Shibori, here I come!

I'm getting ready for a shibori class with Jan Myers Newbury at ProChemical and Dye in Fall River, MA. I've already taken the class with Jan before, but need a refresher course. Jan is an excellent teacher, and I admire her work so much. Take a look at your website, and hold onto your socks!

I'm packing PVC pipe, clamps, bobby pins, washers, rubber bands, thread, rope - anything that can be wrapped around fabric, or fabric can be wrapped around. And lots of shapes to clamp - I especially love circles, but I'm also going to try squares, triangles and long rectangles.

Will post some of the class samples after I return, and then I plan on spending summer making more fabric. Dyeing is so much fun - there's always some new combination to say "What If?"

Published in Journey Of Hope

I'm so proud that my art quilt - "Lift Every Voice and Sing for Obama" was included in the book Journey of Hope: Quilts Inspired by Barack Obama, written by Carolyn Mazloomi, with a foreword by Meg Cox. The book is beautifully done, and each artist had space to write about their work, and the thoughts behind it.

It's only $16.49 at Amazon - how do they do that?! Hardcover, great color printing, and multiple artists' depictions of an historical election. Yes, I'm very proud that my piece is included, as I believe this will be part of the President's library someday. I'm honored to think I'll be sitting on a shelf with many other books that relate to the election, and presidency of the first African American president. The quilt is now part of the collection of the Mississippi Center for Justice, so it also sits with good company.

My Art quilt included the first stanza, because the words said exactly the way I felt after the election of Barack Obama. If you don't know the words to the hymn, written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" you can hear a beautiful rendition on You Tube (many others there as well), or read them:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.