Archive

One of the things that intrigues me about working in wax is it’s ability to preserve things. Flowers are pressed between pages of waxed paper, bronze sculpture is sealed with wax to prevent tarnishing and fruit is covered in a wax coating to keep it appearing fresh a little bit longer. In his treatise, “On […]

For the quilt that I’m making for my grandmother Halice I chose from my existing stock of encaustic monoprints. When I started cutting up the prints into the required shapes I realized I needed another sheet of the dark print for the large triangles in the middle. No problem I thought, I’d just make another […]

My grandmother Halice was big in the local Grange in Levant. Our family had a camp in Stetson and we would generally stop in to visit her on the way out to camp. I can remember going to suppers or fairs going on at the Grange. Everyone referred to my grandmother as “M’am” or “Mrs. […]

I’m taking this as a Bye Week for the project spending time with family and friends (though I did get some good genealogical information from my sister Diana for future research). Have a good weekend, enjoy the leftovers and I’ll bend your ear next week.

My two grandmothers could not be more different from each other. Where Boo was content to stay put in the house next door to the one she grew up in my father’s mother Halice was a world traveler of sorts, making it as far as Greece. Where Boo was happy to be taken care of […]

A corollary of this is don’t take cold medicine and try to work with hot things or sharp objects. Hence I’ve not been doing much artwork the last few days, as I seem to be coming down with a rather nasty cold. So this week seems to be a good time to talk about memorial […]

Ok, to clarify things, I keep referring to these ‘things’ I’m making as ‘quilts’. I know they are not really quilts and to any quiltmakers out there among you this is probably annoying. A ‘real’ quilt has a front, (typically of cloth, yes) some sort of batting (typically cotton or wool) and a backing. That […]

I was reminded this week to go slow and pay attention to what I’m doing, both by my sewing machine and by the terribly helpful people (Tyler and Anita) at Sew Portland, where I took my little Janome 2222. I had I become convinced that the timing must be off because it kept jamming (it […]

Working on my grandmother Boo’s quilt has been an interesting journey. I undertook this project in part because I knew the individual quilts would take so long. I know that sounds odd, but I looked forward to the opportunity to think about each of the individuals while I made their quilts the way that I […]

I spent a whole day last week in the archives of the Maine Folklife Center at the University of Maine at Orono. Started 50 years ago by Edward “Sandy” Ives, the Folklife Center is a repository of folklore and oral history of Maine and Maritime Canada. Back in 1977-1978 the Sandy Ives and students associated […]