These birds are not on branches

 

I'm in a space now where I feel open.
This kind of feeling often happens when a big project has concluded and I usually respond by allowing time to play with new techniques or media.
Now I seem to want to do too much.

 I'm interested in many different branches that grow from the central tree trunk that is me.

Any one of them would be an interesting choice and would probably bear fruit.
But if I only go in one direction,  I will miss something delicious on the other branches.

I use a kitchen timer to divide my time.
It allows me to switch activities during the day.
Sometimes I feel as if I am accomplishing a lot.

But today I am feeling flooded.
I made a sketch to try to sort out the branches (see below).

It helped me to see.

Today is a beautiful day and I am working in the garden.
I have to take a day off.
I'll go see Dad.  He accomplished a lot during his working life and used a kind of kitchen timer mantra:

'One piece of baloney at a time.'

All images in this post are of a new piece.  I have been working on the reverse side.

above us only sky

To me, quilt backs are as beautiful and important as quilt fronts.
Usually I plan the pieced back with as much design intent as the front, only simpler.
I like things that seem simple, yet are also complex.

 I consider how the stitches will look on the back.

The solid piece of aqua dupioni silk has a sheen that reacts to the light and to the variety of tensions I've put into it with my handwork.
For example, the creten stitch (see here) on the front translates to double lines of small horizontal stitches on the back.
I love the quirkiness and the sensuality of these lines.

I've been focused on this piece for six weeks.
My tools are a needle and a small pair of embroidery scissors, my material is miles of thread.
While I've been stitching, life whirls on.
It whirls past.

What was spring is now mid-summer.
Imagine.

planned freedom

About twenty years ago, I saw large embroideries from India in the Textile Museum of Canada.

 They were so cheerful, colourful, beautiful, and powerful that they hit me in the heart.

 I remember that there was a folk-art quality to them.  I remember miles of chain stitch.

Those cloths were taller than I was, wide enough to cover a bed.
They were completely covered with thread.

 Huge immense spaces of stitched marks.

I get similar heart felt feelings when I visit  English gardens.

My eye and heart eagerly follow the masses of blooms and foliage.
Masses of small unique marks.

There is an aesthetic of labour in both gardens and large embroideries,
There is time.

Gardens and large hand made textiles reach something deep inside us and that feeling is more natural than we can understand.

devotion

I have been painting these circular lines with thread for months.
I told myself that I have a dead-line - that I need to focus.
But the truth is that I need to finish something.

I need to complete something that is evidence of my daily labour, evidence of my devotion and evidence of my contemplation.
Circles may be endless, but I am not.

I work to make the fragile marks less like lines and more like brush strokes.  I want this sky to be a summer sky - even better, a sky in early spring.
Fresh, nearly aqua,
not turbulent or stifling
nor too pretty.

I want these concentric circles to open outwards into a bright future and I want to communicate this positive feeling about the future to others.
Yes, sometimes, a murder of crows flies across the bright calmness of the sky.  It actually happens quite often.

A sudden burst of darkness, it just happens.
But it's fleeting.

The circle is what is eternal,
rotating like a wheel,
on and on,
calm and blue,
mark after mark,
line after line.

Accumulation.
Devotion.
For-ever-ness.

feel with your eyes

In the biography of you on World of threads, it states 'handwork adds the sense of touch, a sense more psychologically profound than the sense of sight."  What did they mean?  Question 6 of Martha Sielman's ten intelligent questions she sent me last December as we were preparing the article.

The idea comes from Merleau Ponty.  I know the answer to Martha's question because I studied phenomenology and I am a mother.

work in progress   spirit 

There are five senses.  Touch, sight, smell, taste, sound.  All add to our knowledge and our memories. Over several centuries, we have come to think that the sense of sight is the most important.

Sight is important.   It is how we know with our minds.  Sight helps us think.  Seeing something makes it real.

But the sense of touch is how we know with our heart and body.
Unnameable.
More primal.

Our skin is the biggest organ.
our fingers, the bottoms of our feet

Feeling, it's emotional.

Art is responded to with emotion.  Agnes Martin