Writing Up A Storm

Lost: One Paper Girl

I lost my paper girl last week. It happened like this:

First, I decided to make a dragon, but I couldn't find my old paper dragon from years ago. All I could find was this claw-footed tub from an illustration for a children's book I started several years ago and never finished. The tub is made out of white paper, a tiny piece of silver gift-wrapping paper for the faucet, the corner of a terry-cloth washcloth, and tiny scraps of yellow and orange paper for the little duck.

I found the claw-footed tub because I had used the claw feet for the dragon. All of which got me no closer to finding the dragon.

I was forced to design a new dragon from scratch, which has turned out to be a good thing because I am finding some wonderful dragon details I had omitted before, like that arrow-shaped pointy tip on the tail. I had finally sketched the first pencil draft of a new dragon when I realized I wanted the dragon to be of a size that would fit the paper girl. So I went looking for her.

And couldn't find her anywhere.

After I had looked in all the logical places, and then the impossible places, I sat at my desk with that feeling you get when you can't find your wallet. I wondered if I could possibly recreate her so that she would be just the same? I didn't think I could. I didn't even have a hard copy of her, or a tracing.

Could I go running out to my husband with my tearful plea for help? What would 911 say? Would anyone understand how bereft I felt?

She's only six inches tall, I thought. She's too tiny to fend for herself in the real world. I pictured her in the recycle bucket, but it was too terrible a thought to contemplate.

I even tried to hurtle myself through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, but couldn't manage to get out of denial.

Suddenly, I went looking for rabbit, and couldn't find rabbit, either! At least they're together, I thought. But where? where?

Where had I seen them last? It didn't hit me until I realized that Watch the dog was missing, too. Oh, oh! The last time I had seen the paper girl, she and rabbit and Watch were hurrying off into the world.

I lifted the lid of the scanner, and, yes, yes, there they all were!

Oh, I felt the most wonderful sense of reprieve! Never mind that they were all clearly miffed at me. Such tossing of heads and flipping of ears and licking of paws. Such dark glances in my direction!

And I'm afraid this is all to say that I am spending most of my time these days looking for lost things. I have three posts in the making, none of which I have been able to complete because of lost things: one lost book (paperback, thin), one lost pocket doll (one inch tall, pink), one lost dragon (paper, purple), and, most importantly, one lost energy reserve (not sure what it looks like but I want it back).

I know I have slowed down to a snail's pace, but I'm actually very busy looking for things.

Oh, now, wait just a minute! Surely, the glass on my scanner is not so dirty that lying on it for several days straight requires a bath! Or does it? 

Well, I am off to wash the sheets and do the breakfast dishes and clean the glass on the scanner. And then I will continue my search for lost things.

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Walking Into the World

If my paper girl is to go out into the world, I felt she needed to be outfitted with boots and a backpack and the light of the moon. A shadow intruded, like a cloud, in the lower left-hand corner, something I might think about making happen intentionally sometimes, for I like the effect here. She seems to be lifted above the dangers of dark clouds.

"Outfitters" is such a wonderful word, with all its hints and promises of hiking and canoeing and mountaineering. And this makes me think of a Latin proverb that I found somewhere:

"Solvitur ambulando."
or
"The problem is solved by walking around."

I often find this to be true. I always long for the winter months in Austin so that I may walk in order to think more clearly about one thing or another, but the truth is, it is often just cold enough to make long problem-solving walks a little uncomfortable. I find myself hurrying home instead.

But these first days of spring are calling to me to put my boots on, grab my backpack, and take to the avenues (in lieu of the mountains).

So, to encourage long walks, I gave my paper girl a walking stick, too. This one is modeled after the walking stick my mother-in-law Oleta gave me, a very wonderful gnarled old stick which served for years as a favorite prop during story time. (I must take a photo of it!) 

I love the walking stick in Enchanted April and how it got planted into the earth at the end, and sprouted roots, and grew and grew.  (Enchanted April is a gem of a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, and a gem of a movie, too. I have read and watched both many times.)

And I'm quite sure there is a little notebook inside that backpack, for my paper girl will want to take notes. Hmmmmm. Little notebook and pencil. Going on my to-do list this very minute.

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The Journey

Instead of spring cleaning, I have been spring dreaming, spring musing, and spring worrying, which is how I pretty much spend my days any time of year, I'm afraid, dreaming, musing, and worrying. And I've been dwelling on the word "journey" and wondering how it fits into my own life now, for I don't really intend upon setting foot outside my door, with suitcase in hand, to go on a journey anymore, and yet, every day I travel so far afield in my thoughts that I am very sleepy by the time the sun goes down.

I've also been reading a wondrous blog called The Hermitage, in which Rima's travels in a caravan in Scotland and the beginnings of her new life in a 16th century cottage have taken me back to my own flower-child days of wandering about in a Volkswagen camper and of leaving that life and starting over again. This all got me to thinking about how do I continue my own journey now? How, some thirty and forty years later, do I go on "the journey" without setting a foot outside?

And, curiously, I lit upon these piano keys.

I suddenly went from thoughts of nomadic lives to piano keys to Dante to windows to a paper-cut girl to Mary Oliver. It happened so quickly, like dominoes falling, one after the other. It took me by surprise.

If you will bear with me, I would like to tell you how it happened.

"Musical keyboard with 3 octaves," Tobias R, 2006, Wikipedia

These past weeks I've been very worried about where I am going with my art, and even more worried about the lack of any art taking place at all. I keep finding myself lost midway in the journey of my life, walking around in circles.

I've been asking myself:  Should I try to illustrate one of my stories on my blog?

And then I started asking: How can I illustrate my day-to-day life on my blog?

This seems like the more all-encompassing question.

And then, for some unknown reason, this black and white illustration of piano keys suddenly came to my mind. And even though I don't play a piano and I don't own a piano, I thought that I could make those keys out of strips of fabric. Black fabric for the black keys, and colored fabrics for the white keys, with the colors insisting on being arranged from infra-red to ultra-violet.

Hence the fabric piano keys above.

