St. Francis and the Angels

I have always loved the verse from Psalms 91:11 that says "He hath given His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways." The story is that throughout the history of the worship of one God, it has been believed that each of us is divinely assigned at birth an invisible immortal spirit - that is a Guardian Angel, God's messenger, to guide our spirits through our earthly lives. Our personal Angels are especially dear to us in their protection and for their charity and compassion for our shortcomings!

I have painted angels in needlepoint off and on for the many years I have been designing, and about ten years ago did a series of "monthly" angels for a shop here in Austin - and for my wholesale. I thought I had discarded these scans long ago, but I was digging in an old filing cabinet in the garage today, and found an amazing stash of angel pictures. This is the November angel. More maybe tomorrow.

Another serious angel binge occurred in about 2002, when Anita Perry (Mrs. Rick Perry), the first lady of Texas, decided to decorate the enormous tree in the Mansion with angels that were 40 square inches. Apparently there weren't many out there. I was asked to do whatever I could come up with in a short period of time - and managed to design and paint 16 of them in about two weeks before I burned completely out. I never saw but one of them stitched and finished, but I'm sure the ladies did a lovely job. Anyway, the first one here was inspired by the Mexican Tlaquepaque pottery that I collected while living in Mexico - there are two of them, but the color is so bad on the second one I'm not showing it. My ink cartridge was running out of color, and I didn't have time to replace it. The change of color at the bottom of her dress is due to no ink left.



















The angel with the irises is probably my favorite, but the pansies were also very pretty - unfortunately, the ink was almost gone when I scanned it just before it was picked up .I also found St. Francis in the same folder, and have no idea how he got there. anyway, he is still "talking to the birds and fishes," and looks quite content.

Maybe the rest of the series of saints will surface the next time I go digging for buried treasure in the garage. Actually, I was looking for a file I need - and of course didn't find it.