Close-ups (hearts)

This selection of hearts begins with a sleeping cat on a heart covered bed spread from my book In the Heart. Then there is a felt balsam pillow and a heart pin covered in french knots, both projects from my how-to book, Felt Wee Folk. The last two are a chain stitched heart that’s part of the endpapers and a heart tart from “The Queen of Hearts” nursery rhyme in my upcoming book, Pocketful of Posies (Sept. 2010). The original illustrations will be shown in a traveling exhibition which you can find out about here. 

detail from "In the Heart" 2001

balsam pillow from "Felt Wee Folk" 2003

pin from "Felt Wee Folk"

detail from "Pocketful of Posies" 2010

detail from "Pocketful of Posies" 2010

And the winners are…

I had the pleasure of judging the Felt Smack Down 2010 “Challenge Alert”, which was organized by Patty from My life under the bus.  You can see all the projects entered in the contest on her blog here. The premise of the challenge was to make something based on my Felt Wee Folk book. Here are the results! It was very rewarding to see such a variety of entries to the contest. Everyone’s felt project showed imagination and oozed enthusiasm, so it was fun to look at all the submissions, knowing that there was a lot of thought and labor invested in each one. 

I looked for what I thought was the best character development, color choices, workmanship and presentation. I also was interested in how the projects from my book could inspire someone to come up with their own ideas and interpretations. 

Prizes are for the following projects: 

1^st prize- Alison of Acorn Cottage for her Little Bo Peep. See her blog here. 

First Prize, Little Bo Peep made by Alison

Little Bo Peep with sheep made by Alison

2^nd prize- Caroline for her handsome fellow 

Second Prize, Handsome Fellow made by Caroline

3^rd prize- Loralynn’s Cottage  

Third Prize, Loralynn's Cottage

Thank you to Patty for organizing this contest and to all the folks who committed themselves and worked on projects over the last few weeks. That’s a lot of blanket stitches!

Favorites (Edward Lear)

This alphabet book by the prince of nonsense verse, Edward Lear (1812-1888), seems timely, considering my broken arm, which is much improved, by the way. This 1944 edition was on a book shelf  in my parents’ house. Here’s the title page and some pages from the book, which was illustrated by G. S. Sherwood. Note the unsentimental ending, with the zinc-lined coffin! This was a different age of children’s literature. Read more about Lear here.

Bud and Ivy dolls

I’ve recently finished making a new crowd of boy and girl wee folk named Bud and Ivy. There’s a limited edition of 16 and the dolls are now available at my website. Here they are coming down the mountain through the snow. 

Bud and Ivy dolls coming down the mountain

"Bud and Ivy" Limited Edition Dolls

wrapped arms and legs

Salley wrapping legs

dressed and waiting for a head

Bud and Ivy promenade

Close-ups (winter houses)

Houses appear so frequently in my artwork that I’ve divided them up into categories to show you in this Close-ups series. When you think about it, the shape is just a square with a triangle on top that can be depicted in any color and style to bring mood and stability. And houses are strong symbols of security that I seem to want in my pictures. This collection of winter houses starts with the winter section of a 4 seasons drawing I made at age 7. Then there’s a detail from a fabric relief piece called “Skating”. The next three are from the books, You and Me: Poems of Friendship, The Hollyhock Wall and Pocketful of Posies, which will be published in Sept., 2010.  

by Salley at age 7

detail from "Skating" 1986

from "You and Me: Poems of Friendship" 1997

detail from "The Hollyhock Wall" 1999

detail from "Pocketful of Posies" 2010

Felt Wee Folk giveaway from Craft Gossip

Linda Lanese, who writes the Felting Crafts column for Craft Gossip, is offering a giveaway of my book, Felt Wee Folk: Enchanting Projects. To enter, just go to the Craft Gossip blog and leave a comment, by Feb. 12th. 

Doll projects from "Felt Wee Folk"

Pins (part 3)

Pig pin

Bear pin

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Pin catalog, 1980

 I enjoyed the challenge of coming up with ways to make the animals’ extremities and found beads for their legs, ears, noses and eyes. The business grew to a point where most of my sales were to shops, on a wholesale basis. To keep the process interesting, I came up with new designs like this bread and cheese and scallop shell.     

Bread & Cheese pin

Shell pin

Display stand for pins

 In an effort to meet people and to make more for my labor, I became a member of the Christmas Store, a seasonal cooperative in Cambridge and commuted from the Cape to do my work shifts. For a display, I built a fruit and vegetable stand with crates made out of popsicle sticks.  Later, I made patterns and wrote directions on how to make the pins for the 1982 Holiday Crafts issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine.     

