moms

my mom has been dead a long time now. but i remember her clearly and with much love. she had the grace to allow me to be myself and supported me through my choices and drastically different life than her own. she is my model for my mothering. 

i am lucky to have one kid of each kind, ian and hannah. we have had rocky times, but we are fine together. i love these beautiful twenty somethings. i am so lucky. 


snow today. quite a bit. woodstove on. reading quietly. a good day.

shifu news

i love paper. i love textiles. i love it when they merge. susan byrd has studied papermaking and shifu in japan and has published several articles she's written over the years about shifu. recently she emailed me and told me that you can read them at www.byrdsnest.net. this is good stuff, and the site is a delight as well. she says she is working on a book which i am encouraging her to complete. 


me--i'm hiding out under a piece of indigo shifu from japan. sorry for the photo quality, iphoto took this one.

strange spring

busy at school. this time of the year we special education teachers have more iep's to prepare and cse's to attend than during the rest of the year. an iep is a student's individual educational plan and a cse is a meeting of the committee on special education. the iep is a legal document and our team writes very good ones. that takes time, testing, and three of us meeting on each student. because this program is innovative and individualized, we need to do our very best for each kid. that's besides the day to day programming.

so i've been getting home late. monday we were once again at bittersweet farm. i planted trees with one student all morning. in a downpour. then in a tropical heat wave that dried us out like the eensy weensy spider. i then washed my hands, ate my lunch, and jumped in the subaru and off i went, mud and all, to a cse meeting. it was great to represent our program in a real way. 
the fiddleheads have grown and are over 18 inches tall. the leaves are thick and odd.

this is a trillium, not the wake robin trillium, but a white one in my garden. we'll not discuss how it arrived... i have a tendency to find wildflowers and bring them home, fortunately i have 60 acres of woods where many wildflowers grow. 

i looked in the window, through the wet screen, and i spotted hannah, knitting away. in a couple of days she'll be on her way to bar harbor to earn some money working this summer. i'll miss her... way too much.

wake robins spotted: tooley pond road

i drove into the western adirondacks this morning, tootled down tooley pond road to cranberry lake, stopped for ice cream in star lake, went down the back way to oswegatchie, close by fine, down the cracker box road, to south russell, and then home. and today we saw two ravens, watching over us foolish humans, and many, many spring flowers. on tooley pond road we watched the growing things back up a week or two. but i cursed myself (twice) for forgetting my camera. here's what i saw: wake robin trilliums, the flower my mill is named for. 
all. 
over. 
the. 
woods. 
i have no picture for you.

my first ecoprint. india suggested it. bloodroot on silk. bundled for two weeks. more or less. i couldn't wait any longer.

the velma book/the wendy book

wendy golden-levitt, a toronto based jungian therapist, has given me permission to write about her work with children and an elder using my book. she also uses textiles made by several other artists. if you have been reading this blog you know about this book, the cover is shifu over flax, the pages are all different botanical and rag papers that i made here at my paper mill (wake robin). the binding style is functional and medieval in origin. the first child to work with this book, p., has suffered huge loss, the deaths of his parents, and is trying to come to a place of understanding and surviving this. these are wendy's words and photos, and a few comments from me.

first p. wrapped the book with some cloth from india flint. he said it held things impossible to say. he felt india's (india flint) cloth was just the right amount of seeing and not seeing. p. felt that your book allowed him to look and not look... he thanks you for that.

this next picture was p.'s attempt to look into a bad dream he had. he felt this cloth from india f. would help if he saw his dream through that and therefore it could land differently onto the velmabook.

this photograph was when p. had visited quite a number of times and discovered that jude hill's little "what if" cushion could hold his place while he went into the sandtray or sat with me for a while. he said that the velmabook did very well holding what he needed to stay with in his work with me....and that the judelady had invented a good thing. p. said they both smell good.