And no sooner had I made these keys than the colored fabric strips let me know that they wanted to hang down like long deep-forest vines. And so I let them, and ~ poof! ~ this enchanted forest dangled itself before my eyes. And there I was, brought full circle to Dante's Divine Comedy again:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

The translation of these words, translator unknown, that I like the best is this: 

"Midway upon the journey of my life
I found myself in a dark wood,
where the right way was lost."

Look here to consider other translations of Dante's first tercet. I didn't see the one above, and I don't remember where I found this version, but I have been circling around these words for years now.

I would say it's been a good twenty-five years since I entered the mid-point of my life's journey. So far, I've been quite lost in this very enchanted and dark wood the whole time, but not really minding it that much. 

Here the piano-key woods began to tangle up, and to dance and prance around a little.

Here a great wind has begun to blow. It's been very windy here today, the kind of wind that howls and prowls and growls around houses at any time of year where I live.

I think it was the wind blowing these fabric strips sideways like this that made me think about windows.

I wondered if I could make a window out of paper, and it seems that I could, although it needs some work on its frame and its sill. It's the little window latch that lets you know it's a window. Something as small as a window latch can give meaning to five otherwise meaningless strips of paper.

And when I had the window in hand (it measures about 12 x 9 inches), I felt as if I had turned a metaphorical corner and could see a path in the woods that I couldn't see before.

Often, when I sit in my boxroom inside the fragile walls of this old house that I live in, I imagine that I am in some faraway forest fastness. The world outside becomes pathless, mountainous, aerial. If I should peek out my window, I feel that I might see the tangled forest of the hundred-years' spell, or the clouds that surround a monastic dwelling perched upon a lonely mountainside.

If I looked outside, I might see another world.

The piano keys became the vines, and the vines became the curtains, and the curtains fit so perfectly upon this window into other worlds. It happened so quickly.

Once I had this larger tableau to work with, the girl below just walked right into the setting, as if it had been created just for her.

She's about 5 and 1/2 inches tall. She comes from thousands of pages of stories that I have written. She's somewhere between nine and twelve years old, and her name is Lolly, Lilka, Ivy, Evangeline, Yulie, Kit, Sukie, Rusalka. This one might be Rusalka, for Rusalka means "wood sprite," and she does seem to have walked right out of the woods.

I like how the camera picked up the shadows of her fingers and toes, for I could not get her to stand still for her picture.

Here she is, grabbing hold of the curtains, and getting ready to plunge into the world between those long floating strips of fabric. I feel as if nothing can stop her.

And this is where I find my own self plunging into "The Journey" by Mary Oliver:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.

"Mend your life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

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And my little paper girl is suddenly older than I thought, or maybe ageless. And I, too, seem to be neither old nor young, just a woman on a journey. I don't know what any of this will lead to, but this is what I did instead of cleaning during my spring-cleaning break.

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P.S. It was very strange to be gone from the blogging world for so long. It felt a little lonely, as if I were cut off from the whole world, the way you feel when your electricity is out, and you have to light candles in the dark.

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The Embrace

This is an illustration I began about ten years ago, and by "ten years ago," I usually mean any time between 1990 and now. I've decided that my inability to put things in their proper place on a time line is not a memory problem, it's because events in my mind are not organized in sequence, instead they are disorganized in some other way. But I think my memories are still all in tact, they're just waiting to be found when I open the right drawer, peek into the right cookie jar, peer into the right wishing well, lift the right shingle, or leaf, or log.

I found this illustration thumbtacked into a very far corner of my boxroom, half-hidden by a bookcase and a curtain and a stash of cardboard. It has been gathering dust, literally, for about ten years. I blew on it, and waved it around a little, and smoothed it out, and pressed the feet back down.

And I've been thinking about it.

It might be where I want to go. I've been calling it "The Embrace," for lack of another name, and it occurred to me as I write this that there really is no other name so perfect for it.

It's embracing me a little, or perhaps trying to brace me for putting on my boots and heading out into the big wild world, perchance to have a little walk and talk with the wolves, or the owls, or the moon. 

The silhouettes are black art paper, and the dresses are calico prints. I really do love to pair paper and fabric like this, especially when I am trying to illustrate an idea that is originally in words. This one came about when trying to illustrate the greeting between an aunt and a niece who love one another. But it might be a mother and daughter, or a teacher and student.

Which reminds me why I loved teaching the little ones, for I find that educating and embracing go together in the most wonderful way.

In other news, The Great 2010 Austin Snowfall took place this past week, and I have a photo to prove it. And as this photo arrived on site here, I was so surprised to see how it matched "The Embrace" ~ the red dress and green dress and white background so perfectly match the red and green and white of "Snowflakes Among the Nandina Bushes."

Those of you from the colder climes would have laughed at our antics over this tiny little handful of snow. For three hours my husband and I were running back and forth, calling out to each other:

"Come quick! Look! Hurry!"
"Omigosh, it's snowing!"
"It's stopped!"
"It's started again!"
"It's still snowing!"
"It's really really snowing!"

We went walking in it. We went twirling in it. We held up our arms to the snow god. Sometimes the flakes were huge, and we could track them falling from the clouds. And then, by dusk, it was all over. A short and sweet embrace.

And I've been thinking about how quickly an embrace can fulfill a longing. Or erase a separation, a misunderstanding, a lonely heart. How much peace, I wonder, can one embrace leave behind? And just think what the whole world can do by embracing all who are in need . . .

So, okay, I think I'll start with "The Embrace" and see where it takes me.

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The Sawdust Doll

There is a very odd stuffed doll who watches me by day and by night from a high place in my boxroom. A guardian angel of a doll. She perches on top of one of the library bookshelves beside the clock that used to hang in my classroom. I made her when I was 22 years old. I was in graduate school in creative writing, and I was writing a very odd piece of writing about the birth of a doll.

So I decided to give birth to one.

I will call her the sawdust doll because when I first made her, I made her out of sawdust. I wanted a real sawdust doll, just like in the olden days.

I didn't have a car, so I had to walk or ride the bus to get all the supplies for her: the sawdust, the fabric, the acrylic paint for her face.

I bought a bag of sawdust at a hardware store downtown and brought it back to my rent house on the bus. I don't have any sawdust on hand for a photo, but the tray in my pencil sharpener was full of shavings, and these will have to be close enough for today.

