On the Studio Table: more inspiration and process

This week I finished up the first part of my Master Naturalist Training, completed the coursework, took a final exam and presented my final project. For the next year I have to do field work and a certain number of volunteer hours to be officially certified! I will miss my fellow trainees quite a bit and the weekly lectures. I really enjoyed it. But once everything was completed this week I was back in full force in the studio finishing up and at night, I have been stitching, stitching and stitching.

The inspiration for this stitched page came from my obsession with “tree eyes”. Whenever we go hiking, I tell my kids that the trees are watching us. They agree that it really does seem that there are eyes on the tree trunks. Thankfully they like the idea and do not run off in terror. You can really get this sense if you’ve ever been hiking where aspens grow. The “eyes” are actually scars from a branch that has fallen off. There are no aspens at the Adkins Arboretum, but there are Sweet Bay Magnolias. This image is of the Sweet Bay Magnolia lives along the eastern coast as far north as Massachusetts then south to Florida and west to Arkansas and Texas.

A friend of mine saw this page and said, “Sorry, but that looks like a vagina, I just had to say it!” That made me laugh and I responded, bingo! It is a vaginal shape. How can I speak to nature and the order of things without giving a place for reproduction when it is all around us?

I held this page up to the morning light to see how the light filters through the waxed cloth. The inspiration for this page came from the Black Oak tree. I ended up having to enlist help from my mother with this. The french knot making was very time consuming for me and she was happy to help. She wanted to keep going and wanted to add the leaf, but I told her that I don’t want exact replicas of my inspiration sources, just suggestions. This page makes me happy.

“Our destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”- Henry Miller