enlarged to show details

i've been hermiting a lot lately. poking around in my brain. remembering. connecting. digging aimlessly through scraps and threads.  been feeling disconnected from the community around me. but not yet ready to venture forth into the thick of it. so content myself with fingering salvaged bits of cloth that once clothed neighbors. and strangers from town. scraps culled from known and unknown quilters' fabric dross. while feeling a sense of community amidst these salvaged fibers, a thought filled my mind about creating a human wrapping cloth. a product, i'm quite certain, of my journeys with jude... but also, perhaps, a gesture to pay homage to the longing to feel connected to those around me.

last night the dark skies became crowded with rolling spring storm clouds attempting to cool the day's heated edges while i sat in my tiny house filled with a giant dog and too many big dreams and stitched together remnants of cloth. of community. an attempt to slake this thirst. i'm not ready to spread the emerging cloth out for eyes to peck at like hungry birds, so you will have to be content with these folded excerpts.

this is just the first row of soon to be many. it will be flat. i think. but still a human wrapping cloth. not intended to lazily stretch itself out across the expanse of a bed, but to embrace and cuddle the human body. constructed primarily of 6" squares and 6" X 12" rectangles and soon to be joined by circles (moons?) and smaller squares, if only for good measure. being much larger in scale than i've been working in of late, i've pulled out the old treadle sewing machine again and done my piecing therewith. though i quickly found i missed the texture and interesting bits of color afforded by hand-stitching the seams open with variegated threads... to that end, i am now going back and needle chanting them in place while contemplating my community and how these scraps may have once fit into the lives that once held them.

this morning i planted another oak tree in the front yard. a 14 foot twig, really. some day i hope to bring my treadle out and sit beneath its spreading branches to sew in its cool shade. but for the moment, i am content in its infancy and am delighting in its twigginess.

i'd like to say that i will be getting back on track to posting every other day. spreading my own creative branches once more. offering cool shade to wanderers. my own ideas enlarged to show details. but for right now, i am sitting within my own twigginess...

namaste'