New Art and Some New Hope

I hope that everyone was able to enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends. I know that for many here in the states and for more abroad it has been a very difficult and stressful couple of days. The horrible events in Mumbai just shake us to our core!! That city is living thru it's own 9/11 and it is not their first!!

The world is becoming a very uncertain and scary place and at times, for me anyway, I wonder if there is much hope for our children. I know in my heart that there is great hope, especially after this Presidential election, but at times my head and the news of the hour or minute seems to try to convince me otherwise. Well, if you feel the same way, I have discovered a remedy and a sure fire way to rekindle your hope for the future and your bleif in the inherent goodness present in all humans or huwomens! This rememdy is to catch a rerun of the program CNN HEROES. It aired on CNN on Thanksgiving night- for those not in the US that Would have been November 27. Ten finalists for Hero of year were intoduced and presented and then one winner after voting by the public was presented with THE hero of the Year Award- $100,000 to continue their work. THese are all wonderful people who saw a NEED and did whatever they could to Fill that need. We CAN ALL DO THIS. We don't all have to be BIG IDEA PEOPLE, they need plenty of Worker Bee types also. to find out more and to be totally inspired and uplifted,(what more could you want) go to CNN.com and find the button for CNN HEROS- there will be all sorts of info for you there! TRY IT ! YOU'LL LIKE IT!!!!!!!

And now, for a bit of art!

You may recall some of my sunprint pictures from previous posts(you can see them here)

I have finished an art quilt using one of the floral sunprints that I created using flowers and grasse form my garden. In this particular print I also used foliage from Dill and a seed head from the same Dill plant. I will show you the finished piece and then I will explain what I did and show some detail shots.

This piece started as a sunprint with all of the floral and grass components appearing bleached. In the sunprinting process any colored area that is covered during exposure to the sun, bleaches out. Once the green dye was dry, I brushed off the floral bits and machine stitched around each bleached area. I did not stitch around the images left by the Dill plant stuctures- as you can see in the following picture. Once the stitching was done, I handpainted the bleached areas using Twinkling H2O's- these are watercolor paints that have a very high mica flake content. The inspiration for this method came from the wonderful book THE PAINTED QUILT by Laura and Linda Kemshall.

In this picture you can see the ghost- like feathery images above the tips of the grass. This is the result of using the Dill foliage to mask the sun.

The dill seed head image was extremely faint so I decided to use silver seed beads on each point left by each seed in the seed head. For each daisy center I used several colors and finishes of gold and copper beads.

Then to complement the feathery aspect of the Dill weed I edged the piece with ribbon made from sari silk and sewed the fron to the backing with seed beads with a bronze matte finish.

I have several more sunprints to work on and I am going to continue to refine my methods and try different techniques to enhance each piece.