How lovingly I filled her little body with these golden powdery particles!

And how shocked I was to discover, one by one by one, the realities of a sawdust doll:

First, she was almost as hard as a block of wood. Second, tiny little bits and pieces of sawdust flakes stuck through the fabric like so many teeny-tiny needles. And, third, she sifted everywhere. Little telltale trails of golden dust wafted behind her, as if she were afraid of getting lost and wanted tracks to follow to find her way back.

Who knew?

So I gave birth to her all over again, and this time I stuffed her with cotton batting.

She is exactly as tall as a yardstick, from the tip of her sunburst hair to the tips her red-painted toes. The exact height of a two-year old child. And overnight I decided that I would make a living selling dolls, not her, of course, but dolls like her. So I took her to Dallas to Nieman-Marcus, of all places. I carried her in my arms up the escalator, and I actually met with one of the Marcuses, a son or grandson, perhaps, a very nice man who listened politely to my marvelous idea.

But then he showed me a very pink stuffed doll with yellow yarn hair that they were selling for $25. He seemed to think that I would understand that no one in their right mind would prefer my doll to their doll.

And then he put the matter in different terms. If they were to sell my doll, which they couldn't on account of people preferring the pink doll, they would give me half of the $25, or $12.50, from which I must subtract the cost of materials, leaving me with, I don't know, maybe $2.50. And if it took me a week of hard labor to make one doll, I could hope to make $10 per month selling dolls.

He really didn't think I could live on $10 a month.

You might have thought I would have been discouraged. But not really. I was so sure, you see, that I could make a living as a writer, instead.

In my story that I was writing, the doll was born "in the greening" of a pond. My story doll was stuffed with pond grasses and the dried petals of flowers. This is a photo of the kind of pond I had in mind, Moses and the bulrushes, perhaps. 

When I went to pick out colors for the doll, I only remember that the fabric for her body had to be blue-flowered. I wanted my doll to be neither white nor black nor brown, and certainly not pink.

The fabric for the dress, I have long thought, was simply chosen to match the blue of the doll.

But now I see that the dress is the color of a pond! I wonder if I was aware of this at the time? I only just today, in gathering photos together, remembered this photo (above) of a nearby pond. In pairing it with the photo of the dress fabric, I'm so surprised at the matching colors.

I made an "A" on my rather lengthy prose-poem of a story, but, honestly, my professor should really have sat me down and had a little talk about character development and plot and the advisability of actually making sense.

Well, the story is long-lost, but the doll has lived a very colorful life as a witness to and a courier of secrets.

She has been dragged all over the country and back for some 44 years. For the first ten years of her life she served as a kind of piggy bank, for I tried to keep a hundred dollars hidden inside her. I ripped an opening into a side seam, and kept tucking money inside her, then taking it out, then putting it back. This was not mad money, but rather "last resort" money. I was sure that a hundred dollars was enough money to get me safely home from wherever I might be.

But where was home??

I didn't really know where home was for the longest time. This doll was my home, my writing was my home.

 

Her face is a mystery to me. I would never have designed this particular cartoon face on my own. It came about by accident, for bending over her blue-flowered face, I painted an oval of yellow flowers, the sun and the sky, I was thinking, and I let the blue sky come through her eyes, I gave her a smile, but there is a trail of black tears from her eyes to the tips of her smile, black-painted flower tears, with red-painted roses in her cheeks. 

And when I stood back to survey my work, I saw only painted flowers afloat in a blue-flowered sky.

She is like a character in a work of fiction who takes on a persona that you never intended. Her all-knowing cartoonish expression has been the strangest comfort to me in the most terrible of times. It is hard to be completely distraught in the face of her wide-eyed smiley countenance.

I have posed her above in the wilds of our backyard, the "sawdust" doll on an old sawhorse. Isn't she jaunty, with her legs crossed like that, and her head tilted in that flirtatious manner? And, oh my goodness, that plunging neckline! How risque!

I might let her wander the house today before I put her back on her shelf. I might let her peek into my computer and see what the world has been up to of late.

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A Frayed Frame

After gazing lovingly and long at Spirit Cloth's inaugural flag here, I decided to begin a frame (of sorts) for Tatiana out of torn fabric. (You can read more about Tatiana here.)

I chose fabric scraps that were black and white, with a touch of red, and laid them out on a white cloth. This is very much a sandpainting type of fabric painting, for a whiff of wind would surely blow all these little pieces to the ends of the earth.

I'm afraid I rather like it this way, this evanescent, ephemeral quality. I did put three quilt pins here and there to anchor these scraps a little, but needle and thread are very far away. I don't know why, to tell you the truth. Maybe it's because Tatiana is made out of paper and doesn't want any needles making their way toward her.

The white cloth that I am using (temporarily) for my background is a dish towel hemmed by hand by my grandmother. I tried to capture the million little stitches in this hem, but I couldn't get my camera to see them. The hem is 1/8 of an inch, so tiny.

My grandmother had a little Singer sewing machine all the years that I knew her (this wonderful machine is mine now and I often use it, mainly to repair things). I wonder if she made these dish towels before she got her machine, or if she simply liked to make these little stitches, stitch, stitch, stitch, while sitting in front of her fireplace on a winter's night. 

She was such a tiny little person, quick as lightning, always busy as a bee.

I thought I'd show you where I am usually to be found, in the room we call the "boxroom."

This is the view from across my art table: two black filing cabinets, one on top of the other, and three library bookcases (the third one on the far right is out of view here). These bookcases were long ago Christmas gifts from my husband, very large gifts of love, for he had to assemble all of them (and there are two more behind me, and two more in our dining room).

In the corner between the filing cabinet and the first bookshelf is a stuffed raccoon, in case you are wondering what that is.

This is where I sit to write my blog or read. Behind me is a door, and a blanket is currently hanging over the door to ward off winter drafts.

There's a place for our cat Boo to sit beside me but you can't see it here. He likes to hide and it is a very hidden place.

This is why it is called the boxroom.

