By Any Other Name

Day 10: Puttering around on YouTube, I kept seeing references to "slow stitching," and found myself wondering what the heck it meant. Well, you know what they say about roses and "any other name." Turns out it's nothing more than HAND-SEWING, for pity's sake, but there is a twist on it called "stitch meditation" which appealed to me. Basically, that means doing whatever you want with whatever you have, and having fun while doing it. Odd bits get sewn together...that last tiny little piece of quilt fabric you wish you'd bought more of, tails of embroidery floss long enough to make five French knots, a three-inch piece of bias tape or leftover bandweaving...put 'em together and what have you got? A slow-stitching meditation piece which can be scrolled around an old spool, a dowel, a stick, a dolly clothespin, and then unrolled when you feel like you need a walk down Memory Lane. One variation on the "meditation" particularly appealed to me: the names of all the wildflowers the artist had seen in an area where she was vacationing. I said to self, "All the plants I've photographed for the Burke Herbarium! Yes!" In the end, it will be wound around a vintage narrow-waisted wooden sewing thread spool I've been hanging onto for at least forty years. The fabric is a 32-count cotton, dyed (by me) with tea and a few bits of Lobster fungus to warm the tone. Y'see, I'm coming to the end of the Ring Cycles quilt. Okay, I still have to quilt it, but I needed something to work on in my lap, not sitting up board-rigid at the quilting frame. With each flower name I stitch in, I'm remembering where I saw it, who I was with, what the weather was like, and in many cases, the excitement of finding an oddity, a rarity, even a previously unrecorded weed.