Tag Archives: vintage

Freedom

03 Tuesday Jul 2012

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As a 17-year-old starting college, freedom meant one thing to me: escape. New experiences, different faces, starting over in a world that didn’t know me and couldn’t make my choices for me. That thirst for independence is a natural part of growing up, and I certainly had quite a bit of growing up to do. But I think I was missing an integral notion of what it means to be free.

It took me a long while to realize that freedom is not synonymous with control. The freedom to live, speak, and worship as I desire are priceless to me, and I do not take them for granted. However, personal freedom also means being willing to take chances: in work, in play, and most of all in relationships and letting people in close. Without the courage to love and ask to be loved by others, freedom looks an awful lot like just being alone.

For me, real freedom also means crawling out from under the stifling hood of perfectionism and expectation. Freedom does not guarantee pleasure, but it does ensure that I move forward and learn. To be free is to open myself up to mistakes with the conviction that I am also opening myself up to growth, to finding new ways and new passions.

I could cook only the recipes I already know; paint only pictures for which I have practiced the brushstrokes; stick with the books already on the shelf and the names already in my address book. I would certainly have increased measures of comfort and security in doing so, and that sort of smug satisfaction that comes from doing it “right.” But freedom? No, I would not have that.

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The piece of art above is titled Be Free, and it’s a multimedia collage using vintage papers, vellum, and a hand-made felted landscape. I have felted before, but never to achieve a flat, representational design. I love how it turned out, in part because I took a step into my personal artistic unknown to create it.

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Praying you find the freedom today to imagine and hope, to take risks and build in new directions.

Build

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

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I got the very best birthday present this year: a passel of rusty old metal, courtesy of some dear friends and their 140-year old farm. There are nails and screws, washers and springs, hinges and handles, locks and keys: all lovingly hand-picked, colored by history in shades of deep orange and warm red. Who wants a pristine, shiny package when you can have a gift pulled from the clutches of spiders in the back of the barn? To some, all that rust may just seem like tetanus waiting to happen, but to me it is the sweetest kind of treasure.

Maybe I appreciate it all the more because I’m feeling a little bit vintage myself these days. I’m certainly showing some wear (I like to call it “patina”), but I still work hard and have some pretty good stories to tell. If there is beauty in being authentic, then all my creases and chipped edges make me positively radiant. :)

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It was that theme — the value in building a life with layers of wear and age — that inspired my most recent collage. I used my favorite hinge from my collection of vintage bits (yes, I have a favorite hinge) because its dusky blue reminded me of the sky in an old oil painting. I also picked out a few gears and some rusted nails to bundle in twine, then set to work assembling a multimedia landscape.

The background is a 5″x7″ watercolor illustration board painted to look like a piece of worn metal. This was the perfect opportunity to use Sophisticated Finishes, a liquid copper finish that can be custom-antiqued with a selection of blue and green patina solutions. It is little more than chemistry in action, but it gives me a thrill every time I watch a metallic surface fade and oxidize before my eyes.

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The paper pieces are from a 1952 travel magazine highlighting the charms of the midwestern United States, a great fit considering most of the vintage pieces I used hail from Kansas. I snipped and sanded a little balsa wood house, wallpapered with a page from an old hymnal, and set it against a fence made of sculpture wire. The final addition was a grove of stamped, embossed trees.

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There is such an obsession in our culture today with looking younger than we really are, smoothing out our wrinkles and blemishes until our faces have all the interest of a buffed wax floor. I am not sure how having the forehead of a 16-year-old became so important, but I think a society that values appearance above character has just hammered the perfect, shiny nails into its own coffin.

I value wisdom and experience, and that stuff usually comes with the price of aging. I would rather show and feel those years and know I really learned from them, than stay the unwrinkled, unknowing me I was a decade ago. I suppose that line of thinking also makes me sound increasingly vintage, but I don’t mind, because I’ve figured out how much promise that holds.

Hope Collection

30 Monday Jan 2012

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I am a collector by nature. Not of anything obvious or mainstream, like stamps or rare coins, but of the things that inspire me: vintage valentines, old books and photographs, tiny resin flowers, and Japanese glass beads. I have a pair of antique opera glasses that thrill me with their aged mother-of-pearl, enamel, and brass, and the single-word inscription Paris. I have tucked away fall leaves that look as if each one was hand-watercolored, bits of wool and velvet ribbon, a handful of board game pieces smoothed and worn by the fingers of children who could easily have been my grandparents. None of them bear much monetary worth, but measured in sentiment and beauty, they have great value to me.

When I set out to make a birthday gift earlier this month for one of my dearest friends, I thought a lot about the items I have collected and what they mean to me. She is also a lover of history who understands how a connection to the past can give you steadier feet in the present. We have both had our share of challenges recently and discovered that there is great faith and hope to be found in the midst of pain and loss. I set out to build her a collection of items that symbolize hope to me, then give them words — a sort of visual and spiritual scavenger hunt.

