Hidden Things

Autumn is my favorite time of the year. Here in Vermont the air is crisp and clear, the sun is warm, and the trees are turning amazing colors. It all starts as a lush summer green adding a little more yellow week by week through August and into September. And then, before you know it there are little pops of pure yellow, orange and red before the hills turn to a riot of color.

Have you ever wondered where that color comes from? It really isn’t something new; it’s been there all along. It starts way back in the spring. If you look carefully when the weather begins to warm, many of the new little leaves that sprout are deep red, rust, peach colored, and yellow green. Then, as summer comes along, the leaves turn dark green and lush. The tree begins to make chlorophyll, the green pigment that helps the tree convert sunlight into energy to help it grow. That green pigment masks the other colors that are present in the leaves and so the trees appear as varied shades of green. In the Autumn, the tree stops producing chlorophyll to prepare for winter dormancy and the hidden colors are revealed.

I’m always amazed at what has been hidden all these months – gorgeous rich colors that emerge once the green chlorophyll is no longer produced. This reminds me of the passage in the Bible in the book of 1 Peter 3:3-4 which admonishes us to “not let your adornment be expernal only… but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is prescious in the sight of God.” The beauty that’s important is who we are on the inside, not what we look like on the outside. That beauty is rooted in love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith [in God] (1 Timothy 1:5). I want to cultivate that.

Heart bombing

Here we are in the dead of winter. It’s cold, it’s snowy, it’s bleak. It’s hard to find color anywhere, just black and white and shades of gray.

There’s a group in our town that seeks to remedy that, at least in February. All year long they make stuffed fabric hearts, two of the same bright fabric attached with a crocheted chain. Then on the first of February they stealthily hang them all over town. The largest number hang from two trees in front of the United Church. This is where the idea originated and it has spread over the years to local church members and on to others in the community. They appear in public places like the town green and on private properties. What a refreshing sight to come around a corner and find a rainbow of color in our black and white world.

I came home from church one day and found some on a tree out front. Such a lovely, thoughtful gesture, don’t you think?

Now that February is over I think I’ll take them down, dry then out well and save them for next year.

Valentines

Every year I make fabric postcard valentines for my grandchildren. And each year they have a theme. This year it is flowers. Now that Valentine’s Day is past and they’ve been delivered, I can share them here.

Valentines 2022

The elemants are free-hand cut and fused to the background, then stitched down. The hearts are metal fasteners from the scrapbooking aisle at the craft store. Then the back is fused on and the trim couched around the edge. I used a pigma pen to write the sentiment:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

[kind of flowers] are [color],

And I love you!

Hope they like them and know they are loved!

Art from Nature

The dog and I took long walks every day through the summer, continuing the routine that had been set in place over the pandemic isolation. We missed our companion, but being outdoors helped me to breathe deeply, pray and enjoy the beauty of God’s creation. It was a restorative time to appreciate the beauty around me in everyday living things.

On towards Fall I began to notice the ash trees dropping their purple and maroon leaflets. They are one of the first trees of the forest to turn color and lose their leaves. A particular sprig on the ground caught my eye and I picked it up. I kept seeing these same colors in the scattered leaflets as we walked along and I collected a handful to bring home.

I chose to arrange them in a spiral in the garden. It lasted for a little while before the breeze blew the leaves into disarray.

Later in the Fall I made other collections: of birch leaves, acorn caps and beech leaves. I love that for me the process of ephemeral art is the main thing. The end product may be lovely but it is fleeting.

clump birch #1

clump birch #2

acorn caps with sugar maple leaves

after the wind came along

beech leaves

If you are interested, you can see one of my other feeble attempts at ephemeral art here. There are any number of talented artists out there who do amazing things with whatever they find at hand. One who inspires me is James Brunt. Check out his work.

Grief

Faithful readers will have noticed that I’ve been absent here for a while. Nearly a year ago I was preparing a post about mud season here in Vermont. It’s typically a difficult time of year with deeply rutted and very muddy roads, but it means the snow is melting and Spring is just around the corner. That post was never published. Life as I knew it was interupted by grief.

My grief arrived on a beautiful day in March. Out of the blue. Sudden. Shocking. And grief did to me what Covid could not. Covid had given me time and emotional space to create without outside pressures, to walk, to garden, to write and deepen relationships. But grief brought time to a stand-still. It took every ounce of emotional energy I could muster to put one foot in front of the other, to walk a once-shared path alone.

Grief is a heavy load. Everyone’s load is different but they are all heavy. My faith in Almighty God has sustained me through dark and lonely days. God has been my constant, my rock. His mercies are new every morning and he has provided in ways that are beyond coincidence.

When grief came, I was knee deep in bears, twelve of them on a pieced quilt top for a grandchild on the way. I had plenty of time. She was due in six months and I was making steady progress. Each bear was made up of 50 separate pieces and they were nearly complete. But it all stopped abruptly. A quilting friend offered me some help and came for several days near the end of May. There were a number of chores on my list for her which she graciously did, the final one involving time in my studio to help me begin to regain my creative spark. I’ve slowly been able to create again.

I hope to continue to share some of that work here as I move forward. I hope you’ll join me.

Fabric Books – Part3

The third book has a more varied history than the original two (you can see them here and here). It started as a collaborative project and wasn’t intended to become a book at all. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure it had any intent whatsoever other than for friends to do something together.

It started as a larger piece of fabric, perhaps a free motion quilting practice piece to which various bright scraps had been quilted down on the top side; a tone-on-tone had been used for the back. It was so long ago that I cannot remember the details but I think the idea was that each of us would do something to it – a round robin of sorts.

