Documented Life Project (Week 18 – Quote)

Pouring my heart into this… it counts as therapy in my book! 😉

This is my response (Take 1 and 2, actually!) to the documented life project (DLP, learn more here: Arttothe5th) week 18 challenge to include a quote in our planner to guide the week.  This was the first time ever that I actually did the challenge promptly (on Sunday of the week it was announced!), but alas, it was not to be my final take on it (take 1 is pictured and described later in this post).  I have a quote by my mom, Paulette, hanging in our home and it begged to be used in honor of mother’s day coming up.  It turned into a tribute to my mom in place of a card that I can no longer give her due to the lost battle with ovarian cancer in June, 2010.

I took a picture of a beloved oak tree yesterday morning on my walk to open the chicken coop, which is the tree used here.  The photograph of my mom pushing me on the swing is from “way back in the 19’s”, as my kids would say, 77 or 78 maybe.  I like the idea of memory bringing the past into the present with strength and honor yet not getting stuck in the past with a “poor me” attitude.  The combination of pictures from past and present is my way of doing this.  The leaves are from one of my mom’s old shirts, that I saved to make a quilt.  I have had the idea to do a tree with this technique for years now, since soon after my mom’s death in 2010 and have taken several pictures of trees with this in mind (though I didn’t bother to go looking for any of those and just took a new one).   Thankfully, I finally got around to doing this for mother’s day and with the inspiration from both the DLP group and Kelly Rae Roberts’ flying lessons group, which I just started last week.  Maybe the tree idea was just percolating until the right inspiration came along, such as adding the picture of my mom pushing me on the swing in particular, which was inspired by fellow DLP participant Angela Morris’s paintings!   The Loving Rd. street sign is from a photograph I took on the way home one day (I happen to live on the corner of Loving Rd) and represents the launching of this new blog , the re-opening of my Etsy store (https://www.etsy.com/shop/lovingrd), and the new facebook page for Loving Road all done this week in response to the Flying Lessons ebook and facebook group!  Is there something to the whole idea from one of my dad’s favored lines in Desiderata, “that the universe is unfolding just as it should”?  Perhaps.

How-to’s and lessons learned: I used distress stains for the background color in brown, green and blue, which is much more vivid than these pictures give justice.  Then, I cut out the photographs (will do better job next time!) and planned the layout without using any glue yet.  I took just the background paper to the sewing machine and did the thread painting technique for the sun with fun, bright yellow variegated thread my son, Drew, picked out (I learned the technique in an awesome class, Field Guide to Creativity, with Kristin Steiner and Susan Edmonson at the John Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC this past February).   Then, I re-arranged the cut-out pictures for adhering.  Lesson learned!  Don’t use mod podge for light weight printer paper that is all cut out like a tree and being applied in a magazine page to catch the mess.  The tree image got stuck to the magazine page and lost some of the ink (transferred – when/where I did not intend to do an image transfer!).  Thankfully, too much of the image wasn’t lost so I decided to “trust” the process and consider it meant to be, giving the tree more of an image transfer look on the finished paper.  However, this resulted in a broken looking limb holding the swing (from losing too much of the image in that spot) and I just couldn’t accept that I was swinging on a broken limb!  I was going to reprint the tree and glue over that spot, but as it progressed, I found that I could just put a fabric leaf over that spot instead.  🙂  I kept debating about the leaves, especially in this color, which was never part of the plan in my head/vision (though I always intended to use fabric from my mom’s clothes).  The tree just seemed to want these colorful leaves is all I can say. 🙂  It seemed like the tree wanted to show some joy along with strength.  The quote had to be printed, cut out, and pasted on because it is in my mom’s handwriting from a card she had written for my kids with advice for the next generation.  And the 2 pink plants by the base of the sign and tree are not yet glued on… still debating whether to keep them or not!  Though I look at this and think it appears childish, I have decided to embrace the child within that wants to come out and play and that actually makes me start to feel a little younger and reclaim some of the innocence lost along the way.

