Writing Up A Storm

A Wild Baby

Do not fear! This wild baby is in no danger, I promise you! The prongs of the kid's garden rake are securely at rest over the hole in the cinder block. The little baby opossum is hiding underneath.

My husband was sitting in his camping chair in our backyard where he likes to sit in the evening when ~ all of a sudden! ~ he saw this little one and somehow managed to get a photo. The baby opossum must have been dining on the banana peel in our compost pile, for someone has dragged it out from under the compost leaves.

Oh, I do hope we will get to watch him grow up! I will post more photos, if we are lucky enough to get any more. I wonder if opossums become more daring or less daring as they get older?

And isn't he pretty? Such lovely markings. Those beautiful dark ears trimmed with a smoky-white edge, like piping.

Believe!

I thought I might show you how I made this greeting card, or at least the boots part. This is one of my very first fabric-paper cards, and so it has a special place in my heart. I wanted it to be particularly magical. I had already made a dozen versions with various fabrics and colored art paper, but felt something was missing, when I suddenly thought about using gift-wrapping paper instead of the art paper. I found some leftover pieces of this very colorful Christmas gift-wrapping paper, so that is what I used for the girl's boots, the star wand, and her little vest.

Here is a fragment of the Christmas paper. If you look closely, you might be able to see the tiny area I used for her boots. It's been ten years since I made her, and I had to search myself to find her "boots" in this scrap of paper. (I will show you exactly where below if you can't find it.)

Here is the process I used to make the boots.

I already had the girl cut out from a previous art project but she was barefoot, so I laid a small square of tracing paper over her foot and designed a boot in pencil on the tracing paper. Then, using the piece of tracing paper as if it were a special kind of magnifying glass or spying glass, I went searching over the Christmas paper to find a place that would make a good boot.

(Sometimes I will use a clear sheet protector instead of tracing paper to make it easier to see through.)

This is the spot I chose for my boot. I hope you can see it beneath the tracing paper.

Here I have cut out a square of the Christmas paper, stapled it ~ just so ~ to my tracing paper, and begun to cut out the boot.

Now the boot is cut free. As I did the actual cutting, I adjusted the shape of the boot just a little to fit with the printed pattern on the Christmas paper.

I put a paper "lasso" around this spot on the Christmas paper so you can see where the vest came from. The two little stars on the vest are sequins (look below). And the star on the wand is the same star that is on the tops of the boots. The girl's dress is cut from one of the very first calico cotton prints that I ever bought to use for making fabric art.

Before I go any further, I must tell you that I never really know what I am doing. I have no art training of any kind. I cut out my silhouettes and their clothing a hundred times until I simply accidentally cut something that looks just right to me. I can't believe it sometimes when other people can see what I can see in my cutouts. I feel as if I have to explain, the way a small child has to explain a drawing: It's a little girl, see? There's her face, that's her hand, that's her dress, those are her boots. . .

And here she is, all decked out in her magical outfit!

The one thing I like the best about this particular little girl is the way her shoulders look. Without knowing what in the world I was doing, somehow her little shoulders just came shining through for me. I didn't set out to make her shoulders look a certain way, for I wouldn't have had a clue how to do it, but somehow (or so it seems to me) her shoulders have that oh-so-fragile-feisty tilt to them that children's shoulders do so often have. It's the way they look when they walk into your class for the very first time, ready to face right up to whatever kind of stranger you might be.

I find this heart-breaking and breath-taking all at the same time.

How brave little children are! Plunging into a dozen-plus brand-new things every single day. Facing the unknown every time they turn around! Well, I very much wanted this little girl to be fortified with magical boots and a star wand, too. Just in case those little shoulders weren't quite enough.

And if you want to plunge yourself into something brand-new where you might have to face a wolf or two, please go and visit Tollipop, an absolutely amazing blog which often makes mention of wolves, and also violins, rice pudding, a certain Mr. Darcy, a School for Moderately Well-Behaved Young Ladies, and something wonderful called The Hundred Dresses. And if you go here, you will find one Tollipop post that I particularly love as it is dedicated to the word "wolf." I found Tollipop by accident, but I have not been able to stop reading her ever since!

