Embroidered Cotton Shirt

More spiral hook and eyes, smaller than those on the vest.  The clasps on this embroidered cotton shirt are made from 16-gauge yellow brass wire.  I drafted the shirt pattern.  The collar, cuffs, front placket, and back yoke binding are made from tea-dyed muslin secured with handstitched commercial black bias tape.  Sleeves and front placket have pleats, not gathers.  I drew the embroidery motifs to echo the dotted geometric stripe design of the fabric.  I suppose you could call this “pseudo-blackwork” because it’s blackwork-inspired (and uses the same kind of thread) but is more freeform and lacks the precision of counted threadwork.  This is a “special occasion” shirt, very soft and light, with three-quarter length sleeves so I can wear a bracelet with it.  The clasps will soon tarnish to dark brownish-yellow and will look much less gaudy.

Embroidered Cotton Shirt

Embroidery Details

A Book of Trees in a Dream

I have always wanted to write an illustrated natural history book.  It began long ago, when I began to see scientific illustration as more than just an old-fashioned art form, and started to work on it as a spiritual practice.

Morel - watercolor, 1984

Science. Nature. Art. Spirit.  For me there is no division between these things, although Science typically argues otherwise, and continues to shatter Itself into smaller and more isolated fragments.

“Things just get further and further apart, The head from the hands, and the hands from the heart.”
- Lhasa de Sela (from the album “The Living Road”, 2004).

 It recently occurred to me that I have been looking for this book all of my life, subconciously searching for it in libraries, nature centers, bookstores, and even online.  But I’ll never find it there, and my unusual combination of interests probably means that it must be purely a personal project.  In years past, I’ve made several attempts to plan it, and succeeded only in writing a few disjointed paragraphs to go with a handful of random images.  But it began to crystallize about a year ago, as I refined the Lichen Oracle and decided to let it evolve into a larger project.  A diverse collection of notes, lists, and drawings – some of them years or decades old – slowly came together, like iron filings drawn by a magnet.  I drew a huge diagram that evolved into a tangled net of tiny interconnected sketches and single words.  It sat rolled up in my studio for months as I conjured inspiration to fill in the gaps.  New sketches accumulated on the shelf above it.  One day I unrolled the chart, intending to make a second draft, more organized and detailed.  I realized that half of it was sketches for four drawings that I had since finished.  I rejected some of it as no longer useful.  Only a small piece was left.  I added it to the pile of recent sketches, put them all in an empty, newly-prepared drawer of my flatfile cabinet, and went back to work on a pencil drawing.

Slowly and quietly, all the bits and pieces began to speak to each other.  Irrelevant or duplicated ideas vanished.  Hidden connections surfaced.  A simplified structure emerged.  I began to see it, like a path through a thicket.

A book of drawings, paintings, illuminations, and writing.

The Graphis Lichen Oracle and the Oracle of Sticks, Stones, and Bones.

A record of sacred natural treasures:  trees and precious pebbles, seedpods, shells, fungi, pieces of wood.

How to look at a deer antler, or a desert fern, or a quartz crystal, or a turtle shell.

A Creekwalker’s account of the Gates into the Otherworld:
The Lichen Cloak, the Thorn House, the Wheel of Hawks.

And other pages, still unspoken here…

Of course some of it is already finished.  A lot more resides in the drawer of rough drafts, waiting.  A new red ochre drawing lays on my desk.  One night I saw a version of the book in a dream, a sure sign that the project is well on its way and ready for more energy and a tighter focus.  In the dream, the pages held only pencil drawings of sacred native trees and their wood:  oak, hackberry, saguaro, swamp tupelo, beech, and others.  Its purpose was to “banish the fear of death” in the viewer.  (I expect that would take a very special and unusual viewer, given the incomprehension, unease, fear, or hostility with which most people view this type of art).  But it was good enough for me.  The work continues, more seriously now, as the path rises into the desert oak forest.

