Turtle
Trax Diary. Page 34
September 28, 2001.
Things that happened before the world changed...and after.
by Lucky Magnolia (Susan Shie)
Page Two of this entry
This is a detail of the painted quilt "Liberty Weeps for Her Country," which I made in response to the 9-11 tragedy.
If you like, go to Page One of this diary entry.
OK, above left is the first version of the "Cream and Sugar / Lovers" card quilt, in The Kitchen Tarot. On the right is a photo of it, after I did a whole bunch of quilting to it. No beading yet, and the colors here are not right. I tried like crazy to make the two photos match colors in Photoshop, but I give up! Can you see the stitches all over the one on the right? And this is a fairly large piece...ok, middle sized. 36"h x 25"w. I want to bead it up a little now, even tho a big part of me wants to just make more and more and more paintings with that airbrush!!!!!!!!!!!
Faye Geller tells me to get some apprentice to do the stitching and beading, as an educational experience, so I can paint and draw more. I donno.... Could someone want to come and work with me, just for the education and experience, and work on adding stuff to MY QUILTS? Some eager young fiber student? Or an old one, for that matter!????
I've never had help on the stitching and beading, tho Jimmy has collaborated a lot, doing leather "parts" for the quilts sometimes, along with doing some of the airbrush (and always keeping the airbrush working!) and some machine work over cursive writing on the quilts. I know a lot of quilt artists have someone else quilt their work, but my stitching is very personal! Could I let go of the decisions? Would it still be the same? Well, maybe it wouldn't be the same, but it would still be nice to be able to make a lot more images into quilts with help. I think my ego is very caught up in the whole process! I think I just talked myself into exhaustion over the whole idea!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we had a big
four person camp Aug 22 - 28, which we called our Mavericks Quilt Camp,
since three of the four students came from the Quilt Mavericks email list.
This plot was hatched by Tarot Camp veteran Kerris
Skyye of Middletown, OH, who'd been here a year ago for the tarot camp
which Elizabeth Owen had gotten together with us.
Above I'm getting some help (shades of this future idea of apprentices queuing up to work for me! Ha!) I had drawn the start of a painting of the Mavericks' Camp Picnic, and Peggy Muth, of Columbia, Maryland, and Susan McRae of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, were helping me paint. So were Pamela Allen from Kingston, Ontario, and Kerris, but they aren't in this pic. After they helped me work in the yellow background, I told them to go start on their own paintings, and I think working on mine may have given them some needed nerve to start their own pieces. (Well, Ms. Pamela didn't need to be bravened! She's a seasoned painter who could hardly wait to start her own pieces!!! And they were excellent!) Oh, and this was using Deka Permanent Fabric Paint, which the maker has discontinued! So you'd better come to camp, if you want to be able to try it yet! It's gonna be extinct!
Here's Kerris' piece about being called a pansy.
He hadn't made art with writing on it before, and I know he really loves
this work. It's about 24" square or so, hand painted. He wrote the
words with a new Rub-a-Dub marker. When I took this photo, he already had
sandwiched the painting into a quilt block to stitch and embroider.
Peggy's finishing up sandwiching her quilt
block here, made as Kerris' was, with brush on Deka paint first. She worried
that she didn't know how to draw, but then made some very charming drawn
images, including her sewing machine. As students smile away while working
on their pieces, I always feel that things are looking up, when adults
have art breakthroughs!
Susan was learning some more airbrush tips
from Jimmy here, as they stood in front of the tee shirt project in progress
- fronts being almost finished at this point. They were cleaning up, I
bet, because neither is wearing their respirator. Because Susan was going
home earlier than the rest, we focused really hard on the tee shirts and
drove ourselves to finish them in two days. Whenever one person was done
adding a design element to all the shirts, another student or I would go
into the airbrush room and add something else. Fastest tee shirt project
in history, I bet! Also highly PURPLE!
Here's a happy Susan, showing me her sandwiched
and ready to stitch painting of her garden. I tried really hard to darken
the image, but it just wouldn't show up as much as I'd like you to see!
It's an image of Susan in her garden with her cat, who's quite giant here!