Better Homes and Gardens, 1982

Better Homes and Gardens, 1982

 After about 5 years of mass producing the pins, I moved on to other things, including motherhood.  Since then, I’ve had several business ventures, which inevitably reach a point when I’ve had to make a decision to grow or stop all together. I’ve always chosen freedom, never wanting to spend all of my time running a business, even though I see the promotional part as an important element of a creative project. And it’s not as if I walked away from a gold mine. At the wholesale price, I was making so little for my time. Being an artist means coming up with new ideas and making the same thing over and over has therapeutic, although limited appeal. Even the idea of hiring others to do the work made me nervous. I knew that I would be a miserable boss, having to hold others to a high standard of workmanship at low pay. And, I realized that I am happiest while making things myself! I have no exact record of how many pins I made, but it must have been well over a thousand. Throughout, the peapod was a best-seller, which was ironic because it was the simplest and fastest to make of all.     

Peapod pin

Pins (part 2)

Continued from Pins (part 1). 

I started adding new designs and soon had 20 different pins.  It was time to be more serious about marketing and I decided that a catalog was needed to reach more people. A former classmate from RISD, Niki Bonnett, volunteered to develop some promotional materials for my business.    

rainbow pin

palm tree pin

   

Pin catalog designed by Niki Bonnett, 1980

Niki devised a poster that could be cut up in strips and glued together in such a way as to make an accordion-fold catalog. She made drawings, with descriptive hand written notes identifying materials and features of each pin.  For the sake of economy, the poster was printed in black and white, and I hand colored the pin illustrations with markers. I constructed a cover for each catalog out of cloth-covered cardboard. Then I glued the beginning and end of the accordion folded pages to the inside of the front and back covers, along with ribbon ties. The finished catalog size was 4″ x 3″.    

pin poster designed by Niki Bonnett,1980

 We recently talked from her home in Ashville, NC and Niki remembers this about the project: 

“When I did your job, I was working at Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos (HHCC), a well-known ad agency in Boston. I was doing freelance work at night to build my portfolio and I loved your pins.  

For your project, I designed a poster with all the art and type as white on a black background. Once printed, it could be cut up into horizontal strips that were then hand colored, accordion folded, taped together and hand-bound into a fabric wrapped cover (also handmade) that tied shut with a bit of ribbon. Obviously, back then I didn’t think about my time as part of the cost of doing the project, and I had plenty of it back then too! All it cost was the printing of some black and white posters! Those posters looked great on their own, and it was lots of fun making those books; they were little gems. 

In addition to the design and production of the piece, I also did all the illustrations of the pins, the calligraphy naming each pin style, and I created that typeface that your name and other copy were set in. I got one of the typesetter reps who visited HHCC every day to give me an entire alphabet of uppercase, metal letters (“slugs”? I forget the terminology for those bits of lead type). The letters were tiny, maybe 12 point. I used a brayer to roll black acrylic paint out on a piece of glass and then hand printed each tiny letter on rough newsprint until I got the “perfect” letter. Once I chose the letters for the entire alphabet, I blew them up to four times the original size on the Photostat machine (Good thing I had a key to that ad agency! Can you imagine being able to sneak back into a large office now to work on your own stuff from 8 to midnight?). That became my typeface from which I made all the “typeset” words. Needless to say, there was A WHOLE LOT of cutting and pasting goin’ on!  

House Pin 1977

I was very proud of that project and I know I still have at least one of those books and some pins tucked away somewhere all these years later. I sure do miss the hands-on way design was done before computers; that’s what eventually caused me to quit my graphic design business in favor of making art quilts. I never made the kind of money I made in commercial art with my textile artwork, but it was so enjoyable… the creativity and the “making” of things!” 

Salley arranging pins on top of poster, designed by Niki Bonnett, 1980

Mummy pin

 

Eggplant Pin 1977

Yankee Magazine had a section featuring small businesses in New England, so a friend of mine submitted an article with some pictures. 

Pin catalog, 1980

My pins were included in Yankee’s Feb. 1981 issue, along with articles about a man who played music on a saw and someone who repaired oriental rugs. Laura Gross wrote, “Sparkling beads and soft velvet compliment her intricate hand-sewn and embroidered Egyptian mummies, palm trees, hearts, carrots, etc. Prices range from $4.00 to $12.00, and her custom work starts at $15.00. In the past, Salley has specially made banjos, cats, mermaids, New York town houses, corn-on-the-cob and a doctor’s bag, complete with gold initials.” I don’t recall making the doctor’s bag, but I do remember sewing on individual yellow seed beads for kernels of corn.    

pin catalogs, 1980

People wrote in response to the article and I sent out free catalogs in manilla envelopes. I can’t remember how many orders came in, but it was enough to keep me busy for a while.    