Tree Book - Wood Drawings

O’bon L’Artiste pencils in a Moleskine large sketchbook.
LEFT:  weathered live oak wood (Quercus virginiana), Nags Head, NC.
RIGHT:  part of a walking stick made from Arizona black oak root (Quercus emoryi), Santa Rita Mountains, AZ.
TOP:  saguaro “boot” (scarwood), baldcypress driftwood, and rockmat (Petrophytum caespitosum), a miniature shrub.

Black Steel Wire Necklace

This choker-style Black Steel Wire Necklace incorporates many of the wire design motifs that I’ve developed over the years.  I recently returned to steel wirework to regain some strength in my hands, and decided to make an elaborate project that would use up most of my remaining wire.  I’m pretty happy with this, and still have enough wire for a few chain links etc. so now I can focus on new forged iron  and other metalwork.

Black Steel Wire Necklace

I started with a chain made of two mirror-image trios of graduated double spiral links.  I love the sinuous, flowing look of these, and they were fun to make.  They fit and drape very well, and I may make another set to add to a forged necklace.

Double Spiral Links

Wire “Feather” Fringe:  I used straight, curled, and spiral flattened fringe styles.  I also used three twisted fringe styles:  single twist, reverse twist, and a repeating reverse twist.  These are the only part of the necklace that had to be worked hot (each piece must be carefully twisted in a propane torch flame).  Everything else was done cold.  The difference between the twisted fringe styles are subtle and probably not noticeable to most people, but they do affect the overall look, so I wanted some of each kind.

Single Twist and Flat Fringe

Reverse Twist Fringe

Repeated Reverse Twist with Flat Coils

I connected the pieces with two types of decorative S-links to echo the shape of the double spirals.  These links can be made as short as half an inch or as long as an inch, so they are an easy, unobtrusive way to adjust the length of the necklace and the spacing of the other elements when laying out the design.  The wire is flattened before bending to give it strength and add a bit of 3-D contrast to the round wire used for the spirals.  There are two long links at the front and two short ones at the back.

This necklace has no links that are specially designed as a clasp, since there really wasn’t a good place for them in the design.  Instead, one of the largest double spiral links is slightly opened at the bottom, forming a hidden hook.  It’s just as secure as a hook clasp, and is easier to use since it’s at the front of the necklace.

How long did it take?  You know better than to ask that around here.

Happy New Year!

New Year Black Kitten

This Happy New Year Kitten is another ink drawing for the new cat fabric that I’m working on.  The final B&W version will probably look like this:

Kitten in Hands

Crested Saguaro Pilgrimage

Dan found this wonderful crested saguaro cactus a few days ago, so we visited it today for more photos.  Crested cacti are rare but some areas tend to have more than others.  We have found crested cacti of several species, including saguaros, Arizona barrels, chainfruit chollas, and several of the small cacti.  There are a few well-known crested saguaros along public hiking trails, roadsides, and in botanical gardens or private yards, but of course there are many more that grow in remote parts of the desert and are rarely seen or photographed.  This is one of them, accessible only by 4WD and a hike (or a really long hike from the main road).

A Crested Saguaro

It has small arms growing from the crested portion of the main trunk.  This is unusual but not unheard of.  The three large arms are also partly crested at the tips (most obvious on the arm on the left).  The tiny knob poking up where the left arm joins the trunk is a tiny prickly pear plant.  This is not a parasite.  The seeds often sprout in water-gathering hollows on old saguaros, but they never grow very big since there is no soil for their developing roots.

Crested Saguaro Top

Here’s a closer view of the crest in the late afternoon winter light.  The center of the crest looks brown and dead; this may be damage from last winter’s big freeze.  As is typical for old saguaros, this one is full of holes made by gila woodpeckers.  Other species of opportunistic birds and insects make use of these holes; in the area where this plant is growing, the most common tenants (though only in summer) are colonies of purple martins.  At the far left in the photo you can see that one hole has attracted other inhabitants:  it’s a beehive, and the transparent yellowish thing that fills the hole is a honeycomb:

Honeycomb in a Saguaro

We didn’t see any bees, but it might have been too cold for them to fly much.  The comb looks like it was made this year and doesn’t show any signs of weathering or decay, so I assume it’s an active hive.  Anyway, it was an extra treat to see this on such a special plant.

