sing song

two new pieces, both small, 4 inches by 8 inches each one.I am still working with the feathers, and these are one note each of a song. The feathers are so soft and light and feel delicious. It is almost a shame to have to put them behind glass. I have a few framed now, in gold and and copper mat boards and frames and they look wonderful. I love the metallic threads I am using. Finally I have a sewing machine here that can handle them. The last machine I had here, a cheap brother (which for the price was an excellent machine) didn’t like them at all and would break them immediately.

and a photo of my workspace. I had to take one for a festival I am applying for. Fingers crossed! There are numerous festivals in new Mexico and Arizona I am looking at but a lot of them want booth shots, which of ourse I don’t have until I actually do a festival.

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a note of song from a bird

I have started using feathers in my embroidery. Exploring the texture and general fluffiness and yumminess of them with gold and silver fabrics. Trying to capture in visual terms bird song, the richness of a note that hangs in the air for a second and vanishes.

new embroideries

I have gathered my new embrideries together in my website finally. I want to submit two of them to the RDS craft competition.

I have had a lot of fun doing these embroideries. They are stuffed and even more 3d than before. I am having lots of ideas about what to do next.

I like this next one a lot. I tried to capture the delicatness of the butterflies in the way I constructed it from layers of chiffon and torn edges. The outside edge I embroidered onto a water dissolvable fabric to get the lace effect.

please come and visit.

greenwitch sings to green moon

My latest embroidery of the greenwitch. I have been finishing off and tidying up my work recently, putting borders and names and backs on things that have been sitting half finished. When I go back to ireland they shall be ready to be presented hopefully to galleries to look for an exhibition.

Faces

lots of faces… in watercolour, fabric and oils. I got some big canvases the last time I was in Chihuahua and painted some huge faces and it was great!

Faces are for seeing, for revealing who you are, for validating what i do (as I paint there is someone watching me) for exploring who I am.

I finish a face a realise it’s sad or happy or has a sense of purpose to it and it surprises me.

Faces i suppose go all the way back to babyhood when its the first thing that catches our attention. Our mothers face. A baby reacts to things that have the same structure as a face. They will look at faces quicker than anything else.

a mermaid on my bag

I have a fascination with mermaids… they appear everywhere… I have even been mermaids in dreams… have written at least two posts about them and the sea here and here.

I like this bag, mermaid on the front and fishies on the back. I made it so she could give dream energy to the things inside the bag.

Glorious Bags, designs by cliodhna

swimming with the fishes

sea blue and falling into water. Fishes sparkle around me and dart from side to side. I fall into deep water.

the sea holds all our unfulfilled dreams and wishes until we are ready to receive them

she remembers promises we made to ourselves in previous lives

when the mermaids sing then the waves dance and the sea spray casts rainbows high into the air

x clio

lots of pretty colourful things

I have become the proud owner of a collection of umbrellas! I have had cool umbrellas in the past but only ever one at a time. I had a pink polka dot one for about two weeks before I lost it and for a while I had kids umbrella with a ducks head on the top and two wings out either side. I would walk down the street to a symphony of nudges and cries (in tough inner city dublin) of “would ya look at the state of ‘er”. It made people smile though, made a rainy day a happy escuse to use my bright yellow duck umbrella.

Women use the umbrellas here as Parasols. To stay out of the sun and I have taken up this habit. When you live in the sun you actually spend most of your time staying out of it rather than taking your clothes off and smathering yourself in quick tan lotion and lying very still for hours. I never had the patience for tanning.

Here they are in a row from big to little. The smallest one is a kids one and the blue one was my first and the brown one is a very pretty parasol and the yellow one I just bought in Los Mochis because it was raining.

Paul after I persuaded him to let me take it.

He said I could put this one on my blog if I put another one of him looking tough and being a miner so here is one of him looking tough at his son Arthur and Art very obviously taking him seriously.

I also bought some new oil cloth to make some new purses from. Very excited!

Here is a fish I have done in the last while. It is good to get back to fabrics. I got some cool new fabrics in mochis too.

