Our Daily Bread

9" x 27"



This is late, but was begun while travelling in Italy and that country also influenced my theme. The challenge was 'universe' so with a bit of word play I began to think along the lines of what universal might mean and remembered that the word 'catholic' also meant universal, "of interest or use to all".

In the Lord's Prayer we ask for "our daily bread" and surely nothing, in all cultures, is more universal that bread.

The fabric was printed while surrounded by wheat fields in Puglia, the bread basket of Italy.

Materials: Cotton fabric, textile ink, embroidery floss, batting, thread.

Techniques: Hand printed, hand pieced, machine stitched, hand embroidered.

Blue

by Misik Kim

When I thought about the universe, the first thing that came to my mind was color.

When I thought about the universe, I felt myself standing in the middle of the blue.

Blue is the color of vague longing.

I didn’t finish my work for Viewpoints9 yet.

Now I am working all day for the exhibition of Handmade fair which will be held in July.

I think my room I am working all day is my universe.

The Stream Between

Gulf Stream

Our family went on vacation to Iceland some years ago because my mother-in-law and husband are Icelandic. I’d never been, so I bought a guide and read about the country. I was surprised to learn that Reykjavik weather is moderated by the Gulf Stream. 

Yep, the Gulf Stream. The same current that can intensify hurricanes in Florida. Could there be two more different climates, Iceland and Florida? But a single oceanic link. Just like my husband and me: two totally different individuals linked by a promise called marriage. 

When I first read this challenge and contemplated opportunity and coincidence, I focused on what seemed disparate, unlikely and random. But when I linked the geography of my husband’s and my ancestral locations, I thought of similarities. I guess when fate intervenes, all roads lead to the same destination.

There is one event that is even more unlikely than the link to my husband: the construction of this quilt. This abstract rendition of the Gulf Stream is completely hand done. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I intensely dislike hand work. I won’t even replace a button. I tell my husband that’s what safety pins were invented for.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of this challenge cycle, I developed a frozen shoulder. It’s painful and debilitating, I couldn’t even push a piece of fabric through my machine. My husband affectionally calls me the one armed woman. Regardless, I plowed through. Necessity and stubbornness propelled me to places I’ve never been – and may never return.

Iceland

To create this piece I wet a piece of rayon fabric and formed it into a currents and land masses. When it was thoroughly dry I stitched it in place, added sea glass representations of land and beaded it to add interest. I wanted to maintain the organic edge so I stitched the top and batting to a piece of cotton covered Peltex. 18" W x 27" H

One Small Step

One knows when reading or watching mysteries to understand that there are no coincidences.  The same does not translate so easily to life.  In my own, I would have to rationalize a whole lifetime of coincidences.  Just my being a studio artist working in fiber is a stretch from a twenty year career in real estate punctuated with my stint as artists' representative.

One Small Step into My Universe

With this challenge I looked at what composed my own universe Here and Now:

autumnal colors, mostly cotton fabric both commercial and hand dyed

use of ink and paint

hand stitching along with free-motion, sometimes using a double needle

images of leaves, moons and birds, usually black

The result was "One Small Step into My Universe", 18" x 18".

Grace

"Grace" ©2014, 9" x 27"

How did I wind up here?  Alicia's challenge was a free-association extraordinaire for me.  I struggled to get beyond the "what are the odds" idea until the last time I read the quote.  At home, we've been talking a lot about social justice and the concept of privilege - so the last time I read it, I read the final line as "I have had the privilege". Period.  And I realized, I have.  I have never gone to sleep hungry or in the street or not had clean water to drink.  I've had access to education and medical care.  I have lived in a place that is neither war torn or filled with violence.  I have had basic privileges that many go without, here in the US and abroad.

My piece, "Grace", is about those things that I am fortunate enough to have, but have done nothing to deserve them.  The piece was inspired by a photo my son took of the “pueblos jovenes” or young towns of north Lima, Peru where some 3 million people live in poorly constructed shacks in slum settlements. Most are lacking electricity and proper sanitation, while many homes have no potable water supply. So many things we take for granted.  So many privileges.  With all of the places in the world one can be - what are the odds I would wind up here?

"Grace" was created with multiple layers of photo transfers on silk organza.  Layers were assembled and machine stitched, colored pencil was added and then finished with machine quilting and hand embroidery.  9" X 27"

The Whole Wide World

I usually listen to music in my studio. The song "Whole Wide World" by Wreckless Eric came up on random rotation. The words made perfect sense for this month's challenge.

