Bessesdotter's Blog
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.
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.
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.
Latest work – watercolor with bronze acrylic. I started the ink work this week in my spare time. This piece was painted several weeks ago at the height of summer and after a few cool nights I am preferring autumnal shades already. This has an oceanic almost caribbean tropical feel. I am super excited to be working on it and have some nice ideas for the piece.
Bessesdotter’s Studio at ArtsQuest during Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
The May 2013 Lehigh Valley Style Magazine features me and Tool Boy, a studio art quilt I created last year. Tool Boy is one of the first in a series of studio quilts I call Frankenquilts. Read more…
Boundless 