Recollections in Cloth, Paper and Thread

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Scrapbook first decade stitched

I could just be my age. For something different to work on in the studio I decided to break down my life into decades. Now I am into my eighth, not by a lot, but enough to make some choices of how I see that decade unfolding. There are eight panels of cloth all close to 18″ square. They were selected as a background feel for that period of my life. Here is the first decade. I am a child in a rural community who spends an enormous amount of time outside in the woods and meadows. Old farmhouses in northern Michigan.

I am not a very accomplished stitcher. It takes a while just to get that needle threaded and knotted at the other end. Then it is poke in some place and come up in another.  All the added pieces of papers and cloth were fused into place with a fabric bonding film. Loose bits were tied into place until they could be caught with the stitches.

This piece is trying to capture how those years felt to me, the things that stayed with me. The constellations in a very dark and star filled sky, old wallpapers, some falling away, marked cloth, grandmothers’ influences, the dullness of winter and snow, using only two crayons to wander out of the lines of coloring books. But most of all was the freedom to come and go, come and go and be by myself.

Here are some details of this “page”.

scrapbook first decade grass

scrapbook first decade snow

And now I have finished stitching the second decade. Those teenage years. A move from the woods and privacy to the suburbs of St. Petersburg, Florida in 1955 was a unwelcome adjustment. But being a teenager is constant adjustments, constant changes.

These pages will be bound into a very large scrapbook like we used to have many years ago. The kind we pasted in all our plans for the future. Now it will be pages of how things actually were or at least how I recall them to be. As the pages turn, there will be the marks of the previous decade shown to the left of the new decade. The viewer can see the marks of influence more or less of what is happening next. I think that this is where being a lousy stitcher is an advantage. Those threads and how they travel around on the back of the previous decade’s page is very narrative in its own way. Here is how a section of the two pages will be seen where they intersect.

scrapbook second decade pairing lo res

Wandering in the woods no longer possible with sandspurs everywhere. A red tide that came often enough to make the beach un-navigable. And finding it hard to fit into a predetermined system. I managed like we all do and actually found this a fun page to work on.  See below.

scrapbook second decade stitched lo res

I was now making my own clothes and still maintained my freedom for most of the time. Some details of the page.

scrapbook second decade if you alter

scrapbook second decade detail of shell lo res

I may go back into both of the pages. More is bound to develop in thought and manipulation. And some of these details I really liked and took them into a photo program to play with. I see possibilities for etchings using my press or maybe even collographs. Maybe drawings.

What I do like is finding the marks that are possible with needle and thread that capture my thinking. Better stitching may come as I work on each page. Before I show you the altered image of a detail from my first decade, take a look at how much my eighth decade shares a similar palette. Interesting I think because those other pages get pretty colorful with marriage, family, entering the craft world, then graduate school and travel. Interesting.

Here is the roughed in eighth decade that will take some time to get to as I must do them in order.

scrapbook 8th decade lo res

And the altered image of my first decade detail.

scrapbook first decade detail adjusted 2

I will show more as they develop.

Another Time – Lost in Customs

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Graceland Under African Skies lo res

This is a digital image from a scanned slide. Earlier this week Richard Norman, a book binder who moved from the UK to France several years ago posted two entries on facebook of Paul Simon performing in Africa in the late eighties. They both were songs from his still inspiring album, Graceland. Besides having me humming along as I listened, they reminded me of the Graceland coats I made shortly after the album was released.

I bought the music, came home put it on the player and found out just how easy it can be to be caught up in his lyrics and rhythms. I promptly went to the closest fabric shop and decided to find cloth that could work for the scenes he describes in the music. Primarily two pieces, Under African Skies and Boy in the Bubble (which may have a different title, but that is what I called it).

I asked the sales clerk if she had cloth that felt like an elephant, a Masai warrior or could be a lion, it had to say Africa! After buying bits of each cloth that I thought would work and several yards of off white osnaberg cloth which is like a muslin, I came home only to realize that I had no pattern for what I wanted to do, no coat pattern.

So I folded the cloth in half, selvages on each side and laid down in the center with my shoulders on the fold. With the right hand I pinned along where I thought a sleeve should be by keeping my left arm extended. Then a couple of pins a ways out from my hip. The rest of the length could be figured out after I got back up. Once that side was cut out (both layers for front and back) I folded over that side to make a pattern to cut the other side. Flattened it back to where it was and cut up the top layer to make the opening and scooped out a bit of neck. I repeated this again with a small striped muslin for the liner of the coat.

All I had to do next was place the outer coat on the mannequin, turn up the music, lay out some National Geographics and start cutting and pinning. It was the most fun afternoon. Shortly afterwards I heated up some blue dye in a pot on the stove, shoved the shoulder area in to give myself the “African Sky”. Later I embroidered the “stars of the southern hemisphere.”