Wülves Running With Wolves

I have long been fascinated with wolves. Perhaps it is because I grew up with wülves. Let me explain. My father was one Hans Hermann Karl Wülf. Not only did he carry the weight of his very German name, he was born in Germany, and even though he immigrated to the United States when he was quite young, nevertheless, he brought with him the whole of his Black Forest, Grimm's fairy tale, Germanic heritage.

If you were raised up by an old-world and old-school German father, then I need say no more. And if you weren't, well, let me just say that my father was A Great Force of Nature. One of my siblings put it very well one day when we were little by saying, "Ooooooh, Daddy is fierce tonight!"

There were four of us, the four Wulf cubs, our mother called us, and we all, more or less, survived our upbringing with The Big Bad Wolf, as I am sorry to say we sometimes called our father, however endearingly. Poor Daddy! He was a good man who worked very hard to make a living for his family but whose children were a great bafflement to him.

My father was among that legion of fathers from his particular time period who simply did not understand their own children. One by one, they threw up their hands over their children, and over other people's children, too, and especially over what the world was coming to. No matter how hard these dear fathers tried, they simply could not fathom the mystery of where their children had come from and where their children were going and why.

Perhaps you yourself know a beloved father like this.

I think it must be a great tribute to my father that wolves have always held such a tender place in my heart.

I often long to break the spell cast by children's fairy tales, the spell that has made the wolf a creature to be feared, although, on the other hand, don't we all secretly love being afraid of the wolf in stories like Little Red Riding Hood? Just look at that wolf peeking out from behind that tree!

The above cover illustration of the old Grimm's fairy tale is by Trina Schart Hyman, one of my very favorite children's picture book artists.

And here is the rough layout of an illustration of my own, showing a wolf and the boy who goes to the woods to find the wolf. This is from a story that I wrote as a precursor to A Far-Fetched Story (see right-hand panel of this blog). For now just imagine that you are about nine years old and you have gone to the woods to find the lone wolf. And there you are, frozen in time at the moment when you both set eyes upon one another.

I wanted to capture the boy in my story in that one moment when he is equally poised to flee or to embrace, and I wanted the wolf to look frightening, for it is wild, and it might be dangerous. The boy cannot be sure if this wolf will know that he, the boy, means no harm. When I was nine years old (and actually even now), I believed that all wild animals would know ~ instinctively! ~ that I meant them no harm, and knowing this, that they would come to me, and eat cookie crumbs from my fingertips.

(Note: You will probably find out that I am often writing about lone wolves, I do love them so.)

And the boy's sister? Here she is. And up to no good, as you can see. Sneaking into a hut in the wilderness, and barefoot. This is definitely a self-portrait, for I lived a huge swath of my life both barefoot and age nine. I think I must have been nine years old for about nine years running. In almost all my childhood memories, I am nine. Or could it be that I only remember that one year. . .

If you look closely, you can just make out that a witch on a broom is flying into the illustration, but the girl cannot see her yet. She has, however, deliberately gone in search of witches. She is hoping ~ and yet dreading! ~ that she will find one.

Here are Hansel and Gretel by Arthur Rackham, another favorite artist of mine. A brother and sister lost in the forest. Under suspicious circumstances. Really, these old tales have a way of putting their finger upon the dark side, don't they?

Well, I for one have spent far too much of my life lost in the forest in one way or another, a wülf-girl running with wolves, and sometimes running from wolves, or plummeting headlong into witches, throwing bread crumbs out of car windows, etc. I have often not had a foothold on my own life. But then I'm not a person who feels that I have to understand everything. I can get along very well with just a glimpse into enchantment, with the tiniest fragment of a fact or a piece of poetry, with the whisper of a wish or the wave of a wand to get me by.

