Kiama's Charm - no.3

After staying the night at a  Koa campsite in Crescent City we had a little diversion through the beautiful Redwood National Park, where we visited the Trees of Mystery.
 

Highlights were the Skytrail which took us over the canopy of the giant pine trees and the Museum which housed an enormous private collection of Native American Art with lots of textiles to my delight, which I will post about in another blog.


We then carried on driving south on Highway 101 and stopped at McKinleyville viewpoint, just before exit 721 where I hung charm no. 3 on a fence. Unfortunately I couldn't make any photo's, as there were several people sitting in their parked cars and I didn't want them to see that I was leaving something on the wire fence. However, thanks to Google I could find a street view of the location, so you can have a look by clicking on the link here.

I chose this spot because the Pacific Ocean and the beach looked so inviting and although we didn't have time to walk all the way around the fence to go to the beach we could imagine Kiama running, in knickers and bra, for a quick plunge in the sea. She loved to swim in the sea, whatever the season, whatever the temperature.

Here she is in Winter - January 2011 in the sea in Guernsey

Kiama's Charm - no.2

Driving on Highway 101 along the Pacific Ocean we stopped at a scenic rest stop, between  Cape Blanco and Brookings. We had passed quite a few cyclists along this, for them challenging road, something Kiama would have embraced with all her heart.

 I tied the charm onto the railing of the viewing platform ovelooking the Natural Bridges Cove,

a little reminder of the arches and coves on the coast of Guernsey, where we spend many holidays visiting family.

  John placed a red flower on top in the hope to draw the eye to Kiama's Charm.

Kiama's Charm - Tribute Trail

I always liked the idea of treasure trails and leaving something behind for someone else to find, like Kiama did with the messages she left on parked bicycles. As the idea for this tribute trail in the USA only came to me a few days before we were going on holiday, I didn't have much time to think or prepare anything.
So I got an old Tupperware box an filled it intuitively with 22 pieces each of the following materials:

Empty sewing-thread reels (I never throw them away) they have so much history and so much potential. To me they look like the holder of a scroll and could tell several stories. The colour of thread it carried, the projects it was used for, the identity of the sewer who used it. For me the reel also connect my life to that of my mother and my daughter Kiama, passing on the love of sewing and creating from one generation to the next.

A variation of 22 wooden coloured beads from the time my daughters were small and we liked to make wooden bracelets and necklaces together.

Rectangle coconut bead pieces from a broken bracelet from Kiama which we found in a draw at her student room in Norwich. Her DNA might be still on it!

Red feathers. Red for the Love which connect us all.
My father-in-law used to collect some of the feathers of his chickens and dyed them in all kinds of colours with the intention to use them on his fishing trips on his boat on the English Channel around Guernsey. In tidying up the house, after his death, I took several bags home with me.
Going to America, thinking Native American Indians, I had to take some feathers with me.
To me feathers symbolise wind, flight, a lightness of being, a tickle, soft, spirit, a whisper....Kiama


22 Golden plastic snowflakes cut from a cheap Christmas decoration. Something glittery, sparkling, like her eyes, her laughs.

Some yards of blue cotton yarn - a leftover from a jumper I knitted in 1986 during the breaks of my shifts on a hospital ward in Breda in The Netherlands. The jumper was for a friend, John, who I secretly fancied and who later became my husband and father of my children. This August we will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.

Some yards of red/white string. Broken red - broken love. If I remember well, I got that string from a fellow textile artist and friend, who had also lost a child, suddenly and still so young. With this string I want to show my love and connection to all mothers who have lost a child. We are not alone.

A reel of strong red sewing thread to connect things together.

I also put a roll of double side tape, a set of labels, a role of plastic magic tape and a sharpy pen in the box.

Last but not least I added 22 torn strips of yellow dyed cotton fabric to write on and wrap around the empty thread reels to make it into a scroll. Originally the fabric was from a light blue bedroom curtain from John's flat in 1986, which I dyed yellow in the 90's (it didn't turned green, but it wasn't a clear yellow either). I then made 'new' curtains from it for the girls bedroom in our house in Canterbury.

If you click on the photo it will zoom in so you can read the text I wrote on the strips.

So this is the story of the materials I used to make up Kiama's Charm. Whilst we were cruising through Washington, Oregon and California I was, some of the time sitting in the back, assembling  2 charms everyday for them to be left behind somewhere on the way.

In my next posts I will show the places where we left them.

