Catching up with my life

I feel that, in the time of Covid, I was given the gift of time for working, exploring, thinking and planning. After a long period of this uncertain time, though, the urge to be in the world, to look and be inspired, needed to be fed. I fell into organizing and cleaning things, sorting my house and studio into stacks of Save, Keep, Trash, and Still Good But No Longer For Me. This was a lot of fun for a week. And then the enormity of what I was doing set in. I wanted to stitch-- but every surface was covered with the Sorted and To Be Sorted.

After a challenging 2022, I am returning to a semblance of normality. The guest room is a mess, but it allows the rest of the house to be habitable. The studio, much reduced in content, is becoming manageable. Thus, I am able to work again-- but with a few caveats. The first is a retinal bleed, which has left me with a blind spot in one eye. The second is the lingering effects of Covid, which we contracted in May of this year. My husband was lucky enough to have had a light case, or we would be in terrible shape today. My Covid experience was not mild. He does the heavy lifting; I don't contribute very much, except to be profusely thankful and praise his efforts.

All of this culminates in a birthday that is a pause in the road. I am at an age when birthdays are celebrated as victory laps for having survived another trip around the sun. Having looked at my life and my studio and decided that I will never spin again, there is that equipment and wool roving to be set aside, to find someone who is interested in setting out on the spinning path themselves. I hesitate because there are memories attached to all of this, particularly of my grandson, still in elementary school, helping me to assemble the wheel, sand and stain it, of my son modifying the oriface because the one that came with it was not the one I had ordered, of my grandson learning to spin (because he is a Master Of All Things Mechanical), and both grandchildren having fun learning to create new colors of roving with the drum carder. The children are teens, now, and have lives completely disconnected from the studio, and neither is interested in the fiber arts anymore.

So, in this gentle autumn interlude, I will photograph the equipment and advertise it for sale. It will be a major step in letting go. I need to do this now, not wait and leave everything to someone else to clear away one day.

There is one piece to share with you. This 4" wall piece is wrapped around a wooden block. It was stitched earlier in the year. It is one of my favorite pieces from this part of my life.

Stitching Soft into Hard

Do you enjoy stitching in hand, with no hoop, no stand to hold things neat and flat for you?  The advantage of this sort of immediate stitching, to me, has been the way I can feel the fabric developing under my hand, the gradual building up of a surface that may end in a draping fabric or, possibly, one stiff with stitches of many weights and pedigrees (many of these fibers suspect, but all of them holding their own unique characteristics).

In an on-line class with Shelley Rhodes, I discovered how interesting it can be to stitch into fabrics that had been gesso-saturated.  Later, I saw that Jean Draper used clay slip to coat some of her dimensional work.  Is there no end to the possibilities for combining soft stitch with hard surfaces?

I hope not.

In the first pix, above, I have mixed the gesso with water and added acrylic inks to give some color and body to a piece of linen that would normally be difficult for me to work with because it is even-weave, and the somewhat wandering nature of my work is not at its happiest on beautifully woven even-weave fabric.  But, the gesso and ink filled in those evenly-placed openings in the fabric, and when I added a few scraps of other cloth for textural interest, I suddenly had a wonderful piece for stitching without hoops or frames.  I could still feel the build-up of texture on this unusual fabric, and the raw edges that I cultivate were no longer continuing to ravel and shred the way the untreated fabrics did.  For an intuitive stitcher, that is like being served a little extra dollop of whipped cream on their dessert.

In the second piece, the page has layers of fabric stitched together with different weights of thread before applying the gesso, then a few more used afterward.  I was able to write into the areas I colored, tried some oil crayons, a stylus to scrape away wet paint, washed a place or two and went back with more color . . .

And so I found a new way of working that has many possibilities for me.  One additional benefit is the way I can control color in the background.  For years I've watched watercolor melt into a damp sheet of paper, wishing it would do that same thing on cloth and not bleed along the warp and weft lines.  Using acrylic paints has not always been a solution.  Finding this method of stabilizing color movement on wet cloth is what my sister would call a "Eureka!" moment.

This has all led to a renewed interest in Mixed Media constructions, to begin creating a body of work that uses combinations of techniques and with materials I would never have thrown together when I was younger and still trying to perfect the art of the stitch.  Isn't it wonderful that the greatest gift of Advancing Age is that we don't need perfection any more?  While I still strive to put the imperfect stitch in the perfect place, that perfect place does not always need to be a soft and lovely piece of linen!  

Keep looking, asking questions, and stitching!