I've been weaving and finishing a cardinal bird to apply to the last tapestry I wove before I moved closer into Atlanta. I'll show the bird applied to that last tapestry later on. Not tonight. The first photo is the cardinal on the loom with seine twine building up to the outline and before I started weaving I made half-hitches all way round the build-up. Then I cut it off and the warps needing to be finished in was a CHORE! But I did it, then lined the back. It's ready to be applied.

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I am honored that Tommye Scanlin has curated an online exhibit of my work on the American Tapestry Alliance website. Take a look! 

This is a book I designed and constructed in 2013, but never showed it anywhere. It's the life-span from the planting to the eating of sun-ripened tomatoes. Sooooo good. The dimensions are 5.5" x 8.25" x 2.5" high. Those green monsters are horn worms, enemies of the tomato gardener. The base of the "book" is a photocopy of an actual branch of one of my plants.

I wanted a long, tall book and in it, the intended theme was "flowers," but flowers that mostly turned out to be somewhat anthropormorphized. It's 9.75" high X 3/5" wide X .875" thick with 22 illustrated pages.

​I found it to be a lot of fun. I like to make myself laugh.

This image at the bottom is a fold-out and I drew it side-ways to the regular orientation of the book. 

Since my husband has Parkinsons and the dementia that goes with it, I have been making a lot of books and images that speak to it. My daughter gave me a Brooklyn Sketchbook Project sketchbook for Christmas. There were about 25 or 30 pages in the book, but I dismantled the book and remade it into a concertina with weavings depicting the gradual loss of cognition. It's a lot like another book I made.

I meditate every day and find a lot of wisdom in Buddhist teachings. When I had my hip replaced last fall, there was a lot of time on my hands. Embroidering looked like a good idea for sitting around, so I tried a few things and liked it. I wanted to have a theme and book to assemble with the stitching I did, therefore, this is a book of drawings based on the paintings by Shubun, a Chinese artist of the 15th century. The cover of this experiment into fiber books is one of my drawings, but the interior pages are all mostly copied from the Chinese paintings. The Zen tradition has often taught that there are ten steps to enlightenment. 

Front and back covers spread out.

Inside the book, the first step is trying to discipline the Ox, which is a metaphor for one's mind. The meditator chases the ox around and around.

Step two: The meditator  finally gets a rope on the ox, and thinks that beating it will tame it. [Have you ever beaten yourself up for some perceived transgression?] As the path continues to be accomplished, the ox becomes empty of color--or -- the mind loses it's delusions and begins to understand reality. 

These last two pages are the moon on the left, with a note inside about materials used, and a barn on the right with an encrusted ox that goes inside it.

Caregiving is a mixed bag. Mostly one hears about the self-sacrificing, magnanimous, ungrudging, and saintly characteristics of the caregiver. Not always so. I'm here to tell you that in addition to the above, we caregivers have our bitchy and dark humor characteristics and we talk about it to each other. Just saying. Mixed bag.

I'm experimenting with embroidery techniques combined with whatever I can think of to use to get the thing across. The above is "Hard Day With the Sick One." The outline is embroidered with color pencil shading. A black paper border is sewn to the linen canvas.

The piece above is an embroidered outline of one of my morning drawings. "A man with the moon." 5 in x 8 in. The yellow paper border is sewn around the cotton canvas.