Spirit Cloth

quilting a diary

i am up very early today. this is raya, the sun-catcher and day patcher. sleep snatcher. tender of vines and berries, winemaker in the secret garden.  one of the story lions from the lion quilt, a project that featured a lot of text.  i continue to add charcaters and story to this one. i like the texture that hand stitched writing brings. i like the idea of telling the story in more than one way. i have decided that the next step for coma is to add my coma diary to the cloth. the whole thing...and then some. what if i do that?

digital doodle wednesday

another wet wednesday. experimenting with digitally altering an old watercolor . for fun. sea dots.

doodle wednesday from the past

 .....an old doodle (i think it was wednesday)....)...early 70s... art school... i recall my teacher accused me of doing drugs while drawing. it wasn't true. i just had an obsession with edges. i have a feeling i have published this before. or maybe i have just been here before. i can't remember. it seems this blog has been around forever.

sunshine

...the weekend has been fabulous weather- wise. so much sun. yesterday included a lot of lazy lounging.
......i am celebrating the sun with a sampler of stitched suns from the lion quilt.
...and ' lucky, le little lion of lightness, dancer and prancer and dream enhancer'..., because the sun does that. i feel more leaping coming on.

undoing on doodle wednesday

quilting with story

.....you know those odd scraps, the ones that are leftover from another project. or many projects. the strange shapes with cutouts that are close to becoming only strings. many times when cleaning out my collection, these are the ones i might discard or at least cut into regular shapes. but i have been noticing that sometimes i can remember, vaguely, how they got their shapes. i remember cutting them over and over and where their missing pieces found a home. since many were gifted even you might remember. ha!
 .....the fragment concept is a big part of coma.

things floating around.

a kind of fog of familiarity, unattached.  some kind of  puzzle.

.... i am keeping with the common ground concept, working with similar colors, breaking larger areas into pieces so that if you look closer the solid field seems shattered by a confusion of floating bits and pieces (odd shaped dots) . spring cleaning, confusion and quilting combined.

whenever i arrange collections of things i think of helle over at gooseflesh. she is an amazing artist who works brilliantly with things she has found and collected. i love her new prints. she is very quietly focused. and fabulous.

floating fragments

. ....a patch has been lifted from the the old quilt, because it was going to be covered up by the swirling color. unfolded it has reminded me where it came from... the tiny front panel of the shirt i made for my son when he was born. (he wore it once and grew out of it)   it was embroidered with many floating embroidered  shapes. dots that were not round. i am reminded that i was was already investigating the dot . 

.....so now that my number one thought about dots (... a dot is simply where we begin) has been processed.....i am thinking what if  dots are just little things that float around, like spots before your eyes, like bits and pieces. fragments of something you cannot quite make out because you are looking too closely? yes, i am back to this.

undoing oneself

...i am engaged in a little bit of looking back. digging through old stuff. quieting down a bit. i am just all over the place lately. i want to focus once again on coma. in preparation i am slowly sorting through everything i have done in the past. a bit of pre-spring cleaning maybe. but mostly handling cloth and digging deeper into myself.  pictured here is the oldest know surviving jude patchwork. originally the front of a muslin shirt, since cut apart. it was pieced using scraps from a worn quilt from my grandmother, along with some of the first fabrics in my collection (the birth of my fabric fetish). based on a 3/4" square, the fabric was already faded and soft. as i recall it was pieced on the subway, commuting to my first job in new york city. i remember people staring at me, but not in disapproval...like they were remembering something.
.....one star remains fairly intact which is reassuring. 

.....i like looking at the holes and the order that still remains despite the deterioration. i like the framework that remains where the hand stitched seams hold the planned lines fast with bits of thread from the the meeting places of patches, even though the middles are disappearing. keepers of original intention. that is what i find comfort in today. a soft reflection.

i am also back to what-iffing again.

another ode to nook

 from the lion quilt....
 great white nanook of the north zone. fuzzy nutted winter dancer. sometimes fat, legs out flat, disappearing lover cat. nook was stitched with the moon in his eye. one day he walked away and never came back. now i am thinking may-be he came back as WAS.

(i have created a category for the lion quilt... a pre-blog cloth.)

uncurling-part 1

....a simple comment from jan about hibernating, has me noticing the roll of  insulation in the garage, part of the delayed renovation around here. that is me in the center staying warm. can you see me?
.....i have returned to this image. i had inserted it into an old journal page way back and found it while unraveling my thoughts this morning. it is  the first of many illustrations in my brother nemo's book. Pilgrim's Feather. The illustrations are by his friend and neighbor.  jeanne hedstrom.  You can see more of them here.  jeanne is a marvelous artist.  i am hoping to have the privilege of working with her on some creative endeavor in the future. my brother is a marvelous author. i hope to have the privilege of working with him on some creative endeavor in the future also.
....and so i am back to the nest idea again. a resting place. but instead of thinking of a beginning i have switched to thinking about a point that could exist between the curling and uncurling. not a beginning or an end but one beat (dot?) in a never ending rhythm of change......naturally working in a series.

note. i have chosen to reply to comments directly on the blog while working on coma. i like the conversation and helps me focus on the feedback more. if you don't enjoy being confused, you can follow the progress of this project by using the COMA category in the sidebar.