I’ve been stitching these layers together.
Up till now, I had been just piecing the bits, and stabilising them with stitches. Now, I want to make something tough, protective. Marion Michell asked if they were thick, layered strip on strip, after seeing the photos of the pants and vest on an earlier post. They’re not, they are thin and delicate… But it’s funny, because I had just been drawing layers in my sketch book, and picking pieces of fabric out of the pile to try.
So I am layering now. I started with one of the gauzey surgical swabs, opened out into a single layer. It is a very open loose weave, unstable in itself, but as soon as you start to stitch scraps to it, scraps with a tighter weave, they bond somehow… the gauze holds the strips together, and the strips stabilise the gauze. I then turn it over, and stitch more scraps to the other side of the gauze, into the gaps, until I have a complete layer of strips, divided, and held by gauze. Then I turn it again, and fill in the gaps between the shapes on the other side. I repeat the process, intending to cover the gauze completely on both sides. I think I will sandwich the whole thing between more of the swabs, until it is too thick to stitch. At the moment it has started to feel a bit leathery… it is stiffening up with each layer added.
This is still playing. Because I don’t know it yet. Research by any other name… it may get stuck into my sketch book. It might be a piece in itself. It might get cut up and re-pieced to make something else… a protective barrier… protection from what I don’t really know. It harks back to earlier work about care and protection… family…
This I find interesting… it seems I have a recurring theme. I don’t really know where it came from. I can’t find its roots… like it has always been there, there is no starting point for it, when I think I’ve found it it just comes from something that happened in the item before… (“it’s turtles all the way down”)(bag of chocolate buttons for the first person recognising the quote)
Don’t know about you, but I find this both disturbing and comforting at the same time – the old cognitive dissonance again!
Disturbing, because however much I explore, however far away I go, even as far as working on what I thought was a completely different theme with Bo, I come back to the same place. I can check out any time I like, but I can never leave (no chocolate buttons for that one!)
Comforting, because each time I come back, I know more, I have learned something new, I know myself better.
Hmmmm…….
