bessesdotter – Boundless

September 15, 2021

no time to read?

No Direction Known – Mixed media/collage/acrylic

I miss blogging and mentioned it to someone the other day. They said no one wants to read blogs anymore. I am pretty sure that isn’t true. Authors still write books and people read them and they even make it to the best sellers list and have them adapted to film at times. Not everyone is completely addicted to TikTok or Insta. My friend Claudia has been blogging and I have been a subscriber for years–since I moved to the UK 3 years I have gotten emails of her blog posts and enjoyed them. It made me feel great to see her working and all the thoughts she had about the process and the art.

Making a commitment to blog has happened–I will do it. Soon I will have consistent wifi for the first time in 3 years. I am really looking forward to it and finding new friends that read, write and make art. Live and blogging is a beautiful thing!

The art above is made from old magazines and paper that I alter and collage and then paint. It is one of the processes I love and helps me offset some of my carbon footprint. It helps keep the magazines out of the landfill. I started it about 3-4 years ago and haven’t shared much of the work. I was waiting for the right time, this must be the right time.

September 8, 2021

Sabbaticals

Made with magazines rescued from the landfill

This sabbatical was much longer than expected, some due to Covid and some due to relocating to the United Kingdom. I am finally back to the real world with more art tucked under my arm and a new medium: collage! Painting has been ongoing all the while too. Here are a few tidbits to look at while I setup the New Studio at 19a Bell Street in Reigate.

April 2, 2016April 2, 2016

Seed of Peace

Peace: for all, for animals, for us. This work contains seed of peace–tucked in the details–safely swaddled and with a bold headdress.

I started regularly asking for peace about five years ago. It eludes me still. Maybe I don’t know in what form peace can enter my life. Until it becomes clear, I’ll make peace in my art. The reflection of peace in the art can shine it’s reflection boldly back out into the world.

March 16, 2016

Finding the look

2016-02-26 15.17.46 Several new series were born as a result of doing small studies this winter. The studies are being shown this weekend as a part of exhibition containing a few watercolors and some significant works in fiber that are eco-dyed, handprinted and hand embroidered. I am an irreverent quilter and don’t follow many rules. Sometimes I experiment with fusible, battings and surface design before I quilt. The purpose of it all is to find the look, I am searching many traditional techniques and then bending them to my own style to get a texture and quality that I am not ready to define yet. I’ll know it when I see it.

Cutting on the bias, using my sewing machine, or working by hand, washing, ripping, tearing, machine thread painting, hand embroidery, framing, binding, not binding, giving structure on wood panels, using bamboo to hang work, vintage silk, found objects, eco-dyeing, tea dyeing and over-dyeing, mono-printing, heliotypes, and beading are a few of the ways I am working with fabric now.

2016-01-28 14.51.09-1 Emerging are what I call Spirit Cloth’s…they are worked in a meditative state and result in a pure form of hand and mind being one and the same, a positive flow of the spirit of the artist.

There are also images born out of my love for the earthiness of tilling and gentle farming of grains and vegetables. The works include deep night skies and are simply stitched by hand.

2016-01-31 23.49.33-1

Its a great time for me and my need to explore what is available to me in fiber and art. Today I am scaling up one of the series and am excited to find new ways to bring the color and stitching to life…

February 17, 2016February 17, 2016

Wonk Out

Textiles have memory and can also take on new memory and shape. How we handle textiles, stitching by hand or machine, cutting straight, curvilinear or on the bias (diagonal), sewing curves, surface embroidery, and quilting all disrupt the weave of fabric.

This particular quilt began with a piece of white cotton fabric hand dyed and backed with cotton batting and a muslin quilt back. If I’m not hand sewing, the cotton batting works fine for machine sewing.

I quilted an overall pattern in a medium teal Metrosene thread and then began to add thread painting with shades of silver, graphite, burnt sienna, gold, black and bronze rayon embroidery threads. I added the top grey and bottom rust sections after the majority of the thread painting was underway.
Then the final quilting helped to flatten out the lumpy bumpy hillocks and creases left from heavy but uneven thread painting. Still wonky and now only a series of gentle rolling bumps and lumps the last step is to block before finishing. Photo below shows some of the warping that happens to fabrics that are stressed.

bumps and hillocks from quilting and thread painting

Before binding, the quilt will be dampened and blocked to de-stress the fibers and give it the shape I want it to have.