it seems that the wendy/velma book can hold dreams, nightmares, pain, imaginings, letters, and even be held. an elder who works with wendy wrote me a letter and placed it in the book to "bake" for a week before wendy was to send it to me. this letter told how she was an interred child in europe, and the only thing of hope and beauty for her was a patch of grasses, the book spoke to her of that. the letter was then to be planted in the garden she and wendy plan to dig. another child puts it under her shirt, next to her heart.

i always knew that making art transforms, and that art evokes strong emotions. i never thought my art, an artists' book, would be the conduit for people to process their pain and heal. one very good answer to "why make art?".

big thunderstorm coming, a good thing, because i seem to be verbose today!

silent woodcock, woo-ing snipe

no woodcock calling...but snipe were...

6 inches am, 57 degrees pm

snow: about 6:30 am the daffodils are hiding out under about six inches.

last night was the last class of my "magic spirit bag" tapestry weaving class.

 cathryn made a handle right on the tapestry loom next to the main bag. she experimented with simple patterning and adding beads into the body of her bag.

joellen worked in a weft stripe repeat. she found the large needle easiest to use.

terry pushed herself out of her comfort zone and tried something completely patternless and pre-planned. for a complex knitter (way out of MY comfort zone) this was great!

hilary liked using the shed sticks with these schacht tapestry looms, and found a way to keep it workable. a hair tie!

under the hair tie supported shed stick, this tapestry was growing. one student chose to leave the class, it wasn't her thing. but for those (pictured here) who stuck with it, they left knowing how to weave a tapestry; a knowledge of many techniques, and a plan to finish their weaving on their own. the looms will be returned to the arts council when they're done. i learned we needed at least one more class to finish even a fairly simple tapestry project. i wove along with them, and this is what i came up with...so far...

the thing that is interesting for me is that i really included items of magic and spirit in here, some lokta, wool, handspun cotton, other cottons, and ripped strips of cotton muslin that a friend and i had printed on. i surprised myself with a rather quiet palate. it was a fun class for me--these women were wonderful students. we all spoke about how cool that was! magic spirit bag tapestry class. there is a race to see who finishes first...ok, so not a race, just an encouragement! i'll probably be last.

sunny day, snowy day

mother nature is a joker...and beautiful, nonetheless. i have a sunburn from working outside all day yesterday with my students and fellow staff at bittersweet farm. a great day and then during the night the wind picked up. when i got up, the world was white. 

auction and action

handpapermaking magazine, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in handmade paper and books has their annual fundraiser auction here. go shopping for something special and hand-made-paper-related. this organization/journal is simply the best in the field, for years and years now. i think i own the first issue and all the others since!


and paper artist aimee lee is hoping to build the equipment needed for korean papermaking, or hanji at the morgan conservatory in cleveland. she is seeking help to support (room, board, travel)  in cleveland, while she brings her (considerable) brains (and brawn) to the project. please consider helping her out.

a little hanji present from aimee, "to play" with

sleep and art

i wish i could sleep like tess and gwen. last night, i did, with close to ten hours in bed, reading a little, and sleeping. this is what infections do to me, or maybe it's the antibiotic. this year i seem to be in a battle against microbes...

i am a weaver. at least, that is my background, but these days i think of myself as a papermaker/book artist. i go back to weaver because there's a long connection, back to my mother, elva weaver, her father, john weaver... you see where this is going? west virginia. mountain people are intelligent problem solvers, used to eeking out a livelihood on a scrap of mountainside land. my mom could keep cars going, make a dress without a pattern, cook a meal for one or thirty, clean a cruddy floor so it would shine. with a kid on her hip. 


i once saw a book about families and their stuff. each family was photographed outside their home, with all the people and possessions outside in front of the house. western households had lots of toys, places more marginal had their foodstuffs displayed.


so what use or worth is what i make? i know i'm not good at weaving functional stuff, i tried it. i often make stacks and stacks of botanical or rag paper, but they are rather expensive (in every sense). the artists' books that capture my imagination nowadays are one of a kind or small editions. is it worth it? is art worth it?