Spirit Cloth

stitching a place to rest

it seemed to me that the sun was resting in this dried leaf.
....i was thinking about the end of the year and the concept of finishing things...and one of the questions i keep asking myself is what is finishing? do we finish things? or do we take a rest, gather energy, and then continue on?
'the longest night' has become a place to rest. it is about the dark and the light and their loving dance.it is an offering for peace, and the keeper of the memory of light. the suns have been handled as ghost images to symbolize a  new obsession with the unfinished.  it is a pillow so it can be a place to lay a weary head, or be something to hold on to...a place to dream and regenerate. to make ready for a new continued journey.

happy new year to all of you who use jan 1 to mark that event.

quilting and moving on

the quilt has changed hands quietly, as expected... unfinished and functional all the same. a peaceful transition. a silent ceremony. now i am faced with new questions about everything. i don't plan to be online much until the new year with the exception of some behind the scenes what-iffing. there always seems to be room for another step stitch forward.....thanks to everyone for the holiday wishes.

crafting a holiday spirit

....it was never a tradition to make cute decorations for christmas in my house. we would get out all the scraps and make witches. keepers of the holiday spirit.

happy holidays to all, thank you for your support and catch up with you in the new year!

peace.
 

doodle wednesday-silly thoughts

when you doodle you can catch silly thoughts .  you can do(odle) whatever  you want.  you can doodle in your head. i was thinking about that and well, i have decided to postpone  visiting the post office until a quieter time of the year. maybe next month. so. that being my excuse, all the packages i have here that need to be mailed will be mailed when there are less than 50 million freakin' people on line trying to mail christmas presents.

stitching a little respect

this project is a step by step what-iffer so it is over here. it is about indigo and the respect for process...traditional as well as unconventional .... it has a name  and it is developing a story . and it will be a gift ..the for whom has not been disclosed. i am waiting.

quilting and pacing oneself

.....stitching and stitching, anticipating letting go, the already quilted blocks are passing through my hands one by one...cannot resist the temptation to quilt and quilt again when i can sneak the chance. it wasn't enough to be revisited by slow, but slower has joined in and now my friends have convinced me you can never take too many stitches. i'm  practicing that discontinuous coloring book style quilting, using this lovely teardrop print as my outline and guide...limiting myself to a nest of thread scraps that needs to be used, randomly choosing color without caring. i have lingered here on block 72... for just a while. or was it forever?

quilting uncertainty

....the end of the year is near, walter will be visiting for the holidays, and i am still sewing without really being sure where i am in the process. this project seems to span an epic amount of time... further back than i can remember and way beyond what was expected.
numbering the blocks turned out to be helpful because at this point i am just quilting in limbo, stitching over the sketched numbers as if i have a plan. i am guessing i am about halfway through, but who's counting? its an interesting process anyway, an invisible companion leading me over each and every block, touching and remembering each thought and stitch while i accumulate a growing pile of don't forgets, what-ifs,and OOPSes. i am working on another corner, for some reason i am drawn to the corners, like crossroads they are meeting points of different directions. and over on 67 i remembered how i built this section with fragments of pattern, like wisps of whatever, and thinking how surely that represented the beauty of possibility. i took this opportunity to to quilt the letters  of u-n-c-e-r-t-a-i-n-t-y  onto those little squares which appeared on the back in that barren section of the garden like some secret code, backwards and jumbled. i like the effect but i am not sure why. and i am almost sure i will not be able to include all the things i had intended to include and at this point i am sure it probably doesn't matter . and it is ok. because being sure about everything all the time, well it is just exhausting. i'll sew quietly by hand till friday and let it go.

quilting shelter from the storm

....i could feel the storm coming this morning. it was warm inside but the chill from the studio window was obvious.
.....i did an early morning market run and brought in a good amount of the wood..by 11 am the view between the cypress and the cedar was already showing accumulation. i did not go to work. no day to be commuting. peace is still with me and since i won't make it to the post office today, i have taken the opportunity to indulge myself in the tiniest of stitches ... the white eyelet fabric was already adorned with snowflake motifs and i chose a single blue grey strand of floss and quilted a snail trail through the freshly fallen snow. the linen twill beneath was tied closer to the surface in the process and now those tiny holes are like little windows to that warmer tone underneath. like keepers of the sleeping seeds.
so it wasn't let it go after all. it was let it snow. let it snow. let it snow.

doodle decorations

quilting and being there

Gillian asked a few questions on a previous post that has me thinking about design and planning and how things come together. i thank her for that.

as i think back, this blog was set up to help me understand my own creative workings. so i have looked back and i have noticed that the plan has less to do with it than i thought.
for me, it comes down to #1, catching a thought, and #2, staying with it. perhaps "the plan" is a lie, another untruth. one which generates the illusion that one can be in control. and perhaps this is the source of many sadnesses.
so i now see the creative process as always radiating outward, as opposed to filling up some predefined vessel with things.  i think it is more about sitting in the center of a thought. and really being there. over and over, at each instant. with all your heart. and letting that instant color every  movement and so....everything in your range is part of that thought, is related to your current journey and absolutely everything is there for you to use. and this process is a positive gathering of elements filtered through your heart and it is something new because of that and this is a happy feeling. peace. 
and you continue on until you #3, finish ( oh, NO, there is no finish....another untruth...) until you are ready to let it go.
let it go, let it go, let it go. ( singing to the tune of "let it snow"....)

....in the early dawn i made coffee and randomly looked through a bin of scraps and found an old curtain from my childhood home. ball fringe always amuses me. 8 happy balls of fringe ( i was tagged to do a happy thought meme, hope this counts!) , like baby snowball moons... because they were there and they seemed to fit.

this one is gone.