roots

I have been thinking a lot about where I was brought up and what a home really
is. I have been thinking about  the things that have influenced me along the way.
My roots are from the South. I grew up in Tex-azz, if you pronounce it
the way #3 daughter does. Thank goodness my younger  children do not have my accent. They speak
with an Eastern accent although daughter #3 is a good imitator of me.

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daughter #3 and me. (She is the creative one when it comes to photo editing.)

She has a style all her own and that is another story....

My children roll in the floor with laughter because I have a hard time pronouncing certain
words and they never cease in delighting in correcting me.  Anyway, back to influences....

Living in Texas, where everything is bigger and it truly is a country unto itself...lol!
I was influenced by my grandmother and the fact that she was a cotton farmer in her younger days.
I know it was hard work and I remember her describing being out in the Texas heat and picking cotton. She spoke of her mother passing away when she was a teenager and how she had to care for her brothers and sisters and how she walked a long distance to get to school. Also, she told me how she would get up in the early hours around 4 a.m. and make homemade biscuits. It was a different world than what I live in, but somehow it holds a bit of charm and simplicity for me. 

Also, living
in a Black, Hispanic and White community gave me a love for painting and sewing black dolls.

I became really interested in little black dolls while living in California. I came across a small
town, Temecula, sounds like "Dracula",  where I found the most charming handmade black dolls and I did collect a few, but was inspired to make my own.

These are some repeat pictures, but I will be posting a new Spring post later today, so bear with me...

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antique postcard

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a bit of a painting I did......

I do not claim to be a great painter but I do consider my work to be Folk Art and I like to think of it as Outsider Art because I am self taught in all that I do: Painting, embroidery, sewing, etc.

http://www.gingeryoung.com/subpage3/

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another little painting I did that was influenced by my grandmother.

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Making  little dolls....

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the doll with an embroidered face, minus her hair....

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a wee tiny doll that I made and hand painted the face....

So, back to the word  roots and the word home.....

They mean a lot of different things to people and for me something that I treasure the idea of.

"People come home for a lot of reasons. They come home to remember. They come home because they’ve got nowhere else to go. They come home when they’re beaten. They come home when they’re proud. They come home looking for a door out into their past or a road out into their future. They come home for a lot of reasons, but they always come home to say goodbye." ----Alison Clark
                                                                                                 the movie TAKEN, by Steven Spielberg


Best of all I like the quote: "Home is where the heart is"

<3