Sense riot

Prepping for my first smudge. Short on sage, I've fluffled this bundle with lavender, and something sharp smelling that might be thyme. I forget what I planted.

worlds inside

Grace, you are so right. Each piece a world you can get lost in.

Each piece has a history. A life of service and travel.

Outcomes

The Perseid meteor showers

Are here this weekend. It was overcast last night, but these pieces were out on the deck soaking it all up.

Favorite old blouse reborn!!

the dog days

Don't know what's possessed me. Looking around at the websites of other artists?  The never-ending heat and humidity of a Georgia August?

No matter, the sauce awaits and color and texture will happen this weekend.

The pace is everything.

early returns

my bedroom curtains getting a jolt.

wonder

When I cleaned up the studio the other day I had a tiny piece of mind on the lookout for the most recent travelers - pieces that had been on display and came home. I know I picked them up from Ginny. Then what?

Bringing groceries in this morning a fat bundle wrapped in a white sheet deep in the trunk of my car eased my mind. Colin brought it in for me later. Everyone is here.

I look at these things and remember what I was thinking about when I made them. The newest ones anyway.  These are details from Demons Dance

unfiltered

.

This was waiting for me Saturday morning, the first day without rain in a week.

I was pruney before I finished cleaning it up and stayed another hour and change.

Colin took this outside his theater last night about  8

History

August 4, 2012

Humidity

has no place to go.  Time, though, seems to have no trouble floating away.

Charlie turned four on 8/1. Where did that chunk of time fly to?

Our last picnic before school starts 

summer

I just finished a store update and need to step away from the electronics.



It's been a full week of Life. Very little of that creative.
Sometimes stuff just has to smolder before it catches. I can smell the close, Dreamtime sort, and the only-imagined-in-nightmares kind that so many on the west coast are actually living with. I cannot imagine. I look at the names of the fires, the towns, and cities in the path of danger and then check that against the whereabouts of those I know, even if only through the ether. Always with fingers crossed.

Lately, I've been feeling a little guilty about the weather here. While it seems like the whole country is suffering under abnormal extremes, this backward backwater is enjoying a Summer of old. Sure it gets hot and humid enough to grow mushrooms in your crack. And the thunderstorms roll through as regular as the CSX freight that wakes me each morning at 4:30 am. But none of it has seemed wrong or out of order.  Such hubris! It's only the end of July. Shut mah mouth!

We have a hawk family nesting close by. One of the babies - a spotty near-adult- and one of the parents have been working the front yard for something in the grass. We don't have moles. Snakes maybe? The birds look fat and healthy. The squirrels seem fewer and I'm grateful.

another studio tour

At first, I thought, "Not another glimpse into the perfect world of another artist..." then I saw who the Artist was and knew that I was in for some reality.
Thanks, Dee Mallon, for the refreshing truth. Here's mine.

Judge if you want to. Can anyone remember the last time I cared about that? I'm going to take a stab at JUST the table today, and not just stuff it all into that closet.

wordless

.

.

I voted and passed out.

night skies

 Some of you know that most of my free time and all of my creative blood has been channeled away from cloth and stitch in recent years.

I still enjoy dyeing vintage cloth from time to time.

My personal stash is at a sane level now that I've gotten honest with myself about if and when I might take up the cloth again and sent much of it out into the world for other artists to use.





That being said, these three pieces came from the last dyefest. 

Large. Spread your wings large. I'm thinking about mapping one of the locations in my book. 

A bird's eye view of a village. A nighttime scene, the owl's eye view. Moonlight and streetlamps, a forge stoked for work. Starlight, fireflies, and campfires. A train rushing through the dark. Candlelight. 

This place in particular because it's also going to be the main setting for the next book. I have to clear the design walls and hang these pieces and see what they have to say to me. 

Maybe nothing, maybe everything

An excerpt from the work in progress: Prophets Tango

Anna claimed the quilt as her own toward the end of her twelfth year when it was stained in the night on her first date with the moon. Tam had prepared her mentally, but the physical evidence stunned and mortified her. She waited in her room until she was sure Murph had gone for the day before she spoke to her aunt in an embarrassed whisper.

“Throw it out?” Tam boomed. “Girl, bring that here to the sink and let me show you the miracle of cold water. That nightie too. Come, let this be the least troublesome blood in your life. See to it, Mary, Amen.” She drew a crooked cross on her own forehead with her finger, then mock spit in one hand. “Quick now, before the stain sets. I show you how.” Once washed, it took both of them to drape the heavy, wet quilt over two ropes of the clothesline, backside to the sunshine to stave off fading.

Late in the afternoon, Anna went to see if it was dry. It had been a hot, airless day and the quilt had slipped and hung like a book from its spine over one rope, the ends close to the grass. She crept between the two halves, the space created by the width of her shoulders lit up by the sunlight poking through the layers of cloth and stitch, tinting that light with a kaleidoscope of color. Arms over her head, she searched for the place - a lavender block with a broad yellow cross - that had been stained with her blood. The cross was high, just out of reach. It was unmarked. Clean.

The quilt was old, Tam said. She’d found it on the banks of the reservoir one day when she and Murph were fishing. Someone skilled in the handwork, but short on artistry in Anna’s opinion, had made it from scraps of clothing a long time ago. It had been patched front and back too many times to tell the old from the new. Blocks of different sizes ran over one another in no particular pattern or intent. There was no maker’s mark.

Anna pulled it from the line, folded it carefully and was carrying it back to her room when the mental images overtook her. She got as far as the shade of the towering maples by the back door as the quilt gave up its history in visions as varied and overlapping as the blocks it was made of. Generations of lovers, tender and fierce, had twisted and rolled in its folds, tangled over and under it. Images of sweating, straining bodies of all kinds streamed through her as she clutched the quilt tight against her sore breasts.

She knew about sex, in theory, all farm kids did, but this was a revelation of flesh. As quickly as the panorama of lust made its impact on her, the visions shifted to the tenderness of babies and children, swaddled and cuddled in its folds as they dreamed and peed their way through their nights. Another shift. An old woman lay dying. She pulled the corner of the quilt over her face, giggled like a girl and gazed up through the colors at her last light. A young man, insensate, the blood from a wound to his head trickled through his blond hair to be soaked up by the quilt. Another shift and the cycle began again. More lovers, more paroxysms of passion, weeping, and laughter. The giggling of children receded into soft comforting darkness.

Tam found her curled over the folded quilt, face down in the grass. Anna woke to a cloth cooling on her forehead, her aunt sitting on the bed beside her. Tam patted her hand and said, “I didn’t take you for one to get the lady vapors, Annabea. Shame on me. You okay now?”

Anna blinked up that the slanted ceiling and said, “Where’s my quilt?”

“Right down there by your feet. Too hot for covers in here. You were all asweat when I bout tripped over you out there. What happened?”

She looked at her aunt, saw the worry lines on her face, and said, “Damned if I know.”

c. Deborah Lacativa 2018