Spirit Cloth

the actual journal

as the year comes to a close, i am thinking about the days and the months and the years and how they pass. i am thinking about how we record them. how we refer to them, how they shape us.

this year has been particularly enlightening for me. not so much because i learned something but because i learned a bit more about how i learn. and more importantly how i make what i learn my own. and how i might teach that.  it has simply come down to being there.

a recent question ( thank you) has strengthened  a thought i have had for a while now. sometimes it is so hard to say things that are in your head without stepping over a line that someone has defined as too far.

all my life i have kept notebooks. visual journals filled with sketch and clippings and sources of inspiration.  plans. so many plans. and a while back i began what i called the real journal project. this has been going on here and there, its biggest discipline has been its random record keeping style, notes in a shoebox, unrefined, rather than arranged artistically in book form. i have a so many of those.  i like that at any moment a few of those random notes collide and form a new order. this has been a step in the right direction for me. this has helped me understand context as a component for my making. 

but really what i am trying to express here goes beyond that. it has to do with hoarding ideas. and how useless that becomes for me over time.  it is in my opinion a form of entrapment ( i hope that word can be used here) . an illusion of creative potential. and at times, even a fashionable artistic facade.  i am not against the book as an expressive form, or doodling as a meditative and useful activity, collecting and scrap booking as a hobby.  i just think, have thought, am now much more sure that acting on an idea, not saving it, is the only way for me to absorb it, digest it, turn it into some personal and useful form.  a way to  transform myself and evolve.  So yes, i have pages of faces, but i no longer find mysef referring back to them in any formal way, i carved them into my mind by drawing them i think, and challenge myself to find the right one at just the right time, because if it meant anything at all, it is probably right there in the pages of my mind. it is the act of catching thought, immediately,and using it, acting on it...recording it and not the record itself that allows me to grow.

if you signed up for the Contemporary Boro class, you will hear from me in a day or so.  i have extended the enrollment period until january 10th by request, holidays are in everyone's face, i understand. class will begin a few days later than planned i think but i will let you know.  this will be my last workshop for a while.  i will be whispering and acting on some new ideas instead.

i need to do some mending today... i have put it off because this one was wearing so beautifully.  there are so many what-ifs past here, still hanging by a thread. i like to mend my way into a new year.

a toast to a thread then...!

and gone again...

winter cloth

one of those little holiday cloths has developed more deeply than expected.  right along with the newly fallen snow.  i love the texture of the snowy ground with its shadows of a warmer time.   i was planning something quite empty and white.  but then, as usual, a wanderer.
...warming the ground.  leaving a scent.  a trail.  passing by once.  or once again.  a reminder of a difficult journey and the willingness to endure.  and, as always, the beauty in that.

so now the scene has been changed.  along with a mood.  and  i love how all the beautiful things in this cloth have lined up for a moment. 

i am not finished with this one but i have named it.  alone in winter.  no.  alone again in winter.

i think it contains both sadness and joy.   season is like that.

i took this night picture and i am inspired to do yet another winter cloth. what if i try one with less color?  isn't she lovely?

drifting back

yes i am back. why?   because i feel unusually rested. because i have never before seen such a winter sky and i needed to share that. because i am enjoying so much the characters that have appeared in my c2c3 giveaway. and because some one asked me what ever happened to the alphabet soup cloth.  here it is and it makes a great draft stopper.  larger cloth can be very useful, even in process. so i guess i am back. once again without capital letters. because i can't deal with it really... this correct grammar thing. so for those of you who called me lazy...stitch me up a cloth by hand why don'tcha. a large one. ha.