Handwork at a Rural Fall Fair

Last year I posted the picture above, of a spectacular mend- a patch on a sheet being used as the background for the cabinets where the annual Fair competition entries are displayed. Like this (note that everyone who entered the Maple Syrup competition has the same last name):


Well, here is the same sheet this year! It must wait in the Agricultural Society barn all year.




And Jude's students might love to see these woven paper entries in the 'paper placemat' competition:


It surprises me how little handwork there is on display, and how little variety there is in the canning and produce competitions. Fifty years ago women and their kids canned a much greater diversity of fruits and vegetables than today. Even ten years ago there were stacks of quilts, though most machine sewn. Fifty years ago women would have displayed much more- tatting, crocheting, even garments. And hand sewn quilts. I talked for a minute with a woman who used to show her "quilts and things".

Things change, of course, and trends to 'saving time' sweep away hand work. But things can also change in response to all of the pressures that force us to 'save time'. Maybe we can just have the time to go slow.

Magic Diaries, Big and Little

I was supposed to be setting the table for a Birthday Party under the arbor, and discovered that the Magic Diaries cloth is now just about the same size as the Birthday Party table. It might be the right size, then. It is still two sections made up of four individual panels, each a double woven or mosaiced base. This is the windblown star:


Along one edge there is a long 'continuous nine patch' or checkerboard border.




I see little nine patches in here, and find myself treating them as little parts of the bigger whole.


And, I'm loving where the once separate panels meet. They are nice places to sew- I can use heavy stitches, or make the seams less visible. But it changes everything when they come together.


As Jude has been teaching us in Magic Diaries, when working on a cloth like this, which doesn't have a fixed model, only a modeller, you notice and insert small details. In the space of the cloth you hold in your hands, you find a whole cloth to work. I thought to take some photos of those I like the most. Here are bits of the same old silk sari, part sun faded, part still vibrant, they are patching each other here.



Where a square became a triangle in a funny way.


Where a set of little blocks clustered.


Where a former Rag of Day, a painter's rag, covered in paint, appears to have a print as the colours pop out because of the colour in the base cloth.


And, as Jude has also taught us, when you fold it up, you see other cloths all together. Here, kind of like the pattern I love, 'Flying Geese'.


And the relationships between triangles and squares.


How the shapes travel over the curves when it is bundled.


So that's what I'm noticing about the Magic Diaries cloth today. I think there is one more border to add, a different kind of checkerboard, one that creates rectangles instead of squares.

Rag of the Day August 25, 2011

-maybe nylon or rayon? I started pinning it on another cloth before I remembered to take a picture. Found on the beach on the north shore of Lake Erie at Clearville Ontario. About 2" x 6".

Translucent feather found the same day on the same beach.


Dog I take to the beach to swim with.

Mending and Hybridity

I've settled on the focus for my Magic Diaries cloth, and it is 'hybridity', an overly academic term for the notion that things whirled together in an overly accelerated and border-less world sometimes affix to each other.

Hybrid ideas and images appear in the mundane moments of day-to-day life, when ideas and images and things themselves are slowed down long enough to enter into some kind of relationship. I need a kind of creativity that responds to the possibility in those relationships. For me that creativity is 'mending'-putting together from fragments that have otherwise lost their moorings, or that have been released from those moorings.


Sometimes fragments that have otherwise lost their meaning and value.



I wonder. Is any mended cloth a hybrid? Is any cloth made from fragments with multiple and complex origins a hybrid?


And, here's the big question: is a hybrid cloth made today any different from a hybrid cloth we would all recognize as a 'traditional patchwork quilt' (for example). Does context- where we work from in the flow of time and ideas- matter? This part of the question matters for me- we live in a time when 'things' have such short lifespans, when their transition from 'new' to 'waste' is accelerated.

Is mending a way to deliberately stall the speeding up of that transition, the acceleration so characteristic of today? Can the creation of the hybrid mended cloth be a way to create new moorings, even in the face of processes that make that creation seem impossible?


So my Magic diaries cloth is, I guess, about the magic of mending things together. Not 'back together', just together. This is why found cloth and gifted cloth and second hand cloth and stuff that would be waste is so important to me I realize.

For The Magic Feather Project

This represents a long story, too long to send with it, but I'll share it here. One day about two years ago I saw two perfect little feathers falling from the sky. No, really. I was standing in a gravel parking lot that used to be a train station for a long defunct regional passenger line (the London and Port Stanley Railway). The Dog was sniffing around in the brush, I stopped to look at the clear blue sky. And these two little feathers just drifted slowly into my line of sight and landed at my feet.

I bristled with fear thinking "Gawd, I hope this isn't a sign, I'm not equipped to interpret signs....". I picked them up. Two perfect rust and grey breast feathers. Once I got my bearings again, holding them in my trembling hand, I noticed on the lightpost just out of my view, there was a Peregrine Falcon, now looking down at me, looking like she was thinking "What?". So this reminds me of a Falcon who may or may not have played a trick on me.

The base cloth is from a linen handkerchief I bought around the corner at Goodwill; the thread is white silk, some of it dyed with a fresh walnut I found on Sunday. I dyed the base cloth myself in my homemade, chemical free Indigo vat made in a jar I found up the street. So this also reminds me of foraging, and that being okay.

To the mail on Monday!

Feathers of the Day

Yesterday Jude Hill invited everyone to share making her magic feathers. And so I was not too surprised to find these this morning on our walk. First a perfect Hawk feather, tinged with pink that doesn't appear in the photo.


And then this Crow's feather. A bit worn at the tip, maybe pulled out in a fight, maybe shed to grow a newer stronger one.


The Dog stopped for a rest, and I stood in the shade beside her and wondered about the colours I might need if I was going to make a feather based on these. Should I try to make them brown and a bit pink? Should I just make them white? Oh. The Dog had stopped under a walnut tree.


My white silk from Julie Northcott-Wilson arrived on Friday.


I'm kind of amazed.

Thank You Arlee Barr

I won a prize- the Anniversary Gift from Arlee Barr's Fyberspace Naturally Dyed and Ecoprinted Fabric shop.


I tried to hang it all up under the arbor. I had to keep slackening the line to fit more on. And this isn't even everything.



And everything, each and every piece, is a singular work of art. A treasure.


A world of possibilities.


Full of contrasts and resonances.


Inspiring.


Thank you Arlee Barr. You are astonishingly talented, and you are quite insanely generous- for sharing your work with me like this, but for encouraging and inspiring too with a gift like this.