new pieces

It's been a while since I posted. My husband and I are moving to Overland Park Ks to a senior living facility. We will be near our daughter and our twin granddaughters. Ron has developed Parkinsinism . There is no family in St. Louis to help, so we are moving closer to our daughter.
This fall we celebrated 50 years of marriage. I made a piece with our high school pictures and the high school pictures of our children and our four grandchildren. The gold thread represents the fifty years. I'm going to try to post more. Since we are moving and most of the work of sorting out stuff has fallen to me, I haven't had much time or energy to devote to my fiber art. I also made a piece celebrating my maternal genealogy.

My maternal ancestors came from Ireland, especially County Mayo. This piece has three sections: Ireland, Macclesfield, England, and Holyoke, Massachusetts.  I made an Irish cottage, and an embroidered family leaving Ireland. My great great grandfather was a tailor. I have his shears, and I used a photo of the shears in all three panels. My son spent his honeymoon in Ireland, and I used two of his pictures of ruins, and another of an altar screen. Family legend holds that Michael earned money making uniforms for members in the workhouse. The Welch family left Ireland in 1849 during the potato famine. There is a  picture of Michael in the upper right hand corner, and an appliqued piece of the workhouse.

The family stayed in England for ten years, where two of the daughters, including my great grandmother, worked in the mills. I found a picture of girls working in a mill that I placed on a dyed piece of crochet. I also appliqued a picture of a mill.  The family lived on Derby street which I pictured on the piece, I also mounted picture of my great grandparents, Mary Welch and Thomas Doyle, and included their marriage registry and St Albans, the church where they were married.

The last panel shows their life in America. They traveled on the Tarifa and settled on Holyoke. My grandmother was born in Macclesfield, but she always said she was Irish. There are some pictures of my grandparents, Maggie and John Eagan. They had a general store, which I pictured. I mounted a scrap of fabric and what was left of her silk pincushion. I cut a piece from an embroidery. I also show my mother, pictured with Michael Welch, in her nightie, and at Nantaskett Beach, where her family owned hotels, until the went broke in the late 1920's.I used a book by Maggie Grey, Long Diaries Tall Tales for inspiration.

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