Sweeter Than Honey – 22″ x 22″ – hand-made paper, dyed, marbled, and altered papers, tyvek, plaster, pigment, dried flower petals, cottonwood pods.

I started with the title to this piece, and then went looking through my studio for honey-colored papers and appropriate objects.  The golden honeycomb paper at the bottom was specifically made for this piece; while the paper pulp was wet on the screen, I used a flat stick to make holes in it and push them into hexagonal shapes.  That one piece of paper took nearly half an hour to make!  One of my other favorite parts of this piece is the cottonwood pods, which are flying in a circle around the whole piece.   I’ve been around cottonwood trees my whole life, and always see the fluff flying around, but this summer is the first time I really noticed the pods that enclose the fluff on the tree.  They split open into these pretty little shapes; mostly with three petals, but you can see a few four-petaled ones near the center.

Foundations of the Earth – 24″ x 24′ – hand-painted, dyed, altered, and eco-printed papers, dyed linen thread, on roofing paper.

This piece was intended to be quite different than the way it turned out.  I wanted to make a piece to fit in this frame, with the pattern stitched with thread across a solid-color texture background.  I made a big sheet of lovely teal-colored texture with melted duplicator paper, and when it was finished, the paint peeled off one section right in the middle.  Darn!  So I looked around my studio for something else I could stitch over, and ended up making these concentric circles with many different pieces of hand-painted, dyed, marbled, and altered paper.  The linen thread started out brilliant white, which was too stark against the colors, so I dyed it a pale golden color, then stitched the pattern with the outer points arranged around an octagon.  It is one of my favorite pieces I’ve made this year, and was very popular with visitors to the 2016 Longmont Studio Tour.

Square Dancing to the Blues – 16″ x 20″ – wall texture, watercolor, acrylic, buttons.

The first version of this piece was a very cool collage made with magazine pages and wax, and I ruined it by leaving it too close to a window on a sunny day, which melted about a third of it.  I scraped it off and recycled the board to become another piece of art, but the title was too fun to let go of, so I made this version with wall-texturing plaster, watercolor, and tiny green buttons.

FireFlower – silk flower petals, glue, on board – 36″ x 36″

This exuberant piece is based on the tradition in India of making rangoli, beautiful geometric patterns created on the ground for special festivals.  Sometimes they are made with colored chalk or rice powder, but often with flower petals.  It was surprisingly challenging to make.  I make various kinds of mandala patterns often, and feel like I ought to be able to do it with my eyes closed, but I realized that I usually start in the center and work my way out, and things just fall into place without a lot of planning ahead.  But because of the way the petals overlap, this piece had to be made from the outside in, and I had to think several steps ahead.  I was also limited by the components of the flowers I had, and how many of each petal there were.  But it was also very fun to make, and it’s fun to look at!