cliodhna’s wave

I am getting ready for a craft fair coming up in Nov. Its in Marlay Park Dublin. I am busy busy making things for it and trying to balance the art part with the craft part.

Now, both are both, if you catch my drift, my art is a craft I am constantly honing and changing and tweaking and seeking new ways to get from the image/feeling in my head to the finished piece hanging in the wall. But in the context of this post let us say that ‘art’ is what I do purely because I love doing it and ‘craft’ are the cutesy small things I am doing to sell.

I find myself getting worried about the money end and plan heart patches and bird iron on patches and more hanging birds and although I do like making these, they are not my lifes dream. I get off balance into time based linear thinking sometimes of having to do more more more…. exhausting

Back to balance, heart based, eternity, we are here on earth to learn how to love and ahhhhhh, ok, I will make something special today, something from the doodles that are hanging on my wall stuck up with masking tape waiting for their time.

But first I will make a few bird patches, cause I haven’t made any yet and I want to see how they turn out. That is the other part of the balance, small versus large, silly versus profound…..

The pictures in this post are all part of a series of small embroideries I did. I wanted to make small jewel like squares of rich decoration. I layered cotton between gauzes and used metallic threads. They are all 4 inches by 4 inches and very cute! I changed the usual edging I do from lace to rough stiching round the edge of the fabric.

x cliodhna

… i was thinking about music and about the fact that there is not really that much music that i really really like to listen to. Oh sure, i got tons of albums (and anyone looking for a great music website check out emusic.com, you pay but they have everything) but left to myself and given a choice I always pick a certain style and ignore the rest. Spacey, meditation music, trance to work to and slightly more upbeat version of the same with swedish and irish folk thrown in for driving. There are exceptions of course, there are always exceptions.

Anyway I started wondering where did I ‘think’ I liked the other musics come from? Why did I buy them? In fact where did I ‘think’ I liked anything come from? clothes, style, food, lifestyle choices. I did some recapitulation on it and came up with the startling revelation that most of my life, if not all was made up of choices made because other people thought they were cool, because I wanted to be cool and fit in, because I wanted to be accepted and if I had a definite game plan of ‘who I was’ then there was something to be liked/loved/accepted.

So begins the clearing, what do i want to ditch and what do i want to keep? what attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, are really mine and what have I garnered from outside myself since I was born seeking approval. I guess I have to find out who I actually am first and then the rest will fall away naturally.

I have noticed this with politicians. Politicians are not allowed to be grey, they are not allowed to be not sure how they think or feel about something. they have to be black or white. I think thats why Hillary Clinton got ditched the last election, she is smart, intelligent, savvy and sometimes stands in a grey area. I am glad Obama got in but I definitly would have voted for Hillary.

Ok, just back from Sturges Bike Rally for the second time, this time on my own bike! Bike riding is fun! I am slowly learning my bike, corners, stopping, speed, freeway (still scary). Its amazing, 60 miles per hour on a bike is much faster than in a car.

Anyway, some photos of some amazing bikes we saw there . The bikes are a mix of ones on the street and ones from a competition for custom bikes.

paul in his bike.

a custom chopper from the competition tent, called Pink Lady.

a dragon bike! so cool….

a futuristic machine.. some of them I wasn’t sure how they would actually work on the road

one from the street

main street in sturges

a chopper

Sitting in friends house in Carrick on Shannon we were messing with my camera. Taking pictures of the fire and then seeing what shapes were in it. Try it sometime, very entertaining. The one above is an angel or a phoneix and the one below is a dragon.

fire is amazing, i remember doing a fire dance many years ago on a shamanic course and we danced and twirled the fire and it went into tall thin circles like tornado circles. The tall thin ones were male and short fat ones were female.

Hare, moon magic and swift running and wide eyes and long slender limbs that dart this way and that and flash of white tail bounding over the land. Hare is magic and music and beauty. She is my latest obsession, having graduated in some way from a white fox I now paint and draw hares.

Who remembers Masquerade? Those of you in ireland and england certainly might. I remember the hare and the illustrations though I was too young when it came out to get involved in the quest.

The first image that captivated me was Albrecht Dürer. The study of a young hare. I think it was more the reality of the drawing that got me first, at an age when drawing like that seemed an impossibility to me and now that I see it after many years it seems less somehow, like I imbued it with a magical presence and untouchability when I was young and that impression stayed with me. It is still beautiful and it is a quiet hare that he drew.

My own image of a hare. This is quite large, around 3×4 feet and I like it. It is still sitting in my work room waiting for the sides to be painted and for me to sign it.

a beautiful soft hare sculpture that caught me on etsy by dragonhouseofyuen

a nice image by ElleJW

and lastly, cause my two dogs like nothing better than a charge across the countryside after hares they have not a chance in hell of catching this doggy collar! by fairytailcollars

Hi! to enter the giveaway please comment on either this post or my facebook page GreenBirdDreaming…

I have decided its time for another giveaway.

Now to the theme of the giveaway. The Small Achievement Award.

I was thinking the other day about how I run myself down and always try to work harder and push myself further and think ‘oh, i am not working fast enough’ or ‘I am not being good enough’. I work with a Toltec teacher and part of this work is seeing myself and finding out who I really am, finding where I stop myself from shining but also just be happy where I am right now and accept myself. I, as explained above, push myself in this also and he tells me ‘but Cliodhna, you are great! you are an artist living in Chihuahua and you travel here and travel there and you paint beautiful things’ and I think, ‘you know he’s right, I have done a lot and i don’t give myself credit for what I have done, I just run myself aground on my thoughts of what I didn’t do or how I did it wrong’.

