Spirit Cloth

Just Growing

That's what the going is for.

 

The shift has taken hold, this is probably the last summer like day here. Typepad is tired, as grace said to me, and so am I. Sometimes you just have to move on. I will consider how to do that, but today I am just talking. 

 

audio link if you see no player.

(note, comments are off because I cannot see them, and I cannot comment back, and that is true with any other Typepad blogs I visit. I will continue to post pics at Instagram for now.) Found a temporary solution. Actually that's life.

A Seeing Morning

Good Morning.

It's cool. Cool for the first time in a long time.

Evidence of cycle. I feel like this one was left for me.  Right outside the porch door. Yesterday's confusion led me to a small eye sampler started a couple of years ago.  Some eyes still colorless... "complete the full spectrum of vision" I said to myself. 

There are Shells of Summer everywhere. They seem like eyes today. New eyes. Old eyes. A reminder that we need all eyes. To see.

The first stitching was done on a single layer. I think I used a hoop. But I cannot find my hoops, tucked a way somewhere because I don't use them much. So I added another layer. Because it is easier to stitch on more than one layer without a hoop.  These stitches, today's stitches, go all the way through. I thought about through. Eyes that see through.  Different eyes.  Evolution. How many seasons will it take?

Then looking through New Eyes.

What I noticed here is how the running (walking) stitch outline seems like a solid line on this side. Because I can see the stitch where it disappeared as well. Appear and disappear have become one. Now that's a new kind of magic. 

They also look like some new life form.

In, seems like, no time...

continued from here

I completed the invisible baste around the edge of the patched applique. I could say it took about an hour, with coffee making, in between stitches, included.

I then removed the baste from just inside that area, and cut away as well. The backing cloth is not that thin, and there are already 2 layers from the applique. You can see the invisible baste I did to connect the applique to the front base cloth. It can stay. I think I want to do some stitch work on the center from the front. So keeping it thinner.

And there are leftovers.

I will use the red thread again to baste the center, where I just removed it from, when I add the backing. Which I am going to do right now. The cloth is small enough not to need additional baste at this point. It feels right. And then, I will have a 3 layer quilt base. Poof. Right now I am calling it HEAL. I can add a border later if I want to make it bigger. But it is big enough for a small person. 

I love the way a lighter more loosely woven cloth, in this case muslin, crinkles after washing. Because the threads have room to dance while drying in the wind.

The Big Round Table

A dining table, was the idea. Dining table. We don't need to dine there. No visitors. Won't be. And then in the back of my mind, a place to gather, a workshop. Not gonna happen either.  But it's big, and flat and easy to get around with a seemingly never ending edge. So it is the cloth table. In this year of Big Cloth. And this, this is the other side of Holding Pattern. From a while back. I was talking about it a lot then. And then, like most things, poof. (older posts about this cloth)

It has become bigger. It's for the Boy, an old promise. I did stitch those border pieces by hand. No machine here. 

It's real hard to show or tell you what I am doing, because Typepad is not letting me post media at the moment.

It has actually become a chore to try to post, one problem after another. But like big cloth, you keep at it.

I am simply coating the other side with very thin cloth basted in place (I call this a catch layer, I need to talk to explain that, maybe tomorrow?) and then adding a layer of plant dyed silk, patch my patch, Boro style, no pattern except the one that emerges from how it happens in the holding together. The center has already been quilted through from the front. But I am not getting too far with the edge, because clown cat here has become increasingly playful, spending more and more time at my side since his encounter with The Fox. 

I can say this once a week posting is not working for me. It is putting distance between me and you and diminishing my ability and then even the desire to explain. I have been thinking a lot about habit and process. And how it is that things remain the same. Part of my new thinking path has me stepping back to look at myself and my going, trying to see it in perspective, what and why it is like it is.. Noticing how my needs have changed. Not just cloth but Just Living. Knowing more clearly that this place is not the other place and laughing at my early attempts to make it so. In this last week I have undone all I did in terms of arranging, simplified and even gave stuff away.  I carried too much stuff here and I don't need it. Or even want it. Perhaps it made me feel secure during the process. I have only just "arrived" here it seems. I see it as just new space with a Big Round Table. And blankets. And beasts.