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.  

aesthetic pleasure

 

I have been procrastinating about writing anything this month.    

I will share some photos 

of the layers of linen and wool and sheer that I have been stitching with black and red thread.

It seemed so urgent that I stitch every day.

I thought I might get this one finished.   I told myself that finishing it was why I was stitching so much.

But that was not true.  

I was stitching so much because I was letting my own hands do what they do so well. 

My hands take care of me.

These past weeks, I read essays by women in old magazines and attended panel discussions on Zoom.

I went into my town studio a lot, and came home by the back roads, 

because the trees and ditches take care of me too.

In the essays,  I kept coming across words like care and nurture and support and retreat. 

The water in the lake is beginning to freeze.  

Can you can see the misty fairy hair?.

Aesthetic pleasure is important now, not just for its own sake, but to revive us, to give us the wherewithal to fight another day.      Aruna d'Souza             Canadian Art winter 2019

This piece is called Inner World. 

I'm finishing it up for an exhibition next spring.  All the work in the exhibition is two-sided.  

Most of the pieces are made by stitching first on one side and then another, 

and when they are displayed,  the 'other' or the inner side faces outwards.   

Inner World

Art has begun to feel not like a respite or an escape, but a formidable tool for gaining perspective on troubled times.                       Olivia Laing         The Guardian     April 2020

Stitching helps me because, for the several hours each day that I spend stitching, 

real time is stopped.  

The whirl of it.  The fear of it.

Making my art is like being in a zone of enchantment.

  

Whatever brings the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity.          D.H. Lawrence  1928

The stars.

The sky and the stars.

In current climates, the act of taking time out of our day to make, time to look after yourself, time to be with loved ones, is important.  Modern quilting is all about time.  The moments we share with one another and the processes we choose to adopt to take care of ourselves.                                                    Julius Arthur           Embroidery Magazine      July/August 2021

There's a lot going on with my kids these days.  

Inner World

The title of the exhibition is Inside Out.  

Mark making is a way to make an effect on our own world.                                                          Margaux Williamson             Canadian Art     Winter 2019 

Art is an articulation of resilience.                                                                                                      People create art through war and pandemics and hardship and the work lives on for hundreds of years.                                                                    Tatum Dooley  The Guardian     April 2020                 

it will be ok

I am writing this post to help me see

what am I doing?

I don't know

I've been home a week.

I was in Ottawa with family.

I've been working on this green piece solidly since.

I keep simplifying.  There was more red, but I've removed it.

I've only left the heart.

I've run out of fabric, but I keep going. 

I scrounge yellows and creams to stretch the green.

This green nourishes me so much.  The happiness of it.  

The earthiness of it.  The hope in it

I'm also helped by the motion of my hands.

In and out the needle goes.  In and out my breath.

I had the idea that I was nearly done.

But I'm not.

blessed be thy mercies

This post contains an update about the large wool stitching promised in early December

A week ago, I took it down to our beach to photograph.  The ice had just come in over night, and there was a light snow.  The wind was fairly strong and damp.  

I laid it out.  The reverse side up.

To make a large hand stitched piece like this requires commitment and endurance.  The Finnish word SISU comes to mind. 

The repeated gestures I make while stitching put me into that beautiful, huge, contemplative space inside me.  I think about mortality, I think about legacy, I think about love.  I can't believe that love ends.

Made from three wool blankets stitched together to make a long horizontal about 13 feet wide, this object is heavy and awkward to handle and the wind that day was cold.  

I left it on the beach for a while.   

It became a landscape.  .  

An interior landscape.

OMG, our lives are so brief and fragile and gorgeous.

Last week my family tragically lost one of our young beloved stars.  

These photos feel as if they are from a hundred years ago, not just a week.  

My brother's son, Paul, wrote the following text for twitter and facebook: 

Last Thursday my sister Sarah @cervelle passed away at the age of 38, having lived with cancer her entire life.  Her example of how to be a sibling, scientist and friend continues to inspire me.  The family is incredibly grateful for the outpouring of love and support from Sarah's friends around the world.  Sarah embodied SISU.

Here is what Cathy, her mother wrote for the Ottawa Citizen.  Sarah's obituary

And I've edited this post to add the following news from the scientific community:  

Neuroscience community honours Dr. Sarah A Johnson