The Making of River Bend Lady

This is how our neighborhood must have looked before the tree cutting began..this is the island across from our neighborhood..unbuildable because it floods...lovely trees everywhere

This is a shot of our neighborhood denuded of its trees...

well finally i can blog her and show her off.....shes part of an invitational exhibit at the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center in Tillamook Oregon curated by Larkin Van Horn. The show is called "Its Good to be Green" and the only requirements where that we could NOT send a frog quilt in and it had to be 18x45" long...

I stewed over this one a long time mostly because of the size of the quilt. I wanted to do something about the fabulous trees in our neighborhood...they are soo awesome and people buy lots here just to live among them and then they CHOP them down when they are in thier way...which just kills me...NO one is allowed to prune ours let alone chop them down...all 58 in the front yard and the sycamores along the river...WHY would you buy a heavily wooded lot covered with old growth trees to chop them down so you can have a lawn? I just dont understand...

ANYWAY this is my interpretation of one of the gorgeous sycamores that line the river bank here....a lovely red headed lady with green velvet skirts....and beads and vines curling around her hair and her waist and nestled in her scarf....she is of course bare footed! and tossing her skirts in the wind...

i dyed the silk velvet the cheese cloth and the trees across the river...and the water...and her hair...i guess it would be easier to say that the only thing i didnt dye was the sky and the fore ground...her face is drawn with gel pens, pigma pens, prismacolor pencils...my usual stuff...the hair is hand dyed bias cut silk ruched and couched down ..same thing with the skirt...