For smaller textile projects I use a blocking grid sold at Knit Picks.

The blocks are an interlocking grid that can be used many times over. 9 foam blocks come in a pack and can be put together in many configurations. You can purchase double or triple sets if you need them for larger projects. These have a small footprint for storage and last for years. I know you can use large inexpensive insulation board or even a carpet. The insulation board comes in 8′ sheets and a carpet would need to be rolled up for storage. I don’t have that kind of extra room to store bulky objects in my studio. At $24.99 they are a good deal and they store on a shelf.

You’ll need the following:

Blocking grid or mat

T-pins (rust proof stainless)

Spray bottle filled with fresh clean water

I put enough blocks together to make the grid fit the quilt in this case 4 sections work.

Placing the quilt face down I spray generously with water and smooth it out with my hands. I flip the quilt over squarely in the center of the grid and spray the top with water. It should be damp but not soaking wet.

Next the pinning begins. Starting at the center of the top, taking a t-pin, I press it at an angle through the quilt edge into the foam block.

I continue to place a t-pin at each center point along each side–while gently stretching the quilt and smoothing it. Then push a t-pin 3″-4″ apart on each side of the center pins. Again, I gently smooth and stretch the fabric as I go. Repeat on each side until the quilt is fully but gently stretched. See the photo below – pins evenly spaced and sides of quilt look wonky. They will be trimmed after drying.

My home is very dry and if I do this at night by morning the quilt will be dry and flat. The next step will be to trim to the size I like and bind if desired.

Below is the next day – flat and free from ripples:

Note: I do not use an iron or steam unless it is absolutely necessary. I use a mixture of fibers and a hot iron could negatively affect delicate threads or fabrics with a hot iron set on cotton and would flatten the beautiful quilting textures. I also don’t use measuring guides. These are handmade, work of art and meant to meander and have shape and texture. I am not looking for perfection, but want it to hang crisply and neatly.

February 14, 2016

Hearts in linen

Valentine’s Day 2016.

This day marks the time when my love for making art results in the Spirit Cloths that are in my hands most days.

Several hours daily are going to embroidery and hand stitching. The machine comes in to do some laborious tasks. There is less quiet time, but the movement of my hands is slow and there is a zen to it nonetheless.

Once the embroidery was completed, the batting and backing attached, the machine quilting is being completed.

February 11, 2016February 11, 2016

Listening

As a visual artist I see. Everything. Upon entering a new indoor space I want to see everything. I catch myself furtively peering but trying not to look as though I’m not looking. At. Everything. I feel it may not be polite. In spaces I visit often, the same spaces, it’s easy to get lost in observation of additions and changes. I’m not terribly interested in looking at people. It’s the shape, space and color that stimulate me, causing brain chatter. In 2014, I visited the home of a new friend in Coopersburg. She designed and built her home with her husband. She invited me to spend time looking…saying something like I imagine you want to look at things, please feel free to do that and we will talk later. What a gift. I didn’t ask her if it was obvious that my eyes wandered even though I tried so hard to focus on getting to know her. She has an easy kindness that I’ve come to appreciate. I enjoyed wandering about her home and I looked with an open heart.

With slowing time to make art, and limiting my focus on few colors and no intentional noise–no music–no voices–I hear. Everything.

Today. Rattling. Windows. West Wind. Sweeping through this end of the valley it rolls over the open cornfields. Lower Macungie is the windiest place I’ve ever lived. The house faces south and the bedrooms are like a bulwark to the west. I often wonder if this is what it’s like on the Yorkshire dales and moors.

Rory barks from his post on the balcony. I get up to see what he thinks needs attention. The squealing of the postal truck as it pulls around the bend out of view is all.

The wind is blowing and whipping, sweeping the snow across the pavement in undulating patterns. Rory stands guarding, his long coat blowing with the gusts, he turns to come inside. As he brushes past I feel the chill still in his fur. The wind pulls at the door as I let it close.

