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…

just a few stitches…

to help hold the woven cloth together… I’ve attached the woven cloth to a piece of upholstery fabric to give it some stability and a little stiffness so that I have something to stitch into…

big stitches on the back… but only little ones on the front…

as I’m not sure if I’m going to leave them in… or maybe I will cover them with other stitches… I’ve had great fun with the ’seams’… as I said in an earlier post I had only pinned the fabric strips together… so to join them I’ve cut slits in one fabric and fed the other one into the first fabric…

(did that make sense? hopefully you can see what I mean in the pictures)

where the join occurred under another strip I cut a slit in that too and fed both ends through…

I feel that I’m now ready to start to tell the cloth’s story… certainly a few stitches will be used… maybe a few of my doorways will be added… but I’m coming to the conclusion that the next take it further challenge will be posted before I’ve finished this one… unless I get a lot of stitching time…

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…

Hello slow world!

Welcome to my new blog… this is my journey into the world of slow cloth… I’m starting my journey with a challenge posted by Sharon B over on ‘Take it further challenge

Sharon posts both a key concept and a colour scheme… and these are to be my starting points… for my journey into the world of slow cloth…