Day Three Nancy Crow Workshop
Here is my workspace at the Barn. I’m working on completing a composition that is supposed to illustrate glowing and flat–but somehow I got lost in the composition and just started putting in pieces. I’m pleased with what I accomplished—but have some piecework to add to the sides and the bottom.
I’ve started to use fabric and bits and pieces that were my mother’s and her mother. Unfortunately I don’t have any thing from my father’s mother as it was burned in a shed fire started by a neighbor trying to clear out a fence row.
Grandma lived through very hard times and so did not waste anything. She meticulously cut 1 inch squares using a cardboard template from an assortment of solids and pieced them together with a 1/16th inch seam. She was a sewing machine repair man in the days in which sewing machines were stationary items and women did not have strange men in their house. I can remember my mother saying she could not make a good stitch when she called her mother on the phone (every day–and on a party line) and Grandma promised she would come down and take a look at it in a day or so.
Then she also cut out triangles from dress fabrics, curtains, shirts, using either a regular scissors or even a pinking shears. There was no template in the plastic baggie holding them–advertised as washable footies. A small embroidery piece of a duck, and some hexagons also cut by hand–no template in that bag either.
So I reseamed those 1/16th inch seams and sewed the rest of those solid squares and put them in the piece I was working on today. Then I started in on the triangles–they will go on the sides and bottom—there are quite a few and all need trimming and squaring up.
Tonight’s meal featured shredded beets and carrots–and a gluten free brownie. I am not tempted to make either of these at home.
Tomorrow I start a series of new pieces. The assignment is three–but I think I might manage four—thinking smaller and a simple pattern may make it doable.
Sylvia Weir Art 