My butterfly embroidery.

On the way to the mine in the morning the air is filled white big white butterflies. They are beautiful and fragile. I used a fabric that dissolves in water to do the outside lacy effect (i wish I had more of it now) and then the butterflies and background were done on chiffon that I pulled and stretched and embroidered over. I want to explore these fabrics further…

dancing people

So my threadless submission didn’t get very far. I think I am not hip enough for threadless or else I am not involved enough to get comments. Oh well, not really worried. Would be nice to get a design printed though and get 2000 dollars!

So I took the design I did and made it into an embroidery. I stiched the people up seperately and stuffed them and then stiched them down onto the backround fabric so they stand out. To make the people I patchworked strips of fabric together first and then embroidered the people on top of that and then made them into the dolls ready to get stuffed.

Words in the corner, sky dancing, growing, singing, dancing…

It is good to get back on the sewing machine again. I have one more project on the go and another one sitting in my head ready to leave.

Its funny about what other people think is cool or not cool or marketability. Just read this post today from Florence Forrest. Sometimes I do work which I don’t really value until years later when I look at it and see that it is actually a good piece of art work that I just didn’t think was good enough at the time. Or I understand more about the image and why I did it. I think rather than ‘not being marketable’ I think we are just not ready to expose them. They sit until we recognise their value and recognise the value of who we were at that time. She does the coolest toys too, check them out.

I think sometimes I can get lost in needing to be professional and advance my ‘career’ and forget that the best art comes from the heart in the moment and if we loose that then we have lost our connection to ourselves. Marketability comes when it is ready. Of course actually getting out there and showing the world what you do helps also! Its a balance.

and of course to leave you with,  the usual picture of a beautiful sky!

artists block and black widow spiders

First my newest embroidery. I was having artists block, feeling stuck, a bit down about my art, not going anywhere, not knowing what to do when I said Hey! I can do a picture about it. Because sometimes the best thing to do to get rid of a block is just do something, anything to get the energy flowing again. This image poped into my head and I got out the sewing machine and got to work.

Her hair is flowing looking for ideas and she has a paintbrush in her hand ready to paint and the colour green is good because its the heart chakra colour and that is where all the best images and art flows from.

I go through cycles with art. i want to paint big and loose for a while and then small and detailed. I want to do pretty purses and colourful nice things and then i want to express meaningful truths and deep meaning. I like the flow of paint and then the texture of fabric. I like writing and then thats not enough and I want to draw. I lose all inspiration and get lost in doing other work for a while. Like being a waitress for a few months or being a secretary and pure logic, organizing files and putting sense onto chaos. Then it is time to toss the order and explore the unformed and possibility again.

In the Toltec work that I do it says we are all artists that we create our lives every second, every minute, with every thought and word and choice we make. So when we create a piece of artwork or a meal or write we are extending ourselves outwards into the world to leave form on how we are as people. So for me being a secretary or a waitress or working in a shop is not abandoning my art but it is exploring me as an artist and my life as I am creating it right now. and if you think, but I am not an artist look around you at your life and see what you have created. Even the fact that we are here and have existence is a huge act of sorcery. Now if we could only stop taking it for granted and worrying about the little stuff (whats that quote.. don´t stress the little stuff.. and remember its all little stuff)

I finally got pictures of the beautiful spider outside our house. I had thought she had made her egg sac and died but no. Yesterday I saw her legs sticking out from behind the brick and then looking closer her black shiny body. You can just see a shade of red on her belly (she is hanging upside down) from the hourglass mark. She is a BIG spider. Not as big as those hairy wolf spiders but large enough and more threatening looking.

One of her babies and an egg sac. There have been two egg sacs that have hatched but apparently they eat each other and she eats them so they are lucky to survive.

as one more picture of the valleys from around here. I have sooooo many cloud and sunset pictures. This one is from early in the morning when the clouds haven´t lifted yet. Wonderful looking from the outside and grey and misty from the inside.