Book The Second...

is right here...

If you remember, what I'd learned from the first one, is that scale is everything; this has been scaled down significantly.  Five simple pieces of cloth.  Two of them, at either end, are rust dyed silk.  The central piece is a scrap of transfer dyed lutradur lace.  The second piece is a very loosely woven silk cloth, not unlike scrim.  The last is a piece of natural dyed habotai silk.  The paper itself was dyed with tannin, birch bark and onion skins, which gives the lovely mottled effect, just right for this project. The book is called 'Fragments', and that is exactly what these are, oddments left over from other projects, other things.  The book gives us the opportunity to look at their beauty, individually and collectively, and restores to them a dignity that might otherwise have been lost.

Let's look at them in detail.

You might be wondering about the stitch.  It's still referring back to the Borderlines piece, certainly, but it comes originally from working with adults with learning difficulties, some years ago now, and from one girl in particular, who took to sewing like a duck to water, and pretty much refused to do anything else.  What I learned from her, was that stitch doesn't have to be regular.  It doesn't even particularly have to be functional, even when you thought that was what you were doing.  It's important in its own right.  When I got ill, she gifted me some of her work, one of the kindest gestures anyone has ever made to me, and it remains one of my most prized possessions.

And here's the reverse.

I think this piece is about memory.  The other side holds fragments of cloth, which remember being part of a larger whole.  This side invites us to contemplate the absence of cloth, to remember what that cloth was like, its colour, its texture.  I find it interesting....I hope you do, too.

Book the third, tomorrow.

PS.  I was standing in the kitchen, after posting this, and realised that this is as much about ME as it is about memory.  The fabric side is a reflection of what I have left; a life of fragments of activity, cut from the whole cloth that was my life, pre ME.  The other side is what it will be like if the condition worsens.  No activity, just the marks of where activity used to be.  Let's hope it doesn't get that bad.