As I was working on a series of Valentine’s cards and hiding the crab card I was making for my cancer sign husband’s birthday, I said, “I’m just making these while I wait for an idea for my next piece.” A few days later, an idea did pop into my head – the Woodstock poster, which was perfect because I still have a lot of the vintage red thread I bought at the Ukranian National Museum.
I googled images of the poster and did a little research about it, too. It was designed by Arnold Skolnick, and according to his New York Times obituary, he only had a few days to work on it after the original psychedelic design by David Edward Byrd was rejected because it featured a nude woman. Arnold Skolnick, who did free lance advertising work, was inspired not by typical concert posters but by a Matisse paper cut outs exhibition he had recently seen. In interviews with various publications over the years, he had mentioned that he started out with a blue background and a flute and that the white bird is not a dove but was actually inspired by the catbirds he saw outside his window. He had also said that he didn’t mean for the bird’s beak to be red but neglected to mention it should be black to the printer. A “happy accident,” I think!
I originally thought of embroidering the poster with the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock to the right of it as I had done with the “Angel from Montgomery” one, but the piece of linen I had was too small for that and I liked the idea of just embroidering the image after I found the movie poster on the right above.
I chose the last chorus of the song because I certainly think we are “caught in the Devil’s bargain” these days. I toyed with gifting it to my friend who actually went to Woodstock but realized it needed to live near the “Angel from Montgomery” piece, although it looks a bit different because the vintage embroidery thread is four strands and I usually use three. Now that I see them together, I think that the Hank Williams portrait with the lyrics to “I Saw the Light” by T.S. Green might have inspired both of my pieces.
Although speaking of inspiration, as I was stitching, I wondered where the idea to stitch the Woodstock poster had come from. The answer came a few days later when Fitzgerald’s nightclub reposted an advertisement for an upcoming show on Instagram.
Now I wonder where my next idea will come from!
I have to admit that I was a little disappointed during my first visit to the newly renamed Intuit Art Museum during the special preview a month before it reopened. The museum had been closed for almost two years for a major remodel, and at one point, there were plans for a Mr. Imagination Education Studio, which, in my mind, morphed into a full-time art studio with shelves full of bottlecaps and other recycled materials. So it was a surprise to find that the plans had changed and that the new Carolyn Mys Learning Studio was an empty room intended primarily for school educators and students. And on my second visit, the week the museum opened the door to the space was closed.
However, the Center for Learning Engagement and Opportunity or CLEO space which was named for Intuit founder Cleo Wilson, was set up, and I began to understand some of the possibilities for this “flexible community gathering space”.
The room was totally reconfigured for my third visit, which was to participate in a weaving workshop.
A work by artist Pooja Pittie was projected on the wall, and she was there to teach us how to make the cords she had used to weave the piece.
She had also created a piece for the room, which is visible in the previous photos and in the closes ups below. Museum guests are invited to contribute to the piece.
The Carolyn Mys Learning Studio was also open during this visit for the Teacher Fellowship Student Exhibition.
So, while not what I expected, I am impressed with these two amazing spaces not to mention the museum as a whole!
I have been proposing introducing a wrapping curriculum to the art studio for quite a while, so I was excited this spring when we finally presented it. I envisioned it in the Young Artist Program format with several different stations. Many artists, both outsider and traditional, have wrapped chairs, so I proposed that we start there. Liz took it a step further with the Wrapping Garden, bringing in not only a chair but also an easel and the piece of furniture we use to hang artist aprons on. It was so much fun to watch them transform over the five weeks.
We had a lot of ideas for what would get wrapped at the tables, from small things to natural objects to recycled plastic bottles. But after I sent Liz these pictures from Studio Sprout, we had a new plan.
We cut and notched small pieces of cardboard and offered sticks and other natural materials and enhancements to be wrapped with the yarn at the tables.
I’d say it was a very successful project!
We put larger pieces of fabric and ribbons along with blocks and some other things to wrap in the sensory table.
Photographs of wrapping artists and wrapped objects and books about Judith Scott and Christo and Jeanne-Claude helped to set the stage. Educators were inspired as well!
