windthread

the hopelessly in love wedding cloth  has been tacked down on some kind of vague blue something and will be rolled up in the Morning to await next New Year's Eve when i will again celebrate the Union.  and here…oh, here is my Lucky 2013 Butterfly calendar from the Dollar Store upon which in the next hours i will transcribe all significant info from this passing year that needs mindfulness in the coming year.  The Goats have gone to their straw beds after drinking long and deep from just scrubbed and filled water tubs,  the dogs are piled up next to the wood stove and the cat has excused herself for her early evening prowl.  All is Well and i want to THANK Everyone who has come here and offered me encouragement over this past year.  My Love for you is BIG and i am grateful beyond anything i can ever tell You.

 

 

 

i used to love watching Pee Wee's Playhouse.   one of the dorky things he always used to say when someone said " oh,  i love  ________!"  was  "Well then, why don't you marry it?"    So,  after confessing to being hopelessly in love with rags,  this kept coming up and i searched till i found one of the first weavings i made in Cloth to Cloth.   some strips are of a commercial quilting cotton that i really love though it's stiffly funky alone,  and the rest are from a very large piece of what Jude referred to as good household cloth…a loose weave cotton, kind of like diaper material?  and this cloth was SOOOOO used, with many stains.  some rust, some blood.  it could have been used for so many things…wrapping leaky pipes,  car parts,  menstrual blood,  a birth,  maybe preparing a pig for Mantanza,  harvesting chickens.  wiping up any number of bad messes.  wine.  who knows.  but though so worn and used,  there it was at the thrift shop.  whoever set it out on the shelf thought it still had some life in it.   so…i had torn the strips and woven them but never gone further.  it's been in the bottom of some basket but even though i forgot all about it,  i remembered it.  and then i remembered a lot more things thinking about being in love with cloth,  thinking about love in general and i remembered when Pee Wee married Fruit salad….if you type that into UTube, you can watch.    So i thought ,  OK. ,  if i love raggy cloth,  i'll marry it.   and for 2 days now have been stitching away,  some invisible baste, some kantha and  here is my Wedding Cloth

it curves up at the bottom because it was so cold in here this morning my fingers were all spastic.  but i got it finished to this point.  and now what?  do i trim all those dangling ends?  do i put it on a ground of some kind and stitch them down?  and does it want any other scrap stitched to it?  I have till late afternoon tomorrow,  New Year's eve. 

and the Chanin person has nothing on Pee Wee.  Deb G.  ….go to UTube and watch  Pee Wee's Giant Underpants

 

 

 

 

i just hung up from talking to my friend,   My Friend,  Jane.   she's in Alaska.  and here, i say:

Jane…IF you should ever read this, IF you should ever come to this blog, which i don't think you do, but if you do, know i mean this in the most loving way.

anyway, we have been friends since 16 and 17 years old.   50 years.   We have HISTORY between us. We KNOW each other.   She is a quilter.   Has always worked with fabric, with fiber in many ways.  Has a gift with it,  a  Strong Artistic Bent.   in the conversation, she emailed me a fiber figure to look at, saying she saw it in a shop recently and it was the closest to anything she'd ever seen like the ones i used to make.  we talked about that and i mentioned Charla Khanna, the "doll" maker that is in Taos who used to make dolls way back when we were in our 20's in Ann Arbor and has continued,  when i Did and Didn't Did and Didn't and there was a lot alluded to but not really Said., Charla's dolls sell only through Jane Sauer Gallery in Taos and are thousands of dollars.  They are in the Smithsonian and in other Fine Art Museums around the world.

i knew what she was getting at.

She came to visit me a while ago…when i was still working on the Magic Diaries Cloth.  She saw what i was doing.  She has heard long words about the classes with Jude, with Spirit Cloth.  She LOVES me.   Like really. 

and it makes No Sense to her.   These rags i make.  Crude. 

and in the morning i will box up the Grieving Cloth,  the Other Cloth, and the more simple 6 bales of alfalfa cloth.   i will include words about them.   Their stories.  and send them off, away from here.  It was perfect timing, really.   and Judy,  Judy Martin,  had trepedation about how thinking about selling what i might make would change it.  might cause me to changed the Raw.  well…it didn't.  and it won't.  because for whatever reason, i am hopelessly in love with rags.  with how the threads live free, the edges are ever so imperfect, that there are holes here and there,  things don't meet up, are left dangling,  too long or too short and on and on.  i am just    In Love.  Hopelessly In Love.  and i  don't care.  and i don't need to know.

Here is a gift for Us.   When i was splitting wood,  there was that sudden Felt/Sense….stop!!!!!  and there on a chunk that had been wrecklessly dumped by the wood guy

the most elegant Praying Mantis egg case i have ever seen.   Ordinarily, they are a carmel color, all the same color, but look,  this one has that central cream white color.   So,  i have set it aside.  once the warm comes,   i will watch.  Every day.  All day.  and if We are lucky,  i will be there when they Release themselves….MANY tiny perfect fully functional Praying Mantis.  and  in between this Vigilence,  i will stitch rags.

