A Lull

I'm in the real doldrums at the moment with my stitching and textiles in general. I've nearly finished the first of my stitch pieces for the Guild, but just can't settle to finishing it.

I've still got my ordered squares of linen I took to Birmingham to work on, but have done very little since except stitch them all down to the background. I have a Studio11 session tomorrow, and am feeling all squirbled because I have done no preparation and have no idea what I'm going to do at all, except take pleasure in the space to just be and perhaps ponder. I will at least put some threads together for the linen squares and take my Guild piece to finish!

In part I think it's probably down to some health issues. For several years I've had an intermittent nagging pain in my midriff. Having had some keyhole surgery go disastrously wrong a while ago now, I'd always put it down to aftereffects from this - you don't want to see the scars, I look quilted!! Then, in the week before we went off to the Lakes it got considerably worse for a number of days; so much so that we wondered if we'd go at all, but it settled down to bearable. Since we got back I've been for an ultrasound scan, always a fascinating process, such magical technology. It turns out, I have gallstones! A veritable constellation of them in fact, so my good doctor and I decided today that it's time to sort it out. Expect an announcement of surgery sometime in the future. Hopefully this keyhole will go right ....

Meanwhile I've been reading some treasures. A friend recommended both authors, first Kathleen Dean Moore

Then Kathleen Jamie.

 

Both write wonderfully about being in nature, in very differing ways and in very different places. I've been struck as much by the contrasts as I have by the pleasure of reading. The first, who is American, writes from a philosopher's point of view, and the landscapes she describes could only be those of her homeland. There is a particular quality in what she describes and perhaps also in the way she writes that belongs there; a sense of largeness, openness. I found myself wondering whether growing up in a huge continent with such immense scale somehow evokes a similar expansion of thought and aspiration.

Kathleen Jamie is a Scots poet, and my near contemporary. She has a poet's feeling for language and for the landscape and at times touches on her own past in such a way that I can almost feel myself in the same place and time, so familiar it is. She however, had the courage to follow her ideals; I was never so brave. I have nearly finished the second book, Sightlines; Findings came first, both borrowed from work, and will feel a sense of missing an almost friend when I take them back. Her writing is intimate, her focus often close and with a sense of the deeply personal about it, you feel you have been offered precious bits of her life to share.

I'd recommend them both

Auditioning

I am away from work at the moment, on doctors orders. This gives me some time to nurse the daily hurts that come with having Fybromyalgia and a connective tissue disorder, which leave me feeling drained and exhausted. I don't talk about my health much here, it seems too much like an indulgence, and is only part of who I am. However, I reached a point where I simply had to stop. This allows me to do things at my own pace, to rest when I need to and to take a focused course of Ibuprofen to try and help my body to heal itself. I feel like a convalescent, but the positive side is that I have time to work on a stitch project our Branch Chairman has suggested, a sort of stitch dictionary. We chose two bits of fabric and a piece of folded paper on which was writ our stitch - in my case, blanket stitch. One is to work the stitch in as many variants as possible, using a variety of threads and pushing the stitch to see where it will go. The second bit of fabric is to create an image, using the threads and stitches.

The first task, of course, is to audition threads. I tried a varity, the brief being to use as many different weights and types of thread, and to push the stitch as far as it will go. There were a number that didn't work

This little twist of greens (from Cecil's stash), while full of lovely textures, moves the colour range too far away from "neutrals" which was the brief

likewise, the yellow/orange is, too far away from the initial range. 

So here is what I came up with

the darker piece of fabric will be my test bed, the rosy coloured one I'm keeping for the image. This is my excuse for moving the colours towards the rusty and ruddy, which blend with the darker fabric as well. I have a few ideas for an image, but nothing firm yet. I'm waiting to see what the stitch can do and what it says to me.