I find that I can cut a wolf out of fabric, give it a star wand to carry with its teeth, add the words "A Guardian Wolf," and, like magic, the fabric wolf will take on a life of its own. And so much so that it will guard me, as if it were real.

If there is such a thing as Jung's collective unconscious or some kind of ancestral memory that we all tap into, then it must have been my father who unwittingly brought all the German fairy tales into his children's lives, and yet, ironically, he was a person who wanted things to make sense. Poor Daddy indeed! It was very hard for him to understand why his children spent their childhoods running wild in the woods behind our house, little wülves running with wolves! And even harder for him to understand why his grown children should have wandered so far off the beaten path. . .

On this Father's Day in 2009, let me take the time to honor my father, and to say that if there is any such thing as closure in the universe, it is my hope for those of us who reach for our fathers across the threshold of A Great Bafflement that we and our fathers will be explained to each other some day, and that the explanation will have the power to bring about the kind of healing that comes from the laying on of hands. From miracles. From grace.

And so, Hans Hermann Karl Wülf, wherever you are up there on your little cloud, Happy Father's Day!!

The Kissing Fence

There is a fence called The Kissing Fence. It lies along an avenue a few blocks from where I live. You can see it here behind these pink coneflowers, a fence of very dark blue wooden slats.

I live in an older neighborhood, my own little kingdom, as I think of it, where 100-year-old trees tower over 100-year-old Victorian houses, wood-frame bungalows, and fairy-tale cottages. If you walk two blocks down this very street, you will come to our little bungalow, where we have lived for some twenty years.

The streets that lie north/south are all avenues, and so my neighborhood is sometimes referred to as "The Avenues." When I go for a walk, I love the thought that I am walking among the avenues.

One of the places I often pass on my walks is this long blue fence. I didn't know this fence had a name until a few weeks ago when I walked here with a friend. She said when her boys were little they had gone to the school in the bungalow that lies just behind the fence. It is a Montessori school with a very fine reputation. Every morning, she said, the children and parents kissed each other over the fence, not to say goodbye, but to send each other off into the world with love.

And so the fence became "The Kissing Fence."

In order to facilitate the kissing at the fence, a long two-step stairway with railings was built on the children's side. Here is a view of both sides: the children's stairway-side inside the playground and the parents' sidewalk-side along the street.

I have seen children and parents kissing and talking over this fence for years, and so I am amazed, and really quite, I don't know, humbled, I guess, by the power of a name, for ever since my friend told me that this fence is called The Kissing Fence, the fence has become mythic to me. Folkloric, poetic, legendary.

My friend put it best when she said, "It is a sacred place."

The wood slats have been painted the most magical shade of blue, a very deep royal-cornflower blue that has been blackened, either by age or antiquing or both, making it look colorful and vintage at the same time.

I want to make a greeting card in honor of The Kissing Fence, and so I have begun to sketch out an idea. The fence is pretty much straight across, but if you look closely at the boards, you can see that they are very slightly castellated at the top.

This is my first sketch. Initially, I used this exaggerated castellated effect, because the straight-across fence feels ~ um ~ too straight across. My first thought was to make it a picket fence, but right away I tossed that out: all those dagger-like points in a row ~ way too dangerous for kissing across! But this castellated effect feels a little menacing, too, like battlements on a castle tower.

My husband (who is an architect, among other things) suggested the rounded tops, like this. Yes, I think this will work very nicely. Well, then. This is a very very very rough sketch, definitely a work-in-progress, but if I put it here for all the world to see (not that anyone in the world knows how to find me here!) perhaps I will be forced, no, let's say inspired, to carry through.

And I've been wondering about all the other portals in the world where this particular kind of kissing takes place every day. Perhaps you have one in your own home or nearby somewhere. The Kissing Door, The Kissing Gate, The Kissing Bus Stop. They must be everywhere, when you think about it.

Well, wherever they are, they are very sacred places.

An Ancient Fire

This is a little old lady who camped next to us one time years ago. It was a very cold winter day. She came all alone to camp in what was at this particular time of the year an almost deserted camping site in The Lost Pines of Texas in Bastrop.