This week, I went with a friend to the National Museum of Mexican Art to see the exhibit El Arte Del Pequeno or the Art of the Small. Four miniature rooms were included in the exhibit, and one of the objects in one of the rooms really caught my eye.
So I was pleased when I found a similar one in the gift shop, especially since it was in the clearance section!
The price tag included the description “Mascaritas Guerrera” and googling that led to the website of Universidad Complitense Madrid (webs.ucm.es/BUCM) and this picture of a full-size mask.
The entry explains that the jaguar mask is part of the Dance of the Tlacolderos, a dance from pre-Christian times that, like so many traditions, has been incorporated into Christian observances and is performed in Guerrero, Mexico during the Feast of the Holy Cross, during Carnival, on some patron saint’s days, and in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on December 12. The dance depicts the efforts of farmers to catch the tiger or jaguar.
We had the perfect place for the mini mask on our gallery wall.
I love the juxtaposition of the jaguar mask’s eyes with the eyes behind the mask of the figure to the right.
We drove through Pennsylvania recently, and at one of the rest areas, we found a huge collection of Pennsylvania Turnpike memorabilia.
The collection donated to the Turnpike, as this sign explains, by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Miller includes hundreds of artifacts and pieces of memorabilia representing over 70 years of Turnpike history.
The collection will be rotated, here are a few of the pieces currently on display that caught my eye. They are a bit hard to see because they are behind glass and also because they are backed by blown up old photographs of men in suits. I didn’t see an explanation of who they were, and I cropped them out as much as possible.
One of my favorite pieces was a book of old matches (top left) because the matches looked like gasoline pumps.
Apparently, there was even a song about the Turnpike!
I just realized it is almost time to put the Spring and Easter things away, and I haven’t written about them yet. Spring started here as it usually does with the appearance of frogs. I couldn’t find any little frogs this year, so the larger ones from a few years ago got some company.
The new ones are the two larger ones on the ends. The yoga frog ended up in front of the gourd zebra in its new place. The gourd zebra had to leave its perfect place when we got living room curtains recently. This is the perfect place for the yoga frog, though, since it is right in front of the space, I have dubbed my yoga studio.
I was excited to unwrap the ornaments that we bought in an after Christmas sale at a store in Lincoln Square and add them to the signs of Spring in the kitchen.
I made some new ornaments for the Spring trees in the dining room windows. The fairy and the bunny constructed with painted egg cartons were inspired by Instagram posts and the felted peapod by an ornament I saw at World Market. Their peas had faces, but I went for a more natural look.
I also hung some garlands inspired by Instagram posts above the trees.
It was hard to find a place on the egg tree for the new eggs I bought last year after Easter at Joann Fabrics, but since they’ve gone out of business, I knew I had to try to fit that green one with the white flowers on.
And speaking of eggs, these are the ones we dyed this year. I love the football one!
I’ve written about the Chicago Children’s Museum Art Studio often, but I don’t think I’ve written about my other favorite space – The Tinkering Lab.
The entrance highlights the guiding principle of tinkering – Make it, Test it, Fix it, Share it which is really evident in the recent program – mini museums.
I got to experience the program as a guest with my youngest granddaughter and checked out the exhibits a couple of other times as well. Here are some of my favorites:
I even filled out the paperwork.
And I loaned one of my books “Making a Great Exhibition” to the program.
My latest piece was inspired by the exhibit “Karin Larsson: Let The Hand Be Seen” at the Swedish American Museum. Karin Larsson was the wife of the Swedish artist Carl Larsson, and it’s as much her textile work as his paintings that “came to shape the country’s national identity” as a recent article in the New York Times Style Magazine* put it.
The exhibit included recreations of Karin’s textiles, which were impressive, and I snapped pictures of some of them.
This picture is from the New York Times article* and shows the original weaving in situ.
At the exhibit, I was also taken with the cross-stitch lettering that appeared on the signs and on embroidery hoops throughout the exhibit.
