Interlude: Weaving with cloth

I’m taking an online workshop from Jude Hill of Spiritcloth, learning something about her innovative approach to weaving cloth from other cloth. It’s a freeing experience for me and such a contrast from my rather structured katazome routine. I really enjoy how quickly these pieces of cloth come together. As I tear strips and weave I am loosening up my thinking. Here are my first few attempts.

These little woven pieces also stimulate my own daydreaming. In the piece above I can see ….

a favorite sateen shirt from 30 years ago
limpets gathered on Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland
magenta gladiolas from our August garden (which dyed the silk a light green)
a cloth “palette” I use to test color and off-load my brush when dyeing katazome
an edge of a work called “my sister’s house” …

which of course immediately transports me to my sister’s woodsy place with the salty breezes near the coast of Maine.

anchored weaving with cotton and silk

I used the little stones as weights for one part of the process but I really like how they look on this piece!

one more…

anchored weaving on indigo dyed wool base, silk, cotton, linen

Heart of a nest

I’m contemplating the ideas in a book rich with poetic imagery about houses — The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, first published in France in 1958. The author started his career as a philosopher of science and ended it as a philosopher of the imagination! It’s a slow read, which is fine because I underline many passages, savor them, and then go back to them weeks later. I opened the book at random this morning and came across these gems …
“If we have retained an element of dream in our memories, if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections, bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists of time will appear from out the shadow. We do nothing to reorganize it; with intimacy it recovers its entity, in the mellowness and imprecision of the inner life.” (p.57)

In pondering the qualities of cottage vs. the “manor,” Bachelard muses, “To sleep well we do not need to sleep in a large room, and to work well we  do not have to work in a den. But to dream of a poem, then write it, we need both…Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest.” (p.64)

Then I think of my sister’s house, which always stirs me to daydream and remember.

 

Baltimore Oriole nest