We managed to capture just this one photo of her or we might have thought she was a dream.

I love her white moon coiffure with the little barrette, her pale green jacket, her black-flowered skirt, her rumpled pumpkin-colored socks, and that cloud of smoke she seems to have conjured up with her fire-shovel wand.

She built her little fire, ate her little supper, and slept the night inside her little car. In the early morning hours, she drove away. And how I have wondered and wondered about her ever since! Like Daniel in my last post, was she on her way through the woods in search of coals?

Or did she come to the woods, as we do, to sit before an ancient fire in the forest primeval and commune with the old ones?

I have been drawn to this kind of little old lady all my life. Sometimes I call her a "babushka" from the Russian or Polish word for grandmother or for kerchief. And I often create her myself in my art with a kerchief, or babushka, around her head.

Sometimes I call her a "bag lady," and then I usually picture her in a wool hat with a bobble.

Here is one attempt of mine to capture her in her many layered and patterned glory.

Most of the time I just call her a "little old lady." I have always looked forward to being a little old lady myself (although I am getting glimpses here and there that getting older comes with twinges of pain I would rather go without!)

Whenever I see this little old lady out and about in the world ~ oh! ~ my heart goes out to her, and I cannot completely say why. Maybe I hear her speaking to me, softly, in the words of Yeats:

"I have spread my dreams under your feet,/Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

Or maybe it's because she burns before me like an ancient fire. Yes, I do seem to turn toward the idea of her in my mind as if I could sit before her as before a fire, and be warmed and comforted, and enlightened. . .

Once When I Was Scared

I thought I would talk a little more about this children's picture book, Once When I Was Scared by Helena Clare Pittman and illustrated by Ted Rand, as it is wonderful on so many levels. If you want to give your child the "dark and stormy night" experience with a warm and cozy ending, plus a peek into the past and the importance of fire, plus a wonderful way to conquer fear, this is the perfect book. It's also a story within a story within a story.

There is a present-day boy whom we meet at the end of the story. He is the one who has been listening to grandfather's story.

There is the story of Daniel, the grandfather when he was a boy, making a trek through the woods to get coals.

There is the story that Daniel makes up to help himself conquer the dark and all the dangers lurking in the deep dark woods.

Here is the tin box, all aglow with the coals Daniel has borrowed from a neighbor. Oh my! Nowadays many of us almost do not know anymore how important fire is to our lives.

During storms where I live, we often lose power. Someone's tree in our neighborhood is always falling on a power line. There is a terrible explosion. All the lights go out. We scramble for matches and candles. In my house, we heat and cook by gas, but all the switches are electric. Even so, our power outages have only ever lasted for a few hours at the most. I do know how much worse it has been for others, but I myself have been very lucky this way.

And I have never in my life had to make my way through a woods in the dark, in the middle of a storm, to borrow fire. . .

Here is the cover with a closer look at the boy running through the woods. In the dark, he calls upon the powers of the fox, the bobcat, the eagle, to help him make it through. And there's a feather that plays a part, too.

Here are a few odds and ends for your next night alone in the dark. If you look closely, I did try to arrange seven of those stars to form the Big Dipper, to help you find your way home. The little angel is a candle snuffer with spread wings.

This is all to say that I hope you will try Once When I Was Scared if you haven't already.

If you read this story with a class, you'll usually get a chorus of "I wouldn't have been scared!" or "I've never been scared in my life!" ~ Oh! I love the bravado with which children face the world! ~ But there will always be one very brave little one, the one who sits right at your feet and always keeps his or her fingertips right upon your shoe, who will whisper, "Ms. Cates, I was scared once."

And that's when you wish with all your heart that you had thought to bring feathers, so you could pass out feathers to every single child to take home, just the way the grandfather in the story gave two eagle feathers to his grandson.

And then you think, well, wait, we could make paper feathers, tomorrow!

Terra Incognita

Another rabbit and another storm!

