A Great Trade!

Check out the trade I made last week! A sculptor of faces [Diane Briegleb] commented on one of my box dolls and I offered to send it to her. She agreed to send me a face or two in return. And look what she sent me!

Here's what she wrote:

"I am an old woman of 75 years and I have done my faces for at least 30 years...I have been inspired by all the wonderful things people have done with her. Your piece really touched me as over the years there have been times when I have felt like I was in a room with no dorrs or no windows. And so your lovely doll really struck a note with me. I hope my pieces will bring inspiration. I am happy to be part of such creativity that I have seen over the years, and I am bonded to each thing that others do."

So now I will need to step up my efforts and make a doll or two that are worthy of such fine craftsmanship as Diane's faces. What an honor!

Patience or Mania?

What does it take to stitch a photo like this?

Jill Draper, whose photo-realistic stitched tapestries I viewed with awe on telegraph.co.uk, says that she stitches on her machine at such a manic pace that she gets headaches. She works on a few square inches at a time, carefully following a photograph. Then she hand stitches final details.

I believe that it takes a great reserve of patience to even undertake such a project, but I can understand the crazy manic type of work required to make headway with such small details. It's a mind-boggling process, to work on something so large in scale compared to the infinitesimal gestures needed to complete even a small portion of it. A few years ago I hand stitched a self portrait with DMC embroidery threads and was astonished at the speed required to keep my mind in the game. On top of that there is the mental concentration involved in keeping track of the slight variations in color needed to shade and add contours to the image.

That type of work, I imagine (I have never done work like that on a machine) has to be something like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time -- times one hundred. While you furiously stitch with eyes focused and bright light shining on such a tiny section of the embroidered painting, you are trying to fly over the whole scene from high above with a part of your mind that can envision the end result. That has to be a mind bender!

Kudos to this Jill Draper. She is 62 years old. I hope my brain is as able to round up the intricacies required by my craft in 20 years!