May's Womb. Still a chill at night, but I trust we have crossed the line, here in The Valley. The unexpected snow has cleared the air.
The rain has quenched a thirst.
Stitching without saying much, Needle Chanting, has quenched another.
I have weathered the storm.
The beginnings were simple here. Already present from way back. Looked at for a long time. Years.
A ragged nine cobbled from dyed cloth made during Whispering Color. And then creating the circle field to stitch within , like I do. A field of stitch can hold a lot of stray bits together. Create One-ness. When I use thread beads I call it the Snow Globe effect. Here, a stacked running stitch. Kantha. Maybe the Grow or Flow Globe effect. Imagine this bigger. Oh my. I have done it slightly larger but what about huge? When I began a few days ago, I said it will take forever. It didn't. I stitched through snow, sun, rain, hail and a lot of wind. And now there are flowers. Imagine stitching through all four seasons. Oh. Ideas. Four Globes, one for each season. Four quilts maybe? Ha! I'm back!
This one though, will remain smaller. And only seem bigger. It was a big help to me in the last days.
Being imperfect, a little egg shaped, I suddenly thought womb. And those tie like corners that make it seem so apron like. I think then it is part of the woman series. Womb Woman. Womb Woman's Apron. Need to work on the ties a bit. I can hang it from those. It turned into a little holiday cloth then. A Mother's Cloth.
So we started from scratch here, but the same method I will show here could apply if you just decide to resurface any old garment, like a bathrobe or a robe that has worn out etc. Here I will cover the entire surface, but if working with a pr-existing garment you might just decorate certain areas while mending at the same time. Redesigning is mending too, in my world. Design Mending.
Coating a base with pre-pieced strips
So with the goal of coating the sheet based garment with a second light weight layer, and to use up a lot of small scraps, I want to talk about what I will call pre-pieced foundation patching. Based on a habit I developed a while back, piecing scraps, grouped by color, developed to both organize and store a stash of color related bits. And to live with process...
Here I decided to coat the base with pre-pieced scrap. And I have chosen a neutral palette, thinking that wind is somewhat colorless. And also because I had a lot of neutral eco-dyed scrap. Especially brown, so easy. That is how I began. Consider this a way to use any leftover patchwork as well. And to transform a surface into something else.
The patchwork I was temporarily using as a curtain was pieced on the machine and then dipped in the black walnut dye and left for a few weeks. I blogged about something similar here. One way to get similar colored scraps is to over-dye them as a group. Anyway, now I am cutting the large patched color blanket into strips to use in this project.
Additional strips are being made straight from the scrap basket. As needed.
I had in mind here, to keep things light, only coating the front, but the same method could be used on the inside, in this way, you can achieve a reversible garment where the base actually ends up to be the batting. This concept is where my quilt making and robe making might overlap. I often work from both sides of a foundation when making a blanket. Quilt. There is so much more to say about that. My internet is fading again, so next time.
She. Still standing. Not swept away. Washed by it, that which flows through. Kantha legs are strong.
The additions are all silk. Which started with the foggy silk moon, veiled in summer leaves, a reflection of the moody day, the dot itself in sympathy with the house of time passing. The background in sympathy with blue already there. Blending.
And then the river. Nobody does flow better than Glennis. I love her shibori silk ribbon because of that, and how it is so liquid. You can make it flow around anything, if you have the mind to try.
I imagine there will still be wings. It's not time yet.
All pins are gone. Like most larger cloths I often quilt the center before I extend it. Not always but often. I do this because it is easy to get at. Easier to handle. And often how the center is stitched sets the tone for the rest of the cloth. Again, just my approach.
I will still need to sit with the cloth and consider it's weight and thickness, before stitching. Perhaps I'll talk about managing layers a bit. But I just added a video to the QUILTING page over at Feel Free. Part of my organizing. I used a similar collage method in the video and I will use a similar quilting method here. The video has been included here as well:
