Spirit Cloth

halloween story

somewhere in the 1980s. my son. me. in halloween drag. i am not as sociable these days....i turn off all the lights and pretend i'm not home.

but then again it is hard not to get into the spirit of the thing. Trick or Treat...

quilting with words

often i add words to my cloths. looking back at the lion quilt which i am planning to re-document here on the blog, each lion had a story and the words were all stitched on the surface after the quilt was quilted, a technique i use, grabbing only the top layer, not effecting the back at all. (shown here: the snow lion of the eastern highlands where fear is forever frozen, master of timing, bringer of joy and painter of vibrant energy. in case you were wondering.)

.....so i am stitching  away on FEVER,  on the red lion, and i think...of course...words... after all nemo (my other brother, bringer of treasures from elsewhere) is a writer and poet...this will be the element that brings it together. but this time i will use the words like quilting.. let them go all the way to the far side (elsewhere so to speak).

...and since the quilt has a lot of rough terrain, sometimes the stitches get lost inside and what shows up on the back will not only be in reverse but will be fragmented as well. i like the delirious jumble that has already started to form. yes i do. 

what if wednesday- lining things up

...it has occurred to me that it is difficult to get all my thoughts in useful order sometimes. when the chill comes in i often sit and page through old journals. and i think to myself, oh, that was a good idea. and i wonder about all these journals. and again i question whether the context of my thoughts has been lost over time. and so today i have asked myself  what if i don't just recycle... but refresh my thoughts?
i am looking back and noticing my habit of repeating things and my constant doodling of borders like this. and this. i have several ideas about that today. i am thinking about borders as edges. i am thinking about borders as samplers. i am thinking about borders as meeting points especially where i meet my own thoughts from long ago. now i am considering reworking all my old scribbles into fresh doodles. re-journaling. or something like that. and of course converting that to stitch. what if this what if becomes a series? PS.i am not posting to flickr anymore. at least not for now.

quilting purpose

slow cloth is something that grows with time. it contains so much story and so many thoughts. you could even say it contains an evolution of a sort. i learn and grow a lot in the process. and so when i get to the quilting part, a term i use very loosely... it is the time i take to travel slowly over every inch of the surface. front and back. it is the time i take to touch and feel the weight of the cloth and admire how each piece of the puzzle fits. and if the project is slow enough it is the time i take to witness the change in its surface, and prepare it for yet another journey. it is the time i take  to get up really close and listen to myself whispering quilt tales yet untold.  this is the purpose of quilting. for me it is a kind of ceremony, and it is the best time of all. i like to think of these final stitches as the keepers of the spirit of the cloth.
today i am adding details to the red lion with pen and thread before quilting the surface securely. i am remembering my whatiffing and loving the purpose it has found.

quilting the morning after

..... well it all seemed like a dream. monday this morning before work everything in the studio was calm and back to normal.
  .....until the the moment it came back on me...
 
there are new edges everywhere...many confused glances on that commuter train this morning.