Needle Lace

Day 33: I seem to have got caught up in the web of slow-stitching. The appeal of being able to do what I feel like doing at any particular moment, and doing it wherever I want to do it is rather liberating after hours, days, months, years, decades of devoting myself to specific projects and their particular demands. For the last several days, I have been thinking that my current piece wanted some needle lace in one of its open areas. To that end, I backstitched a rectangle to be the framework, and then worked several rows of simple corded buttonhole. Halfway through the patch, I said, "Hmmm...it wants some holes," so I made a few over the next couple of rows and then finished off with corded buttonhole again. Why? Because I could. And that's what slow-stitching is all about. Having fulfilled my zen moment, now I will resume the rigid discipline of quilting until I have completed the obligatory ten "petals" for the day.

The List Keeps Growing

Day 31: To date, I have contributed 240 photos to the Burke Herbarium (WTU) database, covering 133 taxa. The most recent addition was Cyathus striatus, also posted here on the 10th. The list keeps growing! And so I can keep a handy record, I decided to slow-stitch the name of each species onto a piece of cloth I dyed lightly with tea and lobster mushrooms. The embroidered list will be wound on a wooden sewing spool if there's room. Where pieces of fabric have to be joined, I've used lazy-daisy flowers and leaves to cover the seam. I add at least one species each day, sometimes two (to make up for the days I occasionally miss). That's about all my eyes can take when working on cloth with a thread count of 40/inch. Right now, I'm working my way through the vascular plants. Then I'll dip into fungi and lichens. I suspect my four-inch hoop isn't wide enough to add "Myriosclerotinia caricis-ampullaceae" all in one go.

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.