Right now Theo has claimed his rightful throne, which is on my lap when I’m sitting and in my face when I’m lying down. Guido, our 15 year old tomcat, is preoccupied with his tail. I expect that he will start chasing it at any minute now.
I didn’t do anything exciting today. We ran errands, and I made a leftover hash with black beans and jasmine rice and leftover turkey loaf and hot Italian sausage and tomatoes and sweet onions and one little banana pepper from my garden. Ah, I still love that walk through the garden to see what I can come up with even when there’s not a lot.
I’m thinking forward to my trip to Sunset Beach for a week with family. I want to put together several book covers and text blocks ready to bind, and warp my little copper loom in case I want to make a tapestry with found objects from the beach. That idea appeals to me a lot, even though the last time I tried it I didn’t enjoy it. Now I have loosened up quite a bit and won’t be adhering to many “rules” that I used to set for myself.
I looked at my Magic Diaries class online. I love the way Jude expresses her thoughts. She explores words and ideas and talks as she thinks, or she sure does seem to. She mulls over the word “magic” and what it brings to her mind – appearing and disappearing. Things that turn into other things. It is precisely the kind of dialogue that I have with myself when creating, but I don’t have that knack for expressing it to others.
She uses a lot of woven cloth strips in her work, and there is that appearing and disappearing as the strips cross each other. It is one of the things that I love about the paper weaving I’m playing with. The connections of the two strips transform the whole into another thing, or a big group of smaller things. I’ve always thought of the space of the loom as being a magic space. It’s hard to describe, but it seems to me that the cloth comes to life out of those connections, not the fibers that go in and out, even though I know that the fibers are what make the connections.
I got out some patchwork squares that I put together thirty years ago when I was a theater major working in the costume shop. I abandoned them when I realized that they were all of different kinds of fabric and not the same size squares and would be impossible to wash without some fabrics being ruined or shrinking. I don’t really care about that now. This cloth will be for me. I sort of like the idea of combining something that I made so long ago when I was really a different person with something I make now, reflecting some of that change, claiming the parts of me and my history that I don’t like and loving them.
I’ll take photos and share from time to time, but this project will be personal, will be for me. And I might decide to do something completely different, but I like this idea at the moment.
slowly she turned 