Feathers

I've been very carefully hand stitching these bits together, somehow this bit of silk seemed too tender to subject to the machine. Although it is quite robust fabric, the colours are so gentle, I felt hand work was more appropriate. The effect of this is that you have time to look closely at the fabric, time to feel for what will be the best next step. Also there is the simple pleasure of the feel of the fabric in the hand, and the sounds of the needle and thread as they join piece to piece.

There are two of these feather shapes in the orange fabric, serendipity from the folding and tying process. This bit of silk was wrapped around a narrow piece of plastic tube, then squished together so that it wrinkled around the tube. It's a technique called arashi and was, I believe, an area of special expertise in Arimatsu, Japan, where shibori became an industry from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.

In the blue silk I used stitch resist on folded cloth, hence the variety of blues and regular spacing of areas of block colour with rippling lines.

I want to take this feather theme and expand on it a bit. Not too much, because I love the delicate colouring of the silks, so I plant to use minimal stitching to bring out what is there already; stitching that will, I hope, draw the eye to what is in the cloth already, not overwhelm it.