Collections and Other Stuff I Like

I’ve become aware lately of varied pieces of mermaid art in Starbucks. Or Siren art according to Starbucks. Their website says: “The siren is like a super mermaid. A mermaid with one tail is just a plain ol’ mermaid. (Sorry, Ariel.) But a siren is often depicted with two tails.” This is all they have to say about Sirens – they don’t address the mythology of sirens and their voices that lure sailors to their death nor do they give examples of any sirens with two tails (other than the label on their source picture)

According to the Mermaids of Earth website: “Twin tailed mermaid are not uncommon in history at all, dating back at least to the 7th century…When depicted with a crown, old mermaid illustrations almost certainly refer to the story of Melusine, who according to legend was transformed into a mermaid every Saturday. She married Prince Raymondin of Poitou – without mentioning her little transformation problem – and with him founded the royal House of Lusignan and bore him 10 or 11 children. The house of Lusignan ruled much of Europe from the 12th through the 15th centuries so Melusine would clearly have been entitled to wear a crown.”

Be that as it may, as my mother would say, whether you call them mermaids, sirens, or Melusine you can find a lot of different renderings of them at different Starbucks.

I can’t wait to find more!

Several years ago a friend gave me some old embroidery supplies that I think belonged to her mother. I started using them when I began doing hoop embroidery last year and in the middle of embroidering my Stitchtober fairy tale piece the inner part of the vintage embroidery hoop broke. I would have just thrown it out except that it had a vintage label on it from F.W. Woolworth’s that included the price – two for a dollar – and the country of origin – Taiwan.

It just hung around broken for awhile and then I realized what to do with it. I could use it to frame a vintage image. And maybe because I had been to three Henry Darger exhibits at the Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art over the last year, I thought of searching for an old coloring book page to use as an image.

I found this little girl and with Henry Darger in mind, I thought she would be perfect. I had some challenges transferring the image to my fabric. This time I just traced directly onto the fabric but since I don’t have a light table I have to use the window and it is challenging. Getting her face right was quite difficult but I finally had to accept that I had done the best I could and as long as I don’t compare her to the original I’m pretty happy with it.

I used some of the vintage embroidery thread on her dress and apron and her hair. The label is on the right on the side of the hoop.

I was almost finished with her when I had to stop to take a road trip to go to a wet felting class with Dawn Edwards I had signed up for with my felting friend. We could have taken a weekend long hat felting class but since our first foray into wet felting had been with the master hat felter Beth Beede, we opted for the Friday Flower felting. We were imagining flowers with stems and while Dawn did show us how to do that, the main focus of the class was on flower embellishments. I made most of a poppy at the class and when I got home after I finished the embroidery, I needlefelted a center for the poppy and added some beads for seeds. I think I’m going to attach it to a headband and turn it into a sort of fascinator.

I plan to tackle some flowers with stems next but I’m not sure if I will wet felt or needlefelt them.

We have been exploring collage in the Chicago Children’s Museum art studio. First we offered black or gold background paper and different types of paper to collage with – solid colors, textured, patterned, recycled art projects, pages from magazines and calendars, crepe paper, and old postage stamps.

We also offered hole punchers, foam shapes, and tape and since we were encouraging guests to think about ways to shape and cut paper without cutting we presented the scissors at the “educator bar” rather than on the tables or with the center additional materials.

And then after awhile we switched it up and talked about Hebru Brantley and images of flying and challenged guests to think about Things that Fly and create collages inspired by flying. We placed markers and scissors on the tables and offered blue background paper and cotton balls and polyester filling to create clouds.

With these changes the collages took on a whole different look!

Since my grandnieces like balls so much I wanted to make them another type of food that they could also use as balls for their birthday. After thinking about strawberries for a bit I realized that tomatoes were a better option. I found a felt tomato pattern that used 4 pointy egg shape pieces. My first attempt came out looking more square than round but adding another section solved that problem. I made them three tomatoes each and also made some produce baskets out of stiffened green felt.

Recently my youngest granddaughter wanted to show off her clean play kitchen area and when I went to check it out I was pleased to see the needlefelted potatoes I had made them after seeing some similar ones at the children’s area of the Swedish museum.

I had this little paper bag with the see through window which reminded me of a potato bag so I had searched online and printed some potato bag images to add. They’ve held up better than I thought they would!

In a previous post I said that there weren’t any street murals in my immediate neighborhood but recently a bunch of numbers, letters, and shapes on a gray background appeared on the brick wall of the dance store at the end of my street. As days went on the letters, numbers, and shapes were replaced by an ornate frame and then by an emerging figure (literally).

I was lucky enough to catch the artist at work one day. At this point it was clear that the figure was going to be dancer. Now she’s done and my favorite thing is that she has ballet dancer’s feet – bruises and all!

Recently I read a newspaper article that asserted even walking just ten minutes a day was good for one’s health. Well that sounded manageable and I’m sure going outside everyday is good for my mental health as well so I’ve started taking at least a 10 minute walk on the days I don’t walk for other reasons. (In the past I’ve never been much for walks with no end destination). On some days I walk across the street to the lake since I also believe that being in nature is good for the soul. But sometimes I feel like Nero Wolfe’s Archie Goodwin does about nature:

(The country) is all right, I’ve got nothing against it, and of course in the country something might as well be growing or what would you do with all that space, but I must admit it’s a poor place to look for excitement. Compare it, for example, with Times Square.

