Quilted vessels are three-dimensional sculptures of layered fabric that are so closely sewn that they can bear the weight of hundreds, or even thousands, of beads: glass, stone, metal, paper, or plastic.

To hold the warm curve of suprisingly sturdy fabric in your hands and to run the strings of beads through your fingers is a meditation or a delight.  Or both.

A Reason To Live - detail    I love this piece.  O.K. my sewing skills are a bit above my photography skills, but you can see that the darker burnt orange was appliqued, (by hand), to the dark peach fabric.  After that I randomly stipple-quilted the applique down.  Then I started the beading.

But let me stop there for a moment.  I am going to have a soapbox moment here.  Just skip this if you are not in the mood.  There's a bit at the end about the beads.

If you practice the visual arts, or just watch them, you know that a lot of us were in our studios on 9/11 and poured our hearts out into our work.  So was I.  Let me tell you the story.

 I was busy with the primary stage of applique that morning.  As I listened to the news I was at first incredulous, as I think so many of us were, but then I was horrified by our government's and media's reactions to it.  As a parent I know that hitting a child for hitting a child has a way of eliciting a bigger mess than we started with.  And I never had to hit anyone to figure that out - all the wisdom traditions teach this.  For example the Bible teaches lots of stuff about the adverse effects of eyes having at eyes and teeth being exchanged around.

I stitched and stitched on this piece and could hardly believe the name-calling and worldwide threats being made in my name.  Have you ever read the Treaty of Versailles?  There are plenty of folks in Western Asia who are justifiably angry - NOT that I condone blowing people up.  That is the point.  I don't think that violence actually gets us where we want to go.  But that is where I heard Mr. President et. al. taking us.  I put my work down.  I barely restrained myself from picking my children up early from school.  I could hear the news inciting someone's finger dangerously close to That Big Red Button.

Then the children came home ... and went back to school the next day ... and I picked up the applique again because I figured it this way:  If the world "leaders" needed to be pressing buttons at one another and turn us all into a puff of smoke then I wanted to be doing something that I loved when I met my children in Heaven for lunch.  Aaaand, there is an old witchy saying that what goes around comes around - Christians call it the Golden Rule - O.K. so all the wisdom traditions teach about this too.  It means that one gets back at one's self the same energy that one puts out there.  So if I want to live in a world where beauty is important, and we all take responsibility for the treaties that we sign, then I must make art and do what I love - and probably that energy would add to the love, beauty, and accountibility quotients in the Universe, and hopefully tip the scales towards maybe not causing WWIII afterall.

END of soapbox.  I'm getting down now.

So I started the beading.  I have a habit of wandering into beading thinking that there isn't enough interest, or texture, and then I make up these wild patterns, and then I look at how big the piece is, and then I overwhelm myself at how much I have left to do.  All of those little lines, all of those little twisty tassels take a while to do.  And y'have to count every bead down the twist or tassel and every bead back up after the center bead so that when you twist it will hang nicely. 

Some of us are priveledged to be artists.

Embroider My Heart With Compassion