windthread

this

is part of the reason that butterflies are what they are to me.  i am outside, going in/out of the albatros, the giant shed/garage thing out there, loading the truck with stuff that has accumulated for a couple years.  stuff i have dragged home because it's interesting, or i MIGHT need it, use it.  but i haven't and it's all covered with layers of dust.  anyway, so going back and forth, suddenly i become present enough to notice something just to the right of the back and forth pathway…. and it is this Monarch butterfly.  really, quite       …….intact…….    and this would have been at Least through last fall and this winter.  it is lying there…just in the middle of an expanse of sand,  just singularly there,  so exposed to rain, Wind, the elements and so still amazingly perfect.  How can this be?, i wonder?

and i have been looking at the Diaries Cloth while i am stitching the SideOat Grama grass clump.  thinking.  what all do i still want to include?  and i keep thinking butterflies and i keep thinking Many Butterflies but i can't find a way to depict a butterfly that seems right.  but there still remains the desire for Many.  

and in the mail the other day, was the current issue of Buddhadharma mag.  an article in it about a young artist, Ang Tsherin Sherpa who was born in Kathmandu and studied Tibetan thangka painting with his father, Master Urgen Dorje, a renouned thangka artist.  5 years ago, he began focusing on nontraditional Tibetan Artwork  because he is, to paraphrase, curious about how the Tibetan people's culture will maintain while merging with others.  these experiences are explored through the use of his "spirits" iconography.  "In Tibet, it is believed that local spirits are associated with specific geographic regions, its land, and people.  I am interested to know how they continue to adapt now that their original landscape and people have changed or moved on.  I picture them following the Tibetan people around the world. I have them adapting to their new environment just as the Tibetan diaspora must do as they travel and begin to set down roots in new, foreign lands.  Not only will the spirits be exposed to symbols of modern culture but also to artistic techniques that are new to them."  and he painted this:

and i immediately thought that this is how i would like the top of the Diaries cloth to be….SO MANY butterflies….along with the arc of Black birds going east to west, west to east, simply because they can.

 

 

i use the word love a lot.  i am always saying i love something.  thinking about what Doris said,  i spent some time just now watching the fire and thinking about what all i have loved, if i miss things or not, really.  Really.   Do i wish i had kept things i loved?  skirts, people, places…things.  what do i still love?, that i no longer have?

and i got all vague feeling, so i picked up the drawing board next to the Morning Chair with the paper on it reminding me of what i HAVE to do today, written yesterday,  and just put the pencil to the paper without further thought and this is what showed up.

i tried to get a good picture.  can't because of the time of day…SUN owns the morning here.  but what you can see is a drawing of the creek behind the childhood home.  it was down a fairly steep hill in back of the house.  what i drew first was the enormous old willow tree.  then the creek itself.  then,  the fallen log on the left that crossed the creek,  the two boards that crossed the little spring that fed into the creek, actually hidden in wild honeysuckle.  the apple trees and a pear tree, gone wild  long before.  the arc on the right is the metal culvert thing that went under the road.  which always represented to me "the rest of the world".  and then there's me, walking down the hill although you can't see the hill.

so…yes.  this is what i still love.  this Place,  which no longer is like this and this period of time when my whole life was centered here.  i don't MISS it, but i love it.  no less now than then.  and i am so gratefull that my self grew from this place.   and somehow,  i don't know,  the clothmaking to me is related to That and Then.  i am going to think about this but right now, i need to go to work.

so..here's to love………..

 

 

I love how things become.  transform.  morph.  right before our eyes,  if we're looking.  if not,  it happens anyway and at some point down the road,  we notice.  or not…..

My visit with Rene is still having it's effect.    I'm thinking she is like a mordant? …  < interesting thought >   and,  she is very much a mirror.

I  can't tell it all here,  just some,  which makes these days now open out into the Next.  which i've said the Diaries Cloth is….the cloth of Next.  and without explanation or qualification, I can Tell this:  from an almost incidental moment in our two day conversation:

Our lives feel to us as if having been seperate "movies".  Segmented.  that we were certain selves in each, transforming, morphing (there's that word again) as the "episode" required.  and now, each of us is in the "next".  We are at different points in a human life time~line.  I think she's probably twenty some years younger than i, so has many more episodes to go?  and I imagine fewer for my self, or even that this is my final form?

and THEN,  some events and brief conversations,  co~incidental,  in the subsequent days,  about entirely seperate things, have Presented a really great realization:  That all those episodes, those movies, those periods of time and life are

Complete.

in and of themselves.         That i need not "refer" to any of them to inform each day as it comes now.  it can all be NEW in a certain way.  ~!!!!!!~

a few weeks ago i found this blouse at the Thrift Shop

i really love it.  it "talks" to me.  and i think about the upcoming Contemporary Boro class of Jude's.   clothing.  personal adornment.     Personal Adornment.  and  i am realizing something.  that i really have less an urge to adorn my self than see how cloth adorns my space.  Said a different way,  to just SEE  cloth.  as  an Equal almost "life form" that i share space WITH?

here, the curtain wears the blouse.

and now, the futon.

