Red Thread Studio

Hidden Things

Look, it's a midweek post! I like that.
The always-wonderful V&A Museum will host a quilt exhibition next year, covering 300 years of quilting in England. Curator Sue Prichard has started Hidden Histories, Untold Stories, a blog to chronicle preparations for the exhibition, and the introductory post promises good things to come and a unique look behind the scenes of museum work:

"This exhibition aims to showcase the skill and creativity involved in making highly complex and decorative quilts and bedcovers from 1700-2010 - we will also reveal some of the extraordinary stories behind some of the most superb examples.  Most importantly this exhibition is about the hand and the heart, the sheer emotional response to objects which are so much part of all of our history, we simply need an opportunity to rediscover them."

I like the reference to untold stories and hidden things; I like secret pockets and furniture with hidden drawers and mysterious locks and false backs. There was an exhibition some time ago about the practice of hiding clothes in walls of buildings; I don't remember what the logic (or illogic) was behind the practice, but -- how interesting.

And here's another morsel - the NY Times has a great story today on their Frugal Traveler blog on the flea markets of Paris. In the end, the author bought a vintage textile. Good choice. As I've said before, I'm much more Paris flea market than clutter-free organization. I like the treasure hunt for those hidden things.

There's a great country song that Kelly Willis recorded years ago -- I don't know who wrote it, but here are the lyrics:

I don't need a man to flatter me with praises
I don't need to wear big diamond rings
All I ever need is an honest guy to hold me
Someone who can show me hidden things

Now all across this world I have been a constant traveler
I have sat with presidents and kings
I have sat on stairs with men who have delivered
And I have come to know some hidden things

I don't need to live in a mansion on a hillside
And watch the colored birds as they sing
All I ever want is an honest eye that sparkles
That surely will reveal some hidden things

So if you find someone who says he loves you truly
Make sure that you take a look within
For a handsome face can fade and passion soon grows colder
And all that will remain are hidden things

photo of hidden courtyard by AnnieInBeziers. Some rights reserved.

SDA Conference: Speaker Highlights

Well, so much for posting updates from the road. Now I'm sitting in the airport, homeward bound.

This was my first Surface Design Association conference, though I've been a member for many years. It's been both helpful and challenging, giving me information, exposing me to some wonderful art (including, in addition to all the amazing textile work, a fantastic photography show at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) and connecting me to people whose names I've known for years but never met until now. It's also pushed me up against all my own internal issues about art and craft and textiles, where I fit in, the level of work and commitment that I've had or have not had, and where I'm going from here. Some highlights.

• Harmony Susalla was the opening keynote speaker, and she gave a fluent and entertaining talk about her own history as a textile designer and her path of creating the first viable all-organic print fabric company. I didn't know that Harmony had designed a fabric that is to this day the best-selling Wal-Mart bedding line. If the crowd of people who sought her out to talk more with her was an indication, organic cotton has a bright future yet -- and it couldn't have a more sincere and shining spokesperson.
• Gerhardt Knodel gave a rollicking, practiced speech on identifying your own neighborhood of concepts, motivations and connections through a treehouse metaphor. I'll write more on this. Opinions were divided on this talk, but I liked it. As I was looking online for more information about him for you, I came across Worn Through, a blog/journal that looks well worth exploring if you're interested in a scholarly approach to apparel and dress (probably due its own post in the near future). It's published and edited by Monika Sklar. 
• Victoria K. Rivers gave an awesome overview of her life (so far) as a textilian, a word I wish I'd invented. She's a global textile explorer of the first order, an artist, a professor, and a warm, generous spirit. While her accomplishments are dazzling, she's not even a little bit intimidating. I've written a few times about Victoria's work with mirrors, metal and beads and her book The Shining Cloth, and it was really a delight to finally hear her speak and get to talk with her for a moment. I'm always struggling with the current pressure to clear all clutter, when what I really want is an environment rich and dense with beautiful, satisfying and meaningful objects, so I liked that Victoria declared that it's okay to be accumulative; you don't have to live in a space of Zen emptiness.
• Jane Dunnewold's talk was inspiring in every way. She said: Stop taking workshops and get to work; keep working through times when inspiration seems out of reach; and take the time to do things well. Art or craft? Don't worry about it; call yourself a mixed-media artist and let the details of that be somebody else's problem to figure out -- just do your work. She wove beautiful poems through her talk, showed a visual feast of her work and process, and was so accessible yet clearly setting a high standard. I bought her book Finding Your Own Visual Language and I'll report on my experience with the exercises in the book. She also has a DVD on edging and finishing for textile pieces that's on my wish list. After meeting her it's even more clear why she's one of the most sought-after teacher/speaker/authors in the textile art world.