There are more boxes than this surrounding me, but this might be enough to show you for today. When we first moved into our little house, about twenty years ago, this is the room where everything in boxes went. Some of the boxes never quite got unpacked. 

We live in a two bedroom house: the master bedroom and the boxroom. Since my husband uses the garage for his workroom, I got to have "a boxroom of my own." Overnight guests, I'm afraid, have to sleep on an airbed on the floor in the living room.

This is the window facing the front porch. Small stuffed animals and birds hang in strands down the curtain, turtles on the far left, then peace doves, then elephants, peace doves, peace doves. Most of these were gifts from New Mexico, brought back to me by my husband from his many years of flying his hot-air balloon in the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

I see that the elephants have managed to push the curtains open a crack to have a peek outside.

This room is very small, a little cave of a room. I feel quite safe in it. I usually feel wrapped up in its storybook quirkiness, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the clutter of too many things. Spring cleaning is very high on my To Do List, but (sigh) spring in Texas is just a blink. So easy to miss it.

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Laundry

This is fresh, clean laundry, towels, pillowcases, a small green throw. I wish I could tell you I had just pulled them down off the clothesline, but no, alas, I cannot. These were dried in the dryer. But I do have a clothesline and I promise to start using it. I got my first washer and dryer of my own when we moved into this old house twenty years ago. This means I have spent some twenty-five years, starting with college, going to laundromats, so having a washer-dryer is, even today, an amazing luxury for me.

Before college, when I was growing up, we had no dryer, only a washing machine and a set of rollers, called a wringer, that you squeezed the clothing through to get the water out. With four kids and two adults, there was hardly a day when a load of laundry was not pegged on the clothesline in the backyard.

It was my job when I came home from school to bring in the laundry. I never minded. I loved wandering among the sheets and towels and dresses and jeans. I loved reaching up and undoing the clothespins, feeling the sun-dried laundry tumble down through my hands into the basket waiting below.

It was very cold yesterday when I took my laundry out to take a photo. We had two nights of 19 degrees. Every plant and bush and faucet in our yard is draped in what my husband calls our "yard linens." We look very quiet and very muffled up. The Central Texas version of the snowman, I guess!

We dripped all of our faucets Friday and Saturday nights, I put extra rugs down in my boxroom, and hung a blanket over the door near the chair where I sit to write this little blog. And we put rolled towels along all the door sills, too, to ward off the cold of winter.

On Friday afternoon there was a wind blizzard outside, howling and prowling and growling around this old house, trying to get inside!

The first story that I ever had published (A Far-Fetched Story) came about because I was sitting in my old loveseat, thinking, and a vision of clothes on a clothesline came to me. I wondered what, exactly, had happened to each piece of clothing to cause it to end up in a scrap basket and, ultimately, become part of a quilt. Did some ordinary wear-and-tear take place, or had something else happened, something more . . . far-fetched?

The image above is a rough draft of my idea for the cover, showing all the family's clothing on a line. The color copier that I copied the original on, years ago, added that curious bit of blue, but I like it because of its hint of the sky.

Here are all the ravaged and frayed clothes, the frazzled remains, piled high into the "great-great-grandmother's" scrap basket. She is the grandmother in the story, without all the "greats," but I love the image in my mind that the words "great-great-grandmother" bring to me. They take me back, back, back to my own beginnings, long ago and far away.

I love to go back farther than living memory can possibly take me. But I also love to go back to the summers I spent with my own little grandmother in a very small town in northwestern Illinois. We pegged out the laundry and took it down together.

And she had something else in her basement: a terrifying and terrifyingly hot machine called a mangle, with an enormous roller around which she rolled all her sheets and pillowcases, tablecloths and napkins, towels and dishcloths, to iron them flat, like a steamroller. She let me stand and watch her operate the mangle, with many murmurings about not ever touching it. Lovely to feel so safe in her big scary basement.

Lovely to be nine years old with my sweet little grandmother!

This is my latest version of Tatiana, and I'm no longer sure if this is the little third-grader I had in my classroom, or if this is myself, age nine years old. I think the two little girls have become one little girl!

It turns out that Tatiana, from last week's posts, did not like the polka-dotted tissue-paper outfit. She decided she much preferred the little black silhouette look, instead. So I am pondering this new look for her for now. She is composed of seven little art-paper pieces: her body, face, hair, top, skirt, and two boots. All double-stick-taped together. She is five inches tall.

I have always loved black silhouette drawings, so this feels very much "at home" to me, for want of a better phrase. I have surprised myself by circling back to where I was years and years ago when I made my first drawing in black india ink on a piece of white bristol paper.

It is like being back in my birthplace.

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A Guardian Angel

My guardian angel card was the hardest for me to design of all the guardians. I wanted the angel to have the same look as all my other guardians, which you can find here: the guardian babushka, bag lady, scarecrow, and gypsy, but I found it almost impossible to find the right fabric for her dress, her apron, her star, her wings, her halo. I tried dozens, maybe hundreds, of combinations before I chanced upon this one above and decided it was the best one ~ so far. For I am still looking for my angel.

It may be that finding one's own angel is a lifetime pursuit!

My childhood image of an angel is of an overwhelmingly kind spirit who comes like a light in the dark and says, "Fear not."  And as I have grown older, I'm not sure that my idea of an angel is really any different. In writing this, I thought first that my idea of God had become a much larger and more complicated idea from my childhood idea of God, but then I had to admit to myself that in a crisis I become so quickly a child again, and my prayer is almost always, "Dear God, please help me." Our childhood ideas about God and angels are probably more powerful than we sometimes realize.

"The angels keep their ancient places ~ ~
Turn but a stone and start a wing!"

I have always loved these lines of poetry by Francis Thompson. I often think of them when I am out and about, walking in the world, and yet I am quite sure that I can start a wing by lifting a cup just as easily, by drawing a curtain or stirring a pot or turning a page.

The fabric that I used for my angel is cotton with a whimsical, childlike pattern of bright stars. I have only five small pieces left, each piece about the size of a sheet of typing paper.

I bought most of my fabric about ten years ago when I was first making handmade greeting cards. I cut all of the fabric into pieces that fit into file folders, and sorted everything by color into blue, red, green, yellow, orange, purple, maroon, and black folders. And then I have a few boxes of mixed scraps, a box of burlap, and a box of felt.

