Spirit Cloth

How Humidity Might Inspire

The rain was monstrous. Flooding.

And now just clouds, and mold, and dank air. And a chill. Imagine that.

I have the kind of hair that frizzes and stands on it's own in this kind of humidity. It used to be very stressful when I was trying to look groomed for work. For a short while until I just said, too bad, take it or leave it. Most often, in summer, I walked around with a halo.

HOME WOMAN, continued from here... One strand of thread, split back stitch, which I call (so appropriately today) splitting hairs. Just letting the knots show here, and letting the ends do their thing. They will probably split on their own over time.

So anyway today is a good hair day. Because I like this.

.........

Knots don't have to be hidden. They can be beautiful. If you have been through the Whispering Hearts class, you might Remember This?

knots as an edge

 

Wishing for a change of direction.

A red star.  A lot of color for me. But it was hot. I got caught up in the idea of a wishing star being a placeKeeper for a change of direction.

I'm back to what-iffing. Catching small thoughts in a new way. But I can talk about that later. Here, the star as a corner has caught me as an interesting arrangement. I made one sketch,there are others waiting in line. But the thread part is important. I pulled snippets of thread from the thread nest, because I save all those small thread ends. One by one, small pieces of color ended up in a nice blend and variation on red. But it also had me thinking about variegated threads in general. How so often the color repeat is too long, so on small areas you don't see the color change soon enough. You know what I mean? That's why I like  Deb's Threads.  Her crazy method of dyeing produces the perfect scattering of color. Way better than the commercial kind and even some of the hand painted threads I've seen. 

A red star then, practicing a few things for the Endless Wishing Cloth... and the reflection of a new day.

PS. I did rows and rows of split back stitch on the star points here. very close together.

April Showers

After a lot of slow rain...

Suddenly new green.

A simple method for the dyeing. The dyeing just to use stuff up, color thread, just to go in some simple way. While my mind wanders off like it does sometimes.

Sometimes consistency teaches us a lot. This is a kind of bastardized solar method I think.

The old coffee pot. Put stuff in. Cover with water. In this case rain water. April brings a lot of water.

Heat it. Simmer a bit. 1/2 hour.

Transfer to a jar. Add a bit of alum. 1/4 tsp.

Add a bit of cloth, a bit of thread. Same cloth, same thread. Testing silk this time.

Cover.

Leave it near the sunny studio window.

 

This batch, 48 hours or so.

I never really did the alum thing in any big way. I'm doing it because I have some.  Just to see. Maybe I will compare it with what I have done before. No mordant, soymilk mordant. I don't know. I don't think it is that important to me. The science or the allegiance. I am a casual dyer. Just the way the color appears is joy enough. Probably, for me, the fastness of color is important because my embroideries depend on it. Although it might be interesting to look at it after all the color has faded or disappeared. Anyway, I might just stitch up a sampler to use as a looking cloth, to watch if the color stays or not. That might be a nice kind of living cloth.  The turmeric and black beans usually fade a bit, but this is my first test with alum.  Appearing and Disappearing is Magic to me, so all is well I guess.

Using what I have is really the most consistent thing about my process. Not necessarily trend. What I have here depends on many things, often gifts from others in addition to the rescued cloth and thread. And then there is curiosity, which forms seemingly out of thin air, but no. It's thought. Thought caught. Used.

I'm still wishing, but for nothing specific. Probably because there was not much sleep last night.

I lay awake thinking about how life goes for different folks.

Saturday before the cold moves in

These mornings. So warm for November. Spring like, except for the color and the angle of the light.

One more day. Today. Or so they say. There will be snow north of us maybe.

This morning. A reminder to dust.

Reconsidered... nah. It's a thread. I can live with that.

Stitching instead. Just a bit.

A trip around the moon. Not running. Walking. One stitch at a time.

It's a glorious day. I'll use it to take some pics of the big quilt from here. Because I said I would. And I have been meaning to document it properly for a while now.

 

 

It's relatively cooler. Yes. Drier? Not so much. Since humidity drives me close to insanity, Sanity seemed a sensible direction. So I'm back to it. Specifically , back to here with the feeling it gave me. The thread that runs through it. Which condenses so many ideas down to less. Less is good in this weather.  Some times I just drape white sheets over everything. It slows me down and cools me down.

 

 

So the woven line. It really is like a running stitch. Made while weaving. So much related to stitch. Bringing me back to the root sense of how sewing is weaving. How those two things are entangled in the forms that emerge in my work.

 

 

And the line part of it. Here the seams and the stitched lines. Like drawing. A thread again that runs through me. It.  I've begun to really concentrate on the thread lines. How many ways they run through it. Might run through it.

So far in the context of this patchwork:

The woven lines might seem like seam lines.

The seam lines might seem like drawn lines.

The stitched line might seem like drawn or seam lines.

The stitched lines might continue or connect seam lines or woven lines, dividing the space like the other.

Each kind of line has a different character but is still useful as a line. Line as it divides space.

 

I did a lot of thinking about this in Whispering White, so I'll bring a lot of that back here in the context of the Sanity project. And maybe when this humidity lifts I can figure out what is wrong with my video situation and get rolling again.