There you have a few speaker highlights. I'll talk more about the people, the textile art and some of the things that the conference stirred up for me later this week. Tomorrow my new job starts, so onward we go.

Another Use for Tulle: The Work of Ernesto Neto

Oh, how I love a good arty slideshow (much better than an online video for me, for some reason), especially when it details a truly original and wonderful art installation called Anthropodino that involves sewing, spices, stretch tulle, hand embroidery, lots of masculine/feminine dualities and a wild-haired Brazilian artist. The artist is Ernesto Neto and Ken Johnson wrote the review for the New York Times, with the juicy title of "Into the Embrace of a Great Spicy, Gauzy Mother." There are more details on the construction from "Hey, Drill This! Park Avenue Armory Goes Sci-Fi," by Randy Kennedy, whose text accompanies the slideshow.

Describing the piece as a "biomorphic sculpture," Kennedy says, "Made of hundreds of yards of stretched Lycra tulle, it looks something like a superfine spider web, laden with egg sacks, that has drifted down onto the skeleton of a forgotten species of dinosaur shaped like a cephalopod." Yet within this massive construction are yards and yards of hand-embroidered edging and fabric sacs full of spices acting as natural dye agents, letting rich reds and yellows and ochres seep into the tulle. And then there are bones, perhaps in the spirit of this Mineral Year. One young assistant, stitching underneath layers of tulle, said she felt like a silkworm. (the photo here is the martin margules family collection installation at the 49 biennale di venezia. photo: eduardo ortega, found at designboom.com)

Bloomberg also has an fascinating article on the installation, and you can see more pictures of Neto's work here. Neto has also collaborated with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

There's a whole school, it seems, of other-worldly Brazilian art constructions; when I worked at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, many years ago, we hosted an installation by Tunga, also from Rio de Janeiro, who worked with human hair (preferably on the heads of twins, and braided together) and lizards and copper wire. Tunga, known for brilliance in the global contemporary art world, and his assistants were as gentle and kind as could be; they were attitude-free, enjoying themselves as only Brazilians can, and very sweet to me, sending me postcards long after their stay in Chicago.

When I had the chance to visit Rio, these strange creations made sense. There are more than three dimensions in Brazil, and it's magical and dangerous and inexplicable and generous there. And very big, just as the works that these artists/shamans conjure.

I leave for Kansas City tomorrow for the Surface Design Association conference; look for blog posts.

A Weaver and a Gardener

Aimee Fitpatrick Martin is the author of "At Home with Jack Lenor Larsen," a story in the Southampton Press about LongHouse Reserve, the sanctuary Larsen founded "to exemplify living with art in all forms." Larsen is one of the best-known and most revered textile designers and craft advocates of the 20th century, now in his eighties and continuing to influence the 21st century. From the LongHouse site:

Through its arboretum, sculpture gardens, and educational programs, LongHouse brings together art and nature, aesthetics and spirit, with a strong conviction that the arts are central to living wholly and creatively. Dedicated to quality and integrity, LongHouse programs encourage a broad concept of learning. The art focus at LongHouse is ethnographic and handcrafts -- both areas of collecting with aspects for every purse. Some of these functions, at least on occasion; most merely lift the heart and expand the imagination.

Martin's article describes the residence at LongHouse and many of the artifacts, textiles and furnishings that Larsen selected. It's a fascinating look into the workings of a brilliant designer's process of creating a vision in the material world, in partnership with nature and in celebration of the handmade.

Larsen, with an astonishing list of international accomplishments and awards, says, “I am a weaver and a gardener. Both are slow and require much patience.” This struck me as remarkable; we're all trying to inflate our resumes and our titles, and he's opted for the most reductive description possible. Of course, that's easier when the world has already recognized that you matter, but it's so damn refreshing.

