...it's a beautiful cold shiny day and singing woman in under the needle again. And it is all one thing.
She has come together without a lot of saying that could be said, but I still remember each moment.
I am putting together (or trying) a project tracker for the Forever Zone.
I have come to realize the Poetry of Process.
With New Eyes.
I look forward to
considering/ reconsidering that.
It might be a little quiet here now, while I pull my selves together.
This is not The Magic Cloth.
The Magic Cloth is a large cloth.
I am starting again in the middle.
Continuing could be a challenge.
Challenge is a component.
Challenge can be a base.
Typepad has changed. I/we have changed.
There are two places, here and Feel Free.
Email delivery here is failing. I need a new service.
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It took me hours to put this audio here but I did it anyway.
alternative audio link if you see no player.
This is the Magic Cloth today. Waiting for me to make up my mind about so many things. I am going to hang it next to the bed so I can look at it every morning for a few days, before rising.
Some folks get adverse reactions to antibiotics. I am one of those folks. I feel like shit and that is the base I am working with today.
Look he seemed to say...
The big cold wind erased all traces of Autumn.
Everything seems to rest comfortably...
...In this cloth I call The Nest of Days. It is a basket.
With thoughts (often questions) now, of revisiting Magic Diaries , here, openly (one of my older online making series), I am somehow revisiting an older self. Wondering if I can, will it make me feel sad? Will it make me feel a longing for simpler times? Or is it the same and only a mindset? A frame of mind.
It is really cold outside. Really and metaphorically speaking. But some Inner Warmth remains and I am reassured. Like leaves, some things just need to fall away.
Rosemary came inside.
She is in a pot because she will not winter well here. She will like the dry warmth generated by wood burning , I promised to mist her often. And set her on a tray with water and pebbles.
This is the big scarf I wove in the 70s. It is 8 feet long plus fringe. While wearing it I used to go up to people and say,
...you call that a scarf?
I had this thought last night, or maybe it was a question... what if some of my old weaving could be a base for new work?
I woke up feeling like I was living in a tapestry.
Weave is my new filter. I wove. I considered weave. I am reconsidering weave. Perhaps in my mind for now. A new year is near... Almost 2 years here. And the 3rd winter. Almost woven in.
It was a long noisy process but it went well. The large white oak was tall and had split into multiple trunks, maybe 5 or 6. They came with a bucket truck and wove in and out of the power lines, slowly snipping the branches, dropping them carefully until the danger was past. The tree had been most likely damaged by gypsy moths, I have been though that before. But the wood was mostly good, so maybe not that long ago. We might had left it standing had it not been so close to the wires and the house. They also cut a lot of the fallen trees here outside the kitchen window. More good wood and now clearing the way to the layered stone rimmed ridges that go back to the stone walls. There is real wild garden potential here. That cedar which was hardly visible before will be much happier. There is more air and light and open paths to walk.
I was talking about the lion quilt yesterday. Remembering how it came together. And then not so much why I made it but why it seems important and what it became and then what it has become.
I got interrupted yesterday, which has me on a side trip this morning. After Henrietta asked if I had the drawings of the lions. So I will just talk for a moment.
Link to audio if you see no player below.
And just now, rewriting history I guess, a new loose page, overwritten, to make it useful in the moment. Now motivated to tear up the past and use it to patch the present, make way for the future. Regenerate.
I will start with noting A Field of Color. As a start. As a Base. Considering A full Spectrum of them. I can use them to explain. And they can be used as blankets for little people. Ok. Which color should I begin with. Green?
At Eye level... I was thinking.
So many cloths to be hung, I said to myself, not considered finished. Not including the Sanity Series which needs to remain rolled for the moment. That's a private collection. My purpose was to look, touch, maybe stitch, and then let go. Making space for big cloth. Big cloth going forward.
But now I want to look at all of them. Feel the volume of them. Feel the scope of them. Feel them. Gather their stories. And most importantly, see them as Patches. Puzzle Pieces. I will not have enough space I say. But then there is the basement. And the clothes lines. The ceiling? Oh ha! Let it all unroll then. The big, the small. All.
It has begun in some organized way, but it will soon fall away into some sort of dervish.
Feels so Good.
I think I will put some music on.
For a while, smaller cloth.
But the unrolling has been a reminder.
Coma here again, still ragged and raw, still holding together after years and years.
A documentary, a teacher, a blanket, a world. A timekeeper. A journal. An open heart.
Something as simple a upside down (or inside-out)patchwork. That thought caught, tried. Tested. Remembered in the wee hours of a cold rainy morning. An unfinished wishing star that says it doesn't matter. An early Deb Lacativa dyed cloth that celebrates a friendship. Actually I remember where all the cloth came from. And some old classes when some of this happened.
Large cloth is where I began. Spirit Cloth. The blankets, the gift giving. The long, slow journey with cloth making. Because it is a story, it keeps going. A reminder of that.
I like working small. Firstly because if you are working with scrap, you have to begin there. You need small to build big. And small is endearing. Portable and easy to manage. Good for practice. But there is another reason to work small and that is if you are so inclined, selling is easier. Finishing is easier, letting go is easier. A large cloth is never selfish.
I've been here before, reconsidering large cloth, but I am here again. In a new frame of mind. Unrolling the bigger ones. They are like Pandora's Box. In reverse.
This house is a split level. I never liked them much. But there are highs and lows. Which offer new perspectives.
Acorns have been falling.
Mostly encouraged by squirrels.
I've been thinking about my folks. It always comes in between seasons. The two acorns reminded me of them. Together. Through whatever was.
Yes it's been a bit cooler. But this week will be hotter still. And humid. I always remember the late heat that often coincided with going back to school. The hot un-airconditioned classrooms. The difficulty concentrating. How Dad would be home waiting to whisk us off to the beach for a late swim. Like a little bit extra summer vacation.
I stitched a moon cabin. Because I am preparing for my Patchwork in Perspective. I'm looking back fondly at my patched past. Gathering. Documenting. Reconsidering its use to give it wholeness. There's a bit of Mom's wedding dress in there. The silk velvet. Dyed blue like the old sky. She gave it to me and said make something out of it, make it useful. I could have altered it and made it into a dress. But I don't much wear dresses. I like it better like this. Holding the late August moon. For all of us. Part of the bigger basket.
I used to paint and draw
all the time.
Self Portrait. Being process. 1974
There has been a lot of sorting through old journals and drawings this year. The Loose Pages. At one point in time, I cut a lot of the tiniest doodles off odd scraps of paper and envelopes, shopping lists and what ever it was I drew on. They became scraps in a shoebox. Visual notes to self. I liked them like that for the longest time. Now I am cataloging them. Digitally. Naming them. Providing a way to reconsider them. But then they go back in the box. Because I still like them that way. How I might pick one out and put it into the context of the day. Kind of like a paper component system, that is my thought today. A joyous thought actually.
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
If the path before you is clear,
you are probably on
someone else's.
-Carl Jung