Spirit Cloth

There comes a time...

Time gives us time to reconsider usefulness.

I sat here with a cup of coffee this morning. Remembering all the little bits and pieces of my life that once seemed useless.  Things I  wished I had gotten to. Things I wished I'd never started. Things that were left in between. Lost. Forgotten for no good reason.  Kept secret because of embarrassment.  Ruined and stopped in their tracks by someone's opinion. Left behind because of my own ambitions. Gifts conjured yet never given. I wished I could stitch them all together. They would make a lovely something-or-other.  Then a few seconds later, I realized I already had.

I found this little piece of patchwork this morning. It's been in between for so long it seems finished.

The tree batik dyed by an old friend. She is off somewhere.

Imperfect Patching

Raining again.

Who cares?

So if you've managed to follow along, back to Endless Wishing. The cloth, that is. As I continue Collage Quilting.

I explained how I created the cloth woven center. Using the mosaic method. Now lets look at the patched border.

click here if you see no audio player

The hand piecing method I use to put these pieces together is mostly a simple strip version of this method. And even if I use the machine, I still glue stitch the seams flat. You can iron. It's just a quirky thing of mine. I like the way it feels. 

How Real Heart Persists

Actually, I stumbled upon these.

Looking for a stack of stars I stashed to use on the Endless Wishing Cloth, the spring/summer project.

I found these. Hiding in a basket. Resting.

Old hearts. Simply stitched to cloth-woven nines (this method, three strips each way on a foundation, lightly tacked). Some old stitching project suspended in time. The cloth weave creates such a soft bed for stitch. Especially when the cloth is old and worn. Just turned, line guided applique, (I use rough cut scraps and draw the heart, the turning line) Ragged, once just lazy, tips have become a symbol over time. No heart is perfect.

And this one has one turned edge and one ragged edge. But what I love is the fade that came from what I call seam shibori. Light and wear resist. The cloth from a garment. The darker side was inside for years, the light side faded from wear and light. Newer technologies prevent fading so we don't see this as much anymore. Maybe folks don't even keep things that long. Too bad. To know these things softens life. So anyway, my heart hearts are here, but I have to be Away for a while.

Rocking in April

Fire. Evening. And morning.

The nights are cool, the days are warm. Just warm enough. Perfect. I feel grateful.

 

link if you see no player. just to feel it.

sharing the warmth

 

The Woven Wishing Star is on the studio floor. I made it a while back. Started it during my Contemporary Boro 1 Workshop aka 21st Century Rags) Back in 2011. Has it been that long? I find myself asking that question a lot lately. Anyway, I will be detailing the way I got this far soon.  But today, just there on the floor. The woven part is about 20" square-ish, give or take, and it has been anchored to a piece of thin cotton that measures about 30" square. Ish. My measuring is never that exact. That thin cloth was dyed in a natural indigo vat, a weak vat, and it has  nice light turquoise cast which happens sometimes. I placed the whole thing on a larger piece just to photo it for now.

There are 3 main techniques here, cloth weaving, fields of stitch and mosaic . I will review them soon. The star is not indigo, which probably I regret for this project (which I am now calling the Endless Wishing Cloth, conjured here) but with using what's on hand, first and foremost in my mind, that is the way it will go.

For all of you celebrating a holiday this weekend, this can be a little holiday cloth for now and I Wish you all the best with family and friends. .

I don't do Easter, or Passover. But I will celebrate cloth. And I'll be cooking up some new ideas...

 

To See into Going

It was Dad that taught me what little I've been taught about composition.

Or perhaps I just remember it that way. What's been useful to me.

Art school was not useful to me. Maybe because I was distracted. I think it reminded me of high school, where all my self esteem got jumbled up with competition. And pimples.

This, that Stray Abstraction, turned out to be more of a Stray Distraction.  From anything and everything. Maybe CobbleCloth might come to mean just that. Patching a daydream. With a basket of misfits, and a little time to consider. Even the stitching was done using short threads from the nest (the original ThreadCrumbs). The parts are all there I suppose, floating in the fog of mood.

And with Dad's advice...
"...a good composition works in any direction, you might be surprised..."

A Spirit of Distraction I think, aka Free Falling.

And I am. Free falling. Through this month of February. Knowing I will land somewhere eventually. And keep going.

The roof is not fixed. We've been informed we need to wait until the temperatures rise. And it needs to be the whole roof.  We will cobble together a new plan. Think outside the box.

 

TwoGether

Together. Like one.

But Two always.

I used the last of some old roll of magic. Sometimes things run out. Get used up. Sometimes you can make more. Depends on what's on hand and whether your heart's in it.

I still have so much more to share about technique. Sometimes it is hard to stay open. But I'll keep going. In these times of selfish discontent I am happy to have this as what I can do to make  america great again  the world  a kinder place. Share without boundaries.

The cloth weaving method here goes beyond what was presented in Cloth to Cloth. And I have taken it much further without showing.  I want to share more here then, opening up part of the advanced cloth weaving methods with this new year. To prepare the way for brand new content. 

Cloth Weaving Without a Foundation then... I made the roll of magic weave on a larger loom, but not everyone has one of those, so you might start like this.

