Spirit Cloth

The aWay of Yesterday

I woke up feeling bleh.

As I get older I worry about not feeling well. My mind runs away with me, imagining what it might be instead of what it is.

But no doctor. Old Sea. Old sea speaks to me.

And apple cider vinegar and honey in a bottle of water. Mom's cure all. Day 2.

Two little girls on the beach yesterday. Hours spent catching little fish in their net. Putting them in a bucket. And finally throwing them back. I sat and watched for a long time as it seemed they caught me in many memories from my own childhood. As the sound of the waves seemed to wash my worries away. I floated. I stitched.

House of Stray. I called it that a while back. I am still calling that. It is about safety. Relationship. The freedom to choose Way.

By sundown I felt better. I slept. Here I am. Feeling good.

Still working at finishing up what is here. Because after a while there is no room for new ideas.

But sometimes when I pick up an old idea,it feels new again. And that's good enough.

Working my way around the edge. It's bigger than I remember.

 

 

As We move Toward September

There was a bit of a stomach thing. Yesterday. I rested a lot.

I've walked through the garden. That's all.

It is turning. The beginnings of that.

Cooler nights first. And yesterday it did not reach 80.

I didn't do anything in the garden. I just passed through slowly.

These. New.

Just there. Just like that. On one of the Butterfly Milkweed pods. It took two years but it is well established now. So I researched red bugs on Milkweed pods. And that is them. Milkweed Bugs.  They were still right there this morning. They must like it there. They say it's ok. They just show up for  short while. They reduce the number of seeds for next year. Some folks spray. Some folks consider it population control. For MilkWEED. In any case I stopped at considering it a touch of Red. For now. We'll see.

A touch of Red is always nice with green.

I just uncovered this. Nine for Growth. Part of the Nine Forever Series. Which was something more formal but now it isn't.  From the post here, which was from Small Journeys (one of the free classes in the sidebar)  here, and then here.

This another example of "weaving into".

There are so many ways to do that. Cloth through cloth. Try it.

I think I might put a few Milkweed Bugs on this one and call it done enough. Nine for Growth. Or Staring Growth in the Face and Seeing it Look Back. Sometimes things keep growing without you. It might do that. It contains that. The going. Despite a few bugs.

Later.

And there they are. 9 of them.

Whirling Patchwork

...Need to mend this old table cloth today.

I noticed one block gathering itself ito a basket.

I made this when I was working. From fabrics that the company manufactured.  I never did completely finish quilting it. Because they used it in a photoshoot. You can see some unstitched areas. This is a good example of how the cloth is gathered into the stitch over time and washing. The cloth settles into the tension of the stitch. I made this early on and might not even known that then. Not that it bothers me at all. These days I know more about tension. If it is important to the look of a piece, I can manage it. Sometimes though, it is just fine the way it might move over time. In this case it has always been flat enough and has been a table cloth for 30 years or so. With blankets, well, who cares really? Except maybe some judge of perfection somewhere. That has gone a bit out of style at this point as we have all been exposed to the global textile arena. Generally if there is some dense stitching near some unstitched area, there will be movement, especially if washing and drying is involved. A lot of "art cloth" just hangs there. Although, there is a slow flow there as well, if you look carefully over time.  Personally I like a living cloth.

Looking at how cloth and stitch react to one another, well that might even give you some ideas. That happens to me. And these days I manage stitch in a different way. If I want to quilt but prefer some areas to be less busy with stitch, I alter the length of the stitch, sometimes using that very tiny invisible stitch so the tiny stich hardly shows but still hold the cloth in place. I call this Wizard stitching (and sometimes Sympathetic Quilting). Poof, the thread appears and disappears as needed yet holds all together like magic.  Managing a stitch like this is not possible on a sewing machine. And there is much less play in a machine stitch because there is a more consistent compression and not the weaving in and out that  gives the cloth space to relax.

Since I am at the point of finishing a lot of old work and because I have some patchwork that will become blankets soon enough, I'll be talking a lot about quilting.

To be mended today as well...

Some crazy raccoon party last night. By the light of the moon.

 

 

Line from How it Holds Together

Stitched Line. And line and cloth.  More notes from looking.

The running stitch here. It is not holding anything. If it were added as quilting, at the point of holding layers together, it would be a line derived from that. Or a design element resulting from that.

Why do we just decorate? How interesting it is when the process of holding together generates form. (weaving)

Discontinuous contrast quilting might generate an interesting interaction between lines. Evolve into a more considered decoration. What if?

Here just a visual test, the running stitch still not holding. But well wait. Holding thought. Decorate can be that.

 

 

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.