House of Music, Color, and Peace

It has been 3 weeks.   I have landed in Southwest Florida after a rather epic trip through a Panhandle storm, emptied a mobile home of some else's life stuff, and begun my own nesting.  I can now breathe.

As I look around me, I wonder if I am perhaps recreating my 1970's dorm room. (It was a time of trying to create peace in a cement box at UVM.)  Rag rug color on the floor. Music at hand. Everything I need to live in a rectangular space; a community of friends just outside the door.  It's the same here!  The difference?  I now have TWO rectangles - one is a fully functional studio (and guest room)!

Some before and after studio photos of the "art making" rectangle: 

yikes - two truckloads:  it all must GO!

cut, sew, print, play, GO!

So the music is on, coffee is made, moon and Venus are fabulous in the early morning sunrise, and a great blue heron just flew over my head. Every time I see one, I always tell myself that that's a good omen for the day.  (What is yours?)

Piecing a Way Forward

Final Piece, Terry Jarrard-Dimond Workshop, 2012

Construction Detail

I have been musing a fair amount lately, internally and with my studio surface design friends, about the experience at the Crow Barn with Terry Jarrard-Dimond, a full 5 days of freeing up exercises, creating lightning-fast cloth in the wet studio, and thinking about Map as Metaphor.  

I was at standing at the cusp of a major life change at the time.  AND:  Becoming aware of a prior life of rigidity and structure… always doing the "right" thing; lacking artistic experimentation and the freedom to direct one's own life.  And accepting the WHY of the past - to move forward to openness.

I need to finish quilting this piece… I see it as a reminder, with a 10,000 foot view, that I then directly chose the path to open up, to play, to look forward and not back, and to also see the enormous influence of water on my life.

It's also interesting --> the ocean is now calling me home.