Even more anatomical art!

We'll get to the anatomical art, but first I want to show you an upcycling collage I made. The oilcloth mural above used to hang in the gathering room of the church where Dear Husband and I now attend. After decades and decades with pride of place after having been donated by a parishioner, it suffered water damage during renovations, not to mention looking dated. On top of that, it depicts Saint George slaying a dragon for Mary, Queen of Scots, an allegory for Catholicism defeating Protestantism. So, yeah, maybe no longer something to have in the living room of a Presbyterian church.

The mural was removed and cut into pieces if congregants wanted to keep a memento. DH wanted the dragon, but someone else had snagged it, so he picked up the queen, which we loaded into the car with some difficulty on a windy Sunday after church. He wanted display her on his office wall, so I found a 3' x 4' frame online and invested in some supplies (black paint, silk roses, flower beads, old jewelry I no longer wear).

Then the person with the knight and dragon decided she didn't have a place for it and gifted it to DH. So I purchased another frame. When both had arrived, my Awesome Parents helped me prep and frame them. I then added the three-dimensional flourishes on the acrylic cover, so as not to damage the original mural.

They are so large that with the decorations, we could only fit one into his car at a time, so I will update this post once the second one makes it to the church and the building staff are able to hang them high on the wall above the couch in DH's office.

 

Now to the anatomical art. I am slowly accumulating a collection from cross-stitch to collages to the piece d'resistance, a quilled paper skull and brain. Over the holidays I saw a social media post about the multi-media artwork of Emma Pannell, who uses upcycled materials in her embroidery and beading. I just loved this turquoise-colored hand with its copper wire and stones, so I treated myself to a print and a frame to match the ones above. Since she works in Great Britain, I had to pay a tariff and cut down the A4 size to fit my American frame, but it adds such a pop of color (especially since I left room on the wall for two other pieces I have been watching on Etsy, and they tend more to a brown palette). Now DH and I will have art in our offices in different parts of the city but in the same frame.

The second new piece was a surprise from friend J.R., who made a pair of sooty yet sparkly lungs out of resin and gifted it to me while we were in Tennessee. It reminded me of the antique medical dictionary a colleague had gifted me back in residency, Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon (1854). That led to a project on the history of Black Lung combined with a lesson on racial and cognitive bias in clinical reasoning that I have presented locally a few times.

While the semi-circular cut outs on either side fittingly made it look like an ashtray when flat, I don't have a lot of horizontal space on which to display it, and I thought I would get to enjoy the piece more if I hung it on the wall. In my stash of frames from the Goodwill store, I found a white, square one that wasn't quite deep enough to encase the lungs. After a moment's hesitation, I decided to cut out the "melanosis" and "pulmonary" pages from the dictionary as a background. Then I mounted the lungs on the glass to create a sort of shadow-box effect.

Besides the fact that I decoupaged the pages 90-degrees off from the original hanger and had to affix a new one on the back, I'm really pleased with how it turned out: old and new, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, in a spot where I will always see it from my desk.

Dazzling holiday lights

When My Awesome Parents told us they were coming for New Year's, I bought us tickets to Dazzling Nights Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden. Dear Husband and I have regularly attended the holiday flower and light show at the Phipps Botanical Garden, but I wanted to do something different. A company comes in to set up forests of lights along the pathways. It was an impressive variety of strings, rings, flowers, rods, arches, Christmas trees, and other shapes. There were natural trees illuminated in neon lights, a fairy forest of dancing pinpoints of lights, and a cathedral of candles and stained-glass windows. Everything was even more magical because of a full moon overhead and snow on the ground, softening the landscape and crunching under foot. I just didn't anticipate that it was going to be 20 freaking degrees Fahrenheit. We made it 2/3 through the park before deciding our fingers were icicles, and we had seen enough. Inside was an exhibit of quilts by Black artists, but nothing in the gift shop enticed us enough to be purchased.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

SPC Women's Retreat: Never

Today I attended my first women's church retreat since I can remember. Sewickley Presbyterian Church has traditionally gone out to beautiful Ligonier, an hour's drive southeast of Pittsburgh, but this year they started alternating with a partial-day retreat on the church campus, and twice as many women were able to participate. I could have stayed home, working on the latest version of my book manuscript, which has been sitting in my email for more than a week. (I know you must be thinking, "I thought you finished the book, what more could there possibly be to do?" Well, after I submitted it  to the Press in March, a copyeditor make suggestions over the summer that I had to deal with, and I promise we're now on the final step, which is checking for errors and compiling an index.) Unfortunately, it meant I missed the local No Kings protests, but I've enjoyed looking through photos of crowds and signs online. Here's the sign that welcomed us.

