Stitching

Art Retreat, Day 1

Stitching

Welcome to my own art retreat. I am retreating a few hundred feet from my house, into my cabin. Where it smells good, there are no dishes to wash, and it is quiet. The kids are at camp, and I have a rare 5-hour stretch of time alone.

The first day I spent working on this piece which I call, eh, well, I don’t have a name yet. It keeps changing. Tree Witches is what I call it most often.

I can pick away at the tree branches here and there — in little scraps of time — but I couldn’t envision the larger piece or the next steps while watching kids roast hot dogs or waiting for the water to boil. In those moments, I can do the simple stitching, but not the creative work. In those moments I need the simple stitching, so I can give my brain a rest and find some calm. Today I have calm and silence and a clear desk, all to myself. And so now my brain is ready to open and my thoughts are ready to play. Such a treat.

Art & Math

Inspiration, Stitching

I have been making lots of English paper pieced squares recently, and the grids are bringing my mind to math and ratios and angles.

I found this video after spending some time reading about the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. The three videos in this series are fascinating (and so quick-paced, it’s helpful to watch them twice). I pulled out my sketchbook halfway through the first one.

Scrambling

Stitching

I had a storycloth that wasn’t meant to be — the figures were meant to be in different stories. I started it while in a class with Jude Hill, and I was following along with her process. I reworked the central figure a few times, but it just never felt right. So I cut it each figure apart and tried moving it around to join different pieces that I am working on.
I find that I like the two tree figures as a pair, singing or howling together.

Under the Clouds

Stitching
Under the Clouds storycloth

I spent the last week in and around Glacier National Park in Montana. Spring mountain weather being what it is, there was a lot of rain on the western side of the mountains. We could see, very clearly, how the mountains caught the clouds and there they would sit until they had dropped enough rain to make it up and over the peaks. Cresting the Continental Divide, we would very quickly emerge from the clouds and into open blue skies. But where we sat, or hiked, on the West side was always covered by clouds. We could get glimpses of snowfields and rock faces, but then they would disappear again while another mountain peaked out.

All this sitting under the clouds got me a little gloomy. But then the summer solstice came. And I spent it under the clouds. Even through I knew it was the longest day of the year, it felt like the big skies of Montana were pressing down on us. And it seemed so mystical to me that the was a bright blue sky with hours and hours of sunlight up there, I just couldn’t see it right now. It raised me spirits and felt a lot like hope — knowing it was there was enough.

Green mountain side with waterfalls running down, ascending into clouds

I did a lot of stitching on the porch of our cabin, reflecting on the unseen sun and listening to the evening rain.

Swimming in the Current

Stitching

My little story cloth took a swim on Sunday, when we spent the day next to a mountain creek (the prettiest little creek that you ever did see!). At the time I was very interested in my lunch, when I saw this little bit of fabric tumbling past me in the breeze. I leapt after it, but it moved quickly down to the water and floated on top. I thought it would stop there, since it wasn’t blowing in the wind… but I forgot about the current. The swift current.

It didn’t take me too long to catch the adventuring story cloth, and I didn’t get too wet fishing it out. But I spent a while thinking about the current after that. I had been thinking about electrical currents — the metaphorical charge you feel when an idea flashes through your brain. And also literal currents, since my kids spent the previous day wiring a robo-car with my husband. But now there is a new kind of current to think about — the river current!

What is pulling us? What are the forces that surround us?