Update on Foraging-Scapes

Sharing the work in progress on this little cloth; I'm using Jude Hills mosaic method here, adding eco-dyed bits on a base. The base cloth is mostly from this sheet (former rag of the day entry).


This is the ribbon scrap B found last week.


Even this, which we found during the first real thaw in February, has found its way in.


It is the long bars on the left hand side of this part.


The yellow square above there is dyed with marigolds. All last summer, B would stop and pick the dead heads off of a neighbor's marigolds. The nerve.

This cloth is helping me see such acts of foraging and how they create landscapes, foraging-scapes. Blending ours with the bees and other pollinators. The sheer patch below is dyed with the few black raspberries that dried on the canes last summer. Each little berry was the product of some little pollinator's work.


I'll explain later that all the dots on this are meant to represent the things that bees and pollinators are foraging for- food, water, shelter. More stitching to accompany this idea.


Last night, stitching away in eccentrically connected paths across the seams on this cloth, I noticed it had weight. Really all of a sudden it weighed something. It is as if once the seams between the woven bands are fixed, when they don't shift anymore, the whole thing gets heavier. Thread doesn't weigh much, so it must be the mending.

Foraging-Scapes

Two years ago, I started little sewing projects that helped me reflect on our work of creating gardens using plants native to this region and area. Details of some of them are here. I started out just using the stuff I had at hand- inherited, bits of old clothes, cloth from the second hand store that I'd picked up over the years.


I wanted to tie the materials to the story of the cloth: telling a story about recovering a landscape by reusing stuff. (That's a pun I think...)


Those little cloths featured my representations of seeds, pollen, water, soil, rain, lightening, day and night, snow, leaves, all the stuff that 'makes' the garden.


And the bugs. All the bugs that show me that the new landscape we are creating here is integrated into a bigger web of life beyond the borders of our yard.


The bugs undid my conventional view of gardens as bounded. This place is part of a landscape of places, all bound up in a web of living things. An invisible network. A 'foraging-scape' maybe.


And so I'm starting another little project about these foraging-scapes, to help me think about them. In honour of the work my little bug friends are doing, of the journeys they are making to link our place up to the other places they go, I'm using 'foraged' stuff for the project.


This is the stuff I'm starting with, dyed with stuff we find on our walks. The cloth so far is some from my Mom's old silk blouses, found rags and bits from found quilts. I'll keep you posted.