Needle back in hand my thoughts are back to the movement of the stitches, how placing the needle through and over a single thread in the weave can change the angle of a stitch slightly. Does it matter if I correct the angle. When will I stitch in a way that doesn’t matter which direction the threads go. Should I create a piece like that? What would it look like….there go my thoughts…bring them back to focus on this piece. This needle. This brown thread. The seed stitch.

There are moments I think this might be a madness, to slow time and stitch by hand when I could make a quilt in day as promised by the popular book series. No. Not madness. But it is a desire to live more fully and be mindful of what I’m doing now. Not in the past thinking of loves lost and regrets or concerns for the future.

My fingers feel fatigue, I stretch them and change projects for a bit. I pick up a larger crewel needle and perle cotton to fill in a small square in deep gold.

February 1, 2016February 1, 2016

Found. In my hand.

Lately I’ve been admiring reverse appliqué and thought it might work for a piece of fiber art I am planning.
You see this piece of fiber art exists loosely in my mind, it sort of has a little film attached to it that I play often. The colors change. The fabrics change. But the foundation of the work is essentially the same. It consists of many modular pieces that are similar in size and hue. The black square below is an example.

I’m eager to get the work started and get the film in my head into real world action. This Saturday past I started playing with reverse appliqué sewing. After several pieces were finished the results were different than expected.

About midnight – my creative witching moment happened. Cleaning up the perle cottons and re-organizing threads, dropping scissors into their cases, needles neatly arranged in the drawer…I passed by the stack of recently completed art quilt studies.

recently completed Pennsylvania farmland art quilts

The studies are of my beloved Pennsylvania farmlands which are rapidly disappearing.
New housing and commercial structures are chowing down the land for 3 solid meals daily.

I know this land. Its of my people, my youth, my later adulthood. I’ve come back to the gentle hills that my grandfather held in reverence.

No reference photos are needed. I’ve walked the dusty dirt roads by the farms with my dogs, rode my horses through the brown-green-gold fields, tilled the ground with my hands to plant native species and cut flower gardens. Moonlit nights resplendent with fireflies, moths and bats while seated behind the farmhouse in the deep of night are treasured moments for me.

As I passed by the studies I saw the round shape I have been slow stitching for weeks.

The familiar round moons or suns are exactly what I’ve been planning but I couldn’t know that. Instead of the reverse appliqué, this embroidered style that has been my meditative practice for weeks is it!

The search over, the technique was in my hands all along.

January 30, 2016

Broken Threads

A long night of breaking threads at the machine.

Needles breaking. Threads breaking. Again and again. Adjusting tension and trying little tricks to keep everything running smoothly.

It happens with hand stitching too. Knotting up, catching a thread on the back, tangling. Sometimes it’s that kind of stitching: tangling and knotting.

Learning to wrestle wrought threads.

wound tightly.

Unbound.

Loosened. Breathing.

Softness.

This is the nature of thread work. It teaches me to allow anger in and out—no withholding of breath. Letting it be its own nature. Turn off power and tidy the sewing room. Go to relax and read a bit

morning. opening the sewing desk and do my morning ritual of preparing the machine with basic maintenance. Open the bobbin case. Get the dust remover, brush and oil. Ahah! The culprit exposed in the sunlight streaming through the window. A tiny speck of shredded rayon thread is barely visible under the auto cutter. Another fine long strand is found at the bottom of the case

I remove the threads, flush with air, brush well, oil bobbin and put it all back together.

Last night I did that twice. But I couldn’t see the small specks of thread. Even with my Ott Light.

Under light of day everything is exposed and seen with clarity.

Learning balance and timing, during fatigue and frustration was not the time to problem solve. Bernina sews like herself again.

January 29, 2016January 29, 2016

Prayer Wheels

jonas kept me indoors and stitching while the white flakes were flurrying furiously out of doors. stitching while drinking copious cups of constant comment tea. time to think while i stitch. stitching and staying present. the needle keeps my mind fresh and fingers nimble. watch the thread, like a bell, a prayer wheel, staying with it. mother reads and cleo snores gently. rory guards our home while we sit out the storm.