He looks calm enough, thank goodness! Our orange cat Willy would be there,
too, bashing in that garden, or anywhere outside, if we'd let him. Willy
always keeps us on our toes, making sure he doesn't zoom out any door being
opened. Born on a farm, he was, and it's in his blood forever!
Now here's a happy family: I've got a sledge hammer
and Pamela has a demure little fan! Peggy, Kerris, Pamela, Susan, and I
probably would fit pretty well into an Adams Family portrait, with these
props, and we were having great fun! Felt pretty accomplished, as the tee
shirts were ready to heatset, and we each had something to sew on in the
evenings, since we'd all heatset our paintings and sandwiched them all.
Ah, the joy of achievement and playfulness combined!
And now: The Amazing Three Headed Artist! Peggy,
Susan, and Kerris thought this was just the most clever pose in the world!
"Take our picture! Lookie! Three heads!" I just know Kerris put
in that little yellow smiley face on all the tee shirts, just because I
said I've always hated them! Smarty!
Here are the backs of the August tee shirts.
They have a giant tomato pincushion that sits elegantly upon one's fanny.
Location is everything!
Now here is the group fake quilt, tho it's
missing Susan's work, since she could only stay for part of the week. So
there coulda been an even bigger, more colorful piece created. This piece
is the first quilt ever that I know of, which is U shaped. I've never thought
of that one! I've done many with a kind of reverse of that idea, with a
taller rectangle in the middle of the top, but never a big gap in the middle
of the top. And you know, I really like it.
I had to stay away while these guys were creating
their fake quilt. Not just because I always do that, so the students won't
get my feedback too soon. But also because, by this late in the week, these
were bickering like brothers and sisters, picking on each other in gleeful
sarcasm to the point where it was taking a LONG time to get the stuff up
on the wall and pinned in place. When I did stick my head in, Pamela was
hard at work, pinning and repinning, while Kerris and Peggy sat back and
bossed her around, between breaks for hurling insults at each other! Don't
get the wrong idea: this was all in total fun, and I loved seeing them
work and play hard all at once!
This detail of the fake quilt (remember that
means a quilt they put together on the workwall, and I teach them the sewing
stitches I use to combine all my big quilts on the wall, as a demo), shows
some of the little quilted samplers we made in that week of camp. These
have to be made in the first day or so, and by the end of their creation,
the students know how to do many of the Lucky School of Quilting Techniques.
The samplers are about 4 - 6 " square.
Ratz! I just couldn't get the sides of this
photo light enough, without completely washing out the middle of the painting.
This is my "Maverick Quilt Camp Picnic" piece, about 24"
high x 42" wide. It began as my Deka painting demo in the class, and
later I airbrushed it, to darken and thicken the lines I'd drawn with a
marker, and to shade the painting. Trying to hit little detailed lines
is really tricky with an airbrush, but the marker lines were just too pale
to suit me.
In the piece from left are: Jimmy barbecuing, Floyd admiring Kerris' ballet tutu (He ASKED FOR THAT TUTU, it wasn't my idea!), me, Susan, and Pamela toasting with some nice Merlot, Peggy wearing a sexy bikini and a hat made of brussels sprouts (Yes, she asked for these, too!), Hattie in a little apron, toasting with Merlot, and in the bottom left corner, all the cats, along with Nelson as the Swami in a Bottle beside Kerris as the Pig in a Bottle. (He did not ask for this!) In the sky are the salad in a big bowl, a croissant on the red 50s dinette table, some cantalope slices on the loose, and the patio owl lights glowing above. Ah, making this piece was a lot of fun, as well as a fine example of good art journalism! :)
Here's the tail of the tale of the August camp,
with all of us sitting on a railroad tie, as if waiting for the bus, while
Jimmy took the pic. Too bad Susan had to leave early, as we all felt she
fit in so much, we just hated to see her go.
Here's our garden in early September at dusk. Right up front you
can see one of the purple chrysanthemum plants from Gretchen and Mike's
wedding last October. I was so happy when three of the four plants lived
over last winter, even tho we didn't plant them til almost mid October.
I'd been really afraid that the mums wouldn't have time to take root before
the cold weather set in, but they did. You never know with mums!
