Right around the corner

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November.

All the rest have thirty-one,

except for February which hath twenty-eight,

except in Leap Year when it hath twenty-nine....

 

Yeah, that little ditty devolves rapidly after the 3rd line. You can find many versions of the last two lines should you tiptoe through the interwebs.

All this is a lame intro to the fact that I put thread to fabric today to get Mom's November banner underway.

I've been collecting ideas for a couple of weeks now and knew that the hand turkey would represent Thanksgiving Day (there's also Veterans' Day in the mix, along with Origami Day, and a nod to Thoreau: "This is the month of nuts and nutty thoughts.")

Several days ago there was kitchen trouble at my Mom's facility. My routine is to keep her occupied from 2pm to dinner time at 5-ish. When the dinner plates arrive in the MC's kitchenette, I tell her, "Now that your dinner is here, it's time for me to go home and make dinner for my family." Sometimes I'll add a little joke: "I fed them once when they were born, and now they expect it every day" which she always smiles at.

The other day, as mentioned, there was some issue and dinner was getting increasingly late. After waiting 10 minutes, I found a piece of paper (one of the residents spends her pre-dinner time coloring, so there's always blank sides of her coloring sheets to find) and brought it to Mom's table. With the colored pencils I keep in my visiting bag, I traced her hand, drew in the eye, beak, comb, and shaft lines, then we took turns coloring in the feathers. While I did a quick fill, Mom instead made very deliberately-spaced lines in her feathers. When the lines got wonky, she started riffing on the fact that they were drunk. I burst out laughing in surprise!

The wing was created and finished while we continued to wait, then dinner appeared when we were halfway through filling in the body (the head and neck were her creation, with more drunk lines to comment upon). I tucked our artwork carefully into my bag--I knew I'd be using it for her banner!

It's been interesting doing thread work this time (you can see the feathers being created under the needle). I'd considered scanning then reducing the image of her hand, but the resultant drawing up of fabric (despite being starched to near-cardboard firmness) managed to reduce her hand print by 10-15% easily.

When I left the studio at 6 this evening, I'd finished the two hands and had a good start on the Veteran and origami FPP blocks. Lots of close, eye-tiring work today, and a darn good start on getting this banner made and on Mom's walker in a timely fashion.