The greeting card above is made from cut-fabric for the waves, and the rabbit and boat are cut out of Canson art paper. I thought I could send this card to someone who was ill or discouraged or disappointed. I loved making those mythic waves. My little rabbit looks so small, trying to weather this great fabric squall.

One of my husband's favorite places in the whole world is the territory marked on maps with the words "terra incognita" and drawings of sea dragons. Here is one of his favorite books (and mine, too!): Mapmaker's Art: Five Centuries of Charting the World by Phillip Allen.

If you look closely in the left-hand corner of the cover, you will see the words Terra and Incognita (with Australis in between).

Magical words, indeed!

As it turns out, my husband wants to be incognito himself inside the inner sanctum of my blog. So I guess for purposes of anonymity I'll just call him L for short. Or when he is off exploring the world, maybe I'll call him Mr. Adventure. Although, on second thought, this would make me Ms. Adventure. Well. Having had a life of misadventures, this does seem appropriate somehow.

My husband is an outward-bound person, and I am inward-bound. His idea of traveling is quite different from mine, but we do both like to venture into the unknown.

 

This is another cover illustration that I love (I can sometimes stand enthralled before the cover of a book ~ for hours ~ before I ever enter into its interior). The back flap of our somewhat battered copy of The Discoverers says that the jacket art is an early 16th century woodcut courtesy of Bettmann Archive.

I love those stars, and that figure climbing right through the starry sky to find yet more clouds and suns beyond.

Daniel Boorstin, author of The Discoverers, wrote this very fine sentence at the end of his Personal Note to the Reader: "The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita ~ unknown territory."

Perhaps my rabbit, rather than weathering misfortune, is simply searching for terra incognita.

Test from iPhone

Kari please delete this. Just trying out iPhone app. L

(This is what happens when you aren't smart enough to set up your own blog and your husband sets it up for you and has the code to get into it and therefore can sabotage it anytime he wants to. From his iPhone, no less! But, still, isn't that the sweetest kitten??)

Take the World by Storm

My banner is a variation on this greeting card above that I made a few years ago: "Take the World by Storm." This card and the banner are part of an on-going project of mine, for I keep finding variations on the theme of storms.

At one time I was going to make hundreds ~ thousands! ~ of handmade greeting cards. My plan was to take a design like this and use many different fabric scraps, so that each card would be unique. I thought I could find a way to make a card that would appeal to everyone's color palette.

 

Here is a version in reds.

But I found out, after a couple of years, that my fingers simply couldn't do this much cutting. Even adhering the fabric to the cards with double-stick tape was problematic. The tape leached the moisture out of my fingertips, causing painful little cracks, like paper cuts, a job hazard that I wasn't expecting. So now I prefer to take my time making one original and then I print color copies from that one version.

But back to taking the world by storm.

I do love storms, although the older I get, the more I worry about our elderly pecan trees falling onto our elderly house. We often have terribly wonderful storms in Texas, the kind with thunder, lightning, and ferocious winds.

Perhaps I wouldn't worry so much if our pecan trees had not already fallen, not on our house ~ yet! ~ but on our garage. Luckily, in spite of the mammoth size of this tree limb, only a few shingles were loosened. Other limbs have fallen into our driveway, into the street, and once across our side fence and just barely grazing our neighbor's rooftop.

When the wind begins to blow, I do begin to worry.

Here's a favorite book of ours, Texas Weather by George W. Bomar. I love the cover illustration by Ed Lindlof. He has drawn four trees in the four corners showing the four seasons, and, in the side borders he added the rising and setting sun, the waxing and waning moon. I love his attention to detail, the feel of an old engraving, and the huge tornado in the shape of Texas.

I live in central Texas on the southern edge of Tornado Alley, but I grew up (for the most part) in northern Texas, where tornados are more frequent. We are now at the end of the tornado season, which goes roughly from March to June, although tornados can occur any time of the year.

Darkening skies and howling winds carry a special warning to people who live between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains in the United States. Even so, I love a story that begins with "It was a dark and stormy night." It draws me in every time.

