A Minor Distraction

I was browsing Michael's craft shop, as I tend to do, when I spied these wooden tags in the scrap booking section. I'd come to buy frames and mats for my paintings, armed with discount coupons, but my brain went off in a different direction. As it tends to do.

 I've made tags before, both from fabric, and scraps of watercolour paper, but these sturdy little boards were quite enticing. I covered them in various colours of Golden acrylic paint, adding a few drops of metallic gold or silver paint to each hue to give a light shimmer as it soaked into the wood. Then I added stenciling and stamping to make background textures.

From there I found images of birds (and butterflies and bees) to begin painting, outlining each first in black ink, then layering paint. sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent.
Here is the beginnings of a bee landing on a flower.

And here are finished tags, with additional accents, silk ribbon ties, and a few layers of glossy Modge Podge to seal them.

I am still in the process of making more. They will be on display at the Artist's Studio Tour next month, and are currently on my Etsy page as well.

Glorious Silk

Silk is a wonderful fiber, lustrous, incredibly strong, and one of the most dye-receptive fabrics in the world. It's also made, not from a plant, but from the cocoon of a silkworm, hoping to turn into a moth.

These cocoons unravel into yards and yards of fine filaments of silk ready to be spun.

 Here's our little friend chowing down on a mulberry leaf.

That little creature produces threads that are dyed then turned into yarns and fabric, often woven into saris in India.

 I am at the other end of that long chain of production. All I did was buy a fairly inexpensive bundle of leftover silk ends from the looms that make the sari cloth. They came to me looking like this:

I sorted them into colour ranges then carefully dampened and ironed each strip.

Next I got a packet of paper backed fusible sheets and laid out the strips of silk on them.

When the sheet was covered I fused the silk strips with a hot iron to the backing and removed the paper so the back side could be fused to another piece of fabric.

Another colour variation:

At this point the prep work is done and the sheets of silk are ready to be stitched, embroidered, beaded, and cut.

                                        Here are a few pieces that I have embellished. I basically do running stitches, french knots, lazy daisies, blanket stitches, cross stitches, whip stitches, and any other stitches that I remember from my crafty background. I love being completely improvisational in this part.

I have made a few wrist cuff. This shows the various stages, from cutting the silk strips to stitching, to embroidering and beading.

I have cut some pieces into leaf shapes and stitched them on wool for later projects.

I have used whole fused strips as a background, as in this small skull for a Day of the Dead work. The skull was hand carved on a lino block and printed onto linen, then stitched and beaded.

A finished cuff:

This will be stuffed and made into an art doll.

Sometimes just a strip adds colour and energy to a small artwork (still in progress).

My big project from all these strips is a wall hanging I have created for the Buddy Holly Center's Day of the Dead exhibit, Celebracion. It is 19" x 23" and is called Healing Heart. It will be in a show going up next week and hanging through November. The pink section on the left is from a jacket I made in 1989 and cut up for re-purposing. I also used some brocaded silk trim that was given to me in the 1970's by Glenn's grandmother. Never throw silk away!

When do I have time to do all this hand embroidery and beadwork? Why when I'm sitting on the couch in the evening, watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. The perfect backdrop to these gorgeous colours. I mean, have you seen her wardrobe?

Roots and Branches

This post is all about Geneology and the British side of my family tree (the Russian side is harder to trace due to small snags like the Russian Revolution and World War II). I am mainly writing this page for my relatives and close friends to enjoy so it may be of no interest to anyone else.

We had visitors from England this past week, Matt and Sapna Tugby from Durham, England.
Here's Durham on the map, up near the Scottish border. There's a big cathedral there.

Here's where Matt fits into our family story. My mother, Joyce Radford, was the youngest of four children, born in Long Eaton, Nottingham, England, in 1924. She had three older siblings, Jack, Gladys, and Nell. Jack died in 1950 of tuberculosis. Nell married Harold Tubb and had one child, my cousin Brian. Gladys married Frank Salmon and had two children, Janet and Gay. Matt is the youngest son of Gay. Mom married Vadim Komkov and had five children, thus holding the record so far for anyone in recent generations.

Gladys, Nell, and Jack in 1918 before Joyce was born.

Here are my mom, Joyce and her sister, Gladys and Nell in the 1940's.

Aunt Nell's wedding photo.

 Here is Matt's Dad, Gay, as a little boy. And Gay's sister, Janet.

 The Salmon family, Frank, Gladys, Janet, and Gay in the 1940's.

At this point our British family lineage had all been staying put for centuries in the same region, but then things happened. Mom met, Dad, the crazy Russian, who was now stationed in England during WWII, fighting with the Polish RAF squadron. They got married in 1946.

 Then I came along. Jobs were scarce in post war Britain so Dad got an engineering job in Johannesburg, South Africa, where my sister, Stephanie was born, then later we moved to Kitwie, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) where he worked as an engineer for the Rhokana copper mines, and where my sister Andrea, was born.

Dad and I on board ship to South Africa.

 Kitwie: Mom with myself and baby, Andrea, (soon to become much more attractive). 1956

Meanwhile, Gay's older sister, Janet, now a teenager, came to visit us in Africa, met and married Gawie Roux, and remained in Africa to settle in Zambia then South Africa. Our family was now slowly spreading out across the world. Shortly after this my Dad got a job at the University of Utah and we emigrated to the U.S. in 1957.
Look at these poor immigrants (Stephanie and myself) boarding the ship in Cape Town.

Meanwhile, Matt's wife Sapna's parents, left India in the 1970's and emigrated to England, where many years later, in 2012, Matt and Sapna would marry.

Matt first visited us in 2003 when he was a college student, and wanted to come over and visit this branch of the family. Nell's son, Brian had already brought his wife and three kids to the states in 1982, and later with his twin boys, Edwin and Arthur in 1994.

Here Brian is with his grown children in 2012. Edwin, Arthur, and Maisie, who has three children of her own.

Which brings us back to Matt and Sapna, and what a lovely visit we had this past week, especially as they got to see Mom, now 91, and catch up on memories and back stories. Matt was officially in the U.S. as a professor of philosophy (A PhD in the true sense of the word) from Durham University, presenting a paper at a conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Lubbock was just a short detour. Here are a few mementos of their visit.

At the Ranching Heritage Center. Followed by a visit to the Ansel Adams exhibit at the TTU Museum.

Matt and Sapna, with Andrea and myself. It was a beastly hot day!

It's not an official trip until you go to Prairie Dog Town:

The Robert Bruno house at Lake Ransom Canyon:

The Buddy Holly Center. Closed on Monday but we still got a photo op with the glasses.

And of course, lots of good food, including barbeque, Mexican food, and hearty breakfasts (yes, both Matt and Sapna commented on the huge portions of food they serve in the U.S.). But importantly, they got to spend time with Joyce and reminisce. She was so pleased to see them.