 

 

click here to watch video if you see a blank box or no player

 

I will add this to the index at Feel Free later today.  I am still needing to learn a bit more before switching to the new site.  For now it's fine.

Room

Beside myself.

An old piece of artwork. A self portrait.

The box, the wings, the breaking out. Oddly, one of the few things behind glass here. The paper is very old.

One of the first repairs to the Cat Quilt, long ago. A kind of holding Nothing patch.  Nook, my big old cat is immortalized on the Lion Quilt as well.

And now, after a bit of day dreaming, I've taken a new approach to filling the holes along the edge where many of the white triangles have disappeared.I used a lot of vintage cloth there. It melted but that's ok. I learn a lot by watching things melt away. It's a privilege really.

Filling the space with space. Sky like cloth. But Room. Room is the word on my mind.  Room to expand maybe. Get beyond just that space. Be filled with less maybe. Room makes things seem like less. Room to see. Windows

To be wrapped in space. Room as shelter. Room is a multilayered word today

 

One and sun

Numbering just to keep track. Why not?

In a way I am measuring time.

So I marked this one 1. I do remember starting here.  The old cloth has writing woven right in. But it is hard to see what it says. An old cotton sateen, but not that old. This is the first 6" block I made. Just one piece. A beginning. I drew  a 1 and wrote the word one. not sure which way to go. But beginnings, including this one, are often like that. I slipped when I drew the 1. I will erase that little slip  by stitching (split backstitch) over it with thread. It is a record all the same. As I go I will fill in the squares on the paper with numbers. This will help me map out the basic layout. For now.

It is raining today so it was nice to see the sun block right next to 1.  It will be 2. Not that it was, but it is now. I wanted to do do a bit of video here, but the day is too dark and rain makes me lazy about those things.

This block looked like this before the face wore off.  I had padded it with a piece of batting, and noticing it was the synthetic kind, I cut it off instead of recovering it.  I don't use the polyester kind of batting ever any more. Polyester is "hard". It can actually cut through old cloth (which I use a lot) as it rubs. Not to mention that the fibers migrate and get into your skin. So. Gone. These things I learned later, so now I go forward with where my thought have arrived.

So you can see, I had arranged the petal appliques around a circle and then added a padded circle to the center and then covered that with cloth and quilted the face which gave it dimension.

I think I will try something like this for the mending:

This video is from one lesson in the Sun Mon Stars workshop

 

 

click here to watch the video if you see no player or a black box.

MapMending

 

The sun is out. Old sea, she greets me each morning.

Soul-o likes it better ON the table.

I did not record the making of this one.

Not like I do now.

Long ago, I found a roll of old brown paper. It' heavy and soft and I always thought I would use it. Finally I have something to use it for. On the wall then, behind the mending table, stretched out, a place to map this cloth. Because as I mend, I will try to remember. I started a while back, drawing my work.  This is a bit different I think. I have many thoughts. They will unfold.

I have determined that my basic block size was 6".  And that if I scale the drawing so that a 2" square represents each 6" block, it will fit on the paper.  I have gridded it in pencil. Darkening the 25 block section that was the starting point, as I recall.  As I took the photo, with the sun behind me it reminded me of the silhouettes we did in kindergarten. We used a projector, traced each others shadows on black paper, cut them out and mounted them on white paper.  Gifts for parents to take home on open school night. I must have mine somewhere. Anyway, this is a PlaceKeeper. A map. And something new.

Standing on the chair, this is the center section, where I began, before the ring of cats. Already strays in my mind. As things progressed this was no longer the center mathematically speaking. Personal math has it's own rules. There are many places to mend. I'll take them one by one while remembering. Mending gaps in memory while patching holes in cloth. Mending your own work is such gentle timekeeping.

And here's that poem again...

And what is life? A crazy quilt;
Sorrow and joy, and grace and guilt,
With here and there a square of blue
For some old happiness we knew;
And so the hand of time will take
The fragments of our lives and make,
Out of life's remnants, as they fall,
A thing of beauty, after all.

a scrap... part of a poem by Douglas Malloch

 

December and Blanket

December. Way warm. Hardly need a blanket so far.

In December I will mend. Tend. To the human wrapping cloths as I like to call them.

Get back to blanket.

I put the sketch, altered a bit, here. Again. Blanket. Full-Circle.

There are many large cloths here, some still in process. Cloth I might consider blankets. The Cat Quilt, the Wedding Quilt, the Lion Quilt, Coma, the Magic Cloth, Magic Cloth 2, Holding Pattern, Nest of Days, Sanity. There are also many unnamed cloths destined for blanket status.

I started Spirit Cloth as a blanket maker. I make a note of that today. On this first day of December. In December I will mend the blankets that are in need of that. That patching ceremony for continuing that celebrates "Peace Piece on Earth".

 

And so I will consider (well, reconsider) Blanket. Because there is something quite important that has to do with blanket. And me as a maker. And it has fallen between the cracks many times. But it is not lost. Mending is a great needle chant as background for (re)considering.

I already added 3 simple patches on the Cat Quilt. I kept the idea of stars in my mind.   The blue square patch has been quilted in a star pattern. The small ragged patch, double kantha stitched, always reminded me of stars. And #1? We'll see. I am expanding the idea to Sun and Moon and Stars. I'll patch this cloth with those. They have a sense of eternity about them.