Winter Solstice

The Winter Solstice is the quietest time of year in the desert.  A deep hush rests on the cool earth, and the pale gold sun warms the air for only a short time at noon.  In lucky years such as this one, this also the time of winter rain.  Of snow on the highest mountains, of water flowing in desert washes and ice rimming secret stone pockets in wooded canyons.  Not everything is dormant at this time, and the rain makes many plants more wakeful.  Young agaves grow larger and tougher, though they will not show new leaves for several months.  Yuccas, desert hackberries, and the evergreen oaks are strengthening their deepest roots.  Cacti swell and store water for April’s flush of new spines.  As befits the time of year, the most mysterious, magical, and spectacular event is completely hidden.  Wrapped in earth’s protective darkness, the seeds of annual wildflowers are  soaking up the water, the tough seedcoats disintegrating and new embryos swelling….and waiting for the new sun.

We stay quiet, too.  We have our own small maze-and-candle rituals, but we are mostly hermits at this time.  Anything else is inappropriate and inauspicious.  When the sun returns and the earth begins to stir a little more, it will be different.  But now we rest, and grateful cats gather around us.

For this week’s Third Quarter Moon, I made this drawing.  It is one of eight pictures in a Stick Oracle that I started a few years ago.  I finished it and decided that two of the pictures didn’t work and needed to be replaced, so I put it aside for awhile.  This drawing of my new oak walking stick is one of the replacements.   Finishing it, and looking at the entire set again, has provided enough inspiration for the other replacement image that I’ve started work on that, too.

Here, two sticks – a saguaro rib topped with a bundle of thorns, and an oak root topped with tangled woody grapevine tendrils – stand in a rocky canyon and mark the place where two tiny streams converge as they sink into the sand.

Stick Oracle - Third Quarter Moon

This antler drawing that I finished several months ago is also appropriate for the Third Quarter Moon before the Winter Solstice.  The left side shows the Carbon Antler Fungus, Xylaria hypoxylon, growing on knotty wood.  The right side shows stylized whitetail deer antlers and the top of the deer’s skull, including sutures.  Uniting the two images are the intricately interlocked branches of Pseudevernia consocians, an antler-like lichen that grows on tree branches.  The circle at the top shows the fungus and antler in reverse colors, drawn extremely stylized to resemble hands.  The rim on the left shows the fungus mycelium (network of threads that fills the rotting wood on which it grows) and the rim on the right shows the porous bony pattern of an antler in cross-section.  (Both drawings are on 6″ scratchboard.)

Antler Fungus

Cat Ink Drawings

I decided to design another cat fabric that incorporates some of my old scratchboard silhouettes and a few new drawings.  The first step was to collect some of Beluga’s “circle dance” poses from photos and videos and draw this Beluga Circle:

Beluga Circles

There are 18 different silhouettes on this 12″ x 12″ board.  There is an outer circle and an inner one, though they are somewhat intertwined, and both move counterclockwise because that’s the way Beluga usually circles.  The only time he moves “sunwise” is if he’s walking in straight lines along the edges of a room, following the walls with his whiskers.

If you study the drawings you’ll see that each has a “back view” (mirror image and viewed from the other side) on the opposite side of the board, which reinforces the “circling” theme in what would otherwise be a rather chaotic picture.  For example, the drawing in the upper right corner mirrors the one in the lower left, and so on.  I didn’t plan it this way at first, but noticed the trend as I collected and arranged the tracings, so I chose the remainder of them to fit the pattern and make the entire drawing consistent.

I won’t use all of these for the fabric, but will probably choose 8 or 10 of them that will interlock to form a clean, flowing circle.

