stitching as driving

An experiment this morning.

After spending some time with the manuscript - and running into mental walls and dead ends - I picked up the stitch and decided on the passage, line and colors I wanted.

I wanted the thread to be substantial, but blend, I mixed three strands of machine rayon and one of the 12wt cotton. Experience said they would not play nicely, but I ignored that even as they fought me at the round-eyed needle. I finally had to switch to an embroidery needle even though the rayon is thin as hair.

First pass = a nasty backside nest. "STOP NOW! and go upstairs and get the damn thread magic.

Once the thread was dressed properly, stitching smoothed out.


 There was no TV or background music. My hands were busy with what was now a rote task with little course corrections and design considerations happening in small bursts without interference from cranky thread.

The revelation came when I started thinking about the story again. Missing pieces materialized. Emotions came clean, reactions true. Details sharpened the reality. I put down the cloth and went back to the little wireless keyboard that hooks to my tablet. Wrote for a while and went back to stitching.

And here I thought I was going to have to drive across country to get this book finished.

Charlie Monday

We went trekking yesterday. He has too much energy to confine him to the apartment if it's at all nice out.

There will be trips to the park in the near future. Next time, I'll remember the ball and the picnic lunch. This day we shared and ate "magic". Don't know if I'll ever have pictures of those gestures.

He told his Dad how he pulled Uncle Colin's head down to the X at the bottom and made him disappear from my phone.

Sometimes he makes my hair stand on end!

sun day

I took the basket to the park today. Sunny and warmer than it's been. Somewhere I have some sheers that I want to layer to make value changes.

In the meantime, invisible stitching.

The bright white spots on the piece below kept calling my attention to how it was. Very hot soy wax dribbled onto a very white cloth. Left to cool and harden and then flooded with layers of colors that I hated by themselves, but got along famously, by accident.

There was a large piece of this cloth. This is the last of it.

down and dirty

Flipping this one to the four points of the wind before I nail it down with a name.

It's good to take part in the conversation about making art again. Jude speaking on design here.

Art you can see and touch.

If I don't spend all my time on one or the other, I may actually make some progress.

Also, there is a way-crossing of stitching and writing in my future. A natural path for me. The fabric of Fiction.

Charlie Monday

and a chunk of yesterday too. Spending time with him takes my mind off everything else (like it or not). Sunday he was dragging me into my kitchen every twenty minutes seeing what else I would come up with for him to eat. Today, at his house, all he would eat was applesauce.




On other fronts,  posts about QN17 have started surfacing. No surprise that I haven't found any pictures of the winners, but splashed across the front page of the QN website was the very interesting announcement that artists are no longer restricted from sharing their ongoing work on the web or social media.

It's almost enough to make one think about goals.