I was also taken by the article's opening quote, from Larsen's memoir: “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t seeking identity through a sense of place.” In that sentence I feel like he articulated something I've been trying to do for 50 years and have never expressed so succintly -- seeking identity through a sense of place. It explains a lot. I need to ponder that for a while.

I went looking for an image of a Larsen textile to share and, as is the Way of the Web, came across another intriguing site. Craft in America is a nonprofit with a mission "to document and advance original handcrafted work through programs in all media, accessible to all. We are dedicated to the exploration, preservation and celebration of craft, the work of the hand, and their impact on our nation’s cultural heritage." Check it out -- there are about 300 pages of content at the site. Here is their page on Larsen.

And here is a living archive of Jack Lenor Larsen fabrics at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts. From the archive:

Larsen Design Studio
Conquistador, 1966
Collection: Andean
Materials: Cotton
Classification: Surface Ornamentation- Dyed

99.1.188

Conquistador, introduced as part of the 1967 Andean Collection, was particularly successful and soon became one of the signature cloths of the company. In a note in the company archive Larsen writes that “Conquistador is my concept of how an Inca might handle a baroque motif. That is, flatly and without the robust movement typical in Europe. More like the stone walls of Peru.” For some of the colorways the cloth was dyed twice for a contrapuntal vibration of close value colors such as bronze and amethyst, or amber and brown to suggest a tortoise shell. The Spanish Colonial motif was scaled to fit upholstery cushioning and the total impact is one of great antiquitiy.



In addition to the initial four colorways (wild honey, tortoise, crimson and bronzed amethyst) Topaz, Blue Blood and Pigeon Blood were added at a later date. In 1977 Wild Honey was discontinued, but Tortoise and Pigeon Blood remained in production until 1985 when the company ceased batik production.
(Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Larsen archive)

Seductive Water Spirit

Tomorrow's plan includes a visit to this exhibition of images of Mami Wata, an African water spirit, at the National Museum of African Art.   The show got an amazing review in today's New York Times, complete with excellent slide show. Mami Wata is a fierce spirit, "at once beautiful, protective, seductive, and dangerous . . .She is at once a nurturing mother; sexy mama; provider of riches; healer of physical and spiritual ills; and embodiment of dangers and desires, risks and challenges, dreams and aspirations, fears and forebodings." 

Here is some of what Times reviewer Holland Cotters says about this show: '

It’s as rousing as a drum roll, as piquant as a samba, as sexy as Césaria Évora’s voice. It’s about glitter and tears, bawdy jokes and baskets of flowers, miracles and mysteries, money in hand and affairs of the heart. It’s about standing at the edge of the sea at dawn and watching a world re-born. In that world no one walks; everyone dances and swims; everyone, that is, who has taken the plunge into Mami Wata’s realm.

As life seems to get ever more strange, I think a goddess like this is just what I need. This painting of Mami Wata is by Moyo Ogundipe, 1999; the photo is from the Fowler Art Museum at UCLA:

I also came across what I think is a new Web site of legendary textile artist Yoshiko Wada, and her latest project is called Slow Fiber Studio (click on Projects). She is also speaking and doing workshops at amazing conferences on Slow Fiber. I've sent her a link to my 10 Qualities of Slow Cloth. It's obviously a concept that means something to people. I've been writing about and talking about the Slow Cloth concept for two years now, and I hope I wasn't too much ahead of the time because I'd really like to help this movement and this wonderfully creative community progress in a meaningful way. I guess it's time to get to work on that book proposal when I get home. 

Thank you for kind comments on my last post. It's definitely been a pretty challenging time. Nothing feels any more certain, but I'm feeling slightly less raw. Slightly. As some readers know, I'm a pretty good, if amateur, astrologer, so I like to follow a few exceptional starwatchers, here and here and here. They seem to agree that things are pretty intense right now. So let's all keep breathing, keep stitching, keep doing whatever keeps you sane. Right now, that's going to be another glass of wine, an hour of Friday Night Lights (Tim Riggins, my television boyfriend!), and dreams of water spirits. 

Feeling the Felt

As I visit the Smithsonian museums, I'm wishing I could get to the coolest of them all, the 

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. I've mentioned the Fashioning Felt exhibition; definitely go and visit the exhibition Web site and the Museum blog.

