Spirit Cloth

place

since i have been rambling about where this touches that... here and in my head ... i have come to a new focus on place.  the place i thought i was going to by adding to the first nature of dots piece became way too big.  it wasn't a safe enough place.  i didn't like it there.  at least not last night when i cut all the chatter off the edges and made it into the place i needed it to be.  a long cloth but not too long, a short journey. it is a place where i have been. i have been thinking about dots.  and dots as other places i have been (the new title for this piece).  saving them up.  putting them in little boxes . squares.  squares can be places too. 

i added just one little square as a sign of a new place i might be going to.  i left the edge open ended to make it easier to go there.

a place is simply  where we stop for a while, somewhere we can relax, maybe a shelter we build around us or a space we squeeze ourselves into.  it could be just a set of rules to test and examine, and maybe a window for others to see us through (or the other way around ) . it is definitely a way to crop life into bite size chunks.   being in a place is a way to make a mark and move on.  or stay.

nature of dots 2 is on the work table. i am off to somewhere new....and  i magine the place where the dot meets the square will  generate a lot of energy .

longer cloth

i will be off to mom's today and working on coma. and thinking about what i have been thinking about and working into for a while now. longer cloth. longer cloth has to do with weaving. and what if.

...and a few undoings of plans and purpose.

have a good weekend.

( pictured here: a handwoven strip that used to be the edge of something, evolving into something else)

recalculating time

when i started this long cloth i was in a different place. this past year held a big scare for us. the details are not that important. it was just scary. i got stuck there for a while and i made this piece to express the timelessness that i experienced. i was trapped somewhere very unfamiliar.and there was no end, no way out.

the idea for the long cloth came from a protracted sense of time. a time line representing an unfamiliar landscape or an endless day. a sense of the real-ness of shadow, the un-real-ness of order, the lack of orientation. tunnel vision.

i included the many eyes that appeared and seemed to be staring back at me. at first i felt them as a threat. but i realized they were all my eyes, and i needed to use them to get outside myself, to see things from a distance. to make fear smaller and easier to handle. a dot in a familiar landscape

this piece took a million years to stitch. i mended the open edge of the coming storm with fragments of my husband's old shirt and braided the tangled old fringe and now it is done. it can change shape, it can be rolled up and put away keeping secrets safe and then unrolled and remembered. and shared. it is a story, and nowhere as long as first expected. looking back...just another small journey.

coma and dot diary - holes

today i am thinking about dots as holes. and holes as viewfinders. eyes. and viewfinders as masks. and masks as choices, and the difference between looking  from the inside and from the outside.

and then the  sameness of that when a narrow opening in concerned. and how getting rid of the mask can increase vision from either direction. how real vision is a bigger experience.  a view after all is a limited idea. a point of view is a tiny hole.

i am working on the second long cloth because it has become  coma related. it is about stepping outside oneself and discovering many eyes.

the where am i ceremony

...what a coincidence, that as i look for a way again to continue with this project, that i am asking the same question i asked almost exactly 3 years ago when i started this blog.  a different cloth, but the same journey.  so where am i?  coma is a longish cloth.  it has been edged and it now measures 46" x 70" with a small triangular protrusion outside the frame when i was thinking that it needed to be square.  but i like the shape.  it is a nice bed runner and easy to wrap around my shoulders as a sort of cocoon.  i also like it because it emphasizes the shift in direction that the color blocking created.  instead of just a spin it also has an implied wobble.  something imbalanced. something that might fling itself off the edge and out of sight in a moment.  without notice.

and in its calmer moments it is longer and narrow like a pathway.

each corner has a different color scheme, meant to symbolize some seasonal order amidst chaos.  after a walk outside yesterday i noticed a fern that had been totally bleached by the coming cold.  still intact but colorless.  and the colorless corner of coma fits so well with the idea of a cycle of drain and renewal.  time as a coloring book. 

...i liked this picture of coma on the rail of the deck that was also undone when coma began.  (a link to that thought, in case you don't remember)

so here i am, looking forward to where i will go tomorrow.

working with shadows wednesday

9:30 AM. the studio is usable for a few hours this am so i am working a bit .  i did find a sheer fabric, not the linen i was looking for but a spooky crinkly silk circle print. hardly enough.

i traced the outline of the figure and cut it out leaving the line intact. it is a bit larger but i am thinking shadows/ reflections can be like that.  and i had to leave a part off the tail because the scrap was just too irregular.

the fabric is easy to see through so i will stitch it in place and then think about maybe cutting through to expose some of what is beneath, or maybe not.

this project has been continued from here. i will post continually all day on this one just to try the real time workshop idea and see how it goes.  it is not an official workshop wednesday. just an experiment in time for myself.

i will not be around much for the rest of the week.

continued here

shadows

it stormed yesterday (in more ways than one) and it rained all night.  as the sun returned this morning, i left the curtain closed to enjoy the shadows of mom's gift of dried lavender against the ancient pattern on the cloth.  the shadows in the thin fabric seemed almost a watery reflection of my dreams last night. i dreamed of fabric. i dreamed of brother nemo who is walking around some where in asia . i woke thinking of my son. a reflection of yesterday.  a day filled with life and fabric and a few unexpected shadows.

light and dark still fills my focus...so i'm working with another long cloth this morning.... the one where she looked outside herself... maybe to get a better look at her own shadow i thought, which was really her reflection.  i want to express that in cloth but first i traced and cut her form from a cloudy plastic sleeve recycled from an old discarded photo album.  the pages are aged and the photos can no longer be viewed clearly.  this is making a great stencil for me to use as a guide.  and the milky translucent quality is just what i want.  i will search for a very sheer linen for this layer of self...i think i have it somewhere.  i am sure it is somewhere.  in some dark corner.

the circle as a straight line

we grabbed the chance to catch a few of the last warm days by the shore.  the open space allowed me to unwind a bit.  i felt relief in the emptiness as i noticed the gentle arc of the beach stretching out in the distance.

as the tide came in i watched a large circle of sand become surrounded by sea and form a line on my horizon.  later i saw it  become a circle once again.  i started thinking about unwinding. how wound up in our little worlds we become.  and then the about the dot, how that can represent some sort of compression and concentration.  how depression is like compression.  how round and round in such a small space can create a kind of darkness.  how good it is to stretch out once in a while.

i returned to  long cloth  with the idea of how things happen.  something tight and compressed when rolled, but still something hollow in the center.  something to be unfurled for easier viewing. something round but then linear like a time line.  something  unrolled that seems a straight path but is only then a tiny piece of an arc which is part of another circle too big to see.  something bigger than me obviously.

...and speaking of unwinding, i feel like i have been offered a red carpet after reading the wonderful review over at MrXStitch. how about that for a welcome back? thank you arlee.

posts related to this long cloth.1. 2.

short and long

a short blog break and a long cloth. some indigo dots to keep things cool. too hot to be plugged in.

doodle wednesday and the long doodle

i started this long ago.
...it has turned into a long doodle. when something takes a long time or a long form, it seems more like a journal, a journey.  a dot connector.