Old Ladies, Hearts and Roses

When I was leafing through the paper this weekend, two things caught my eye.

First was this ad showing tiara-wearing Italian grandmothers holding handbags from the Spring 2015 Collection of Dolce & Gabbana...



Aren't those ladies wonderful??

A few pages later, this pic of a window on Fifth Ave in NYC also caught my eye...



Beautiful!  It too was Dolce & Gabbana.  Isn't that coat gorgeous?



The embroidery looks machine-done but ooooohh!

Both pics sent me scurrying to look at their Spring collection...



Where I found tons of Spanish-inspired looks covered in roses...



Heart milagros were emblazoned on everything from jackets and dresses...

To handbags...

I don't know about you but it made me want to start embroidering a milagro heart inspired by these beautiful images.

Unlike these gals, my little old Mrs. Rose is going to have to wait a bit for me to finish her roses...

Luckily, she has the heart for it...

Here's to hearts, roses and remembering our grandmothers today!

Leave-ing

A big wave to everyone!  

I was out of town all last week but found some time to work on making leaves for Mrs. Rose...

It has taken some time to figure out which materials and techniques will give me the look I'm going for.

Thank God for all-in-one printers!  First thing was to copy my leaf patterns and reduce the patterns so that my leaves would vary in size...

I've decided to embroider some leaves and construct others by using wire, velvet and silk bias. 

I started with Hanah-dyed silk velvet cut on the bias and framed up the pattern using water soluble stabilizer called Fabri-solvy...

The stabilizer was too much for the silk bias ribbon but just right for preventing the nap from fraying on the velvet.

The range of colors in the hand-dyed velvet is giving my leaves lots of different shades of green which I am loving.

The greatest assistant to me has been this tiny gauge Wapsi ultra wire that fly fishermen use when tying flies.  It's significantly smaller than commercially available paper-covered wire, is rust proof, and comes in great colors...

I've been attaching the tiny wire as veins on the rose leaves and then cutting them out with a very sharp pair of scissors..

These guys are tiny and each spray is taking me about 35 minutes...

Looks like I've got a lot of leave-ing in my future.  

I'm off to play with Jim...it's our 19th wedding anniversary.  

And a huge thanks to all you servicemen and women...and your families...past and present.  

Thank You.

Through the Window of Mrs. Rose's Room

Holy Smokes!  I had no intention of not being here the last two weeks.  The transition from end-of-school to Summer chewed up my days in new and exciting ways and left little time to sit down and work through the next steps with Mrs. Rose.

So I did what any respectable needlewoman would have done under time constraints...

I got out some cross stitch and took it with me to stitch when I could.

Both cross stitch and knitting are easy to pick up and put down.  I actually had to dust this one off since it was bought in 2001!

As for Mrs. Rose, I finally turned my attention back to her today.  The next step in that project is to introduce climbing roses that grow over the walls, creating a rose bower that provides shelter and warmth.

It is the gifts that Mrs. Rose gives that transforms her environment from a depressing institution into a home.

I drew from a number of pics online to help me decide how best to create this bower of roses.  I like how this rose climbs up the walls...

And how these roses grow to frame a doorway...

Or drape down over a wall.



While I was pondering my next steps, I happened to get another bi-weekly newsletter from Robert Genn.  I've mentioned him before and can't say enough how helpful I find his tips.

This time his letter was on "Cropping"-- you can read the full letter here.

The upshot is that there are tricks to deciding what is placed in the "window" of the painter's canvas...what is cropped and what is not.

The advice was quite timely and useful since I'm currently deciding how to draw and shape the bower.  I hadn't considered that I'd been creating "windows" into my work, but it is true of many of us who are working within the confines of a quilt block.  Check them out...

• Do not have curved areas or lines tangential with the edges.

• Do not have a lot of small items dribbling along edges.

• Do not have spikey or angular items pointing too directly at corners.

• Do not have an even or symmetrical division of elements lying against the frame edges.

• Do have a design near the frame edge that has both positive and negative areas.

• Do vary the thickness of lines and patches that lie against, come up to, or approach those edges.

• Do have mystery, understatement, softening, incompleteness and wabi-sabi as part of your edge consciousness.

After digesting these guidelines, I found myself looking to some famous rose bowers within paintings to see how other artists treated the cropping of a rose bower.

In the painting below, the Madonna is placed centrally in the painting yet the roses on either side are asymmetrical.  I also note the larger roses in the left foreground adding more interest...

Madonna in the Rose Garden by Martin Schongauer ca. 1473

And the bower in the picture below surrounding Sleeping Beauty has been cropped quite severely at the edges...

The Rose Bower by Edward Burnes-Jones ca. 1885-1890

Note that the vines do vary in size and are not tangential to the edges.  The poem at the bottom of the frame was written by William Morris, a contemporary of Burnes-Jones.  Did you read it?  It's quite lovely and mentions love, treasure and a gift.

And Morris himself has provided a climbing rose design to inspire...

"Trellis" wallpaper by William Morris c. 1859

This last painting shows lots of flowers encapsulating another sleeping beauty, giving the impression that we really are looking through a window framed by roses.

Rose Bower by Hans Zatzka c. 1859

With all this to study and consider, I'm off to sketch a design for the climbing roses and to hunt down the right fibers for stitching the climbing vines.

It's great to be working on roses right now since they are blooming everywhere.

Speaking of gardens, the bluebirds have come back this year and I have three baby bluebirds in my bluebird box.  They were just starting to hatch when I took this pic... 

I'll take an update picture in the next few days.

Happy June and Happy Roses everyone!