Tag: Stitch: Lettering process

Story Cloth: a beginning?

~ Liz A ~ 24 Comments

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 …

How I (don’t/can’t/won’t/never) follow recipes

~ Liz A ~ 11 Comments
I’ve mentioned many times before how I am seemingly incapable of following recipes, to which the following links attest:
http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/search?q=Follow+recipes
Nonetheless, I love having recipes as a jumping off point. This morning, it was this from Austin Kleon …

I walked around the house with this in mind, thinking how I’ve been “stuck” recently … with so many projects that I can’t choose which to work on, so I do nothing.
Which brought to mind Remember 2016

http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/search/label/Remember%202016

where one small patch a day added up to something worthwhile.
And the Peace Pin Project
http://imgoingtotexas.blogspot.com/search/label/Peace%20Pin%20Project
which likewise became more than the sum of its parts.
So I sat down, tore off a bit of cloth, and wrote “each day one small thing” …

which is what Austin Kleon’s quote had become in my mind.
But as I started to stitch I realized that my days, the good ones anyway, add up to far more than one thing. By the time I started stitching this I had already made myself breakfast, read the paper, started a load of wash, called (and called and called and called) my senators …

through ten minutes of busy signals and voice mail boxes before getting through to live staffers and lodging my opposition to the insanity they call tax reform.
And so the cloth got edited and became “each day many small things.”
I’ll probably have more to say about that, hopefully soon. For now, I’m going to go do some small things …

Word matters (part 2)

~ Liz A ~ 9 Comments

So, I’ve never been a big fan of my own handwriting. Somehow the letters always end up different sizes and there’s no consistency in their formation. A calligrapher I will never be.

But I did pick up one very useful tip in my middle school library teaching days: don’t even try to align letters on a bulletin board … stagger them instead.
Both these truths are realized here …

Heck, even when I draw a guideline (here done in water-erasable pen), I can’t manage to follow it. But at least the lettering is uniquely mine. And I’m very happy with my new set of permanent markers, purchased on sale from Dick Blick. They are 0.05 mm (half the width of an XS Pitt pen) which is fine enough to hide behind the single-strand split backstitching I favor (aka “splitting hairs” in Jude Hill’s lexicon) …

Speaking of Jude, I have to credit her “Flower Power” post 
with pulling this peace patch out of my brain (where it’s been germinating for a while) and onto a piece of indigo shibori … not exactly tie-dye, but close enough. 
A couple of seams later, I had the latest peace shawl patch …

which I like even better on the b-side …

P.S. I always wanted to be a hippie, but I missed the boat by a few years. Still, my kids and grandkids might argue otherwise, especially after receiving the books detailed here: