I’ve been thinking a lot about what stories I want to tell and how cloth might be a part of that. This is where it ended up today …

And here’s how I got there.

I’ve been reading Jude Hill’s Spirit Cloth blog from the beginning … again. This time with more insight and the intention of taking notes with Jude’s words on the right and my responses to them on the left …

My all-time favorite cloth (to date) is Remember 2016, with a patch for each day of the year I turned 60. It currently lives on the back of a chair where I can see it every day …

Many of the patches hold words and I realized how much they are a part of my way. So I went to my boxes of cloth looking for these scraps of my mom’s shirt …

It was a simple, printed cotton, button-down shirt … one I claimed from my parents’ house on Shelter Island after my mom died in 2008. I wore it as a nightshirt for years, until it began to fall apart. Then I began to use it in paperless pieced cloth …

a technique learned from Jude.

For this new project, I chose a piece of cloth from the worn elbow, one that had a flaw in it, and pondered what to write …

The pen I used has a pleasingly fine tip, but an annoying habit of vaporizing so quickly that it has to be reapplied again and again …

I chose to stitch the letters in creamy white silk, remembering this picture from Meg’s graduation in 2005, just before mom became debilitated by the cerebral vasculitis that would not be diagnosed until after her death …

Then I moved on to a second patch, inspired by this picture of Meg’s daughter, Parker …

She’s holding a miniature towel I made for the play kitchen her parents got for her second birthday, hence …

Dyed thread by Deb Lacativa

After stitching the words (and I’m feeling a bit rusty as it’s been a while), I pieced the two patches together with an overcast seam …

thereby joining the generations from my mom to my granddaughter …

A perfect pairing …