Doodling.

Ideas come from all sorts of experiences.  I was talking to a landscape architect; we're in dispute with our builder over the garden, it's a long story, won't bore you with it... and he was very helpful, but he did go on a bit...I took some notes on the back of an envelope...and ended up doodling.  As you do...well, as I do, certainly...   Ended up with this

And, as you do, wondered what to do with it.  The star shapes could probably be pieced; the internet is full of videos and blog posts with instructions.  But they would be based on a central square; this is based on a Very Large Circle...make that Oval...  I like the smaller of the two, better, the one where the central oval dominates the uneven star shape.  So... applique.  Evolon, probably.  With yarn couched in an irregular spiral, to give a similar effect to the drawing; an applique'd centre would be too heavy.  A printed centre would be too flat.  This is about movement, more than anything.  Would want to be on a dark, hand dyed fabric (haven't got any).  Stars randomly scattered around the surface (random is more difficult than you would think).  Or suggesting an underlying grid (would take a good deal of measuring and marking, but might be worth it).  Or a large central(ish) star, and lots of smaller ones scattered around. 

In the end, the landscape architect was too busy to help us in a timescale that met our needs, though he did make some useful suggestions.  And I got another idea out of it, and three versions of it, to boot. Will I make this?  Probably not...doesn't fit in any of my themes for work.  Mind you, it would be Fun.  Everybody should have a fun category.  Yeah...fun...what the hell...

Seeing Things

Pondering what to do with this piece of dye painted cloth, which I found in the wooden chest upstairs.  Not long before I moved, I did some dyeing with my friend Clare Hedges; she dyed some warps for her loom, I stuck to cloth.  She wrote about her day, and what she did with the warps,  here; I love the braid she made from them.

But I digress (so what's new, huh?). Like the photograph I showed you on Monday, it made my heart sing when I found it, a combination of the brightness of the colours and the movement in the piece.  I'm not sure about the orientation, though... this feels 'right', but landscape is not an orientation I usually use.  So there's this...

..which looks to me to be promising, too, but with a different feel to it altogether...it feels as if all the marks are trying to escape out of the right hand side of the cloth.  Turning it over, as we did above, somehow grounds the movement, almost literally.... it becomes an abstract landscape of sorts, in my head, at least, albeit with a lot of sky, while the top piece feels as if things are completely air borne.  I wonder how many of you can see what I see...or indeed if you see anything at all.  You can let me know; that's what the comments are for!

It's tempting to simply iron the cloth, and leave it as it is, as a painting.  I won't, though, because I think it needs texture, and leaving it flat just isn't going to work for me, whichever orientation I end up choosing.  That said, if I ever get a painting studio, this will be used as the basis for a painting or two on canvas, complete with texture.  So...stitch it is.  I think.  The other option, of course, is to cut it up and reassemble it... not really an option I want to take with this piece, because it feels like either way, it has a coherence, a meaning, that I don't particularly want to disrupt.  There is, I think, another similar piece in my stash, however, which would let me explore that particular avenue.  And if there isn't, I can always create one....eventually.  It's an avenue that would let me have lots of small pieces, or a couple of medium sized pieces, with the chopped up bits reassembled, either on their own or with other fabrics.  As squares or rectangles, they could become the heart of a log cabin type construction.  Really, the permutations are endless.

Which is why the post got the name it did.  I see things in this cloth.  I see meanings, and I see opportunities.  So far, I've described at least six different ways of approaching this cloth... as two different types of painting, two different types of stitched piece, as two or three different types of pieced work (okay make that at least seven).  Picasso said, 'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working'.  I believe that the process I've just described, is more or less what he meant.  So the next time you 'just don't feel like working', or 'aren't in the mood for working', or however you describe procrastination to yourself, just go look at a piece of cloth, or a painting, or a photograph.  Challenge yourself to find as many options as possible in it.  And then...just do it.