Spirit Cloth

Just Quilting

This part, the quilting. Needle Chanting.

I am quilting a Nest Of Days.

My favorite part is the hardest for me these days.  Older with thumb joint issues. Slower than ever. But then, it is the forever part that holds me in the safest place.

The basic quilting style I began with. Just going, along the seams. Simple. With squares, reinforcing the grid. I am back there, in simpler times. Hoping to finish another blanket before winter. 

The quilting will be done using what is left in the thread nest from a year of working. No worry about color. Just thread to hold it together. Mostly I use 2 strands of floss. No hoop.  I will quilt what is here and then make the whole thing bigger by adding around the edge. A cloth can always become bigger. Even if it is already bound. I am not sure I have ever composed that thought as I have this morning.

A baby quilt might just be the gift of beginning, it could grow with you. Imagine it as a nest of days, adding a ring each year as needed, so it remained big enough to hold you.

...in the spaces in between...

The time in between is the time so telling.

The breaks from what needs to be done. Calls to be done. When you come up for air.

Why do I call this my work?

Suddenly it is quite the opposite.

I have stitched quite deliberately, but without drama. In rows, and then sections.  I tacked the sections to the deck rail. To get to know this deck.  Forgetting the order of the design. Sensing the beauty in that. I fall back into the simpler time before art and judgement. And I am refreshed. Spaced out like this, the pieced sections have become, again, loose patches. Or even long cloths. Path-works.

The clothesline is temporarily out of reach due to some forest management. With the advisement of a new friend. 

Splitting needs to come soon.

When we first moved in, I dumped my kitchen scraps on one corner of the existing  raised bed because it was the only spot I could find where the soil was soft enough to turn over. 

The soil is good. What a gift, the soil is good. Even though I have decided that this will eventually be a dye garden,it looks like, for now, we have some bonus potatoes, tomatoes, onions and squash. I will space them out a bit today. Madder has been planted on the other side. That will take more time.

Yes, I feel torn apart.  Don't we all?

Piece.

Preparation

 

 

I have been thinking about being prepared. How it sometimes seems like a "suddenly" last minute kind of thing to rush and change everything now, which often pushes everyone and everything else out of the way in the process. But then it can also be a constant worrying activity where you keep at it based on a long standing fear, which might wear on you and everyone else around you. Drag you down and limit the rest of your activities. Poison your days. But then in a more gentle perspective, just going works too. A moment to moment witnessing and knowing who you are and what you need to work with. Which includes others. How this habit might just make you prepared. 

In preparation for the HUNKER DOWN and make do teaching series (Patchwork in Perspective part 3/Large Cloth and whatever else gets us through) that will be hosted here, I will be cleaning up this page and making room for teaching related stuff.  A lot of current links might be moved to the Place Keeper page.  Again, if you are subscribing to my posts by email, you will only see the post itself and not the rest of the site. I feel subscribing is a good way to be alerted to content, but not a complete picture. Visiting the blog will allow you to interact with comments, and view media in a better format and browse related materials.  I am not worrying much these days about how it will play out. I am not making any promises. Who can do that these days anyway?  I am just going. In a sense I am making my online world smaller and easier to handle, while others seem to be embracing fancier far reaching technologies. I am opting for something more modest. Call me old fashioned. I'm old enough. So I will begin, in earnest, on Wednesday, and we'll see. I suppose I will continue for as long as I can for now. Open ended. Thank you to all of you, those who have donated, those who cannot, we are all in the same boat, let's just keep paddling and see where we end up.

On another note...The Journey from paper to Cloth and back again is a circle that needs to be completed. For me, a necessary path to peace. Working on paper will not be the same as it was when I was in art school, hoping to be an illustrator.  Too much has happened. But in some strange twist, I am simply picking up where I left off and letting all that happened in between inform the change I feel will happen, once I get familiar with it again. I will use the story card exercise to transition. I will include my paper to cloth to paper musings here as well as they happen.  Peace.

Easing into it

 

Not sure why I raised my voice in this video, didn't expect it to work maybe.  Feeling a bit wacky. Anyway, it did. No sense wasting it. And apologies for the suggested videos that pop up at the end. YouTube used to let me turn that off but not any more. YouTube is reliable and free so... just ignore it.

 

link to video if you see no player above

 

It feels good to be here doing this, like old/ simpler times.

ready for another day...

with a not so perfect sense of something bigger than oneself.

 

Can u tell I'm ready?