[Nfb-krafters-korner] My newest blog

[Blindhands at aol.com]

How beautiful.  u have come a long ways since that day and climbed  over 
the obstacles   that have been thrown  in your path.   You have proven to 
yourself, "Yes, I can!"
 
Joyce  Kane
_www.KraftersKorner.org_ (http://www.krafterskorner.org/) 
Blindhands at AOL.com   

 
In a message dated 7/7/2013 10:36:49 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
riverwoman at zoominternet.net writes:

Can you  remember when you first learned to use a needle and thread?
In my latest  blog article, I talk about that day, with my mother at my 
side, gently  teaching me to do embroidery.

I will attach the link AND post the  article here below, too.

Lynda

(Block quote)



I  was thinking this morning about our influences, and how we got to where 
we are  today as artists.  Have you stopped to think about where the ideas 
come  from when you are creating your own  art?









I thought about the choices we  make. How do we decide what to create?



I immediately think  of  my MOTHER who patiently teaching  me to do 
embroidery when I was  a very young child.  We were  sitting side by side in my  
GRANDMOTHER's kitchen.  She had purchased a kit. It consisted of a piece  of 
beautiful linen fabric, in white. There were three colors of embroidery  
thread: Light blue, dark blue, and silver gray.  I held those little  skeins of 
thread in my hands and moved them about to catch the light on them.  They 
seemed to shimmer as I turned them over and over again. They felt so  silky 
soft in my small hands. The colors seemed to me like they were magic;  they 
were the colors of the sky on a summer afternoon. 



There  were two  more thing in my embroidery kit; there was a slender, 
sharp,  silver needle and a round metal embroidery hoop.



As I speak of  this day, I can still see my mother bending over me, and 
showing my how to put  my needle into the cloth, to push gently down on it, and 
to bring it to the  back of the linen cloth. I searched for just the right 
spot where the needle  would be pushed into the back of the cloth, and gave 
it a shove and watched it  pop up onto the front once again.



That feeling of pushing the  needle gently into the fabric, then pulling 
the blue thread so gently until it  was completely through the fabric was 
something that stays with me in my  memories after sixty years.



My imagination brings me once again  to feel the silken thread, the tension 
of moving it from the top to the back  of the linen, and then the pull of 
bringing it back up to the surface.   It is a feeling of  the comfort of  
repetition  and the  solitude of working with fabric and thread.  It's a quiet 
feeling that  gently comes to me when I remember  the slender  silver needle 
in my  small fingers.  I was about 8 years old at that time.



This  afternoon lesson sitting with my Mother, is one of the many precious 
things my  Mother gave me. Did she  recognize that I was a child who was 
destined to  be a maker of beautiful things? Somehow, she must have known 
intuitively that  it was important to take the afternoon and spend it with her 
oldest  daughter.  Did she know that she was teaching  me  a life  lesson with 
three skeins  of thread, a delicate needle, and a piece of  ivory linen?



Today, I recognize that this was my first  "painting" lesson.  In the art I 
am making these days, I am conscious  that I am PAINTING with a NEEDLE, and 
the THREADS are the SPLASHES of COLOR,  my PIGMENTS.  Into this mix of 
fibers and threads, I add dashes of  natural gemstones; I gather things from 
Nature that will be part of my  pictures.  And, not only are my THREADS the 
strokes of the painting's  surface, so are the glass beads, the pearls, the 
vintage objects, and the  crystals.



(End of Block Quote)





PICTURED  HERE:  Ilsa's Butterfly Garden, Mixed Media Painting on  Fabric.





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