The shipping box is opened. All looks good. The suitcase is full of the back-up research. My intrepid assistant springs into action assembling the frame. He consults with another artist’s assistant (Judy Martin’s husband Ned) on the workings of the trapezes we are hanging our work from. The bed sheets are slid on the frame before it is fully assembled. The frame is pulled […]
Read More...Reluctantly, I have altered the bed sheets. Each sheet will hang from a wooden beam threaded through the top hem. The hem pocket needed to be wider to accommodate the beam. Also, the hem fabric is so fragile in its decayed state I doubt it would support the whole sheet for long. I opened up the […]
Read More...My lumber jack/sailor friend helped me with a trial installation of the 4 tree cloths. Unfortunately, the wind came up and it started to rain. But the trial supporting frame was up long enough to confirm dimensions and to work out where the structural forces would be. We quickly lowered the frame and got […]
Read More...The Maple tree cloth’s Battenberg lace deteriorated and was not able to support it so it came inside for repairs. Safety pins held the lace together until I could do the repairs. I stitched a supporting grid but I anticipated the strengthened lace insert would next tear away from equally fragile woven cloth. It just needed to hang […]
Read More...Here am I stitching while traveling on the Coho ferry to Port Angeles, Washington, USA. One of the passengers, a tourist from China, travelling with her family, was fascinated watching what I was doing. We got talking and I invited her to work on the cloth. Her concentration and dexterity were way beyond what I expected from her […]
Read More...Here are 3 cloths waiting for their ‘Cold Moon’ (January) band of running stitch. I took a cloth with me whenever I had to go out. Stitching in a coffee shop. But this is where I did most of my stitching. When I looked outside I could see all 4 trees.
Read More...I called the October new moon ‘Falling Leaf Moon’ and worked autumn leaf colours into the bed sheet.The hole was made after the stitching, while the cloth was on the tree. During ‘Wet Moon’, I added colours of decaying leaves lying on the ground within the tree’s drip circle.The 3rd band, during ‘Frost Moon’ or ‘Long Night Moon’, I worked a […]
Read More...Over winter there were a number of challenges I had to respond to.A wet, heavy snow accumulation broke the string and the 2nd Cedar cloth fell down.The lace insert in the top of the Maple cloth was decaying and tore on a snag.During a wind storm my husband and I watched the Douglas-fir cloth flapping wildly. My husband […]
Read More...Early December I brought the Cedar cloth inside. It was deteriorating much faster than the others because it stayed wet. I made repairs to just hold it together until I can stitch on it. I decided to keep it inside so I could stitch on it when it was too cold and wet to go outside and stitch. I was […]
Read More...Each new moon I took my colour studies tools outside and visited each tree. Joen Wolfram’s Color Tool was an invaluable aid. Back inside I’d go through my thread boxes to find colours I observed on the trees.I invested in this pigeon-hole box to keep the many thread bundles organised. Each month, for each tree, I made a thread […]
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