Thursday, February 13, 2014

Beautiful and meaningful temari by Cindy Coleman

Cindy Coleman lives up the road from me in Hickory, North Carolina. Well, it is a bit of a drive up towards the mountains on I40 towards Asheville.  She has been making temari for a few years now and sharing it with her community. I'm happy that she shares it with me via email. Cindy expresses the challenges of designing temari. Oh, but the results are fantastic and well worth the effort!

From Cindy:

"I am attaching three photos of a temari display I made for the permanent Holocaust collection at Catawba Valley Community College where I teach.  The project took me longer than expected because I had to rework my design several times on a smaller thread ball.  So many prototypes had to be dismantled. I transferred the final design to a 4-inch temari; the final result you see is a 5-inch ball.  It is asymmetrical which provided a bit of problem solving.  So that folks could see both top (Star of David) and bottom (kiku flame), I mounted the temari on to a 3-inch clear-glass candlestick which was glued to a 12”x12” piece of glass.  The temari sits freely on the candlestick.  At the base is rusty ring of barbed wire and a fabric Star of David on which was written 'Jude.' (The fabric star is impaled on one of the barbs.)  My husband found the glass cover online.  All in all, I  think it turned out well. The curator of the collection is Jewish by heritage, so I gave the 4-inch temari to him.

While working on the project, I discovered the meaning of the word holocaust is 'sacrifice by fire.'  The stitched Star of David was an over-under form which the curator told me is the preferred way.  This I didn’t know either."

Holocaust temari by Cindy Coleman

Detail of Holocaust temari by Cindy Coleman showing the mirror beneath.

The Holocaust display from April 8, 2013.
This is a recent display at Cindy's library. 
If you have a temari exhibition, please let me know. I'd love to share it for you.