big girl quilts

I did more sewing on the deck until 6 pm and then did my walk through and cut the long grass that edged each garden, bending over and not falling, and then we had soup and I lay down again.  Now I’m back in my studio, in-sewing one of the quilts that had gone wonky.  She texted.  She thinks I’m tired and I am.  

Dialogue with the invisible

She knits.

She will finish this work and make others, devoting herself to this occupation of the hands of women for thousands of years, to this creative, calming activity, which legitimizes idleness of the mind and gives the possibility of a secret dialogue, deaf and mute, with the invisible, always present.  

about Russian poet Maria Tsvetena by her daughter Arianna Efron

I do not know and should not be expected to know

I make very simple, large constructed textiles.  All my work is hand stitched, a slow method that gives me solace as well as a place where I can gain perspective in these worrisome times.  

I will make an installation that pays homage to the beauty of damask.  I will highlight the special quality of this type of heirloom linen fabric that becomes more beautiful as it ages.  

Re-reading this proposal is making me have second thoughts about covering the old fabric.  I read Celia Pym’s book on mending yesterday and she said that she wants to show the story of the textile when she mends it and doesn’t cover everything old with new.  

I don’t know and I should not be expected to know at this early stage.  

Conversation with my daughter

You can only talk about your own experience and your own family heritage.  

Mending this bed quilt is more than re-claiming the linen damask backing cloth and more than extending its life.  Mending it in a beautiful, artful manner will honour the life-cycle of the flax and the labour that went into processing the fibres and the weaving of them.  

You are moving this linen from domestic work and allowing it to rest.  

  

Like an ocean. Like the sky.

Why do it? 

The older I get, the more mysterious that seems.  When I’m really working well, the work has no meaning.  I want to get in touch with something more mindless.  Intuitive.  

Things are formless, hard to grasp.  Like an ocean.  Like the sky.  I never thought to call my work a pleasure.  I just felt the compulsion to do it.  The making is not just busy work.  The making and the thinking bypass the brain yet still leave signs of intelligence.  

Vija ‘s Celmin’s  interview in Border Crossing #87 much shortened and paraphrased.  

Linen

Space and Time!  

What I guessed at.  

What I guessed when I loafed on the grass.  

What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed

and again as I walked the beach 

under the paling stars of the morning.  Space and Time.  

Walt Whitman

that story was your life

 I sometimes imagine my whole life as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, quilting it altogether in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced.  As though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.  

Rebecca Solnit. (Abbreviated slightly)