Ever Tied

Love holds us all really

A binding fiber sure but also

A throughline and OH MAMA

I will never be unknitted from you

Even if I tried (I didn’t)

Even if I wanted (I don’t)

Even if I lost a thread (it can’t happen)

Your skeins made me possible

And  your love made me real

A Valentine

For the delicious truth that we are never the same person twice (and the better for it).

Every texture, every pause, every caught breath…shifts the course of things, and us, with it.

For you, Valentine

For all your ever-wending ways:

For big dreams, true loves, firsts, lasts, and constants –

  Friends of all stripes (and species)

For sidebar revelations and your own best self

         And love, risk, all of it, always.

Dedalian: To loving a little or a little too much

Dedalian Collection

In an attempt to bridge our love of materials and making something new with our love of collage and chance, we found ourselves enmeshed and enacting our own kind of alchemy- fabricating a fantastic (in both the literal/figurative sense of the word) fusion of elements both felt and forged.

Heavenly Helpers

Inspired by what we find ourselves needing most.

Saints preserve us! Or something like that. We’re fairly certain that heavenly help is readily there for everyone, regardless of creed, belief group, background. After all, look up anyone in a Lives of the Saints book and with notable exception, he or she started out ordinary – and then for assorted reasons, most often driven by conviction, faith, or some other ethical engine, opted to change directions, help others, make faith-leaps, take risks, give/love selflessly, and be transformed, and later on…people started to talk about them, remember what happened, and trace miracles and marvels back to the story.

So…we found some of our favorites, and made our own renditions, because in a way, that’s what saints did anyway.

Little Couragies

St. Theresa of Liseux, known to Catholic girls like the Pagliei sisters and many others by her nickname/defacto moniker of “The Little Flower,” was a petite, shy girl in 19th century France whose faith, devotion, and small-scale-but-not-small-beliefwise-fortitude transcended her own expectations and changed…all manner of things.

And so we were inspired, by her and by others, to make these – little reminders, little objects, little indicators of something greater or more complicated than we might know or understand, but that we believe (or are willing to believe) might change things. And they will. And with heart and good faith and good…luck (of a certain stripe).

Shop Waxing Poetic Charms.

Flora with Honey Bee

Flora, the Goddess of Flowers unknowingly has attracted our Honey Bee.

See this masterpiece of pastoral abundance here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primavera_(painting)

Waxing Poetic Heroines: Venus

, beautiful Venus, Roman goddess of Love and Beauty. She shows up everywhere,the best paintings , in the most beautiful poetry, in our favorite myths. She appears in different forms, under different names (the Greeks called her Aphrodite), and in sometimes different costumes, and she’s far from perfect as a character – but what she IS, or IS while and when we believe or tell each other old myths and stories, IS something, someone, utterly enchanting: a human-looking, love-generating, awe-inspiring immortal embodiment of all the things which keep us going forward: LOVE, FERTILITY, VICTORY, TRANSCENDENCE, BEAUTY, REGENERATION (see also SPRINGTIME!!!), PROSPERITY, RENEWAL, WONDER OUT OF NOTHING BUT THE POSSIBILITY OF WONDER, BEAUTY and a particular kind of GRACE.

And so we’d like to say this: LOOK AT BOTTICELLI’s wondrous depiction of her magical ‘birth’ – fully formed, prosperous, beautiful, and floating in on enchanted seafoam in a lovely scalloped shell.

She is both easily accessible and elusive in all her stories. She blesses the rich and poor alike. She helps warriors win just battles, and lends her wondrous, life-affirming aura to all manner of people and situations (so long as they give love back and around those nearby). She forgives slights and helps transform the world for people she formerly feared or felt threatened by. Oh? Yes.

Venus’ son, you see, is the Roman god Cupid, aka Eros. He fell in love with a mortal beauty, Psyche, and she with him—but Venus put some very strict rules on their romance, and Psyche wasn’t allowed to see her husband. She peeked anyway. She broke the rules, and was cast out – but not for long. Venus was willing to be proven wrong, in a way, perhaps her daughter-in-law wasn’t only after her beautiful, immortal son for the chance to become immortal herself, and…after a fair amount of trials (and a lot of help from animals and magic creatures), Psyche proved herself deserving in Venus’ opinion: she had been doing everything out of, and for, and because of, and because she wanted to give back some more…

LOVE.

And so all was forgiven and changed and healed and Eros + Psyche had a beautiful little child which they named PLEASURE, and all of it happened because of LOVE.

Venus is a creature of myth, some might say fiction, but she is also entirely real in so much that she’s the sum of all our best wishes and most poignant heart-ward journeys.

Delighted States of America!

America is a patchwork, a paragon of piecemeal personal narratives and particular details…and a place for everyone (and everyone in his/her place, yes? Yes indeed)… But as for how it all adds up… we were at a loss. Or a little bit of a loss. So we asked you (and you, and you, and you, and our friends, and our families, and our obscure distant but still loved associates elsewhere…) and you answered the question: what makes a state a place, a home? You answered. Bits and scraps, something redolent of home… all the little pieces added up, together and for you and for all of us and… we piece it together, together, and beautifully, and with music, and love, and pieces of poetry. This is how we make sense of the world, and how we make the world, and how, in turn, we make… a nation. A quilt. A chorus. A great love. Let’s do this. Let’s revel. 

NOTA BENE HEROINES: SNOW WHITE

is WAY more than just a pretty girl in a old children’s story. She’s a character, and like any good (or bad) character, she changes every time someone tells the story. And how awesome is that? To rewrite or retell something familiar, to either wake up because you loved your mom so much when she was alive and you miss her terribly and somehow that love manifests itself outside of time and intervenes in a very dangerous sleepy state to save you – or, that being kissed was so nice while you were asleep/faux-dead that you HAD to wake up and see who was doing it and in doing so, saved yourself, or….all kinds of other endings.