weaving cloth

I watch the magic that Jude creates when she takes strips and scraps of cloth and weaves them into whole pieces and makes a story of them.

Way back in another age, I was taught to turn and finish and hide the seams... way back I had problems coming to grips with the raw unfinished edges on 'art' quilts, but the more I work with the ripped and torn, the easier it gets.

This little piece of weaving was just 'for' - not part of anything, not with a purpose, not to exhibit, no one to ask 'what is it for' - it was just for me, to stitch and touch.

It might turn into something else or it might just stay as it is and go into a drawer and years later I'll find it to touch again and be reminded that things don't always have to be 'for' or finished or turned and tucked.

a bag....or maybe not

I started to make this little patchwork bag, really like the way the three fabrics were used in the pleats...and then I thought 'what the devil am I going to do with this bag' I can only just fit my hand inside it, it's way too small to put all my junk in, I don't go places where I need a delicate little clutch bag.....
but it does.. sort of..look like a cocoon
I seem to have a thing for cocoons lately, snug little nests, somewhere to crawl into and hide from the world ....nothing to do of course with the fact that daughter has just moved back home, VERY temporarily, and we are trying hard not to invade spaces...

slow cloth and practical pottery #6

I added a couple of strips of rusted cloth to the bottom left corner but wasn't happy to leave them alone, so drew the outlines of more pots and coloured them with fabric crayons, then outlined and filled in with embroidery

slow cloth and practical pottery #5

Here is a little more of my slow cloth project, I wasn't sure enough of my drawing skills to work directly onto the fabric, so made a couple of attempts on paper first, then pinned the tracing paper to the fabric and stitched through it onto the fabric.





I really like the shadows and lines that the stitching creates in the fabric, a bit like digging furrows in a field.

really cute

Want to see something really cute - these photos are not mine but have been circulating around my friends and their friends - we have been having incredible heatwave conditions, it's our turn in NSW this weekend but the southern states of Victoria and South Australia have really been hit hard the past week.

This little koala wandered onto someone's verandah trying to escape the heat, so she put out a basin of water for it.

New curtains and cushions

Oh waily, waily, waily,
it's SO HOT!!
....and everyone from UP THERE keeps posting their snow pictures!

I decided to tough out the heat in my sewing room and make a new kitchen curtain - none of the squares line up because it was too hot to measure the window first, (well that's my story) I just kept adding bits then holding it up to the window.
I'ts really hard to get used to not looking straight out the window so I added a couple of lace squares as little spy holes - and it stops short of the sill so I could show off my teapot collection.



then I remembered some UFO cushion covers started yonks ago, so I finished them off by adding the back and some inserts and ticked that off my list!

slow cloth & practical pottery #4

I decided to start numbering the embroidered pottery entries to keep track of them.



After beginning the lettering I thought it needed some colour, so I added a nest of pots using fabric crayons directly onto the material.
Another way of applying the crayons is to draw on paper then place the paper face down onto the fabric and iron, this transfers the reverse of your drawing onto the fabric - I've never had much luck with this method, maybe I haven't had enough crayon on the paper, but it always seems to be a very pale image.



I outlined the pots in stem stitch then filled in the colour with running stitch using matching thread.





then started the stitching on the background - I'm just using running stitch at the moment, similar to kantha style work.

Slow cloth and practical pottery

"...and here we are, back with the gods,
whose thunder and whose thunderous tones
dwell in the plasticity of our clay"

I found this quotation scribbled in one of my clay notebooks but with no attribution.

A search came up with a book by Mary Caroline Richards called
"The Crossing Point - selected talks and writings".

Richards was a potter during the 1960's, she relates creating pottery to personal development. She speaks of 'a hunger deep in people all over the planet for coming into relationship with each other'....and isn't that just what we are all doing here as we visit each other's work.

This 'crossing point' she says is like the image of centering clay on the potter's wheel, we work the body of clay as we work the body of our mind, we make a big vessel of living water that we all need to drink, and we all need to help to make so that it will be big enough to hold us all.

In the chapter called 'Occupational Therapy' she connects clay and song "the inner ear and the moving hand"

She found that the German word for Sound is ton which means both tone and clay, and the common quality of tone and clay is their stretch, their plasticity.

Their ancient root is TA: to stretch. We hear it not only in tone, but in tendon, tension. The Latin word 'tono' means to resound, and 'tonens' is thunder, the thunderer, the thunderer God Jupiter - and here we are, back with the Gods!
Isn't that an interesting connection!

This was a fascinating book which I am still reading, you have to love the 'innernetz' without it this would have remained a nameless quotation.

And on to my slow cloth, which has me so obsessed it is not slow but progressing very quickly.
I cut a pattern from freezer paper which is supposed to represent the heat flowing around a kiln.





Using a piece of the fabric that I had dyed with rust and iron oxide, I ironed the paper to it then outlined the edges with a Shiva paintstik, This was worked into the fabric with an old toothbrush then ironed to set the paint.



After the colour has set, the freezer paper is peeled off. It can be used again.





Now on with some stitching.