Kiama's Charm - no 1

I left the first mark/decoration on the 18th of June in Florence - Oregon at  the car park of the supermarket Fred Meyer.

You see the trolley bay? Well there it is.

On the right of the bottom bar of the rail

Kiama loved Florence - Italy. She went there on a school trip and decided to use one of her sketches to create a site specific mural for the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, UK.

It will now be preserved and got a memorial plaque next to it.

Florence in Oregon is of course nothing like the one in Italy, but because of the name association and memories of a budding artist I decided that it would be a OK place for the first mark on my tribute trail to Kiama.

The greatest gift is the present

Hi and welcome to my blog, especially if you came here after finding an unusual arty/crafty thing somewhere in the state of Washington, Oregon, or California.

I am on a road trip there with my husband and my best friend, Mary, who lives in washington, from the 17th until the 28th of June 2013.
I am a textile artist and live in Hertfordshire in the UK and i decided to leave some kind of mark behind whilst cruising through a part of America.
The idea was stimulated by the memories of my daughter Kiama Petit.

Kiama suddenly died last year on the 11th of May, within 10 days of falling ill from what was later discovered to be the 'forgotten' disease of Lemierre Syndrome.
She was an art student  in her final year at Norwich Univetsity College of the Arts, who awarded her with a post-humus first class honours degree for her work.
Kiama was interested in Participatory Art  and liked to get people involved in community enhancing projects.
One of these projects was Paper girl Norwich which involved a group of cyclists distributing 365 free art works given to her by 52 artists for the public of Norwich.
In another project she would write postive messages and secretely stuck them onto parked  bicycles to brighten up the day of the unsuspected owner.

She loved to do random acts of kindness and  enjoyed the element of surprise.

She lived her unexpected short life to the full and treasured every moment inviting and inspiring people to do the same.
We discovered she had written a Bucket List, which was printed out as a poster from which 1000 copies were  given away by the university  during the graduation show.
Feel free to download a copy here.

Kiama was 22 years old when she died, so I decided to leave 22 craft decorations behind during our trip in honour of her spirit.
Kiama never visited the USA but she had all intention to travel different parts of the world so we are also leaving some of her ashes on American soil with the wish that her spirit may touch who ever feels the connection.

If you came to this blog because you found 1 of the 22 decorations I would love it if you would leave me a comment, mentioning the number, written on the scroll and I promise I will get back to you.

Feeling The Blues

I had such good intentions to write at least once a week, but......there you go.
Life wasn't easy in the last 2 months, especially leading up to the first anniversary of Kiama's death. I was feeling the blues, like the  forget-me-nots in our garden.

The mind can be so powerful as I was reliving everything what happend last year. I also had some health issues to deal with, as I was diagnosed with Diabetes 2 and had and still have all kinds of doctors and hospital appointments. Luckily I don't need any medication or insuline, just diet and exercise. Although I do go to a yoga class once a week I should be doing a lot more exercise. Being a housewife without the cleaning work-ethos of my Dutch female ancestors, as I prefer doing my textiles instead, doesn't help the situation.
So I have been doing lots of walks over the last couple months. I got a friend who likes taking me out on walks because of the way we both look at nature - full of wonder and inspiration and with art and creation in mind.
I also get to discover a lot more of our  beautiful local country side.

Bluebell woods near Abbots Langley

Blue sheep near Potten End

I start feeling mentally and emotionally a lot better now. I went onto a meditation retreat for a week, as I really needed to take some time out being on the inside of myself - seeing things from a different, more neutral perspective.



Everything changes, so here I am in a different environment with new experiences and exciting adventures.
John and I flew to Seattle last Thursday to spend 3 weeks with our friend, there. Today we are picking up a motor home to start a road trip to Yosemite.

Is it Dying or Dyeing?

You can't believe how easy it is for a Dutch person, like me, to scramble these words, especially as I am so familiar with the meaning of both of them.
Next year I will be living 20 years in England and I still seem to encounter problems with the language. Although I must admit that writing and speaking in Dutch is more difficult for me now then using English. Not that I believe I will completely loose my native tongue, but as I think, dream, read and talk in English I have to turn a switch in my head when 'going Dutch' again. And I can't always remember where that switch is....
Back to the Double D words of  'Dying and Dyeing', which reminds me of a piece of work I did, called 'Double Dutch - a Strangers cloak', which was for an exhibition in Norwich, but I will talk  about that another time.

