click to enlarge - Courtesy
- Beth Kellc's front porch
A Burlington woman has turned the enclosed porch of her South End home into a revolving art gallery.
Beth Kellc's latest exhibit is an array of Barbie-size garments hanging on two miniature clotheslines: cuffed denim overalls, a sleeveless jumpsuit in a bright floral print, flannel pajamas, a linen apron and a flouncy summer dress like the one she recently made for her daughter.
A seamstress since the fourth grade, 73-year-old Kellc incorporated darts, top stitching, buttons and trim. She sewed a pocket onto the pajama top, pink rickrack around the hems of flared denim pants, green bias tape around the neckline of the jumpsuit and yellow blanket stitches around its armholes.
The clothes fasten with buttons and Velcro. "I thought we should probably make them work," Kellc said.
The smallest admirers, a line of preschoolers who file past Kellc's house holding onto a rope, stopped one day recently to discuss what they saw on the porch. Fairies might live there, they said. Kellc's friends have jokingly asked her to make the overalls or that swinging '70s jumpsuit in their size.
Kellc started the show a year and a half ago, when she hung a flock of hand-sewn, stuffed felt birds in the windows as a winter decoration. This past December, she displayed the birds again. When she took them down, she decided to put up eggs, which she and her now-adult children had blown out and dyed over the years. The objets d'art — including pysanky, intricate Ukranian eggs — dangled in the porch windows in the earliest days of spring.
Then Kellc decided it was clothesline season, so she pulled out her fabric stash and whipped up a laundry load. She hasn't figured out what to do next. "Maybe something with sand," Kellc said.
Preschoolers will be waiting.