Once When I Was Scared by Helena Clare Pittman and illustrated by Ted Rand is a wonderful children's picture book for that "dark and stormy night" feeling. Here is a piece of the story from the very first page:

"Don't go wandering, Daniel," she said as she looked uneasily through the curtains at the sky. "It feels like a storm is coming."

Lovely words!!

I was raised on tornados and Grimm's fairy tales and all the old deep dark woods bedtime stories. And sometimes ~ yes, even now! ~ when I go to bed at night, I imagine not just the wind and the rain, but blizzards, too, and sometimes wolves storming at the gates of my windows. I hear their fangs glancing upon my window panes. Really.

So, it's no wonder I thought about writing up a storm!

Still, I was somewhat shocked when I googled "writing up a storm" and saw how many people are using this phrase for newsletters, blogs, titles of workshops, etc. By the time I had thought to do this, my husband had already set up my blog and had even purchased "writing up a storm dot com" for me. I'm actually amazed someone hadn't already acquired it.

Well, I guess I should have googled this phrase before I started my blog. Now that I know how many people are already using the phrase, I've had second, third, and actually several thousand thoughts about using this name for my blog. Maybe I should go with something more unusual? But I don't want to ask my husband to have to do whatever it would take to change the name.

Plus I've already almost finished the banner. . .

Carry Stars in the Dark

 Hi! Well, here is a paper rabbit of mine. In the dark and carrying stars.

A very few weeks ago, I discovered blogs. I have felt like Alice Through The Looking-Glass ever since. It's as if I have stepped through some kind of digital looking-glass into another universe where people from all around the world are sharing their art, their recipes, their patterns, their dreams. It's like an underground network, only it's aboveground. It's in the cloud. The idea that all this internet stuff lives up in The Cloud puts me into a poetic trance.

The fellowship of the cloud!

I am a writer/artist/teacher/homebody type person. I've published two children's picture books, and I love to make fabric-paper greeting cards. But I do from time to time hit the proverbial brick wall. Lately the wall has verged upon the magnitude of the Great Wall of China. I have not been able to get over it or under it or around it or through it.

I even sat myself down and made the brick wall. Out of fabric.
 

 

First I assembled gold and gray art paper, brown-print fabric scraps, and my treasured Gingher scissors.


 

But do you see how uniform and uncompromising this brick wall is? There's not one single chink in it. Just total mathematical precision here. You can see how far away my mind is from allowing things like chinks and crumbling mortar or anything remotely resembling spontaneous combustion to occur.


 

And then I made a little paper gecko ~ we have geckos where I live running around like kindergarteners in our garage ~ and I let him have a go at my brick wall.




The little gecko climbed right up and disappeared over the top.


 

The last time I saw him he was foraging in one of my favorite mugs, searching for coffee and sugar crystals.

And I was still here, facing the brick wall.

So, when I discovered blogs, I thought, hey! maybe I could start my own blog to help me find a way to the other side of the big bad brick wall. My husband is all for any kind of adventure, and he said he would help me. He asked me, "What is your blog name going to be?" and I said "Oh, how about Writing Up A Storm?" If I were just a teeny-tiny bit more confident, I'd have gone with Take the World by Storm, but I'm standing in front of this brick wall.

Anyway, before I knew it, he had this little blog all set up and ready to go. And then I had to actually start writing. Well. Wait a minute, I said to myself. First things first. So I started working on the banner instead, because I do love to cut things out of paper and fabric, especially lightning bolts, boots, and twirling skirts. And, speaking of first things, I'm going to have to learn how to use a camera. Because I have never in my life spent any kind of quality time with a camera.

Let me just end this first post by saying that if I do find a way to write up a storm here, I'm afraid I'm going to be all over the place with my thoughts and my memories and my dreams.

I'm pretty sure this won't be a one-thing-at-a-time affair or even coherent half the time. I won't be following anything remotely akin to proper-paper-writing rules.

I'll just be this person trying to carry stars in the dark.