Sometimes, I just get the urge to sew scraps of fabric together. I have bags with scraps some that I’ve put together after working on a quilt. Some that many of you have sent me.
I was craving bright colors, so I took out the small baggie of scraps that a friend gave me, left over from a quilt she is working on.
In it were some oddly shaped triangles all with similarly striped fabric.
I’m always intrigued by the patterns and depth that striped fabric can create depending on how they are pieced together. I didn’t think about it much, I just tired to makes sure the stripes weren’t going in the same direction.
When I had used up all the striped scraps, I cut them into a rectangle about 5″x6″.
The feeling that kept coming to me was about the mystical nature of the woods where I walk.
This morning I saw a bumble bee sleeping in a hole in a dead tree. The idea of the woods as a whole, where each part is integral to every other, kept coming back to me. How that dead tree was not only a safe place for the bumble bee to sleep, but it also had a cache of hickory shells in another cavity and a spiderweb in a smaller hole.
And that was only what I could see. I know that dead tree is not only full of life, necessary for it.
It was the mystery of the woods that was on my mind, the seen and unseen. How the “eyes” of the woods see and what those “eyes” look like.
I think that what I am saying is that I felt the presence of the woods, in a deeper and more mysterious way this morning.
It was that feeling I was working with as I sewed those scraps together then added the eye fabric.
Then I thought of Carol Conklin’s batiks. The way she painted with wax and dye, the layers of the earth. The macro and micro and how they mimic each other.
So I pulled out the batiks printed on fabric Carol gave me a few years ago and found one which spoke to just that.
It was a long piece and I cut it in half and placed it on either side of the striped fabric and eyes.
I didn’t get much further before it was time to go to the Cambridge Food Pantry to unpack the food from the truck that comes weekly.
I haven’t sewn the dandelions gone to seed on it yet, but I think they will be the next thing I do.
I don’t know where this is going, what it will become, only that I could feel it so acutely and that it was something I needed to do.
I wonder if “dead” is the right word. I’ve been thinking that we tend to think of “alive” and “dead” as a binary choice like “on” and “off.” But that’s an oversimplification, and on us. Maybe “alive” and “dead” are more like pointing out two different places in an ocean.
That makes a lot of sense to me Pete. I’m going to think about that. I’ve beading Walt Whitman recently and this idea, although I hadn’t thought of it that way, is there throughout his poems. If were all a part of everything else, then there really is no “dead”, but content shifting….thanks.