I took a garden bouquet down to Gretchen and Mike last weekend, when Jimmy and I spent the weekend with them in Cincinnati, and I made an extra little bouquet of cuttings from their wedding plants. I wish they could have come up to see the garden this year, but they never made it. So I took part of the garden to them. (More on that visit to Cinci in my next diary, since the pix are still in my camera.)
A visit from our cousins and my aunt! At left, Tamara
Shie, my cousin Duane's oldest daughter. Then there's my Aunt Pauline Shie,
Mom's first cousin who married Dad's brother Russell. And Pauline's daughter,
my cousin Candy Watson, who lives in Winchester, VA now, having retired.
Tamara lives in CA, where she goes to grad school now, and Aunty still
lives near Orrville, about 15 miles away. Debi and I both think she reminds
us of Mom a lot now, especially since Aunt Louise, Mom's little sister,
is gone. She's our closest person to talk to, who reminds us of Mom! Pauline
still lives alone at age 87, and has a cat to keep her company.
We caught up on old times and got to know Tamara better, since she grew up near DC, and we didn't visit back and forth much in all those years. All three of these women are true Shie women: Feisty Under Pressure!!!!!
Same day, this is my sister Debi and me. We're
the Queens of Feisty Under Pressure! Actually, Debi says it's more like
Feisty All the Time! We sat out by the garden on a bench with Candy, Tamara,
and Aunt Pauline a long time, telling stories and laughing. My brother
Jimmy and his wife Lyn came over for part of the day, too. It was Sept.
1, ten days before the surprise attack explosions happened. I will cherish
days like these always, as happy times I hope people in the world can always
have, and can expect to have, to be carefree and just enjoying life!
But then Floyd had his TV on early that Tuesday morning, and he came to tell Jimmy that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane, and as they watched, another one hit the other building. Jimmy came and told me, and we all heard that a bomb had gone off at the Pentagon - later to be retold as another plane hitting. We watched as the first tower fell down on itself. Then Gretchen called from her museum, wondering if we were OK. She didn't have TV in the museum, so was listening to NPR. Couldn't get websites with news on them to download, because everyone was trying to see them at once.
The second tower fell in. A fourth plane went near Cleveland, but later crashed near Pittsburgh. All planes were grounded. What next? What next? What should we all do??????????? Gretchen tried to call my friend Robin at her job at the Met in NYC, but Robin was at home that day, so I called her. Are you OK? Yes, but the whole city is terrified.
You know that day. How we all just went numb, hardly able to comprehend that this was happening. Imagining what must be going on inside those fallen buildings, under them, around them. I read posts from friends on my Quilt Art email listserv all day, some from people in the cities hit, others from people around the world. All putting the situation into the crystal clear reality of a globe in panic.
My Russian penpal Ivan Yurushev wrote to tell us that all Russians were in shock, grieving for the US and unable to understand why anyone would do this. He said New York belongs to the world, not just the US, and that attacking it was an attack on the whole world. This stunned and comforted me. But with the images and stories in the days to come, as you know, there was little to comfort any of us, except the love and sympathy we could all send to each other. That event somehow made us all more appreciative of our simple lives, of daily routines shared with others. But still, as reality sunk in, we all were left with a real depression.
I had to do something creative, but the works I had planned to work on were all supposed to be upbeat, and I realized I needed to make art about the tragedy first.
So this is what I made, starting Sept 13:
Above are three early stages of development of my art quilt "Liberty Weeps for Her Country." On the left is the sandwich of fabrics dyed by Anne Warren as the face of the quilt, with a semi circle of Lunn Fabrics' hand made print fabric at the top, as a sun eclipsed. I was trying to create a peaceful beginning in nature on the front, with the back being the explosions of the WTC and the Pentagon, with a scrunch dyed fabric by Lunns, of reds, purples, and oranges.
I drew my image with a marker on that first stage of the piece. Then, as the second picture shows, I airbrushed over the blue and green fabrics. A large eye in the sun weeps streams of tears that are the lines flowing down in the painting. This stage came out so dark that I decided to use covering white fabric paint to lighten it up. I didn't get a picture of that level of work, but it was REALLY white! So the next step was to go back and airbrush over the white brushed on paint. I was getting a real rhythm going between these two ways to apply paint: Back and forth, between my studio and the airbrush room.