Artist Janice Arnold made and installed a yurt at the exhibition. From the Museum blog:   

The traditional yurt is a trellis-frame tent covered with thick, humble felts made from raw sheep’s wool. The largest, most elaborately decorated tent is the place of celebration, songs and epic poems. Arnold’s design is a fantasia on the yurt form, which is still the preferred environment for events of spiritual significance, even as nomadic peoples become more urbanized. 

Arnold will create a total environment from her luxurious handmade felts, which combine Merino wool with silk and metallic fibers and sheer fabrics. Her technique allows for the creation of richly textured areas in combination with gossamer sheer ones. The wall panels will use that sheerness to maintain the light-filled feeling of the Conservatory, while the leaded glass pattern of the ceiling inspired a mosaic of sheer and opaque areas. The window seat will be covered with a thick, dense, hand-beveled felt, to enable visitors to experience felt’s tactility and contemplate both its history and versatility. 

The fabric panels composing the walls and ceiling are so large that they have to be felted outdoors at Arnold’s studio in Centralia, Washington. Nomads felt in the spring and fall, but Arnold’s team has been working through the winter to complete the installation. Unseasonably cold temperatures coupled with record snowfall have made it challenging work indeed. But the Palace Yurt, both traditionally and in this contemporary interpretation, is the place to gather for celebration when the felting is done.

This sounds amazing, doesn't it? The sketches and samples from Arnold's sketchbook, at the yurt link above, are -- my favorite word -- fascinating, and very beautiful. Here's one:

 

sketch by Janice Arnold, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

I found a photograph taken inside the finished yurt here, on a lovely writing and poetry blog by Patricia Markert. 

Thinking about the yurt, I couldn't help but think about the stories in the news last week of tent cities around the country, growing alarmingly fast. Nomads living in fabric houses aren't new to the world, but we've lost the skills to make and use these beautiful, safe and portable homes. It takes skill to fabricate them, imagination to beautify them, and a highly developed sense of community and mobility, I'm sure, to survive in them. 

I like the roundness of the yurt; like belly dance, it's all about powerful feminine shapes, where most of our housing and much of our movement in the West is angles and planes. 

Here's another photograph from the exhibition, with more curvaceousness. As I've mentioned before, I haven't succumbed to the felt craze, but as I see these images I think I could. I like it best when color is added, I admit, since one of felt's most appealing qualities is the ability to hold saturated, gorgeous color. 

Bodhisattva, Would You Take Me By The Hand

Lots of walking today. My favorite way to explore a city is on foot; there's really no substitute. I've walked miles across London, through the vertical mazes of Hong Kong, and as a resident in the streets of New York and Chicago and San Francisco. Why be in a dank, crowded subway when you can see the city? 

Here in Washington, I've usually been here for trade shows and not as a tourist; I've often been to the National Gallery but not done the full-on walking thing, and now I have the chance. My suite is only a little more than a mile from the White House, but once you're down in the museum zone, you're clocking some miles. 

I think it's worth noting that our highest halls of government and power are surrounded by art, lots of art, and culture. These museums are open 364 days a year, and you just walk in; no charge, they belong to We the People, damn it. And, at least at the Freer, where I went today, there were no guards in the rooms; nothing but -- come on in, make yourself at home, a quick security check of the bag, and enjoy. There didn't even seem to be restrictions on photographs. 

The Freer Gallery is a little jewel of a museum that had an interesting show of paintings by James McNeill Whistler in the context of his interest in Asian art. Charles Freer, who founded the museum, had parallel interests in ancient Asian and contemporary American art, and he felt that in Whistler these two paths converged. I also saw the beautiful Japanese tea bowls repaired with silver and gold; in a year when I've felt so irreparably damaged and broken sometimes, there's surely a message there. I saw galleries of Japanese screens and scrolls, Islamic decorative gorgeousness, Buddhist art, and some beautiful statues of Shiva. Below is a large 12th century Bodhisattva (the best photograph I could get with my limited skills and the museum lighting). 

Can't we make a law that our political leaders have to just sit with this statue once in a while, and contemplate compassion? It's right down the street from their offices. I know, church and state and all that, but it might do some good.

Now, here's what I especially want to share with you. The Freer Gallery has some fantastic interactive exhibitions online. One in particular is called Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey, and the opening splash, as well as some of the robes, has lots of those beautiful wish-fulfilling cintamani dots. 

