all the pins are out…

I’ve finally managed to get all the pins out… the seams are all either stitched & finished… tacked / basted… or fixed with hidden stitches… so the quilt is now easy to transport… it’s been to my art group… so instead of painting I sat and sewed… and it’s just had an outing to ‘team combat’… it attracted rather a lot of attention from the other Mums running a taxi service…!!!

all packed up… my Grandmother would be telling me off, if she were still around… ‘the stitching on the back should be as neat as the front…’ this statement brings me around to the word conceptual…

I’ve been thinking about the word ‘conceptual’… the speaker on Saturday used it a lot…I took a look on Wikipedia

“Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.”

so after considering the above… does this mean that ‘my slow cloth’ is conceptual art…? in making this woven cloth I’m not following traditional methods of working and I’m not paying much attention to how the different fabrics are normally treated…

so if my Grandmother would tell me off for the stitching on the back… I would hate to think what she would say about the front… with its raw and fraying edges (much encouraged fraying I will add)… but if I were to say ‘but it’s conceptual art’ would this stop her…? it’s certainly stop me…

dotty…

what else could you do but add dots to this fabric…?

it’s all about the process… enjoying the making… taking time to master the stitches

the weather has had a hand in picking these colours…

while pondering the Feb. challenge I’ve continued to work on Jan. woven cloth…

 can you tell it’s cold outside…

 it’s a bit chill inside too…

couldn’t even get out to do the afternoon school run… so plenty of time to sew…

time to ponder… and contemplate… trusting to the process and enjoying the making… I’m begin to think like this in other areas of my life too… not just my ’slow cloth story’…

trusting to the process…

this is not going well… I’ve tried to finish the end of this strip off with more weaving… but cutting into the backing fabric was perhaps not such a good idea… it’s fraying… I just need to try and put a needle through and it splits apart… room for improvement here I think…

the first seams…

stitches have been added… the first seam done… it came together with

simple running stitches…

while the second demanded more sophisticated treatment…

first the stitches had to follow the weave in the fabric… then the velvet wanted more than running stitch… so a few French knots crept in…

here you can see the first two seams stitched…

it certainly is easier to stitch without the pins in… I’ve not counted the number of seams left to stitch… but this is one Tifc that is not going to be finished by the end of January…

the process of stitching is giving me time to ponder… to contemplate… ( meditate even… something I’ve tried to do in the past with very little success… ) getting enjoyment out of the making of this woven cloth, without a final product in mind, really is relaxing… this ’slow cloth’ approach is just great… so it seems…. ‘it’s the journey, not the destination’… therefore… it’s the process not the finished article that’s important… well that’s what it feels like at the moment…

the flowers have started growing…

a couple of flowers have made an apperance…

while the progress on the woven cloth may be as slow as a snail… I’m getting so much out of the process… just taking the time to sit quiet and sew… the time to ponder and let your mind drift… it is a lovely relaxing way of working… trusting to the process… to let things develop at will… this to me is what ’slow cloth’ is all about…

the cloth knows what it wants…

I started stitching… I simple followed a few of the holding stitches as a way of starting… the dark green thread contrasted nicely with the pale green damask…

while I was stitching this… looking for somewhere to add a doorway… flowers just appeared… so the cloth now has the start of a flower garden…

where will they lead to?… maybe a secret… or two… this cloth seems to be growing fast… while I’m still pondering on the word slow…

joining the seams…

not sure if I explained very well in the last post…

so I thought I’d try adding a few pictures

first find a seam…

then make a slit in one fabric… and push the other fabric through…

now wait to see how it wants to be stitched down…

taking on a life of it’s own…

while I was sorting / ironing my fabric things just seemed to start happening… several of the pieces of fabric had already been torn into strips…

so it just seemed natural to work with strips of fabric… I joined some together… soon having quite a large pile… all this seemed to happen with very little thought on my part… you could say that the fabric decided what it wanted to be…

 

the strips were only pinned together… but without any sewing happening first… the fabric strips just seemed to say ‘weave me’ … so that’s what I did… this was a completely different way of working for me… normally I would have drawn a design out first on paper… measured everything carefully then cut and sewn everything together pressing the seams as I went…

but as you can see… I have a woven piece of cloth… uneven… both in terms of size of strips and colour and tonal value… if I’d followed my normal way of working I would be re-weaving this so that the colours would be ‘better’ spaced I would have spend hours arranging things… but this time I just let the cloth ‘do it’…

I ended up with some wonderful combinations… so thanks Sharon B for the take it further challenge… and thanks Jude for your what if’s… I feel that maybe this slow cloth is starting to evolve into a story cloth as it certainly took on a life of it’s own in it’s early development…

daylight…

… before sorting and ironing and… after… a much reduced basket full

 while I started with Sharon B’s suggested colours I ‘took things a little further’…