This has become the mother’s day “card” (tribute) for my mom this year.  Mother’s day has become very bittersweet since her death.   I’m sure anyone else who has lost a loving mother understands!  And while missing my mom makes me sad, every time I look at this “card”, the memory of her love and the bright blue, pink, and yellow make me happy .  🙂

In addition, I made a mother’s day gift to go with it.  I always try to do something even though I can’t actually physically give her a gift anymore.  This year, I made a homemade fabric journal necklace.  I’ve put a few pictures of her and I inside it (kind of like a mini scrapbook instead of a locket) and will write some thoughts inside as well.  And since I can’t give it to her, I’ve decided to do a mother’s day give-away in her honor/memory.  I will give away one homemade fabric love note necklace (similar to the one I made for my mom) to someone else this mother’s day.  🙂  You can enter on the new facebook site (https://www.facebook.com/lovingroad), which is the evolution of Pasiton, created in my mom’s memory.  I will do the drawing on mother’s day to select a winner and announce the winner on mother’s day on facebook (and contact them with a private message for the address to mail it).  I haven’t yet decided which lovelace love note necklace will be the one given away yet so to enter, please follow these 2 steps:

1. Please comment on the  https://www.facebook.com/lovingroad page under the give-away announcement and picture (it says Enter Here) and either tell me which of the lovelaces is your favorite or how you would use a mini-journal similar to the bigger booklace journals shown.

2. Please share the link to enter the give-away with your friends so they have a chance to enter (& win!) as well.  You do not have to “like” the page to enter.  Of course, it’s always appreciated if you do. 🙂

Now, I don’t want to forget or leave out Take 1 on the challenge!  🙂

I love quotes so when I saw this week’s challenge, I knew I’d love the process.  The hardest part would be selecting just one quote (which I obviously just couldn’t do!).  Sunday morning, on my walk up to open the chicken coop, I found this single wing (moth, I think) and one of my chicken’s feathers on the ground (see the strange “butterfly” in the picture).  These chose a quote for me, one that I’ve known for a long time: “If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”

To make the page, I wanted to play with the new Fiskars texture plates my husband gave me so I started with that.  I don’t have a fancy machine so I just used a piece of wood to rub the paper over the texture plate.  Next, I tried to keep a light “fairy touch”, as one of my teachers called it, to color and bring out the texture.  I first tried using gel sticks for this, but I added some acrylic paint as well because the texture wasn’t showing up much.  I ended up with much more subtle colors than I intended, but I’m really trying to trust the process and stuck with it.  This led to the choice of the word “trust” within my peculiar butterfly.  I simply stamped the butterflies and owl.  What owl? The one that didn’t stick around!  I cut the bottom off the page with an owl and the quote because something just didn’t work for me.  This time, when I re-wrote the quote, I did so on different paper that I could move around before adhering to decide what I preferred.  I had drawn the sun prior in the week (only recently working up the courage to try to draw again since childhood!) and her expression seemed to capture how I feel about this particular quote so she was added to the page.

I had used this quote for the closing page of a book I made for my mom for her 60th birthday, having no idea that she would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer later that year and gone from our sight 2 years later.  Hence, this particular quote has become rather difficult for me to accept sometimes.  Obviously, I would have never imagined nor wished that kind of change.  Now, considering this quote and the meaning, I think back on the major changes in my life and realize how many have been quite bitter and how many have been super sweet, and I acknowledge this aspect of life.  Yet, as I continue on life’s journey, I choose to focus on another aspect of this quote, that of growing wings (as butterflies, moths, and dragonflies do).  I read this poem about a dragonfly at my mom’s memorial:

The Story Of the Dragonfly, A Tale Of Life After Death..

Once, in a little pond, in the muddy water under the lily pads, there lived a little water beetle in a community of water beetles. They lived a simple and comfortable life in the pond with few disturbances and interruptions.

Once in a while, sadness would come to the community when one of their fellow beetles would climb the stem of a lily pad and would never be seen again.  They knew when this happened; their friend was dead, gone forever.

Then, one day, one little water beetle felt an irresistible urge to climb up that stem. However, she was determined that she would not leave forever.  She would come back and tell her friends what she had found at the top.

When she reached the top and climbed out of the water onto the surface of the lily pad, she was so tired, and the sun felt so warm, that she decided she must take a nap. As she slept, her body changed and when she woke up, she had turned into a beautiful blue-tailed dragonfly with broad wings and a slender body designed for flying.

So, fly she did! And, as she soared she saw the beauty of a whole new world and a far superior way of life to what she had never known existed.

Then she remembered her beetle friends and how they were thinking by now she was dead. She wanted to go back to tell them, and explain to them that she was now more alive than she had ever been before. Her life had been fulfilled rather than ended.

But, her new body would not go down into the water. She could not get back to tell her friends the good news. Then she understood that their time would come, when they, too, would know what she now knew. So, she raised her wings and flew off into her joyous new life!

I will choose to focus on the flight of the butterfly (and dragonfly) in spite of all the ups and downs and unknowns of this life.

So fly she did!