On the way home I walked by the Obamas' house, on the north side, and it made me very happy to know we have a really good, not perfect but very, very good, honest man and a totally awesome woman running things inside and trying to fix this country's damage. See? It's like a little party outside all the time.

Gold in the Broken Places

I love it when my seemingly random interests converge. I was indulging myself this morning with a quick read of Perfume Posse --  I think I've mentioned my fascination with the strange world of fragrance journalism --  and right there in the current post, tucked between paragraphs on new spring nail polish and eyelash-lengthening drugs, is a little gem about an exhibition on Japanese mended ceramics, at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute. Author March has been writing periodically about wabi-sabi, the perfectly imperfect, and what could be more wabi-sabi than a beloved teacup, cracked after years of use? 

The Japanese elevate everything to art and meditation, and repairing broken ceramics for the reverent tea ceremony is no exception. The ancient vessels in this exhibition are artfully remade with plant resin and powdered gold, in a craft called kintsugi, or golden joinery. From  the Smithsonian research newsletter:

One shallow stoneware tea bowl in the exhibit dates from early-16th century Japan. For centuries, its owners spooned powdered green tea into this bowl, added hot water and swirled the contents with a bamboo whisk before passing the steaming beverage to an honored guest. Someone also dropped the bowl—more than once. Tracks of precious gold snake up its side, highlighting fissures in the ceramic where broken pieces of the bowl have been rejoined.

“It’s been repaired a number of times,” Freer Curator of Ceramics Louise Cort observes of the antique. Artisans who mended the bowl used lacquer—derived from the sap of a plant related to poison ivy—to glue the pieces back in place.

Finely powdered gold was then sprinkled onto the sticky lacquer seams, a purely Japanese technique known as kintsugi, or golden joinery, illuminating the repairs. 

Tea-ceremony aesthetics often focused on the beauty in imperfection, Cort explains. “Even in tea bowls that were not repaired, people came to look for the slight idiosyncrasies, even flaws, in the glaze that made one bowl more interesting than another. The context of tea drinking created a moment of awareness of transiency, of the way in which all objects, like all human beings, exist in a fleeting way and are decaying.”

photo: Freer Gallery of Art

And this is from a review of the exhibition in the Washington Post:

Kintsugi adds a whole new level of aesthetic complexity to the vessels that it mends. A beautiful 14th-century vase from Longquan, China, glazed in translucent celadon with fronds and leaves in delicate relief -- just the kind of porcelain that shogun Yoshimasa is supposed to have sent out for repair -- started life as an example of pristine symmetry. Once it was broken and mended, however, that order was disrupted by bold zigs and zags of gold, along with a golden crescent where a piece of the original rim was replaced. Because the repairs are done with such immaculate craft, and in precious metal, it's hard to read them as a record of violence and damage. Instead, they take on the look of a deliberate incursion of radically free abstraction into an object that was made according to an utterly different system. It's like a tiny moment of free jazz played during a fugue by Bach.

The art of Japanese mended fabric, or boro, is probably familiar to most stitchers interested in global textile traditions, but this ceramic-repair art is new to me.

For most of us, any "pristine symmetry" in our lives is shattered these days. Artful repair is the name of the game. What a beautiful example the Japanese masters give us, once again. There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in.

The birds they sang at break of day

"Start again" I heard them say

Don't dwell on what has passed away

Or what is yet to be

You can add up the parts

But you won't have the sum

Strike up the march; there is no drum

Every heart to love will come

But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

           Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Celebrating India and Shooting Stars

I'm still wrestling with my deadline this week, but my open windows of sites I want to link to are piling up, so here are a few, and forgive me if this post is a little rambling.

• In honor of Slumdog Millionaire's unlikely ascent to the top of the entertainment heap, and the absolute, sincere joy and curiousity on the Indian kids' faces last night at the Oscars, here's Indian By Design, a very beautiful blog full of contemporary art, textiles, architecture and ideas from the  subcontinent.
• A few more for India. I've mentioned this one before - I'm a big fan: Anaka's BrassTacks Madras blog. Anaka has a small but growing clothing company based in India, and her thoughtful blog chronicles her experiences as a sustainablity-minded entrepreneur with a love of beautiful textiles and intelligent fashion.
• Amazing photographs of India here -- the colors are just astonishing. 

