Sometimes I have tried a different approach to a batik and I have started working with the black fabric and gone through many stages of bleaching out and re-dyeing color in. This first photo shows a picture of the wax on the black fabric in the beginning of my batik, Caught in the Thunderstorm. The strange thing…
Light as a feather, her hooves barely touched the ground as she stepped out of the trailer to my home in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Amity the filly had arrived from Green Meads Farm in the Berkshire hills. I had longed for a registered Morgan that I could ride, show and breed to have foals (baby horses)…
The yard outside our old house has been bursting with daylilies and other flowers, and I have just been swept away with the beauty of them. My favorite time to take a walk is at sunset time, and the light here comes in from the West and bathes everything in the golden light. It’s actually…
People ask me all the time, “How do you do batik?” I used to try to write summaries, but now I can just say go to my website! Last Friday, Maria Wulf of Bedlam Farm came and took video of me doing batik. She wrote some beautiful blog posts about each part of the tutorial…
It is said you have to love farming to keep doing it and we did. It was not a job but a way of life, a ritual repeated day in day out with exciting and unexpected events both good and bad. We loved the animals and loved the land. Here is the memory of our…
The dye buckets are finally outdoors and sit on the ground waiting to merge with the wax. The mixing of dyes is time consuming and my least favorite part of the batik process but I feel a release of my creative spirit now that the buckets of dye are ready. It is warmish and the…
With one big push the calf finally gushed into the world and lay still behind her mom. Being nervous I pushed forward to be sure the nostrils were clear to breath, but before I reached the small jersey heifer (female calf) she shook her head and took the first breaths of life. Birth is a…
Sundance Trilogy, this batik is finally completed, out of the dye and hanging to dry, free in the wind. Nothing dyed here, except the batik. Here is a large pail filled with a deep red dye, which was the final dye bath for Sundance Trilogy. Sundance Trilogy going into the dye set…
So I wrote out the request. “Please cash in my teacher’s retirement account”. I had worked as a traveling art teacher for about five years and took a leave of absence to work on my art. But I never went back. I loved creating my art and was managing to sell much of it in…
He is sitting beside me on our trip to the Memory Center in Bennington, Vermont. My husband Dick had a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s last fall. I knew it was coming as he would ask the same questions again and again, become anxious especially at night and go over things repeatedly. He had had a…