 

 

 

 

 

 

so, i have been writing this post in my head for a couple days now.    pages and pages, but as it seems to go anymore,   in the end,  not much.  and things keep circling around.   i am more clear about why these images suddenly needed to go up on the wall the other day

having all to do with the urge to Claim my life in yet another way.  To go back around to seeing it all as an Experiment.  and in keeping with the coming of Jude's  What If,  try it that way. 

and looking at these two pieces of ART i have bought this year

here is Saskia's   Air Tree.   before it finally arrived here from the Netherlands, from her studio,  where i have begun to feel familiar,  i thought i knew where it would rest here.   but it has remained close.  right here, on the table with all the things i use every day.  the little table next to the morning chair.  and throughout the days, every day, i gaze upon it,  into it.   it Glows and Pulses.

Cindy's shawl.  wool she carded, spun, knitted.  the warmth and beauty of it,  more than i had imagined when i asked if she would make it for me.

so…both these.   and part of why i love them is that they were created by two women i have come to know and through buying what they created,  i could participate in their lives, their Livlihood  as atrisans.   this has great importance to me.

and quoting the same passage as did Deb G.   from Joanna Macy's book  World as Lover  World as Self……….."We can watch time's rhythm in the breathing of the moment, and sense how its very passage connects us with the past and future moments.  They become to us like unseen guides and companions as we once again reinhabit time."

When i left my old life, my old self in Michigan years ago,  i was driven by the words   "living hand to mouth".   So, i see this coming back around now.  and  see it again as claiming my days even more.  However it can work.  To fully inhabit time.  Time meaning moments, days,   the experience of being alive.  a life.  To fully inhabit being.

 

 

ok, nance.  next question.   but first, this is the only photograph any one had of my maternal grandmother,  Katrin Marie Ludvinka.   In her mother country,  Moravia,  she was a trained midwife.  She also was the record keeper, as in birth/deaths  property ownership etc in her village there.  i can speak the name of that village but don't know how to spell it.   the spelling looks nothing like the spoken.   anyway,  upon immigrating to America via Canada,  she was no longer able to practice midwifery, did not speak english.  and so, she worked first in the sugar beet fields of Nebraska,  and then the potatoe fields in Owosso, Michigan and supplemented her income by occasionally assisting at a birth,  taking in ironing  and selling eggs.  i never knew her.  she died just months  before i was born.  But  the story of her that my mother told upon my request was that some unforseen expense would arise and every time, like Every Time,  Katrin would somehow miraculously sell just enough eggs,  iron just enough shirts or sheets and the expense would be met "to the penny".   

so.  the next question is:  is this minimal cloth and any other's like it that may come along, is this cloth worth $48.00,  or,  the cost of 6 bales of alfalfa?  which  is what i need, weekly, for the Goats.  if now and then,  a cloth would sell,  it would be good.

you look at a lot of  fabric art.  what do you think?  AND,  does this, factored in change your mind about leaving it exactly as it is now?

 

 

 

 

 

 

ok.  the progression.  any of which can be Undone/Changed

Feeling odd.   like i NEED to Not Know anything at all.  Like i need to move through the days, singularly, each as they come, uhhh,    blind.    Blind in some way.  Blind is the word that seems to stick.   an odd word for an odd time.  Maybe, Re feel it all?  develop some other kind of Sensing???  set aside all familiar definitions????

and this.    Wendy, of Grace and Mending,  set all this in motion by sending me some excerpts from this really incredible book.  She had used it as the text for one of her classes.  and then,  nance sent the actual book.  i don't know exactly how to talk about this book,  this stunning incredible book.

and then, this.  the woven part done long ago in Jude's Cloth to Cloth  and now, this odd moment, when the butterfly and the caterpillar remain paired.

so…i don't know.  am waiting for something to happen.

 

 

the first real "winter weather".  wet miserable goats.  what can i DO?  now, dark dark dark and Wind.  that diagonal Wind that breaks fences sometimes.  so inbetween, i stitch.  finishing that Other Cloth that came just before Grieving and got set aside.  This one too will travel.   Can't wait till light to see how it looks, so this here, with the flash, so not quite true,  more defined than in the light of day

very close to finished.

??????? it's just there.  on the wall.  out of character.

and this.  a Relief.  a Reprieve.  Just a piece of walnut dyed harem cloth.  really, to me, just as beautiful as anything could be.

 

 

 

 

i know.  i know that it simply is the way it needs to be.  but still,  these loooong stretches of darkness wear on me.   i am better with them, but still, they wear on me.  so i found myself doing this on the wall just to the left of the morning chair, where i wait for the Light

some, like this last, glued on cardboard i have had for 20 some years.  some are print outs of Jude Hill's work that work with things inside me that i want to let out.  some are recent found images. 

so this wall is my companion as i wait for the Light.

 

 

finished.

now it will rest until the other cloth is finished and then will travel a while.  It will be interesting to have it gone and then return.   We have work to do, this cloth and i, together.   

Much of the scraps that i love are from Deb Lacativa…that greeeeeeeeen damask,  the Sun  and  Moon.  other pieces are plant dye from here, Wind is this last summer's attempt at indigo vat.  the rest recycle scraps from our Thrift Shop.  At the bottom, in left of pic,  7 alternating stitches of black/white thread,  a red thread bead, then one more each black/white.   this will be recognized in michigan.   almost all the fiber figures i used to make had that mark  but made with seed beads,  one african blood bead.  so, things circle around.

here is the ecstatic moment the other day from Jude Hill's Spirit Diaries.   suddenly seeing in a totally different way,  the nature of this damask,  suddenly understanding that i could put those few seemingly random stitches and they would work in a way i'd never imagined.  it doesn't look like much, but it was and IS and will be.