cliodhna’s wave

So i know I am very remiss in posting posts on this old blog of mine but I realized the last post but one is me getting started on the fish quilt then how perfect to post the ending of that project.

My mother just bought a quilting machine and we rolled it up and off I went… so cool and so fast!

The quilt hung in the knitting and stitching show in the RDS.

and the stall at the knitting and stitching show. I met some lovely people at the show.. some women from my facebook page stopped by and the ladies from Green Angel were across the way from me (I was right beside them last year in Marley park) and beside me was the owner/editor of the Irish Quilting Magazine who is from San Francisco so we had a barney about being homesick and living in a different country and the perils of driving in the states. I had a great time at the show and it was inspiring to be around so many textile artists of such high quality. I look forward to it next year!

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

I put a treasury together on etsy.. called ‘Queens’ its a collection of queen related items from cool shops.. check it out and let me know what you think!

Queens on Etsy

Does anyone else have this problem?

I want to do big stuff, then I want to do small pieces,

I want to do huge quilts that cover a wall and then I want to do tiny stuffed birds with beads hanging off them.

I want to make skirts, underwear, felted hats,

I want to dye my own fabrics with the plants in my surroundings and I want to save time by buying the already wonderful luscious fabrics that exist out there

I want to do commercial pieces that will sell and make me money and i want to do one off exclusive squares of beauty that take days and days and you can’t possibly sell them for enough to recoup time, materials and emotional input

I wish there were four of me….

Balance Clio, balance, and of course the word I am still improving on…. patience

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.

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.

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!

I love mermaids. I didn’t know this until recently when I looked at the work I had done for my last exhibition and realised there were loads of mermaids. I have dreamed of being a mermaid. I am not sure why the fascination. They are from the sea, from the subconcious, from dreams, from magical possibility. They are emotion and from our deep-selves. My name comes from under the sea. There was a race of Tuatha de Danann living in the kingdom under the sea.

I think i just love the idea of them. I love the sea but it scares me too. Deep water, seaweed. Anyone else get a panic in their stomach while swimming over seaweed? Maybe its because they are at home under the sea, in a strange murkyness, belonging to the moon.

When the sirens sing you don’t feel seasick. Mermaids are the souls of sailors who loved the sea.

Maybe they come from the need for sailors to put a beautiful face on the sea. The sea was changeable and dangerous and uncharted and mermaids were its soul and reflected how the sailors felt about the sea. Dreams about women on the long lonely voyages out of sight and contact with land for days on end. No cell phones or fancy navigational aids on those days.

When you catch a mermaid you had better hold on tight, she is as slippery as a fish and will vanish from your grasp if you don’t keep her in your sight.

Mermaid, who does my dream self love?

I haven’t gotten over it yet. I have mermaids on my wall from mexico. They are still sitting in boxes in my new house in chihuahua so when I get there I will take some photos of them. I want to do some more. I have ideas! I even made a mermaid puppet I was really proud of, she turned out wonderful, until the house cat got a hold of her and chewed her head off.

Maybe she is my sea soul, my feminine side of my soul, my dream part. I will ask for a dream from her and see what she has to say to me. I would ask her to help me release my fear of deep water, to see the beauty and power of the sea and the hidden treasures waiting for me.

What would you ask her? x clio