 

The apron came from one of my scrap boxes, and these were scraps that my mother-in-law Oleta donated to me for my cards, from a dress of hers, I think. These pieces are a see-through organdy fabric, very angelic indeed. I really need to make an angel out of these pieces alone someday, for I love the translucent apron that came from this one little piece of flowered gauze or gossamer. It is diaphanous, a word I sometimes see in print but tend to never use myself.

I love how the colors of the apron are deepened by the starry blue cotton underneath. It makes me think of how rich the layered-look really is, when colors from one layer seep into another.

 

I would like to add my guardian angel to Tollipop's Hundred Dresses project. And here is my wish that we will all find our very own angels, if we haven't already, for I understand that all we need to do is but turn and start a wing!

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Stars and Clouds

I drew "Stars and Clouds" during this same period, about 1979, when I was very much interested in M.C. Escher and also anything in a black silhouette. This was originally drawn in black ink and later printed as a card in brown ink.

I loved trying to trick the eye with this sleight of hand, an enormous billowing world of both stars and clouds above this tiny little house, with its two tall cemetery pine trees and its swirls of art nouveau smoke, its little fence and mailbox on some lonesome landscape, where a falling star has landed like a space ship.

A friend of mine used this image for her wedding card (in blue ink) and I was so touched and so surprised, too, for I had not once thought of this as a wedding, but she made me look at those stars and clouds and that little house in a different way.

Here is one image that I was studying so intently in 1979: "Sky and Water" by Escher. Oh, how I loved how the silhouettes of the geese become more and more defined as they rise up to the sky above the fish in the water, the whole of evolution, our lifting off into flight, and the interlocking, inter-dependence of our world, the oneness of it all, and more, all captured in this one woodcut.

As the white fish ascend, they become the white sky, and as the black geese descend, they become the black water. This one incredible drawing made my mind go round and round, for it seemed to me to be a visual poem without end, one thing becoming the element in which the other lived, and vice versa.

And again it had that jigsaw puzzle element that was beginning to take hold in my mind: my growing desire to lift the pieces of a drawing off the page with my fingertips and move the pieces around at will. This was when I first began to cut things out of Canson black art paper.

The black paper led me to all the colored art papers, some with textures. Soon, I began cutting into gift-wrapping paper, but it would be about 15 more years before I would suddenly reach for a piece of fabric and think to myself, "Wait! I could cut a miniature dress out of fabric and hang it on a clothesline ~ like this!" 

In writing this post, I went looking through WikiCommons, searching for a painting of a lone house sitting beneath a big sky. And I found this painting and got stopped in my tracks. It was painted before 1917 by Serhiy Vasylkivskiy, a Ukrainian artist. I haven't been able to find out anything more about the painter or the painting, so I'm not quite sure what it is.

I see a windmill in some vast hinterland, with the hint of other windmills far away, disappearing at the horizon line the way ships disappear as they float over the curve of the earth, passing out of our sight. I think I like my oceanic interpretation of this painting and how these windmill ships remind me of the ships that dared to cross the ocean in search of the East but finding the Americas instead. How brave those men were!

How brave are those who go to war in search of peace and those who don't go to war in search of peace. And so, from stars and clouds, to sky and water, to windmills and ships, I find myself brought round and round and round from a greeting card I made in 1979 to Veteran's Day in 2009.

All of a sudden, I am sitting here with bowed head before all the men and women who have given up their lives to make the world safe, and I hope for the day when such sacrifices will never be asked of anyone again, when humankind will have found a peaceful way to solves all its differences, for we are as interlocked inside this universe as an Escher drawing, and surely, surely, we can find a way to see inside each other's hearts, being so entwined as we are.

I might rename my old drawing: "the falling of the stars in the clouds of war and peace."

.

The Musicians

Curiously, because I am wanting to delve into frayed edges and torn paper and loose threads and all things raggedy and tattered, I find myself looking at my old pen and ink drawings instead, to see where I was thirty years ago in order to understand where I am going next, perhaps.

I loved omitting the instruments here, and the shoes, too. Trying to let the barefooted essence of something have its place, I suppose. I copied these horizontal lines from a piece of blank sheet music, using my makeshift light table, and somehow the lines became the stringed instruments themselves. Honestly, I don't really understand my drawing, except in feeling that I have "deepened the mystery," as Francis Bacon says it is the job of the artist to do. Maybe it's a visual haiku:

Two musicians
making the sounds of music
without a sound.

When I was looking up everything gypsy for my guardian gypsy post, I came across a piece of music called "Wraggle, Taggle Gypsies, O!" You should be able to hear it if you click on the title (above). I very much love this little piece of music. It seems to link my barefooted and yet so stylized and spellbound musicians of 1979 with my lifelong longings for tattered and torn rags blowing in the wind.

I wonder if the almost mathematical precision that I tried to apply to these pen and ink drawings came about because I was trying so hard to set my feet upon steadfast ground after my ten years of wandering hither and yon and back again.

Wait. I do remember now that I sometimes saw my two musicians as a couple making their own private music together without the need of instruments or notes or sound . . .

Two people
making the sounds of harmony
soundlessly.

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Rabbit

My first forays into art were with pen and ink. "Rabbit" was among my first creations, and I did love drawing this rabbit in an impossible position among my books, candle, salt-and-pepper shakers, cup, and bottle of flowers. The original is in black and white, but this is a little card I had printed in brown ink. The white of these old cards has faded after some 30 years have passed, and the edges look singed with fire.

I have set this old card against a piece of fabric with an autumnal print. Those falling leaves and the apparition of a rabbit seem to go together. I find this time of year mystical beyond words, full of hauntings and ghosts. I love to walk in these cloudier, rainier, colder days we are having. This weekend there was an early morning fog ~ lovely, lovely!

My first pen-and-ink drawings were all extremely stylized, very prim and proper. I drew them all in pencil and then copied them in ink with a light-table that I had made by using an old dish drainer filled with nightlight bulbs and covered with a clear plastic cutting board ~ very makeshift, but it works and I still use it sometimes.