This was me, starting to airbrush colors over
the white paint. Just lightly fogging tints into it, so the piece wouldn't
get too dark again. Now you can see the seven rays of the eclipsed sun
have turned it into Liberty's crown, upside down, as in distress. After
a lot more tinting with airbrush tho, it did get a bit dark again, so the
last painting process was to use Lumiere pearl white to add another dimension
of light over the piece.
I goofed by not taking a picture of it before the pearl paint was applied, but after all airbrushing was done. Try to get all stages of work, if you can!
This is the finished piece. After all the paint was on, I heatset
it, using a presscloth over the face of the quilt, since the sandwich was
already made. Then I machine quilted with free motion work, all over the
piece, doing outlines and sewing over all the letters of the large words
with straight stitching.
I hand sewed on bugle beads around the heart and the large eye, and made a second fabric border around all the edges of the quilt, which I added embellishments to. The clothespins are antiques from our 50s childhood of innocence, showing where we came from and seemingly can't go back to. The buttons are all in drab colors in the border, showing our work lives, the routine of our labors that have to continue, and maybe the heaviness in our hearts. Oh, and there are many beautiful blue pearl buttons in the sky, which are surplus Navy Waves' uniform buttons, for the military that tries to protect us. I made polymer clay faces for at the top of the piece, angels looking down, and put more faces in the borders, to represent those whom we love.
The symbolism is this: The main figure began as an angel, and when I realized I could turn my sun into an upside down Statue of Liberty crown / eclipse, I began to see the central figure not just as an angel, but as Liberty. Her roses are for peace, which she has always offered in this country. The words around the painting are from my heart, wishes I have for us all, as we face what may happen next in the world. The two snakes at the bottom represent the Year of the Snake, which 2001 is, but also they stand for the sneakiness of the attack on the US. Maybe also for the careful studying and movement forward that has to be done, to try to figure out what to do to stop terrorism in the world.
In painting around "Give peace a chance" (upper left corner), I didn't highlight "a chance." What that caused is for one to read it as just "Give peace," which I think is a good idea in itself, besides giving it a chance. So I didn't paint light colors around the last part of the phrase.
I have to say that painting this art piece and sewing it didn't change the world. It was merely my process of grieving and trying to feel useful somehow in the days after the attack, while rescue workers dug for survivors 24 hours a day. We artists have such good fortune, in being able to therpaize ourselves at least a little, by making art about things that trouble us, besides creating art that celebrates things we are happy about in our lives.
Here are the lovely September flowers I can
focus on, to remind me of beauty in the world, and of goodness. We worked
very long and hard earlier this year, putting in new flower beds around
our house, besides replanting the old ones. Along the driveway we tilled
wider beds this Spring, and worked long hours all Spring and Summer to
nurture the plants along. Now they glow in sun and rain both. I'm busy
collecting seeds from the Four O'Clocks and Cosmos, as a reminder to myself
that next Spring will come soon, and I'll want to have lots of seeds to
start this beauty pagent over again!
I think collecting seeds, a few here one day, a few there the next (since they ripen here and there), is a very calming and grounding activity. So are planting, watering, and weeding, for that matter! I remember looking out of my bedroom window in the summer, when I was a little kid. Mom would be in her garden very early each day, weeding, watering, babying her garden plants. She grew more veggies than I do, and her garden was huge! She loved being out there in that sunlight, among her plants. I understand as a grownup, but as a child I thought she was suffering, working so long out there. Little did I know how gardening is a healer beyond belief!
If you have a garden, relish its last hurrah of Autumn, before the frosts take it away this year! If you don't have one, maybe find a garden somewhere to enjoy a little! Let it remind you that the world is naturally good, full of peace and hope for the future.
Blessings and comfort to you.
Love, Lucky, back with another diary entry around November 30.
If you like, go to Page One of this diary entry.
Turtle Moon Studios
Susan Shie and James Acord
2612 Armstrong Dr
Wooster, Ohio 44691
330-345-5778
email: turtles@bright.net
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