So here we are, let's start with  the 'darker' side so we can end with some colour

Dying, Death and Death Café's
This coming Sunday it will be the first Death Café I am facilitating.
Apart from advertising it on the Death Café website I also advertised it in the newsletter of the Rudolf Steiner School, which my daughters attended and where we celebrated Kiama's life, almost a year ago now. I have been overwhelmed with the response of people who want to attend and had to put people on a waiting list, as we only had place for 12 people and now we got 14 coming.
I am already thinking of doing another Death Café here in Hertfordshire next month.
Possibly during the Dying Matters Awareness Week, which runs from 13-19 May, starting just 2 days after the first anniversary of Kiama's death.

Apart from my recent passion to inspire people to talk about life, death and funerals I have been curious and fascinated all my life with the BIG QUESTIONS of Life, Death, Consciousness and Identity. This fascination lead to a conscious decision, in my late teens, to leave religion behind in search for the Truth. I am a great believer in no-believing and have dedicated my life to discovering the knowledge and wisdom inside myself through meditation, contemplation and philosophy. So far it has been the most amazing life-changing and life-affirming 'journey' I could have ever dreamt off. More importantly all of the Big Questions, I had, got resolved which is the main reason why I also can deal with my daughters' death the way I do.

Many people find comfort and strength in their faith, traditions and believes but many also experience being challenged in this when confronted with death and bereavement. For most people questions are still left unanswered, as religion nor science provide the answers.

I just had a look at what Wikepedia had to say about Death and I have copied something to ponder on:

"One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. As a point in time, death would seem to refer to the moment at which life ends. However, determining when death has occurred requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This is problematic because there is little consensus over how to define life.
It is possible to define life in terms of consciousness. When consciousness ceases, a living organism can be said to have died. One of the notable flaws in this approach, however, is that there are many organisms which are alive but probably not conscious.

Another problem is in defining consciousness, which has many different definitions given by modern scientists, psychologists and philosophers. Additionally, many religious traditions, hold that death does not (or may not) entail the end of consciousness."
 
Of course no personal account of life, death, consciousness or any unmeasurable, unscientific personal experiences are taken into any serious consideration to come closer to the answers on the big questions. So we are left finding our own ways, our own answers........but that might me a good thing and maybe this explains the increasing popularity of the Death Café movement!

Now over to some Dyeing.
I am working on a commission of 22 ribbons, each containing text inspired by the 22 cards of the Major Arcana of the Tarot Deck. It's quite a big project, which has been delayed by a year now, so I really have to pick it up and run with it.
As I couldn't and didn't want to use commercially fabricated ribbons, I had bought some nice cotton sateen fabric at Art van Go to dye in all the colours of the rainbow. (3 ribbons in each of the seven colours plus 1 in 'gold' for 'The Fool')
I don't have a dedicated studio for dyeing, so the whole mess has to happen in our kitchen and to be honest I was not looking forward to it. Partly also because it was several years ago that I dyed fabric.
So I kept putting it off until Jenny, one of my textile friends, offered so kindly to come for a day to start me off. Although Jenny's expertise lays in Natural plant dyeing and I am using Procian Dyes, the principle is the same. In fact it is all very straight forward with the help of Ruth Issett's books Colour on Paper and Fabric and Colour on Fabric.

I decided to use the method of  tray dyeing, where you lay the fabric in natural folds in a tray and mix your dye powder with a soda solution and a earlier made up chemical recipe containing urea and Calgon. It creates a more organic textured appearance rather then the plain flat colour which you get with Bucket Dyeing.

Not to waist any dye I gathered lots of snippets of different fabrics, which I pushed in plastic beakers to soak up any leftover dyes, like the turquoise and blue's here, waiting for any future projects.

 Indigo and Violet drying here.

The whole dyeing project took about 5 days, which included a trip to Art Van Go for more urea and missing colours of dye and.... all the other necessary household tasks, like cooking for loved ones.

All the colours posing here.

The only one I am not totally happy with is the 'Antique Gold' in the front. So I have to see what to do about that. The other seven colours have all gone through 2 different dye processes to make them a bit more interesting.

The side view gives a bit more of an idea of how they would look as strips of fabric. The finished ribbons will be 140cm long and about 4 cm wide, but they need to be double, to hide the back of the stitched lettering, plus seam allowance.

So now I need to tear strips of 10 cm, iron them all and try out some lettering.

By the way, I think I finally cracked it, the use of the words Dying and Dyeing,  language is so colourful, I keep you posted.