Well my neighborhood isn’t as exciting as Times Square but sometimes like Archie I’d rather look at buildings than growing things. One of the things I’ve found interesting lately is the contrast between buildings right next door to each other. For example 625 and 619 Stratford:

Today I saw this interesting juxtaposition on Buckingham Place.

Inspired by the Instagram account of Merrilee Liddiard, I decided to use more of my clothespins and make some butterflies or moths with my grandchildren. I flattened cardboard tubes (the flattering name for toilet paper roll innards) and put out tempera paint and pipe cleaners. My oldest granddaughter made one she described as a pink cow butterfly.

And I made one for each of my Spring trees.

After attending a workshop at the Swedish American Museum on Easter crafts and traditions I was inspired to make some Swedish Easter witches or Pask Karringar. A handout from the workshop explained: In Sweden on Easter Thursday girls dress up as witches in colorful skirts and headscarves and go door to door carrying brooms and copper kettles begging for sweets in exchange for handmade cards. This recalls the folk belief that at Easter witches flew off to Blakulla or Blue Mountain to convene with the Devil. I had read about this tradition before and had read that the girls also painted red circles on their cheeks and I had saved a photograph of a a Swedish girl and some vintage postcards to Pinterest.

I was lucky enough to find the perfect copper tea kettle and some brooms at Michael’s and made a grown up clothespin witch flying off to Blakulla and a little peg girl heading off to beg for treats.

After my Chicago niece sent me a picture of my great nephew incorporating the elves I made him for Christmas into a highway scene and captioned it, “The elves have become construction workers”, I decided to make him a set of construction workers for his birthday. And then when the firetruck invitation to his party arrived I made a couple of fire fighters as well.

After I finished painting them I was appalled when I realized I had made them all exactly the same and wished I’d stained a few of them darker or at least given them different hair colors. “It was like you were on an assembly line”, noted my daughter or “like you were making favors,” according to my niece.

I have been trying to embrace something my husband said to to me when I was being critical of some of these creations. “You can’t expect things to come out perfectly the first time you make them. You’re learning how to do them.” A lesson you think I would have learned before now!

After my foray into hand embroidery I knew I wanted to return to cross stitch but I had to wait for an idea to strike which happened when I read the Hatch Show Print book recently. A page at the front of the book features a silhouette of a rodeo wrangler with the chorus of Angel from Montgomery by John Prine and that was my starting point. While the song is actually written from the point of view of an old woman (the first line is “I am an old woman”) I remembered how much I identified with the third verse as a young stay at home mom so I decided to include it. And while the second verse begins, “When I was a young girl, I had me a cowboy” as I searched for images of old rodeo posters I thought a female rider spoke more to the feelings I had when I played my Bonnie Raitt record over and over again.

This was probably the trickiest pattern I ever designed. I did the lettering of the lyrics with 2 threads directly on the 20 count cork linen since I found it very hard to do it on graph paper first and I made a lot of changes as I stitched.

I began the rodeo poster with this image but I put her in a blue work shirt and bluejeans and gave her red cowboy boots, gloves, and a red cowboy hat. Since I really wanted her hat to show and since I thought it would be too hard to cross stitch her face I used the head from another poster as well.

I had to make changes while I was stitching here too as some of the colors got lost next to each other. I found the saddle particularly challenging to work out on the graph paper and then when I stitched it turned out that the rust color of the saddle couldn’t be too near to the red of the boots so I had to redesign it while stitching.

I also searched Rodeo cross stitch lettering and using a couple of those as references designed my own letters to give some of the flavoring of the original letters. After I had stitched those letters and the horse and rider I added more type to mimic the look of actual posters.

I stitched the image and lettering of the poster with three threads and the background with two threads using two similar colors to mimic the antiqued look of the original poster.

While stitching this I confirmed that I prefer the way I do cross stitch to the way others say to do it. The author of a cross stitch book I recently purchased writes that you want to have all your x’s crossed the same way because it just looks neater but I realized that apparently Neater is Not what I’m looking for!

We “went to” another Intuit home tour on Zoom the other night and when Intuit President and CEO Debra Kerr thanked collector Jan Petry for sharing her collection she mentioned that she knew Jan was anxious to do so. Jan replied that the thing about collectors is that they really like to share their collections. I would add that collectors also really like to look at the collections of others so I was happy recently to get a text from my Birmingham niece with a photo of her seasonal mantel featuring the ceramic egg collection that she and her daughter have painted over the years and I zoomed in to see the details.

Of course I immediately reciprocated with some photos of my wooden egg collection.

I bought most of them on my lunch break walk from a small store on Green Street in Northampton many years ago. It was my impression then that the store owner purchased them in Europe. I haven’t added to the collection recently although I did purchase the larger light green one from World Market a few years ago.

This year a small antique store recently opened on Broadway and I always look in the window as I pass it on the way to the gym. One day an eclectic selection of eggs including one painted wooden one with geometric shapes appeared so I bought it. The next time I walked by there was another painted wooden one – red with flowers similar to but more elaborate than many of mine – so of course I thought I needed that one too. When I went to buy that one the store owner asked me if I had seen the ones that were inside a dish with a cover. Hidden Easter eggs, how appropriate! After examining them I decided to buy one that was both etched and painted rather than the one I had come in to buy. Obviously, I had to return a few days later to buy that one.