Pin catalog

The story will be continued in PINS (part 3).  

Pins (part 1)

The peapods were the gateway to my life of stitching. I started making peapods and other pins in art school, as a totally separate project from my class assignments.  Some of my friends knew about them, but my teachers hadn’t any idea.    

Peapod pin 1977

One day during class, I was listening to a critique, sewing some peapods, when my teacher, Judy-Sue Goodwin-Sturges, noticed what I was doing. She looked more closely, asked me a few questions and said, “Why don’t you do this kind of thing for your illustrations? Try sewing them.”    

Watermelon pin 1977

Bunch of Grapes Pin 1977

With that simple encouragement, I stopped trying so hard to communicate the pictures in my head through a brush or pen. Given permission to work outside of the usual illustration mediums, I found that I was much happier and energized. I was no longer struggling to keep in step, but, with a needle and thread, I could dance.  For some reason, I’d been under the impression that in art school, one does “serious” fine art and I’d kept my interest in sewing and handcrafts underground. I rediscovered the joy of creating and learned to trust my hands and gut feelings to help work out challenges.     

Cat Pin 1977

 

Bananas Pin 1977

After graduation, I added more designs and started mass producing pins and selling them on a wholesale basis to shops. I had to really push myself to call shops and arrange business calls with my basket of pins in hand. I was more content sitting at home, covering little red beads with sheer lavender fabric to make bunches of grapes or sewing strings of green wooden beads inside a velvet ribbon peapod.  Despite my shyness about pedaling my wares, I found the marketing part of the business to be a creative excercise. I’d spent my teenaged years working in my mother’s import shop in Woods Hole, From Far Corners, and the experience dealing with customers and learning the difference between wholesale and retail sales was helpful.   

Carrot Pin 1977

I started making custom pins of people’s cats, based on photographs they sent. I remember that Siamese cat owners were particularly fussy about their breed and one time had to redo a blue point. The cat ears are made from a coiled wire bead, which is cut in half.  

back of Cat pin

Some of the pins like the cat and the watermelon have a cardboard shape inside to give them stability. I’d sew a little pocket, turn it right side out and slip the cardboard in, put in some stuffing and sew up the pocket.   

cardboard patterns for pins

I used my Singer Featherweight, the same machine on which I learned to sew, to do the machine part. There was always a lot of hand sewing to finish and attach the pin back.  I had some labels printed with my name and sewed them under the pinback. They were the same kind of labels you get at fabric stores for sewing on your children’s camp clothes.   

In the studio 1979

The story of the pins will be continued. This is the first of 3 parts.  

Recovery

Here’s an update on my recovery from last week’s fall. My left wrist broke in a complex way, so as to require surgery to repair my poor bones. Luckily, I was referred to an excellent orthopedic surgeon in Boston who specializes in hands. On Wednesday, the doctor operated and it looks like everything went very well. She used a metal plate and some screws to hold the bone fragments in place. So, now airport security will never be the same!   

I have my version of the “pain scale faces” that are displayed in hospitals.  

This is how I feel without pain killers:   

detail from "Pocketful of Posies", to be published in Sept., 2010

This is what I look like with some pain killers:   

detail from "Pocketful of Posies", to be published in Sept., 2010

 Here’s what it looks like with too many pain killers:  

fairy sleeping

I can’t say how long the healing process will be, but I feel like the worst part is over and my body will mend at its own pace. Now that I’m taking fewer pain killers, I’m more alert and noticing things around the house. I watered the house plants before they died and emptied the dish washer, using one hand. Taking a shower with an arm cast is becoming routine and my husband is able to do a bra clasp without saying, “Why are these so tricky?”   

We had to throw out last night’s dinner. My husband spent hours making a squash and chicken casserole, which looked so good.  He even made homemade croutons to mix in! We found out that our garden grown acorn and butternut squash was so bitter it was inedible. It didn’t look rotten, but must have something very wrong with it.  

We don’t have TV service, which normally is not an issue, but at first I wanted to watch something, for the distraction. We’ve been borrowing movies from the library and watching them on an old TV set with a Dvd player that broke the other night. The disk was stuck and wouldn’t come out, so my husband took the whole thing apart and got the disk out, so we could return it. We haven’t the nerve to try another Dvd for fear it will get stuck. For now, I’m listening to books on tape because reading is still difficult since my concussion. Right now I’m enjoying Alexander McCall Smith’s Morality for Beautiful Girls, which is in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I love listening to the narrator’s lilting Botswana accent. 

So, that’s it for now. Thank you for your kind and encouraging words. Keep tuned: I’ll be posting new stories that I wrote before the accident.