I also made this scratchboard portrait of Beluga in a typical pose.  It’s on a 6″ x 6″ board:

Beluga

Beluga’s portrait is the latest addition to a collection of 6″x6″ semi-realistic black cat drawings that I started a few months ago.  Here are two more:  my pair of brothers and best friends, Dumas and Ararat.  People sometimes ask about their strange names.  They were born in 2000 and were dumped at the shelter as kittens.  Both have always been rather shy and are slow to learn new things and do not adjust to change easily.  Dumas was called “Dum*as*” but whoever wrote it down was not good at spelling (which is probably for the best) so he was “Dumas” on paper.  I pronounce it DUmas, like the town in Texas, because I have a friend who was born there.  His name has recently evolved to “Doomies” which he likes better.  Despite his shyness he is quite active and curious, and has mellowed into a very loving, gentle cat.  Ararat was named for his tendency to get stuck on high shelves.  As he grew older he became quite sedentary and is lazy even by feline standards.  He loves petting and belly rubs, but is the first cat to hide when a stranger arrives.  He spends most of his time sleeping on the bed or lying in his favorite hideout at the bottom of the cat tower.  He and Dumas were inseparable at the shelter, and have remained very close friends since I adopted them.  They still eat side by side, sleep together at night, and do not like to be separated from each other for very long.

Dumas

 

Ararat

Smithsonite Necklace

I finally finished a necklace to hold the smithsonite beads that I carved back in August.  My Pink Bead Necklace is so comfortable that I made this one in a similar style.  Forged from high-carbon steel and black steel wire, with bronze spacer beads cut from a broken Tibetan singing bowl.  The copper beads were cut from scrap tubing, then hammered flat and polished.  The bead at the back was carved from a piece of ore that I picked up at an abandoned copper mine.

I usually like to put reverse twists on this type of forgework.  But that doesn’t work with this thin high-carbon steel stock, since it can’t be quenched in water or it will shatter.  So I just tapered, rounded, and curled the ends.  Although it’s not apparent from the photo, the iron pieces have a “vertical” curve as well as a horizontal one, so the necklace doesn’t lay flat on the ground but it drapes nicely when worn.  The bronze and copper beads will eventually tarnish and will be subtle accents for the “screaming” turquoise color of the beads.

I have one small piece of smithsonite left.  It will probably become an earring.  Sometime this winter I’m hoping to go back to the mine where I collected it.  I’d like to find more of this unusual material, since it makes such beautiful beads.

Smithsonite and Forged Iron Necklace

Walking Sticks

I’ve been carrying a Trekpod (camera tripod/hiking stick)  for about a year now when hiking off-trail or on rough trails and washes.  I recently decided that my everyday walks – partly on pavement and partly on dirt roads – would sometimes be easier if I had a stick.  In my neighborhood, many people carry one anyway, mostly for protection against unfriendly dogs.  A neighbor gave me a dried agave stalk that had tangled in a tree as it grew, so it had some interesting curves.  Like their cousins Sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) and Yucca, agave stalks are light in weight, strong, and (usually) very long and straight.  They have sharp leaf scales and thin, papery bark that must be filed off, but the soft, long-fibered “wood” underneath can be sanded very smooth and takes a soft polish.  My stick is topped with a small deer antler that I picked up in the Empire Mountains and a hammered copper ferrule made from a piece of tubing.  The antler and stick were also drilled and fitted with a piece of steel rod to hold them together, so the handle is stronger than it looks.  I added an iron bell and antique African glass beads to decorate the forged iron loop on the antler.  Most of these things are “recycled” from other projects.  Below the ferrule was a hole that I drilled to hold a bell (this is the stick that I carried in the All Souls Procession, but it didn’t have a handle at that time).  I lined the hole with a piece of copper tubing to protect the wood, and now it can be used to hold all kinds of temporary decorations.

Agave Walking Stick

Here’s the agave stick with two other sticks that are a bit big for daily walks and are better suited for ritual use.