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The container itself is a printer’s tray, sometimes also called a specimen tray, depending on whether you lean more toward bibliophile or biologist. I filled it with the kinds of things I think someone might make and collect over a lifetime, a very personalized sort of natural history museum: rocks and feathers, shells and dried flowers, bits of embroidery and handmade paper snowflakes.

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Underneath each smaller box is a Bible verse that links directly to the item above, so that each little compartment hides a secret message of encouragement. My hope is that after reading the verses a few times, just seeing the pieces of the collection will be enough to call to mind the words behind them.

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The most challenging task in the whole project was covering each of the 21 inner boxes, ranging in size from 1-1/2″ squares to 3″x6″ rectangles, with a half dozen layers of tissue paper, cardstock, and sealant. The vintage text and rich green, purple, and mustard are much more visually appealing to me than its original gray craft paper covering. It was detailed, time-consuming work, but it gave me plenty of time to plan the contents and verses. As is often the way with this kind of artwork, I was definitely blessed and encouraged myself by the process of creating it.

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Clockwork Cthulhu

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

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I made all the holiday gifts I gave to grown-ups this year, and these three polymer clay miniatures were without doubt the most fun to construct. I made one each for my husband and two close friends, all of whom like Steampunk and the work of H.P. Lovecraft. For those of you not on that particular bandwagon, be warned: you may feel yourself growing geekier as I explain. ;)

Lovecraft was a prolific horror fiction author from New England who lived in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Cthulhu is one of his monsters of the deep, a sort of winged cephalopod with a few human cousins somewhere on the family tree. Cthulhu is one of Lovecraft’s most beloved creations and has gone on to inspire a whole range of modern fiction and film. (I personally attribute his popularity to those charming tentacles.) Of course little did Lovecraft know, he wasn’t even scratching the surface — have you seen the stuff that actually lives in the deepest parts of the ocean? (Don’t get me started on that episode of Blue Planet with the anglerfish…)

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On to our second geeky definition: Steampunk is a science fiction sub-genre based on a sort of anachronistic alternate future, modeled after Victorian England’s technology. Just picture our society as a Victorian might have imagined it — steam-powered, clockwork-driven, and founded on the principle that everyone wears hats and gloves at all times. Jules Verne wearing goggles + metal gears + computers = Steampunk.

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I love working with vintage materials and I appreciate a vivid literary imagination, so these projects were a good fit. I decided to blend the two genres and create captured, clockwork Cthulhus, so I emptied out my jar of pocketwatch parts, grabbed a pack of glow-in-the-dark Fimo, and got to work. I really enjoyed crafting the tiny clay miniatures, brushing them with mica powder, and posing them in their new habitats.

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I am such a sucker for anything luminescent, and I spent as much time sitting in the dark watching these glow as I did actually sculpting. :) The smallest Chtulhu is about an inch high and spends his life inside a pocketwatch case. The other two measure about 2″ and 4″ across and make their homes in vintage mainspring advertising tins. I used tiny old screws, cogs, and rivets to add a little extra Steampunk flair.

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While studio time is often both cathartic and challenging for me, the hours spent on these were just plain old, inventive fun. They were also a great exercise in using what I already had on hand to create what I had in mind. I vow not to stop here, and there are definitely more tiny clay creatures in my future. I’m thinking a tiny jar of miniature, glow-in-the-dark, mechanical fireflies…

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If you’re interested in making your own Steampunk creations, you might check out Steampunkery: Polymer Clay and Mixed Media Projects by Christi Friesen. Her design sense is a bit different from mine but wholly inspiring nonetheless, and she has a fantastic sense of humor. It’s a great starting point, especially if you’re new to the world of polymer clay. Happy Steampunking!

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Housewarming Tree

30 Wednesday Nov 2011

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I made this paper tree full of birds as a housewarming gift for dear friends who just moved in-state. Something appealed to me about using vintage maps to welcome them, and the colors seemed a good fit for their charming 1920s home. I am often drawn to using books and text in my artwork, a natural tendency I suppose for an English major and bibliophile. I’m among the few shoppers for used books who entirely bypass consideration of subject matter in favor of pretty fonts. :)

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Making the little birds required some patience, but I don’t mind that at all. Whether in the kitchen or the studio, I find great therapeutic value in hours spent on methodical, detailed tasks. It gives me the opportunity to put all my energy into accomplishing one single thing well. That kind of focus is an increasingly rare occurrence among my other daily responsibilities, and I find I need the balance provided by those deliberate, harnessed moments; they result in a beauty of their own, no matter what I create.

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One of the housewarming tree’s layers of texture comes from cashmere wool the color of linen (also the color of book pages). I finished the tree off with a curled paper nest at its base. It probably says more about me than I care to admit that the little paper nest didn’t get added until three weeks after I originally gave the tree away. I planned to put it on there all along, but my life seldom divides neatly into “before” and “after,” so why should my artwork? I kind of like the potential in that.

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