4th Year - Linen

Each year for our anniversary, I've made Paul a card out of the traditional material usually given for a particular year. First year was paper, second was cotton, third and fifth I got mixed up (leather and wood) so I made a wooden card, and this year, linen. I enjoy reminiscing about the past year and all the stuff we've done together, and usually I include photos. Well, the cotton card from two years ago looked a lot like a book, so for linen I wanted to do something totally unique. So I used iron-on transfers you can run through the printer to make the photos and around the photos, on a long piece of linen, wrote about our memories with colored Sharpies. I then installed it to hang from our ceiling, with tendrils of other strips of linen around it. To present it to Paul, I had him shut his eyes as I led him to a chair that faced it, and when he was settled, he opened his eyes and he loved it! Yay! Happy Anniversary to us!

Something New

While on vacation last week, I spent another hour or so on the collage I began during the Lynne Perella workshop I participated in at the beginning of August, and got to a point where I felt I couldn't add any more. Complete? As Lynne said that day, "Nothing I make is ever complete!" But I am satisfied. She read a poem to us that day called, What's In My Journal, by William Stafford, and then assigned each of us a line from the poem to inspire our piece. The line I got: Evidence to hang me, or to beautify. This piece is about 24" x 36", big for me, but her final technique was folding it up into a book, sectioning the piece off in eighths, which made the whole experience different. You notice such different things, and knowing that the piece was created with the "big picture" in mind, turns out there was a lot of detail I didn't pay attention to until I got to see it sectioned off. I've attached some smaller snapshots of the piece below.

I love the concept but feel that I do need more practice with paint. So I'll keep working on this style. I'm very inspired!

(If you click on the image, you'll see it in bigger form.)