It was from my desire to manipulate the pieces of my drawings with my fingers, to lift the candle on this shelf and put it at the other end, rearrange the salt-and-pepper shakers, move things around like pieces of a puzzle, that I first began to think about cutting everything out of paper instead of using ink.

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A Guardian Gypsy

This is a brand-new version of my guardian gypsy, made from long thin strips of rags, blowing in the wind. I will show you the older version below. I kept her turban-like scarf and the wand, although here the wand has a different star.

The crystal ball is new. I had to try out several marbles to find one that would photograph well enough to use. I have a clear glass marble that looks like the perfect crystal ball but it refuses to photograph as anything that remotely resembles clear glass, so this white marble with its cloudy insides was the next best choice. This gypsy has paper hands, and I was able to fold the paper to hold the marble in place.

Her halter top is three short pieces of ribbon with three tiny bells hanging from the waistband. A red "gem" is glued to her kerchief. And I added the little pointy parts of her garment at her waist to give her an extra layer of fabric that was like an apron but not an apron.

The sleeves and bodice of her dress are cut from this fabric, which is the same fabric I used in my header for my blog. It is such a magical fabric and so very kaleidoscopic! It varies from sharp color edges to a blur of color, and seems to me to capture a kind of gypsy evanescence: now you see me, now you don't. For is that not what we think of as a special gypsy quality? The ability to disappear into who knows where right before our eyes. The kind of person who slips away before we have even managed to get their name . . .

I hope with all my heart that it is not politically-incorrect to wax romantic and poetic over gypsies!

My gypsy above isn't quite finished yet. I have laid her upon a piece of gray construction paper, and am still thinking about her. I thought my idea to make her skirt out of those strips of rags was my idea, but then I remembered where it came from.

This is a rag doll that my mother-in-law Oleta made and gave to me years ago. Isn't she the most wonderful old-fashioned doll? This is the kind of doll that children grew up with during the Depression days and back, back, back to the 1800s, in the wild west, on the prairies, in the deep south, in little hamlets in the mountains, and back before then, too.

She is made entirely of strips of rags and tied with string at her wrists, her neck, and her waist. No, wait!

Oleta, I just looked closer and the "string" is actually a tiny strip of the cloth that borders the top and bottom edge of a bolt of cloth. I don't know what that edge is called. So, anyway, she is entirely made of fabric torn into strips. No sewing, no safety pins. With a little torn triangle of cloth for her kerchief. So incredibly simple and sweet!

Here is my earlier version of a guardian gypsy. I love her, too, but she does lack that "rags blowing in the wind" quality of the new one. She has a vine of stars and I managed to keep the new crystal ball from rolling off her mittened-hand just long enough to take this photo.

I do love that very dark flowered-forest fabric. It makes me want to find a way into that forest, to push those flowering vines to one side, and step into the deep dark heart of its interior. I suppose I want to find the clearing where the gypsies are staying for the night, where their caravans are encircled around a campfire and their folksong encircles the darkness.

Anyway, I submit my gypsy guardian as a part of The Hundred Somethings Project that Tollipop started. And her idea came, in part, from this book:

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes seems like a perfect book to put here among the gypsies, for it is about understanding people who are different from us ~ before it is too late. It is a poignant story for children, a Newbery Honor Book, 80 pages, available in paperback, and illustrated by Louis Slobodkin with such gently-colored little sketches. The back of the book says "Ages 6 to 10." (I first read this book when I was in my forties and I loved it, so I'm not sure about those ages.)

I did not use this book with my classes, but it was always on my ever-growing list of "Absolutely Wonderful Books to Read Aloud With Children." Alas, I just never got to it. Oh, if only there were time enough for everything!

Anyway, today, I give you my guardian gypsy. Here are the words I wrote for her some ten years ago:

Your guardian gypsy knows
how to foretell the most wonderful fortune for you.
She will clothe you in sparkly fabric
into which little bells have been sewn.
She will set your feet to dancing.
She will surround you with music and folksong,
bright campfires,
and the influence of the stars.
She will teach you to look into the future
with joy.
Then she will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.
.

May a guardian gypsy steal out of her flowered forest and work her magic ways upon your past, your present, and your future ~ for who knows how far the influence of the stars can reach??

.

Edited to add: I just this minute realized one thing that is missing from my gypsy made of rags: there is not one single strip of a blue rag in her skirt to match the blues in her sleeves, face, hands. She needs three or four strips of blue mixed in with all those other colors. Working on it right away!

A Guardian Scarecrow

I feel in the need of guardians again. I do know they are all around us, all the time. But sometimes they seem to be wearing way too many layers of invisible cloaks. I wish they'd take them off every now and then.

Anyway, September seems to me like the perfect month for having a guardian scarecrow hovering around. I know they are supposed to be watching over new little seedlings, so I guess that's why it seems as if they should be more of a spring and summer guardian, but for some reason I always think of scarecrows in relation to autumn instead. Maybe it's because of all those autumn-harvest crops that I love so much, like pumpkins, for example.

The stars encircling my guardian scarecrow are cut-paper, the vine is green thread, and I made the hat out of a straw hat that I found at the Goodwill. I found two hats, actually, one for the scarecrow in my garden and one to use to make miniature straw hats, or baskets, for my cards.

Here is what is left of the hat I use for my cards. It is slowly being devoured by miniature scarecrows in need of hats, or miniature ladies in need of baskets.

The way I make a miniature hat is to plaster a small portion of the back of this hat above with clear tape. Then I cut out the crown of the hat and the brim, each one separately. I tape the crown and brim together from the back, and then, when I'm ready, I use double-stick tape to fix the hat in place on top of the scarecrow.

As you can see, a piece here and there of the straw is coming loose. And I'm starting to like that. I've been painstaking in trying to make each little part so perfect, cutting off every loose thread, etc.

But I'm changing my mind about all of that. I think I should leave the loose ends and all the loose threads in place. I'm going to start letting that happen, and not just in my art. In my life, too. I'm thinking I might just have to let more things fall apart. Do you know what I mean? Maybe we're not always supposed to try to hold everything together.

