Grow your own heart

How do you grow your own heart?

When we feel and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.

You can't offer happiness to another until you have it youself.

Learn to love and heal yourself, then you have something to offer others.  

Thich Nhat Hanh

Images of one of the quilts I've been growing my heart with this summer.  In progress.

seeking grey

rug hooking wool

There are leftover potions from April's visit
goldenrod, onion, avocodo, sumac drupes, sumac leaves, and iron water
and I am seeking grey from them.

linen damasks

cool grey, warm grey,
it's not a neutral for me
it's a magical lifter-upper in my cloth paintings
any colour placed next to grey, glows

cotton, some overdyed

tanin plus a little iron = grey

Iron water can be made by soaking rusty bits of iron in a solution of vinegar and water for a few days before adding to the plant solution..
Alternatively, ferrous sulphate (available from Maiwa) also works to sadden the plant colour

Also,
I have been having new ideas.
The trick is to be AWAY from the studio for a month or so,
then return home and start cleaning it.
Ideas flow like water.

if you keep working on old ideas, new ones can't show up.
cosmic law

Inspiration

"Vetruska" Marimekko fabric designed by Aino-Maija Metsola 2012

I continue to struggle with the studio(s) here at home that are no replacement for the light filled, high ceiling space in town that I had to move out of last summer.  Although I do have a pin wall in the one upstairs,  it's not even 8 feet high.  Right now this marimekko fabric is pinned up. 

Vetruska is such an interesting and edgy dot grid and so large.  Each repeat of the design is over 6 feet long, 5 feet wide. I find it to be very inspiring but how can I learn from it yet still keep my own voice?

In my second studio (another bedroom) I have been trying to create a drawing/painting place but it's really hard to get in there.  Right now that room is a mess because I used it to sort my old paintings for the exhibit that just went up at the local library. 

 Grow Into Understanding 2007 by  Ali Cavanaugh

But...things happen for reasons.  Here I am having a show of watercolours that feature my children, and by chance I opened the 2008 American Artist Watercolor magazine purchased years ago.   

Falling Through Your Redolence 2008 by Ali Cavanaugh

It was the article about Ali Cavanaugh's work that inspired me to buy that magazine then and it inspires me still. I love her use of emptiness, mystery, fabric pattern and the figure.   She spends a lot of time on preparatory photo shoots with her daughter and nieces as models, dressing them in her collection of vintage clothing. 
"The creative part of my process is capturing the figure in a pose that is emotional"  Ali Cavanaugh

Putting on Perfection 2008 by Ali Cavanaugh

There is information about this artist online here, here and here.
Daughter April is coming home for a week.  Perhaps she won't mind posing for me.

Vetruska, designed by Aino-Maija Metsola, for Marimekko

Fabric or figures?
One of the challenges I often face is that I get too many ideas so easily.  Does that happen to you as well?