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This wall hanging was inspired by the back side of the stiff African fabric for making hats. Being the back side it has strange looking designs. The copper/gold color and the texture of the fabric called to make something magical so I continued to work with colors and textures. I found and added a red border of flowers that sang with the background.
Still having no idea of what the subject was, I was guided to add a central tree trunk. Fooling around with some of the eyes I cut from the other side of the African fabric a magical deer’s head appeared looking like a deer totem.
Baby's World
At the time, fall 2011, the Japanese maples were losing their beautiful red leaves and the big oak tree in our back yard gave me a great gift. One still morning she lost her leaves while I watched. This beautiful display of letting go took about an hour. The combined inspiration of both these trees led me to add a canapé of red to the top of my fabric tree.
This wall hanging had gotten pretty far along in the making and I still didn’t know the subject. As I sat staring at it and the floor I saw a heap of the black shadow fabric that looked like a dog. Perfect for the foreground. So I carefully lifted it up and pinned it in place. I needed to define the feet more clearly. The head and a tail quickly followed as they were pieces I'd already cut out of the front side of the fabric I was using as a background.
Again magic happens. The baby’s eye and a kind of halo are there in the background just where I want to put the baby.
"Baby's World" was finished in the Fall of 2011.
Thank you Goddess of Making! Thank you for teaching me about sending and receiving love bubbles.
Staring some more at the piece the strange symbols that came from using the back of the fabric I saw suggestions of how they might be incorporated. Slowly I realized that something like this could be in a baby’s world before she loses the sights and symbols.
In an IFS session a baby part of myself was distressed because she sent out love bubbles but no one returned them in a way she could feel. Here the bubbles easily turned into hearts cut from the “front” side of the same African fabric. The baby and other shadowy figures appeared made out of very light black material that challenged my sewing skills as it is very delicate and the background very tough to sew through.
African fabric from which the dog's head was cut
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