Tag: Stitch

A dream come true

~ Liz A ~ 19 Comments
May 7, 2021 – A torn and tattered heart reimagined

I scrolled and scrolled to get to this post in Mo’s blog and her reply to a comment …

The rest is Kindred Spirit history, beautifully documented on Mo’s blog through the tag I dream of a world where love is the answer and in an online catalog of her resulting Artsite Gallery exhibit.

It was the online catalog that led Andra Stanton to send me an email inviting me to contribute to a book she was writing for Schiffer. I confess to being skeptical at first, but she included the title of her book, Dimensional Cloth, which convinced me to explore further.

Many emails and two years later, Andra’s latest book, How Art Heals, has now been published …

and the oddment from Mo’s exhibit, first written about in my original blog …

appears on page 156 (where credit is incorrectly given to me for the first photograph, but was actually taken from Mo’s online catalog) …

All of which I find most amazing. So thank you Mo for making this possible … on so many levels. And to Old Man Crow for the words and music that carried us through. May we all continue to dream.

Bell bottom blues

~ Liz A ~ 39 Comments

I was the last kid in my high school to get bell bottoms because my mom, thinking that the “fad would never last,” refused to buy something that she was sure I wouldn’t wear for more than a month.

When she finally relented and let me get a pair, they were too short and definitely not Levis. It ruined me for life. Once I got a job and my driver’s license, I bought my own jeans: long and Levi’s. To this day, my jeans have to be dragging-the-ground long and yes, they’ve got to be Levis.

I present to you Exhibit A, from my high school yearbook …

and Exhibit B, from last week …

So yeah, some things never change. Fortunately, my mending skills have improved somewhat (along with my taste in shoes and socks). For instance, I did try stitching a pair of jeans a few years back …

But this time I wanted to try a patchplay solution. So I sacrificed a much-loved-but-no-longer-worn denim dress, first cutting off pieces of the hem …

and then attaching them to the trimmed back edges of my jeans. This patch was attached with Jude Hill’s glue stitch (seen here on the “other side”) …

and this one was attached with running stitch (also a b-side view) …

I bound the raw edges on the inside with blanket stitch, but for the outside I used Jude Hill’s wrap stitch and two strands of Deb Lacativa’s magic thread …

To good effect methinks …

Now I just need to tackle the Levis that I bought at a Wimberley thrift store for two-bucks-a-pop and wore to shreds …

It’s a good thing that old dress has a lot of bound edges!

Red redux

~ Liz A ~ 17 Comments

“Things you value and know to be true.”

Acey’s words finally sank in as I continued to work on the second red square, the one that called out “poinsettia” in response to Dana’s comment …

Things I value and know to be true.

Home.

Family.

Food is love.

And this community of cloth … the one I entered upon finding Jude Hill’s Spirit Cloth … the Kindred Spirits.

So I guess it wasn’t surprising that I travelled back in time to my initial explorations, which included the Kitchen Towel Series. Pieces that had purpose, not only as a tool in the kitchen, but as a way of testing the durability of cloth and stitch, how they might withstand many trips through the laundry. They withstood it quite well, it turns out.

And so it grew in my mind to create a new kitchen towel …

And to finally finish another one begun two years ago …

Because, one can never have too many kitchen towels …

no matter how long they last.