Anyway, here's an outdoor scarecrow of mine from a few years ago:

This is where the other hat went. And speaking of falling-apart, that is the fate of scarecrows, isn't it? In fact, the more tattered and shredded and shabby that they become, the more perfect scarecrows they become, being more perfectly scary with every magnification of the "frayed and frazzled" look.

I really liked this jaunty scarecrow, all purple and red, with bright Mardi Gras necklaces around her neck.

Her clothing and hat ultimately disintegrated, but those Mardi Gras necklaces were almost indestructible. They never lost their color, and I think they would have lasted forever if the tiny threads that connected them hadn't finally deteriorated.

Here's the big outdoor hat up close. Those are silk flowers from a hobby store and they keep their color forever, too. Or maybe they're plastic. I really don't know for sure. The metal bells are hung with brown twine from the inside of the hat, to look like earrings. I thought these bells would jingle in the wind, but I guess it would take a hurricane-force gale to make them ring. Even so, they hang in such a lovely, calm, metallic silence.

Can you see that portion of a safety pin in the red apron at the bottom of this photo? I don't sew ~ I "safety-pin." Really, I'm often walking around in public wearing something or other that is safety-pinned to keep a hem from dragging or a seam from gaping open.

But back to the hat.

The hat itself has to be nailed to the central post in three places: one nail right on top of the crown, and then two nails, back and front, to make the brim stay down. Otherwise, from the street, you can't really see the brim at all. You lose the whole effect of the straw hat. It just becomes a horizontal line with a little bump where the crown is.

By forcing the brim down, you can see the straw hat in its full glory.

I showed you this scarecrow before, but I'm very partial to her in the same way that, if you're a writer, your favorite story is always the one you're working on. This is my favorite scarecrow because she's the one guarding the garden now. I really love this scarecrow!

Only the wooden frame, the old garden gloves, and the bells survived from the older one. I had to find yet another hat at Goodwill for her, because the one from that purple and red scarecrow just fell apart, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, straw to weathered-straw fragments, flakes, and powder.

This time I made her a necklace out of fabric remnants all tied together the way a kid ties sheets together to escape out of a two-story window, or a prison in a tower. In stories, of course ~ surely never in real life. Or have you tried this yourself and lived to tell the tale? 

This is Gladys. "Gladys as a scarecrow," photo taken by James.lebinksi, and given to the world on WikiCommons.

And isn't Gladys simply the very finest specimen of a crowus scarius bovinus that you have ever seen in your life? A very rare, shy, and only recently identified species, in case you haven't heard of her yet.

I put her here, not just to allow her a place in the sun, but also to let you know the full extent to which I really haven't done a whole lot of thinking outside of the box about scarecrows. I fully intend to enlarge my vision in this regard one of these days.

And since I put a crow on my scarecrow card, I added Van Gogh's painting of "Wheat Field with Crows" (1890) here. You can almost see the scarecrow that isn't painted here. Surely, the tatters of its clothing have become the tattered wheat, the tattered earth, and those tattered ribbons of green.  

For some reason, every slash of paint on a Van Gogh canvas is like a slash of lightning lighting up my heart and soul.

I've read enough about Van Gogh to know that great beauty can come from great pain. The art he created in the 1800s was stunning and unorthodox and revolutionary. The world was not ready for him during his lifetime. I hope that he knows that he has endured the test of time.

If I could, I'd send Van Gogh my guardian scarecrow to watch over him. I wonder if I'd change the words that I wrote ten years ago, below.

I borrowed a few words from the Talmud: Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow, grow."  I hope the Talmud doesn't mind.

Please let this be my wish for you if by chance you are reading this today!

Your guardian scarecrow knows
how to protect you from every kind of harm.
She will watch over you
in sunshine and rain and hail and sleet.
Her rustling dress and flapping hat
will scare away
all your fears and tremblings.
She will whisper to you every day
in the cool of the moon and the heat of the sun,
"Grow, grow, grow."
Then she will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.

.

P.S. This is another guardian in my attempt to make a hundred guardians as part of Tollipop's brilliant "Make One Hundred Somethings" project, which you can find here.

A Guardian Bag Lady

I have added a guardian bag lady to the Hundred Somethings Project started by Tollipop. Every time I see what I call a "bag lady" out and about in the world, my heart comes to a stop. We see these ladies everywhere, laden with their multitude of bags and sacks and baskets and shopping carts, and their multitudinous layers of clothing, and I wonder if they are not special angels sent here to teach us something precious.

I loved picking out the fabrics in which to enfold my guardian bag lady, the flowered dress, the starry apron, the coarsely-woven vest with its flecks of gold, the bright scarf, the plaid wool hat, the plumped-up bags, and of course, a wand.

The scarf is a ribbon, and it feels very Scandinavian to me. I love that cornflower blue against the red, and it made me very happy to find the same blues and reds in the cotton calico that I used for her dress. And I love stars, hence the starry apron and the bag with the gold stars.

The fabric I used for her vest is akin to something in between homespun and burlap. I don't know what it is called. It is a little like gauze only very stiff and loosely woven with gold threads in among the brown threads, the way a bird will weave a golden ribbon into its nest. Or golden hairs! Look here to find how TinyHappy's golden hair became part of a bird's nest!

I have used this wonderful fabric for vests, hats, boots, and even housetops ~ it lends itself to so many things.

In writing this post, however, I wanted to go deeper into who the bag lady is, where does she come from, how did she end up on the street with all her possessions flocked around her like so many children. We had just such a lady in our neighborhood for years. She went by a name that might have been short for Katrikki or Katyenka or Kirochka or Kuwanlelenta, a name that began with K, for she was simply called K.

I never knew anything about K's life, and she has long disappeared from our neighborhood. But, I don't know why, thinking of her made me suddenly think of Dorothea Lange and all her photographs of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl migrants and the pea-pickers. For it seems to me that there was a time when K was at the same crossroads in her life as this woman, below.

I found, to my great surprise, that this Dorothea Lange photo, so famous in its black and white form, has been colorized. I hesitated to put it here, for it seems not right for the original photo to have been changed, and yet I think these gentle pastels somehow bring this woman closer. I love black and white photography, but I always feel that it comes with a kind of distance, a remote silence. This photo in color seems to speak, however softly. It taps very quietly upon the heart, doesn't it?

The Wikipedia photo information says this woman had seven children in all. Here, two of her children with tousled bowl-haircuts are looking away, and you can only just barely see the baby's little smudge of a face on the far right.

This woman in Dorothea Lange's photo might be the precursor to all the bag ladies we find in our world. For are they not all of them this one good woman who has fallen on hard times?

Really, I bow my head before her and her children, knowing how closely bound together we all really are upon this earth.

When I made my guardian bag lady, some ten years ago now, I tried to write what she would teach me, if only she could. I might write different words today, but ten years ago this is what I wrote:

Your guardian bag lady knows
all the secrets of the world.
She will show you how to smell the roses.
She will share with you all that she has
of bread and poetry,
of sorrow and joy.
She will surround you with simplicity
and the art of contemplation.
She will teach you
how to travel by the sun and the stars.
She will send you on your way filled with
her wisdom and mystery.

May she stand guard over us as we wend our way through our own lives!

.

Little Girl in a Red Kerchief

This little girl ("Kleines Mädchen") is from the nineteenth century. She lives in this painting by Nicolae Grigorescu (1838-1907). Such a sweet little face, with that open-to-the-world look that children do so often have, so ready to believe. I love how Nicolae has haloed her head with this red cloth cloud. She seems to be not so much wearing the kerchief as looking out from inside it.

Nicolae Grigorescu is said to be one of the founders of modern Romanian painting. Romania! Truly, I can never see the word Romania in print without immediately thinking of all things romantic. I know that I am always making leaps like this, but I do like how my mind seems to constantly draw me into anything romantic, poetic, lyrical. Somehow, it never seems like the wrong place to be!

The little girl in the red kerchief interests me for two reasons. The first is because the way in which her kerchief billows out around her head is somewhat like the way in which my folded fabric kerchiefs also stand out. My kerchiefs, however, have the advantage of crisscrossing the "face" so that I have no need to worry about creating a face at all.

But I do love the look of that little girl's kerchief.

So I made a tracing of it.

And then I cut it out of fabric. Such a tiny little piece of cut-cloth! And isn't it amazing how the mind adds so many details all on its own? Especially if you have already seen the painting above, then you can see that, yes, this is a little kerchief all wrapped around a little girl's head.

But to try to get closer to the effect of Nicolae's painting, I cut an oval out of black art paper.

On the left, I placed my little red piece of cloth upon the black oval as if it were a Victorian miniature. On the right is "Kleines Mädchen" again, for comparison, and I do think I have echoed this lovely painting in some very tiny way.

The second reason this painting interests me so much is that I wrote a children's picture book story about a little girl who goes on a train to the far north. Her mother ties a new red kerchief around her little daughter's face, something bright and fancy to wear as she sets off upon her journey. My story is titled "The Wolf in the Memory Box" and, yes, there is a wolf in it! Alas, this little story keeps coming back to me, no matter where I send it as I try to find a home for it in the great and vast publishing world. I've been sending it off for about ten years now, I guess.

But, in the back of my mind, I also keep thinking about illustrating it myself. I can just see my little girl, a black silhouette of a girl in a red kerchief, flying through the northern woods in pursuit of a wolf!

This nineteenth century painting, this little piece of cut-cloth, this splash of red against black, might be all I need to get me going on this!!

Letting Go

I have long skirted around the idea of birds and letting go of things. Today this greeting card from ten years ago seems to express how I feel about writing this blog. I'm not sure I can really put why I am doing this into words. The reasons are so many, but one is that it seems like a place where I can let all the things that I love loose upon the world, instead of caged up in my heart.

I do know how very lucky I am to have published two children's picture books. But there are so many more stories that I have sent out into the world that have come back to me. If you have had this experience, then you know the incredibly mixed feeling of disappointment on the one hand, and (sometimes) a kind of relief on the other hand, relief that your "child" is safely back in your arms again, where no harm can come to it.

Finding this world of the cloud, as I am coming to think of this aerial blogging community, has made me feel that at last I have found a place where I can send all my little love children, my cards, my stories, my thoughts, my imaginings, my dreams. This way, at least, maybe they will find their way into the heart of someone out there. Otherwise, I fear they will be locked up inside my own heart, forever.

This is a black and white silhouette print that I did years ago ~ exactly 30 years ago, for I can see that I have signed this "Kari © 1979." This silhouette was done in ink ~ it is not a cut-out as my later card is. However, I gave the same title to this print that I later gave to the card: "Letting Go." I think we spend our whole lives having to learn how to let go of things, our children, our pasts, and ourselves, sometimes our loved ones, sometimes our friends, sometimes our dreams. And isn't it curious how "letting go" can refer to both giving and giving up?

The world comes into us and changes us. We, in turn, give of ourselves, or let go of ourselves, thereby changing the world. I think that is what I was trying to say in this print, but I created it so long ago that I have, alas, let go of my memory of what I was thinking, back then . . .

In making the photo of this print, I tore it out of the paper copy (this is a copy of a copy of a print of an original ink drawing) and laid it, oh so tenderly, upon a scrap of fabric, but not just any fabric! This black-flowered print is from one of my favorite dresses that I wore and wore and wore until I wore it out during my flower child days.

Letting go is very hard to do sometimes.

Speaking of letting go and birds, here are some old birdhouses that are being collected in our backyard ~ plus a few other things. If you look closely, you will see an airplane (truly, flying things are everywhere where I live), and, yes, that is a faucet coming out of that post in the lower left-hand corner. I wonder what fantastical liqueur will pour from its spout?

These old things are being let go of here in a backyard sculpture-in-progress, and Nature is slowly taking them back for herself. But my husband still puts birdseed into these old birdhouses, and the birds still flock to this little city on a wood beam.

I love this bright little cardinal with his bright little head just peeking above the potting tray! We have put seed out for him, too, and he has come. Maybe that is what I am doing. Maybe I am throwing the seeds of everything I love out into the world, wondering who will find them? Who will come?

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!

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.

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.