This post might not make a lot of sense, but remember, this blog is primarily a Cloth Journal.  where i document the story of my growing relationship with cloth.  So,  it's ok.

 

but only sort of.  today was replenishing the wood pile. 

so in the meantime, please go see Lynda Merry's blog, which i think is lyndamerry.typepad or i wonder, sorry for the sloppiness of this, but go look at her streetpeople.  they are totally mesmerizing to me.  i LOVE them ……. keep looking at them.  they are REAL in the way she is creating them, they are beauty Full and so as if they could at any moment become animated.

 

 

and as It moves in its' arc,   It shines down upon me   …  cleaning.  cleaning the Room.  i will have company on wednesday.  the cleaning began a few days ago with yet more divesting.  i am getting close to spartan.  who would guess.   and as i look at what i've done,  i see that i have really become serious about this cloth stuff.    it's pretty much all there is left.  a few drawing pads.  my colored pencils.  the box of drawing tools,  like blending sticks and erasers..the stump of my first pink pearl.  so what's left, i have moved from here to there, there to here.  looking.   in a stack of folders of all the classes of the MotherShip, there were these two cloths.  i stitched them together and stuck them on the window as Moon turned the sky that amazing evening blue,  a color that Glennis gets a lot with her indigo dye.  the artificial light in the Room made it's own changes.

these are two cloths from the first class, Spirit Cloth.   parts of them are on this Diaries Cloth.  today Jude commented about how maybe parts of the beasts, of us, come loose and become integrated into our environment.  yes.

 

 

this is the first time that there has been enough of an issue of ,  uhhh,  lumpiness,  for me to feel like i am going to have to actually DO something about it.  since this cloth is going to be roaming around the house, around Me, and not on a wall once it's done,  i might just let it go.  but the pooching is definately there with the dense stitching of the Feather Grass.  i was aware all along, but then suddenly it was beyond being able to be pressed flatish with my fingers.  what to do, i don't know. 

and the grasses here are only about half done.   that will make it harder.  i put the two pieces of what might be rock cloth there, thinking i could pull the ripples "under them" when they go on?, maybe.

and i went outside to look at the Feather Grasses and realized that how i have been depicting them is how they are in the spring, when they are "new" and more upright.  now, in winter, they are all "out", i guess, feathery.  hmmmmm.

and this morning when i awoke, i saw something on the kitchen floor…a tiny perfect ….. dragon!  and squated down to see it more closely, picking it up, realized it was a dried out piece of Arugula from my salad.  but still, a tiny perfect dragon.

 

 

so,  here is the rack with pretty much all the cloth on it that i have dyed  (local plants)  in the last 2 years.  except for what is part of the Diaries Cloth.  i borrowed the rack Tuesday and have looked for 2 days.   it takes space.  but i really like it.  i don't know why.  but having them stitched together and STORED this way brings a mysterious sense of anticipation to the house.

the recent onion skin yellows,  i want to leave pinned to the curtain for a while

am still learning from this.  i would have never thought of having anything  YELLOW  in here, but i like very much how it changes the whole room.

THEN…….at the Thrift Shop yesterday, i found this cotton/linen shirt.

i like the weight of it.  so, i modified it a little,  and yes.  will use it in the Contemporary Boro 2 along with the Traveling Jacket.

otherwise,  back to stitching grasses.  this time, the Mexican Feather Grass. 

there are 3 seperate cloths.  pretty much all the browns that i have dyed.  the one on the far right is the one in the previous post.  it's early evening and hard to get any true color.  i had no idea i had these cloths…well, i knew that i had a basket referred to as Stuff i Dyed, but it was just a basket of cloth.  all is cotton,  silk noile, and linen.  all just plunked in either an aluminum or cast iron pot and left in the Sun.  Summer dyes.

and this.  this one strip with a notation.  Yerba Mansa.  8/10.  this would have been when the thought of moving to California first arose.  i think at that point, i detached from looking closely, here.  but isn't it interesting.  this is a color i have been wanting in the last months.    the Yerba Mansa this is from was in a pot by the front porch.  it died last summer, but i don't know, it also might be a biennial?  whichever, i have access to endless amounts of it.  it is common here.  today i see that it is a color similiar to the colors of the eucalyptus that i have longed for.

this has been Some Day.

 

in Magic Diaries 2,  Jude talked about    Storing   cloth by stitching it together.   what is pictured here is nothing at all like the cloth she pictured,  but i was completely taken by the idea.   and then, i went back over to Southerly Post, Elizabeth's blog in Ballarat and for some reason an old post was there waiting for me.  a wooden clothes rack with fabrics drying……and those two ideas magnetized.  YES.

stitch the color houses together and just drape them on a wooden clothes rack.  easily accessable, easily alternated.  loose running stitch so that if a piece is needed, it can be easily taken out and the color house put back together without it.

so as an experiment, so i don't lose the thought, i found some browns (in all different places) that were the results of last summers dye pots.  i really had no idea that all this was there.  and there's probably even       more.  but, for now…………

and in looking at this,  i realized that all this was connected to the realization yesterday,  that i will need some rocks and stones on the Diaries cloth.   Isn't It All just Somethin.