Welcoming tableaux with encouraging words and lanterns to light our metaphorical paths. 

Despite our suburban setting, the retreat planners opted for a rustic-country-chic style, which just elevated the mood of the basement dining hall. They fed us a cold breakfast and soup for lunch. The theme was "Never," based on Tasha Layton's song "Never" which proclaims "Never forgotten / Never forsaken / Never abandoned."

Pastor Barb chose three Bible passages to illustrate these themes: the story of King David showing kindness to Mephibosheth (2 Samuel 9-13) instead of killing him as the heir of a rival; Jesus' uttering the first line of Psalm 22 as synecdoche for "hope still has the last word"; and the story of Moses' birth (Exodus 2:1-10). This last one was very personal for Pastor Barb, who shared some of the toughest moments in the long journey to adopt two of her children from Haiti, and for two of the women at my table, who had both adopted children from Russia. They talked about the courage it takes to give a child up to another family being the opposite of abandonment.

We played some ice-breaker activities like "That's so me!" and "What's in your purse?"

After lunch, we walked over to the Faith House for "prayer activities that sometimes look like crafts":

• just sit in stillness and rest
• read some psalms and then write one
• pray for your family over a heart-shaped keychain to take home as a reminder
• sit on a comfy sofa and do breath prayer
• put on a backpack full of rocks and meditate on the burdens you're carrying, then remove one of the rocks, write a burden on it, and leave it at the foot of the cross
• take-a-verse-leave-a-verse (see below)
• write a magnetic poem-prayer
• meditate in front of a mirror about replacing negative self-talk with positive affirmations
• decorate a ceramic tile with your "sins" (in marker) and then symbolically "wash them away" with alcohol
• pray for the least and last in the world while looking at photos
• make a Bible bookmark and take one someone make
• pray for someone who has hurt you and then bury those resentments with a heart-shaped seed card that will hopefully grow into flowers
• color part of a "Never" poster while thinking about the women of faith who have impacted you

I left the verse, "Cast all your worries upon God, because God cares for you." ~1 Peter 5:7

I took home, "The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you, he will never leave your nor forsake you. Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged." ~Deuteronomy 31:8

I brought my prayer beads (a craft from graduate school Bible study), seen here with two small devotional books for later: Chris Tiegreen's Moments of Hope: 40 Days of Encouragement for Women (Walk Thru the Bible) and Lysa Terkeurst's Is God Speaking to Me?

It was a good day of fellowship that I hope will bring me closer to my sisters in Christ.

25th High School Reunion

I hadn't attended a high school reunion in a quarter century until now. There was a 10-year event while I was either in Illinois or Germany, and the pandemic put the kibosh on anything in 2020, so when some classmates with whom I am still connected on Facebook started planning an event on a September weekend when I was miraculously free, I decided to pack my high school memory box, my yearbooks, and my graduation dress into my car and drive down from Pittsburgh. Being a pack rat turns out to come in handy for things like anniversaries and reunions. The space was lavishly decorated in red and black (school colors) and silver/gold (anniversary).

"With class, elegance, and sophistication, the Class of 2000 has no limitations!"

The planning committee put together gift bags that included, among other things, a bingo card to get us talking with each other. "Published author" was one of the squares!

Familiar faces in the slide show:

One of my classmates' dessert business catered the event in addition to what the restaurant provided.

Unfortunately, six of our classmates have died in the last 25 years.

 The only two things I regret were having to change in the restaurant bathroom and the fact that there were no name tags. I am even worse with names now than I was 25 years ago, but I recognized some faces, and many people recognized me, so in the end, I'm glad I went.