Once the outer layer met my expectations (which I kept pretty simple) I matched it up with the lining and added a layer of filler between. To finish it took just edging the front opening and hemming up the cuffs and bottom.

Then I made another:

Graceland Boy in the Bubble 1988 lo res

More dyed shoulders for the Boy in the Bubble. Had to have a place for that “distant constellation.” And doing the bomb in the baby carriage was interesting to say the least. It was one of the last pieces that my mother helped me stitch on before she died. I think she thought I was nuts. I loved these pieces.

I even wore one to a national quilt conference in Houston, Texas of all places. I just wanted to be in the audience with it on. It was swelteringly hot!

I was also active at basket making conferences at this time and some of us who taught had to do a talk to the attendees. I took my boom box so I could play the two pieces of music when I showed the slides. Not only that but I had shaped little rounds of black paper into fortune cookies with a curled quote about art making sticking out. The audience was to help themselves to one of these from my African basket on the way out. In all honesty I did receive some strange looks but I loved what I was doing and just wanted to share the enthusiasm.

Later on after moving myself and my coats to North Carolina, I decided to mail some of my art to wear on to Australia. There they were more likely to wear it than in my more conservative crowd. The first box arrived fine and donned the chairs in the dining room for years there in that most hospitable house.

The next box that contained these coats among other costumes did not fair so well. I received word that I had insured them too high and they were being held hostage in customs for a fee, $65, I think. I emailed customs there and apologized for my error and begged them to please release them. And I actually thought it worked.

After two stays at their home I realized that the coats I had sent a few years before were not there. They only could have went the way of the unclaimed at customs and met some sort of demise. But I would like to think that somewhere over there a customs inspector’s spouse puts them on when she plays Paul Simon’s Graceland album and dances around with all the pleasure I put into them.

Australia – A Memoir – Part III

Posted on by Sandy Webster

bourke and wills

On the subject of Burke and Wills, one of my most memorable trips to Australia was in a small plane put together and piloted by a friend who shares a similar interest in those explorers and offered to take me out to where they perished and other places he thought would be of interest to me. At first I thought it was just a hopeful conversation egged on by shared bourbons, but within a few months he sent me the itinerary for my next time over. We would fly into where Burke and Wills died.

mike and his plane

First stop, The Dig Tree, then further inland where a driver would meet us and take us out to the exact sites where they died and we could read their last letters home aloud.

burkes stone

wills stoneAt each stop we tied down the plane and walked to where there would be a ride to what we came to see. Innaminka, Birdsville, White Cliffs, and more, finishing up in Broken Hill at a somewhat seedy hotel with one bathroom on each floor for our final night out. When we returned from dinner, they were waiting for the “American” one of us to read a favorite American poem aloud to the gathering of Poets in Pubs Night which just happened to be meeting there that month. A Toohey’s Old among Australian poets in a dingy hotel/pub….excellent!

black lion

There is a kindness that Australians readily offer to a lone traveler in their country. In Townsville on my wedding anniversary a young bartender bought me a nice dark porter on tap at his brewery and showed me to a very private location in which to write, sketch and have the most delicious barramundi. Another similar experience happened in a small pub after teaching and touring wineries.  I waited for all on the bus to unload and follow each other to the left. Then I went right, around the corner and into a hotel bar patricks pub where I met a young man anxious to relive his experiences in the states over a couple of beers he shouted for the only woman in the bar at that hour. Lovely.

A coffee shop owner opened early and treated me to a latte after watching me skype my husband from a computer perched on the lid of a garbage can out front in Katoomba. A lovely older woman of means advised me in the lounge car of a train that perhaps I should not drink my dark beer from the bottle but have it put in a glass first. A cab driver who told me all anyone would ever want to know about dingoes. A student in Gympie who told me at the close of the workshop that I had done a good enough job to learn her secret of keeping a spikey hairdo…….leave the soap lather in all day.

Judes car

Kind, informative and patient people in Australia, all anxious to be of help and tell you something you didn’t know. None more so than those who volunteer to look after us during our rushed schedules of teaching, traveling, teaching again and taking a break. They offer beds, refreshments and travel….and all with such obvious enjoyment.

townsville pub

Thank you to them and to their country. I have my journals, my notes, my sketches and memories of some of the very best times of my life…..all ready for me when I want to visit again and again. I am looking forward to next March. It will be my twelfth time there. Some places in Australia I will never see but what I have will stay with me forever.

northern territory

Australia – A Memoir – Part II

Posted on by Sandy Webster

HobartToMelbourne00001

But I did go back, asked to return and do it all over again…..ten more times. And each time I drank in the country, in great gulps of experiences documented with drawings and notes. Every penny I could afford went into getting to another place and immersing myself into the land.

sketchbook with flying arts

 

A first class train ride on the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth had the country presenting itself by way of a continual travel film passing by the window. While in the dining car seated at any table with room for a single foreign traveler, I was encouraged to ask as many questions as they could answer while my cabin was magically turned from sitting room to sleeping room. A toilet and sink ingeniously folded down from the wall and in the morning I would be awoken with a gentle knock, a hot cup of tea and a time to be seated for breakfast. And the day would start all over again. Three sisters bringing me flowers to sketch and telling me the names so they were properly documented. It was wonderful and ended far on the other side of the country….Perth with its Botanical Gardens and National Gallery, Freemantle with the remains of the discovered East India Ship, Batavia that I had coincidentally just finished reading about. There was always another generous volunteer driver to take me about and answer questions.

Indian Pacific Window 2

Ghan dining car

loo

Flying to Katherine from Alice Springs for the first time with a stop for fuel in Tennant Creek was exciting. A bag of chips placed on our seat and a cooler full of sodas to help ourselves. The pilot told me if I didn’t like my chips I could toss them on someone else’s seat and take theirs if I wanted, no worries, he kept an assortment on board. My hosts there in Katherine fixed me up with a snack bag of Anzac cookies for my day trip the Northern Territory Craft Council was treating me to, a cruise on the Katherine River through the Gorge. The second and smaller bus going in to the river was driven by a woman who wanted to show us a camel behind a fence by the road. We were not allowed to get out of the bus and go near it because, with an accusing glance in my direction, she said an American woman told her she was on speaking terms with camels and could be trusted to go up to it and pet it. She was bitten immediately and from then on, no one was allowed off the bus at her “camel stop”.

gas stop in tennent creek

katherine gorge

The second time I came to Katherine it was by way of a very small plane with a pilot who informed me in Darwin that I was heading the wrong way on a weekend…..he said most people leave Katherine and come north to the city….not the other way round. He made sure someone was there to meet me before flying back. This time I was housed further out than I had ever been from a town. It was at the time when cane toads were first migrating into the Northern Territory and, so I was told by my Land Patrol host, were deliberately bred to be bigger. They hopped into my wall-less bedroom at dark and reached up the side of my mattress on the floor. I pulled all my belongings into the middle of the bed, took out my notebook and wrote without seeing my pad about how that felt, to be by myself in a dark room with cane toads, big cane toads who could only lope about and reach up with their clinging little toes.  Another evening a massive yellowish green snake was matching my pace to the shower a few open rooms down. My hosts knew the snake, all eight feet of him and told me this was its path to the neighbor’s chicken house. I heard such good stories at their place and developed a taste for Vegemite for breakfast served on cold, dried, burnt toast. I thought it doesn’t get any better than this….. in the Outback near a river at the end of a dirt track full of signs warning of the danger of Crocs and no one but us anywhere in sight.

SoundsOfSilence00006 camels

Almost every trip down under included a stay in Tasmania, my most favorite state. So much of it reminds me of home with the gentle hills of green and bluish mountains in the distance. And the basket makers are simply the most generous of time, knowledge and materials…..materials harvested just for the sole purpose of sharing and showing someone new how to use them. They have taken my classes, housed me, driven me to any place they think I would enjoy and introduced me to the magic of Mt. Wellington and the Salamanca Market. They have helped me collect soils for pigments, mended my clothes, shown me how to strip New Zealand flax to weave a basket, given me time to sketch in my journal and given me memorable lines like, “Just out here past the moon is where I will take you in the morning to catch your flight home.” Whenever I see the moon I remember that it will also show up just before you get to the airport in Hobart.

tasman tree another view

MtWellington00069

barbaras face

barbarabasket

I never miss a chance to stand in front of a painting by Rover Thomas or a room full of Aboriginal bark paintings. All the State and National Galleries have them, hung on large walls in big rooms furnished with benches placed just so. To be able to see a Sydney Nolan retrospective and rooms full of the work by John Davis a personal favorite, printmaker Bea Maddock, are among the many extraordinary opportunities I have had to view Australia’s art. And who can resist the sad narrative paintings by McCubbin and Longstaff’s massive interpretation of the final days of Burke and Wills. It is the statue of those two that make Melbourne my favorite city in all of Australia. Sydney is the opening arms of that country, but Melbourne is the destination. Exceptional vineyards within a few hours’ drive, Federation Square, the bronze statue of Burke and Wills that I love to touch, the State Library, the War Memorial and Botanical Gardens and an endless free ride on the tram through a city filled with the best coffees and savory muffins. It really does not get better than that.