Oak, Agave, and Saguaro Sticks

The straight one on the right is a saguaro rib that I’ve had since 1994.  It was a gift from a fellow Tucson artist.  The plant must have been a 200-year-old giant because this “cactus bone” is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen.  It was cut from the lowest part of the trunk, just above the roots (it’s upside-down in the photo).  Although heavier and more substantial than an agave stalk, it’s still quite light in weight and easy to carry even though it’s more than six feet long.  It has a substantial presence and I have never  been sure of how to use it or had the nerve to add anything to it.  That’s about to change, since I finally found a worthy stick to balance it:

The curved stick on the left is a root of Arizona black oak (Quercus emoryi) that I recently picked up on a hike in a rocky canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains.  The root had grown along the edge of the wash and had been repeatedly exposed by scouring floods and re-buried under gravel until all the bark was polished off.  The tree itself (about 50 years old) was still alive when it fell during a summer storm and shattered among boulders in the wash.  The root was torn out of the bank and lay bare and clean on the rocks.  It’s very heavy and twisted, with alternating cupped, flattened, and ridged sections that have weathered to show the coarse “braided” fibrous texture that seems to be unique to this species of desert oak.  This stick definitely calls for some kind of ornament at the top to hide the raw cut where I sawed off the broken end.

Now I have the two sides of a Gate to walk through, or simply two signposts that help define the way:  Earth and Water opposite Air and Fire; twisted oak root from a shaded mountain canyon opposite a straight cactus rib from a sunny desert ridge.

Embroidered Patchwork Vest

I recently finished this vest which had been an intermittent evening project for several months.  I love vests but it is difficult to find one that fits properly, since I have such a short back.  It took me three paper drafts and two muslin ones to get this pattern just right, but it was worth the trouble and I still finished the pattern in one evening.  It looks like a short bolero but the hem sits precisely on my waist and the whole thing is a perfect fit.  The front is wider than the back (not the other way around, like a man’s vest) and the shoulders are wide enough to fit without slipping, even over my usual drop-shouldered dresses.

The vest is brown 100% linen, lined with teadye cotton muslin and bound with black/indigo batik quilter’s cotton.  The binding is entirely handstitched.  The shoulders and side seams are reinforced with commercial black bias tape, embroidered with french knots.  Bias tape (overlain with woven running stitch in several shades of blue) was also used to bind the white/indigo  calico that I used for the center stripes.  The linen fabric is not a very tight weave so it’s rather unstable and needs the tape for a good fit.  Most of the applique patches are from the “blue tiger” and “cat skull” fabrics that I had printed at Spoonflower, so they are my own designs.  The indigo wave and charcoal bird fabrics are Japanese dobby cloth.  There are a couple of flannel scraps and some vintage 1970s trim (peach/brown/white on black).  On the back is half of a crocheted disk that is positioned to look like the moon rising over the waves.  I picked up a bag of these round crocheted pieces (somebody’s abandoned unfinished table runner or something) at a thrift shop about 20 years ago.  I made the front clasps from 14-gauge copper wire; they will look much nicer once they’ve tarnished.  I thought they might be a bit heavy but they work fine.  Each side is designed to be stitched down at four points for stability.  They are slightly oversized for durability and ease of use.

Umber and indigo – used together, often with black and/or deep grayish-purple, are my personal ”shaman’s colors”.  Indigo is paired with dark brown in several traditional and/or ceremonial textiles around the world, such as Japanese clothing, Batak ikat weavings from Sumatra, and old Zuni mantas from New Mexico.  It would be easy to say that this is just because these two colors are common in naturally-dyed fabrics everywhere, but there seems to be a bit more to it than that, since the same pattern (brown with a blue border, or vice versa) seems to turn up over and over in “special” garments that have been lavished with extra work, even though they aren’t brightly colored.  The blue/brown combination also occurs in nature in several creatures that are both common and conspicuous, such as Steller’s jay (western U.S.), the blue tiger butterfly (Asia), and the pipevine swallowtail (U.S.).

Embroidered Patchwork Vest, Front

 

Embroidered Patchwork Vest, Back

 

Copper Clasp