This sign explains the origin of the title of the exhibit, “While helping weave mats for the Larsson family home, one local weaver made a mistake to which Karin simply said, go on…the hand should be seen.” It almost begged me to embroider it! When I transferred the letters from the sign to graph paper, I realized they were too big to embroider on 20 count linen, so I adapted them, and I added a border on top so it would work in the frame I found for it. I thought it was ironic that as I was stitching, I was fixing any mistakes I made, so when I realized I had miscounted both when graphing and stitching the border, I decided not to take it out and redo it.
I mentioned a putchase from the Ukranian National Museum in a previous post, but I don’t think I mentioned that while I was there I also bought two boxes of vintage DMC embroidery thread from a “make us an offer” basket. I was surprised when I took out the black thread to use on the “Alternative to Appropriation” piece to find that it had four rather than six strands. I also found while stitching this piece that it left a bit of red on the linen when I removed stitches – another reason for leaving the border as it was.
This piece also seems like it belongs on the workroom shelves.
*The Hand-Embellished Countryside HomesThat Helped Define Scandinavian Style” Nancy Hass, New York Times Style Magazine 3/20/25
While visiting Maydel, a new needlework shop, last weekend, I also visited their really beautiful little free craft supply library compkete with “Guidelines for Use.”
I was glad to see that people were following the last two guidelines – no graffiti or trash. Unfortunately, there weren’t many craft supplies either.
Speaking of little free libraries when we got stuck in Wrigleyville traffic on the way home the weekend before, I noticed the little free Snoopy library was decorated for St. Patrick’s Day. I snapped a picture through the car window, but I really wish I had gotten out to take it, which certainly would have been possible since there were a lot of shenanigans going on. We even saw some leprechauns!
I have always admired and been inspired by other cultures and appreciated artists who were as well (Alexander Girard, for example), so I was disturbed a few years ago when it suddenly seemed that almost everyone was being accused of appropriation.
Recently when I read “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin, I was struck by the character Sam Masur’s response during an interview to accusations of appropriation in the video game he created with his friend Sadie Green. Sam, who at this point in the story is going by the name Mazer responds: “The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.” The interviewer responds, “That’s an oversimplification of the issue.” Mazer continues: “The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it.”
Yes, I thought that’s it and wrote the quote down. After picking up the piece of paper and reading it again many times, I realized I wanted to embroider an abridged version of it.
I thought I’d use the same small alphabet I had used for the “Angel from Montgomery” piece, and I thought it would be perfect to surround it with folk art borders from many countries. I knew I wanted to use the Scandinavian selburose (eight pointed star) I had used before on Christmas cross stitch pieces and the Greek key pattern I had used in my Greek myths piece and that I first saw on to- go coffee cups and have always loved.
Those two choices led to the decision to use four closed borders and four border elements. I searched through the resources I had and did some Internet searching to find the rest of the elements. An internet search for “Chinese cross stitch border” yielded a pattern that I didn’t think would work with my initial concept, but would be perfect to frame the quote.
I found another border in an old DMC Library Morocco Embroideries book that used to belong to the Heath Library. My sister had rescued it for me when the library discarded it many years ago.
I adapted the Native American pattern from the directions that came with a beading kit. I don’t think I ever successfully made anything with the beading kit, but I saved the directions and have used them when designing cross-stitch patterns before.
While I was still thinking about the piece, I went to the Ukranian National Museum and snapped some photos of embroidered pieces, which inspired the color choices for the Ukranian pattern I found by doing an Internet search.
An internet search also led to the Celtic border, which is probably the hardest thing I have ever stitched. It was made even harder by the fact that I ran out of the thread, which I think would have been hard to match, while I was stitching it.
My internet search didn’t lead to any Japanese borders, so I adapted the cherry blossoms from another pattern I found. Finally, I designed a border meant to evoke Kente cloth.
When it came time to frame it I thought it didn’t make sense to frame what was essentially already a frame so I decided to use a stretched canvas like I had with the “Never Let The Old Woman In” piece. But this time, I had to make my own canvas, which worked well, although I’m not entirely satisfied with the mounting.
I think I found the perfect place to display it, though. Right under the hair baskets I made many years ago which some might accuse of being good examples of appropriation.
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 