Wrapping up the Residency

 (Above:  The last few pieces made for The Clothesline.  Click on any image to enlarge.)

Time has really flown by during the past few weeks as artist-in-residency at the Springfield Art Association.  I've been more productive than I thought possible.  The Clothesline now includes sixty pillowcases, sixteen vintage child's garments, and four dozen household linens.  Hand prints made from found fabric are fused to every item.

I've carefully zigzag stitched around every hand print.  The household linens presented a unique design challenge.  I had to decide how to best make each one look good from both sides.  After all, both sides are equally visible when hanging on a clothesline.  Most of the long table runners had hand prints fused to both sides ... allowing the bobbin thread to create a nice outline on the opposite side.

When hanging in strong light, the fabric hand prints on the opposite side are actually visible right through the ground material.

For the fancy fabric place mats, I fused the fabric hand print to the "wrong side" and carefully stitched a yoyo on the right side.  Therefore, each side sort of looks like the "front".

(Above:  Great Grandma's Remnants, a yellow fiber vessels filled with the leftover sashing from a top quilt and a small red-and-yellow fiber vessel that will be given to Betsy Dollar, executive director of the Springfield Art Association.)

Yesterday I took down the clothesline I hung in the spare bedroom.  The actual clothesline was made from yellow cording and a small length of leftover red-and-yellow cording zigzag stitched from old yarn months ago.  I took the two pieces of cording and zigzag stitched them into fiber vessels.  I did this in order to have a place for the pink and blue leftover pieces of sashing that had once been part of the Sun Bonnet Sue quilt top used during my first week to create Sue's Environmental To Do List.  Each piece of pink sashing made two rolls.  Each blue square made one.  Now, every scrap from my great grandmother's quilt top has found a place as art.

 (Above:  The grand hallway at the Lincoln Museum.)

I've also recently visited two more tourist destinations here in Springfield.  The Lincoln Museum is part of a complex that includes the presidential library.  It was wonderful!

Some areas included great vignettes depicting Lincoln's early life.

One section showed reproduced garments worn by Mary Todd Lincoln and other socialites living in Washington, DC during the Lincoln administration.

The staging of an exhibit of newspaper caricatures was utterly fantastic ... at least to the custom picture framer that I am.  All these trapezoidal frames made the experience of seeing these images as off-balanced and tumultuous as they must have been experience during their day.  Another area had blood red walls on which portraits of Civil War era personalities appeared. A touch screen allowed viewers to learn the identities of those in the pictures.  It was quite effective and so was the lighting and seat vibrations during the seventeen minute film shown in a lovely auditorium.

 (Above:  Living room fireplace at the Vachel Lindsay home.)

The other place I went was the Vachel Lindsay home.  Before coming to Springfield, I'd never heard of poet Vachel Lindsay. Evidently he was quite a popular poet/performer in his day and is frequently linked with Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters (poet I have heard of). He is also credited with discovering (or at least assisting with the early success of) Langston Hughes ... another poet whose latter fame certainly eclipsed that of Vachel Lindsay.

 (Above:  Downstairs bedroom and location of Vachel Lindsay's birth.)

I was the only person visiting the house on the day I went.  The tour was quite in depth as the docent is a poet totally devoted to all things about Vachel Lindsay and his entire, extended family.

I was there for over two hours and treated to stories ranging from Springfield's 1908 race riots to Vachel Lindsay's sister's missionary trips to China.  The docent even played recording of Vachel Lindsay reciting his work.  While I'm not necessarily now a Vachel Lindsay fan (have only read one poem, Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, since visiting the house), I found myself latter thinking about time, fading fame, and last influence.  I'm glad I went.

 (Above:  Upstairs bedroom.  The far room is where Vachel Lindsay died after downing a pint of lye.)

Finally, I went to last evening's month meeting of Q.U.I.L.T.S. (Quilters United in Learning, Teaching, and Self-Improvement.)

It is always nice to share some of my work for link-minded fiber people.  It is also so much fun to see "Show-and-Tell".