Hmmm, I guess I should go see the movie. Next week.

I also want to link to Judy Martin's wonderful post called New Art History. Judy considers the idea that "19th century quiltmakers were artists and knew themselves to be," instead of the modern notion that these women were just scavenging scraps of fabric and making do,  and that any art on their part was almost accidental. Traditional quilting has such a bad name in some textile art circles -- so much so that at least one very popular art quilter/blogger refuses to call her quilts quilts, and my comment on her blog, saying that it was really a shame that this was the state of things, was deleted for not supporting her marketing goals. Seriously. (And as an aside, please always feel free to be honest in your comments here -- I promise you that you won't interfere with my marketing goals.) Maybe, to Judy's point, if we saw old quilts less as mending and more as true creative efforts, we could take some of that quilt stigma away. 

Finally, Harmony (who'll be speaking at the Surface Design Association conference in May) sent a link to the work of fiber artist Carolyn Kallenborn. A professor at the University of Wisconsin, Kallenborn makes very powerful garments and sculptures that are drawn from, she says, moments of transformation. An exhibition of her work opens this week at the Quincy Art Center in Quincy, Illinois. This garment is made from 40 pounds of river rock and taffeta:

It made me think of the idea of 2009 as the mineral year -- the year of what remains when everything has been burned or washed away. I thought of that, too, reading Dijanne's accounts of the Australian fires. 

And tonight's the night to see the green two-headed comet Lulin! I have no idea what that's all about, but here's a song for it:

I saw a shooting star tonight

And I thought of you

You're trying to break into another world

A world I never knew

I always kind of wondered if you ever made it through

I saw a shooting star tonight

And I thought of you. 

I saw a shooting star tonight

And I thought of me

If I was still the same

If I ever became what you wanted me to be

Did I miss the mark, overstep the line

That only you could see . . . .

I saw a shooting star tonight

Slip away.

                   Bob Dylan, Shooting Star

Imagining Art, Collage, Beaches

Everybody seems a little unsure about what happens next; we're filled with hope and inspiration and all the news is about fear and scarcity. It's like we're all on some vision quest, sorting out the dreams from the demons and figuring out where we fit in, and certainly wondering where art and creativity fit in. This article in the New York Times talks about the role of culture in the economic recovery. If we can begin to reverse the economic death spiral, maybe we have the chance for a wonderful renaissance of art and soul and creativity -- not the soulless creation-of-wealth that set us up for the Bernie Madoffs of the world, but an authentic restoration of American imagination and ideas. 

Before we move on from the Times, I love this picture from the Style section -- the designer is Marc Jacobs, the look has handcrafts and multiculturalism written all over. Writer Karin Nelson calls it "collagelike" -- what a great way to dress -- as if you're composing a collage every day (and I especially love the sequins on the skirt):

In other news . . . starting on March 6, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will display Fashioning Felt, an exhibition that will run through September 7. Located in New York, the Cooper-Hewitt is a part of the Smithsonian. "This exhibition will explore the varied new uses of felt—an ancient material, believed to be one of the earliest techniques for making textiles.  . . . The exhibition will begin with historic examples of felts, showcase innovations in handmade felts, and feature contemporary uses of industrial felt in a range of fields, including product design, fashion, architecture, and home furnishings."

I was visiting the browngrotta site and was reminded how much I like artist Sue Lawty's Concealed, Discovered, Revealed blog hosted by the Victoria & Albert Museum site, full of fascinating insights on textile art and artists. Sue also created the World Beach Project, wherein people all over the world make beach art with shells, stones and driftwood, photograph the ephemeral work, and send the pictures to Sue. (You'll find links to the blog and the World Beach Project page through the main link at suelawty.com).

It's 10 degrees here, so it's a good day to dream of beaches. 

Southerndown Beach, by Lesley Lobo, from the World Beach Project

On this new moon/eclipse day, I also want to recommend a wonderful astrologer, Julie Demboski, who does a fantastic single-question reading for only $25. She's incredibly insightful and a brilliant writer. I know just enough astrology to be dangerous, but I love the language of symbols and patterns and connections that a good astrologer weaves together. If you have a burning question and wonder what the stars have to say, ask Julie!