Front cover

The first person applied a layer of light-colored, sparkly paint to the original quilted piece to tone down the very bright colors. It was then cut up into postcard sized (4″x6″) rectangles, and another person sewed the tree shapes into each “postcard”. The project came to my hands and languished for a very long time until I began making little books. I decided these various pieces would make a lovely story which I entitled “Enchanted Forest”. There is someone lurking in that painted-over side. Can you find her?

Pages 1-6

This project would need a different kind of “binding” than my other method because the pages were already sandwiched and I would not be able to run ribbons through the midddle of them. I wanted it to be mostly invisible but sturdy enough to hold the pages together and to handle some “reading”. I settled on using tulle and I chose orange since it was the color that showed the least. I used several narrow strips that I could sew to each page edge, leaving enough room between the pages so it would fold up nicely.

Close-up of the tulle binding

After choosing a layout I fashioned a sign that I “nailed” to the tree on the cover, sewed the pages together and, Voila! , a fun book that I treasure to this day.

I’m linking up with Nina Marie’s Off the Wall Friday.

Fabric Books – Part 2

Following on the success of my first little book (read about it here) I decided to make a book of seasons. I wanted to “write” about some of the things that are notable here where I live in Vermont. Again, it is a book without words and I decided to call it “Roundelay, A Song of Seasons”. A Roundelay is a song or poem with regularly repeating parts; the seasons are a perpetual cycle. Roundelay seemed a fitting title.

Front Cover

This book was put together using the same methods and process as before but since I had some experience now, the construction was a little easier. It is the same size: 2 1/2″ by 3 1/2″ (trading card size) with a few more pages, although not quite 1 per month.

Pages 1-6

Pages 7-11 and the front cover

Winter and Sugaring Season

Mud Season and Spring

Summer

Autumn

Autumn and Stick Season

Ski Season / Winter

I’m linking up with Nina Marie’s Off the Wall Friday.

A Shamrock

I stumbled upon a sweet little shamrock pattern in a Craftsy email, just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day. It was for an 8″ block but I thought with an added border it would be a nice compliment to the small pieced heart I made last month and the evergreen tree I made in December. The pattern did not include a stem so I made one out of a bias strip sewn into a tube and hand appliqued down, then top stitched. All three piecees are each about 12″ square. The thought has occured to me to make a series of small seasonal quiltlets that could be changed out throughout the year. Time will tell whether that happens or not.

Fabric Books – Part 1

Recently I was thinking about making a little fabric book. And it got me to thinking about the books I made back in 2017. Somehow they never actually appeared in my blog and I thought that was sad. They were fun to make and came out pretty well, I thought. So, in several posts I will share them here.

The first one I made was for a winter challenge at Six Loose Ladies, the yarn shop where I volunteer. The requirements stated the submissions must be fiber and I thought fabric qualified even though I was pretty sure the rest of the entries would involve yarn. Since it was a winter challenge, I decided on a winter theme – hence the title “A Winter Tale”. It is a story told without words.

The book itself is quite small; the pages measure 2 1/2″ by 3 1/2″ (trading card size) and it is accordian style. I fused and stitched the hand cut, raw-edge elements to the pages and drew on some of the tiny details with a fine tipped Pigma pen. Each little page was prepared separately and then stitched to its corresponding back page using stiff batting inbetween. There are ribbons that run through the pages to hold them all together and allow it to fold up.

Pages 1-5

Pages 6-9 and the front cover

And here are the pages close up, two at a time.

Pages 1-2

Pages 3-4

Page 5

Pages 6-7

Pages 8-9

I’ll be linking up with Nina Marie’s Off the Wall Friday.

Flora and her Salamanders

Back in the Fall of 2020 I was inspired by Alex Anderson on The Quilt Show. She presented some regular episodes on how to make a whimsical self portrait, not taking yourself too seriously nor trying to be too life-like. Many moons ago (1999!) I made a self portrait in a similar vein and I thought it was time to make another one.

The idea was to identify some things that characterized you – things you like, favorite colors or activities, etc. – and to riff off those to construct your portrait. She gave a general size and some templates for features that were proportionate to that size, but mostly they were suggestions. We were encouraged to not be too literal and to have fun.

The first order of business was to piece a background of 3-4 different fabrics, then to cut a head and neck and to add features as desired. These were raw-edge pieces cut and fused down to be sewn on later. In my typical style, I just started cutting and thought about the fusing afterwards. I have a shoebox full of bits with fusing on them and I went there first to cut the flowers I had decided to use for hair since I am an avid gardner. Of course there were some inherent problems associated with this approach: There was lots of overlap, creating thick layers to stitch through, and not everything stuck down because of overfused bits and many different kinds of fusible products calling for varied treatments. I fussy-cut some salamanders (six actually – can you find them all?) from a piece of fabric to add since I like small amphibians of various kinds. And I gave myself glasses – I need them for distance. And while these are a few of the characteristics that are true, there are a number of features that were added purely for artistic drama.

Once I got most of the elements cut and chosen, I assembled batting and backing and set about sewing everything down. I finished with a diamond grid for the background and a fussy binding. The wavy patterned black and white fabric was chosen to give a sense of movement and an off-kilter feeling. Oh, and I named her Flora.

“Flora with Salamanders: A Loosely Autobiographical Sketch” by Lynne Croswell 2021

In case you were wondering, here’s the self-portrait I made in 1999.

“Self Portrait” by Lynne Croswell 1999

I’m linking up with Nina Marie’s Off the Wall Friday