When I was a young boy, my mama said to me

"There's only one girl in the world for you

and she probably lives in Tahiti"

I'd go the whole wide world

I'd go the whole wide world just to find her

I started thinking about the distance Tom and I traveled before our paths crossed in Westbrook, CT.  And how lucky I am that we ended up in the same place. Which led me to the idea of maps.
I pulled out one of my favorite photos of Tom, a very rare one of him sailing. This background fabric reminded me of vague land formations and water. I used similar colored fabrics and shapes to create Tom's portrait, and used echoing lines within the shapes to make him look more like part of the map.

The red dots are like push pins you might use to mark your travels. The numbers next to them are coordinates – latitude and longitude – related to 9 important places for Tom and me.  They range from Rijeka to Dublin to San Francisco as well as our home in Cheshire, CT.


Technical details
Finished size 18" x 18"
Materials: hand dyed fabrics, ink, fusible web
Techniques: raw edge applique, machine quilted with free motion stiching

The Ninth Circle

For this challenge, I used as the base a piece of silk that I painted in several layers, letting water and evaporation determine the patterned areas.

The idea was to take the human equation out of it somewhat.....I followed the natural paint deposits with hand beading, couching and threading.

There are nine large cone beads scattered throughout.  I was looking for an ambiguous effect- something that could be the surface of an alien planet, or a microscopic section of some organism.

As you can see from the detail, I used all analogous colors except for the green cord- because, well, green.

as you can see from this detail, the cones stick up for extra texture

The Ninth Circle, 11x17"

Particle Paths in the Quantum World

My challenge combined the nine planets in our solar system, and the world of coincidences.  But the universe and the paths of our planets are now fairly well understood, and predictable. The behaviour of the universe mostly corresponds to our expectations, even when we are constantly discovering new things about it.

But inside the atom, where quantum mechanics apply, everything is unpredictable and coincidental. We have particles that behave as waves, particles that decay and become two other particles; a particle can be here, there, anywhere, sometimes at the same time.  The whole behaviour of particles is probabilistic rather than determined by precise laws. Paths don't follow expectations.

Two beams of subatomic particles, going in opposite directions, are accelerated to almost the speed of light inside the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, in Geneva.  The two beams are allowed to collide in certain controlled occasions, when some particles crash with others; the resulting collisions gives rise to other particles, some of which exist for only a billionth of a second.  These collisions are registered by computers, and the data analysed to see what other particles appear.  That's how the now famous Higgs Boson was discovered.   

I have long been interested in questions of astronomy and cosmology, and more recently have become fascinated by particle physics.  So my piece for the Nine Planets challenge is a textile interpretation of the computer-generated images based on the arrays of numbers registered when particles collide. I based my image on the fact that when photons collide, an electron and a positron are produced.  They have opposing electrical charges - electrons are negative, while positions are positively charged - and within a magnetic environment, their paths split and curve in opposite directions, producing beautiful patterns (as interpreted by computers).

These collisions are very random; of billions of particles which circulate at high speed inside the machine, only a very few actually clash with another.  So actual collisions are very coincidental, and the quantum world very unpredictable.

My piece is 27” by 27”, made with fused fine lines representing the curving paths of the positive and negative particles that emerge from the collision.

Happy Birthday

by Lin Hsin-Chen

When I read the quote from Alicia, I was deeply touched. It’s so nice for us to know each other in such a big universe. Time and space can’t stop our communication and distance can’t separate our friendship. As long as we remember each other in our hearts, we are dear friends.

Out of curiosity, I started to explore the meanings behind the number 9. I kept thinking about it and amazingly I bumped into so many surprises that I haven’t experienced before. It makes me thinking of many people, things and issues in a new perspective. It feels like going to school and start to learn things that I have never focused on in the past. The school is the universe.

Your attitude changes when you see things from different angles. During the creative process, I was keen to include the number 9 in my work. As a reward for all the things that I’ve learned from this challenge, I sewed this piece in a very delicate way with some special fabrics. However, I accidentally hung this piece upside down so that the 9 becomes 6. I’m delighted with the result. My husband is very supportive to my quilt making, but he seldom comment on my works. I completed this quilt on his birthday. He said happily, for the first time, “Is it my birthday gift?” Happy birthday to you, my dear! Happy birthday to everyone!

Thanks for everything that this topic has brought to me.

Materials: floss, silk, hand-dyed silk, commercial cotton, linen, woolen yarn, metallic threads, beads, glitter

Techniques: hand stitches, hand appliqué, hand pieced, hand quilted

Size: 18” x 27”