitched that to a small piece of beautiful waxed blue art paper a friend wrapped a gift in

the paper underneath was one I painted last year, a cardboard tube dipped in ink and "pounced" onto the paper... the little dots from all the splatter remind me of sand

lots of small stitch experiments, quickly done to catch the thought... tomorrow I start taking them further

and so I keep on trying

there's a lot of that going on in the world right now