Murmuration

murmuration 

This is a post about a new quilt top, murmuration.  I want to write about the process and how it made me feel as I machine pieced pinwheels from silk samples that were given to me by my daughter April and her friend, Em J, who works in film costuming. 

I want to write about how I let this obsession happen and how I loved that it happened.  I was in a rare place of creativity and had to keep sewing and pinning to the wall until finished.  

I used silly rules things like having to sew the four half square triangle blocks of a pinwheel together when I ran out of pins and then eventually having to sew two pinwheels together when I ran out of pins again.

And I want to tell you how I used my body, not my mind, (unless it was my mind that made up the limits and rules). For example I didn't let myself change the size of the gifted strips of cloth.  If they were 5 1/2 inches wide, I left them that size and therefore had to pair them with another strip the same size.  Eventually, when I was forced by to change colour, I would trim the larger piece, and that is why there are smaller triangles.  They are the trimmings from the wider strips.                    

I also added some pieces from my own supply of shot silks, but chose not to have any reds or yellows in order keep to the rather sombre palette in the original fabrics.  

Usually when I work I turn the phone timer to one hour but for the ten days that it took me to do this piecework, I turned it to two hours at a time.  Even then, time went by so quickly.

And yet, physically, I tried to slow everything down.  I used my body and moved a fair amount for each step.  I cut the four squares needed for a pinwheel at my cutting board and then marked them carefully with the diagonal lines for seams and then I would walk around the table to my sewing machine and sew them together and cut them.  Then I had to get up and go to the iron in order to press them flat, and then walk into another room to the pinwall and place them.  Then I sat for a while in my chair and look at it all, eventually getting up to go back to the cutting board to cut out two more sets of squares.  My rules said that they had to be a different pair than the previous time which made it interesting for me.  My point is that I did not try to cut a whole bunch of squares at one time, or do any chain piecing, or iron everything at the same time.  Each block was done one at a time and then looked at.  Regarded. It was like painting with my body and the sewing machine and the iron and those beautiful silks.

I wanted to tell you this thing about moving my body more than I needed to because of the feeling that it was necessary to slow down the machine sewing.  I used the wall as if it was a piece of paper or canvas and worked by intuition in that arbitrary placement.  I was obsessed with getting the whole thing finished though, because of the placement.  It wasn’t as if I could just pile up the blocks and put them in a drawer, I had to finish it in the one go.  At least that's how it felt.  Urgent.

When I finished I put my coat and boots on and took my cane so that I could manage my way down the gentle slope that was deep in drifted snow and pinned the sewn assemblage on the line I have there, down in the cedars.  

It had snowed three or four inches overnight and the east morning light was delightful on the moving lake.  

Now I've chosen a backing cloth from the silk fabric that my instagram friend, Fabia, gifted me earlier this year (two shades of gold), and I will hand stitch this not-square shape.

I love that it is shaped like a cloud and I may make another.  

The thing is, I thought I'd lost this almost erotic passion of losing myself in creativity for such a long period.  I realized that I was in that rare place where reality was outside of me. I was in a dream world and I knew it.  I was in another place.  I was aware of this and I loved it.

It's hard to write this so it makes sense, but maybe you understand.  

I think you do.