navylane :: musings

        
Paradox, a handmade book for a 2005 graduate.
(click to enlarge photo)

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Life is not about answers. It is about learning to live in the middle of complete uncertainty, and doing so gracefully.
– Swami Chetanananda

Recently one of the most kind-hearted people I know asked if I would make a collage for her daughter. The idea was to incorporate photographs of five women — the daughter, the mother, the grandmother, the great-grandmother, and the great-great-grandmother. Five generations of phenomenal women. I feel truly honored to have been asked to do such a sentimental piece.

The 8×10 shadowbox collage includes an excerpt from the poem A Bridge Across Time by Darlene Stevens, shown in its entirety on the back of the piece, as well as below.

A Bridge Across Time

She calls to me from long ago;
through sunlit skies, through drifts of snow;
in dancing clouds above the sea,
I call to her, and she to me.

So real was she. She laughed, she cried,
She loved, she lost, she lived, she died.
In hopes and dreams, so real was she,
She lived her life that I may be.

The blood through which my veins does flow,
The same as hers, so long ago.
So it will be. Then when I’m gone,
in a future child it will flow on.

I’ll live my life, and when it’s done,
I’ll live again in those to come.
For I’m a bridge from her to me,
From all that were, to those that be.
Darlene Stevens

Canvas tote embellished with a hand sewn fabric collage

Here it is… my first fabric collage. My sewing machine still terrifies me a bit, so I opted to sew it all by hand. The original idea was to have three hands — outlines of my hand and my daughters’ hands, but that concept quickly changed when I found out how looooong it takes to hand sew! Don’t look too closely — there are tons of mistakes, but nonetheless it was a great project to work on. The finished project was given to my mom for mother’s day.

Oh, a few details to note since this project didn’t photograph very well: The heart was created from a baby wipe that I had used to clean up the table after one of my daughters’ watercolor painting sessions. The result was such a nice shade of pink, so I dried it, cut it into a heart shape and added it to the fabric with silver metallic thread. And I’ve sewn on a small clear bead in the middle of each of the white little starbursts on the yellow fabric.