Waving and Curving Lines

The very best part of a basket of threads is the potential there.  The colors are lovely, the textures are varied, and nearby is a pin cushion full of needles of every size from a huge size 1 down to a barely-visible beading needle.

I have been thinking about waving, curving lines these last few days.  This is a group project for our November Freestyle meeting at Marcia's house.  I suggested that we all try to make a sampler, large or small, using wave-ish lines, not straight ones.  Any stitch.  Any thread.  We will make a collection of Freestyle samplers and display them at the April Chapter Meeting of the Knoxville EGA.  Unlike most of the neat and tidy samplers made by chapter members, the lines and stitches will roam in our display.

When I stitch lines that are allowed to wander where they may, my entire brain shifts into another gear.  I reach for a sketchbook and jot something there, even if it is only a few words or a very rough sketch of an idea to try when this project is done.  Everything about me loosens up, and I even smile as I stitch.  When I'm working this way, the ideas seem endless.

But in stitching straight lines, however, I stitch myself into the proverbial box that I should be thinking out of (I won't even mention how many rules of grammar were smashed in that sentence).  Instead of loosening up the way I do with curving lines, I tighten up— my stitches, my shoulders, I even clamp my arms to my sides.  Pathetic.  Really.

Which brings me back to the basket of threads.  I have some lovely hand-dyed threads that have been calling to me for several weeks, now, and on Monday I put a large group of these autumn-colored hanks and skeins in the play-with-me basket, and have been stitching lines on a piece of discharged linen since then.  The linen's original color was pumpkin orange, but it has been reduced to a melon that is not so hard on the eyes.  The body of the waving line sampler is almost done.  Once the main bones are in place, I can go back and stitch in and out and around these lines.  I will share the sampler with you when it is more of a finished work.

Meanwhile, I stitch a little, reach for the sketchbook, go to an old Doodle Cloth or book of stitches and flip through until something interesting pops off the page at me, and I start working on a way to curve it across the melon linen . . .

I can't imagine what I would do for fun without the studio!