D as in . . .

Doodle Cloths!  The funnest of all embroidery, Doodle Cloths are places to explore the effect of a new thread on a stitch, of pulling the edges of a stitch to re-shape it, or trying out an idea before you invest hours of labor in something that doesn't quite fit your mental image-- a sort of embroidery where you kick off your shoes and thread a needle and just see what happens with a line.  Paul Klee called this type of un-pre-meditated drawing "taking a line for a walk."

The doodle cloth below is one I carried with me for more than a year and embroidered in the tiny minutes between things-- waiting in doctors' and dentists' offices, stuck in the traffic in Buckhead, holding for some recorded message on the telly . . .  I kept it in the corner of my purse, with a handful of threads, needles, and small stork embroidery scissors tucked inside.  It will always remain my favorite because it was the one I lived with for so long:

Here I discovered silk ribbon and began to look for the most textured stitches and threads to use with it:

This Doodle cloth was done at a Freestyle meeting when we were studying chain stitches.  Beth had a lot of cotton fabric in varying colors, and I took a load of it home and cut it into 10 inch (roughly) squares and painted or used discharge paste and re-painted the squares several times . . .  It was a colorful room of Doodle Cloths that day!

This one is from a Campbell class, random and exploring layering with appliqué as well as plain stitching.  It is a bright, happy bit of needle rambling.

I have a box of these experimental cloths, and they are some of my favorite rainy day contemplations.  I mine them for new ideas-- they are a bit like having a stack of embroidery notebooks always at hand.  I learned this habit from reading Jacqueline Enthoven, in the 1960s, and I began to keep a Doodle Cloth in my embroidery bag at all times, ready for the next trial stitch or two.  Then the embroidery bag grew too bulky, and I began to store things in boxes, but the Doodle Cloth never fell by the wayside.

When I taught at Campbell, I always brought the box of Doodle Cloths from the past.  Seeing all the possibilities was a way to generate enthusiasm for the coming week of projects.  As the class worked, I began new Doodle Cloths to demonstrate the basic stitches, to explore the contrasting effects of heavy or light threads, and to see how much distortion we might try with a stitch before we had to call it something else entirely. Sampling stitches and threads is fascinating.

Sampling stitches . . . this sounds as if we're talking about Embroidered Samplers, doesn't it?  Doodling is free-association sampling, and sampling is a form of structured doodling.  However, there is quite a difference between the appearance of a Sampler and a Doodle Cloth.  A Sampler is more organized, and has some element that pulls it together-- color, line or shape, theme, stitch, etc.  The orientation is always a single direction in a Sampler, where the Doodle Cloth can be turned in any direction to find some interesting stitch variation.  I will confess to being less capable of stitching a Sampler than a Doodle Cloth, because I often lose interest in the organization process, and what started out to be formal (think: stitches dressed in Sunday best, sipping tea with hands still and gloved) ends up in a riot of color and stitch placement (think: children on a playground, out of earshot of anxious nannies).

The name/pigeonhole really doesn't matter-- except for the fact that this was to be a "D" day in the alphabet series.  The stitched ideas are saved there for some future day when I may want to investigate them on a larger scale.  Making Samplers or Doodle Cloths is a lovely way to spend a quiet afternoon!