Thats where this post comes from, not the big achievements that are in papers or make news on the television but the little achievements we don’t give ourselves credit for, being a mother raising wonderful children, painting, making a cake, being nice to the neighbour, listening to someone, learning to drive, traveling, just being me, whatever you have done or do that you don’t recognise as an achievement.

I am going to officialy give myself a pat on the back for living in another country, learning another language, and on an even smaller level changing a lock in a door which took me a while to figure out but all finished and I had a perfectly working chub lock without calling a locksmith to do it! I was quite proud of that

Comment below to enter the giveaway and if you like, share something small you have achieved you would like to congratulate yourself for. Can be anything!

x cliodhna

Fishes swim in the pool of our minds. Wolf watches the pool and listens to the fish. The Bird takes the messages form Wolf and carries them to the sky.

To listen to silence is a very rare gift these days. We are surrounded by so much noise we cannot hear the silence behind everything. A child can hear silence, can listen to the song of the world as it turns and the song of the birds.

A house on a hill. A garden with a pool in it with three huge old fish, two gold and one silver. A child climbing over the wall, silently, cautiously, he had heard too many tales about this house in the past,

To sit on a hill where there is no noise except birds and wind and crickets is to listen to the world as it was in the beginning when we were not here, when there were no humans, it is timeless. Listen, hear and the world expands in every direction. We are too used to looking we forget to listen too. So listen and behind the sounds of the birds and insects there is a vastness and a sense of something timeless that surrounds us.

We have lost this connection I think, living in our machine age. Our televisions, radios, mp3 players, there is music and chatter everywhere. In supermarkets, cafes, buses, lifts, we live our lives in a shell of aimless sound and gossip. Our attention is always hooked outside of us. And we allow this to happen because that silence is too scary to experience. That vastness is too huge and we, who have not faced our true selves and found the inner core that cannot be blown away, are too afraid to face it for fear of not being enough.

To connect to this silence for a few minutes everyday puts us back in connection with ourselves and who we really are. I have heard it said that only troubled people seek peace. If that is the case then I am grateful for my worries and my inner angst because it pushed me in a direction I would not have found otherwise.

The child walks through the garden his eyes and ears open, his mouth open in wonder. Trees shaded him from the sun, parrots squawked and flew in a flurry of colour, a fig tree laden with fruit offers a branch with ripe fruit. He takes one and eats it, startled at the intensity of the flavour. He walks on soft grass, cut short and tidy, a white peacock ambles across his path, not bothering to take notice of him. He walks, taking in everything eyes looking up and down and around and above him and below him. He comes across a pool, an ornamental pool, quite large, with a small wall around it. In the pool are three huge old fish swimming in slow circles, two gold and one silver.

They swim in endless circles, when the sun shines and the pool is a mirror of glass they swim, when it rains and the rain makes a hissing noise as it hits the surface of the pool they swim, when it is winter and the surface of the pool is frozen they sink to the deeper parts and swim even slower. The water is their world and is all they have ever known, this water, this pool, this branch hanging over head, this face that hangs over their pool twice a day and drops the coloured flakes that is their food. They rise slowly and with gulping motion of their wide mouths they swallow the red and yellow and brown flakes.

I have written a lot about mermaids,  not sure what the fascination is except maybe they are women who live in the sea and maybe because of that are the connection to our subconscious. Here is an older post about them. Maybe it is laziness on my part, easier to draw a tail than legs

Mermaids can bring wishes to the sea and make them real. She can find what we really want in our deep minds and tell us and bring it up to the surface for us to see.

This is my latest embroidery, the mermaid swims around a magical island. If anyone except the mermaid tries to go onto the island to take the fruit then the birds sing them to sleep and they are transported back home again

This took me a while to do, I beaded it more than usual and layered netting over a gauze over blue to get a depth in the colour. I love the fabric I used for the tail. I am enjoying doing some more detailed pieces before I have to get into production for the Christmas fair (fingers crossed I get a place!). I also bought more fabric for the quilt today so no excuses, get out the cardboard shape and get scaling!

xclio

I have just spent the last hour wandering through Kathy Yorks Art Quilts and being inspired and wowed. Her quilts are beautiful!

This one is incredible, the buildings are all 3d blocks. She describes how she makes them and how she puts lollipop sticks in them to reinforce them structurally.

I adore this one. Called ‘Falling through the cracks’. The bird fishing for the falling beads and the textures of the different colour buttons in the squares up on top. I love the subtlety of the colours.

This one is from Kaizer Krafts blog. I found it when I did a search for ‘goldfish quilts’ before I started my own one. ‘Wow’ is all I can say. She has other pics from the Tokyo International Quilt festival.

This is beautiful.. It is from the National Quilt Museum. The link is to their facebook page.

It makes me wonder when I see art that truly drops my jaw open. A part of me wants to compare and think ‘I could NEVER do that!’ but of course I could, it would just be differant thats all. I am inspired about the whole quilt thing. That is what good art does, it inspires you to create. Dream beyond your old borders.

I am slowly defining myself as a textile artist. Before I did textiles but I wanted to paint and when I went into galleries with my embroideries they would generally shake their heads and say ‘no crafts’. Now, I am starting to find all these quilt shows, textile fairs, arts and crafts festivals and other opportunities that I would love to do. I think getting into an international quilt festival would be a good goal to have!

x clio