sadness and art

It just hit me today as we plan to head out of town for a memorial service, how much loss a cousin's family has sustained this month. In early July the son was killed. Then a granddaughter died. And now the mother has lost her battle with cancer. I'm at quite a distance and probably only met the granddaughter once or twice and I'm reeling--how sad for everyone.

It made us all really appreciate and revel in the family connections as the other side of my family held a reunion this weekend. So Saturday we mourned and Sunday we rejoiced. Quite a contrast. Our reunion isn't big (under 30 people) but cousins came in from all over the country and, very important, they brought their kids.

Here's some of the crowd from Sunday on my sister's wonderful river-front porch. I just noticed it is all the guys. The women were either down on the grass or sitting around the kitchen table (the best place to be for good conversation). And the kids congregated down by the river, sitting on the pier.

Needless to say, I haven't done much in the way of stitching. Things have been busy. I've mostly been reading when I've been home. I got a new issue of Selvedge this weekend. It is one pricy magazine ($25!) but I think it's occasionally worth it for the beauty of it. You can just sink into it and since it's all textiles focused it is perfect.

I also purchased The Painted Quilt by Linda and Laura Kemshall (with a very nice coupon from Borders). This book pairs beautifully with the Studio Journals class I've been taking. Like the Double Trouble books, this book shows the design source, journal pages as they work through the design, and the final piece. This book, however, is a bit more technique oriented and has clear instructions for how to do some of the techniques they use. The one that really got me going, since we'd been doing rubbings in the journals class, is to make a wire form of your graphic shape and make a rubbing of it. Then use the same shape as a stencil, as a mask, etc. I feel loaded up with good ideas.

This may be my only chance to post this week. I've done some playing wiht this week's project of clip art and wingdings and dingbats (I love it!). I took a webding (they're fonts in word processors with symbols rather than letters) and played with it in Photoshop. I've posted the photos on Flickr.