There are diversions and then there are DIVERSIONS! Organizing can be one of those. I finished the BIG piece I’ve been working on and instead of leaping into something new, I got sidetracked with organizing. Organizing my work space, it’s pretty small so it takes some doing to spend more than a few hours on this one, organizing my threads, I’ve got a LOT of thread, so this one is easy to lose oneself for a day or two or week or month, and organizing my materials, again there’s a lot of stuff, some of which I use often, others not so much, still it’s a sink hole.
It all began with a YouTube video, doesn’t it always, though?
See that huge bag filled with thread winders? That’s only some of them. I did another video for my Patrons over on Patreon and had a little give-away. Five lucky patrons are receiving a nice package of those thread winders from me. I haven’t sent them yet, because I keep finding cleverly hidden stashes of OH, so that’s where those were! threads that I then rewind onto those large cardboard bobbins and put in those 16″ long plastic refrigerator shelves. It makes my life so much easier when I can see everything easily and quickly.
But now I’m nearing the end of my reorganization efforts, not that one is ever really done organizing, it’s like laundry, AND I have a lengthy to-do list that is calling to me as well, but the nagging thought that I need to start a new piece has been buzzing around making life feel a bit more fraught than usual. A friend of mine used to say that she was both the team of horses pulling the carriage AND was also the driver with the whip beating those horses on. It’s all a bit like that. Still there’s good that comes from it. Organizing makes me breathe easier, having a to-do list calms that voice that screams at me, and knowing I will not feel calmer until I begin a new project, propels me on.
It’s all good, as they say.
The stoics suggest that each day is best lived as though it were your last. But if I did that, I wouldn’t get all that much done, because I’d just spend every moment that they’d allow with my children and husband and cat. So yeah, there’s that.
Now I have some fabric kits for one of my upcoming workshops to pull together… did I mention those?
No?
Oh well…
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This was a question a number of people asked after my mother died. But I wasn’t. I hadn’t. In fact I couldn’t remember dreaming about anything or anyone, until this past week. Maybe it was because it was the first Thanksgiving since she died. Maybe it’s because her birthday fell on Thanksgiving every 7 years and so Thanksgiving always reminds me of her or because this was her first birthday that went uncelebrated. This past Saturday she would have been 93 years old.
When we were in Jordan, just a few weeks ago, (it seems like months already) our guide told us that the life expectancy there was mid seventies. He then asked if I was considered old in the US. “It depends upon who you ask,” I joked. “How about you?” I asked.
“I don’t feel old, until I look in the mirror,” he replied. Which was just the sort of thing my mother would have said. We laughed about that.
“Aging isn’t for the faint of heart,” my mother used to say. She also was known to say, “Aging sucks.”
But in my dreams she isn’t old. She can still speak. She has shoulder length hair and in my dream last night she was wearing an emerald green bikini, of all things, with a cream colored, open lacey top that I’d crocheted for her. Did I mention that I’m teaching myself to crochet? I’m no where near good enough to make such a thing for anyone, let alone as a gift for someone I love, but in my dream, she looked amazing and youthful and the crocheted top looked pretty fabulous as well!
I remember thinking, “I want to look like her when I’m her age,” but in the dream I said nothing and instead just told her how much I loved her. She gave me one of her magnificent smiles and then began talking to someone else in the room. I almost said something about how happy I was that she was wearing the top I’d crocheted her, but didn’t want to interrupt her conversation with this other person. Secretly, I was thrilled. After all I only just began trying to crochet in the last few weeks. Wearing that crocheted top that I’d made for her was so typical of my mother. She was a huge supporter of all my various passions, particularly when it came to making things.
It was my mother who taught me to knit and as she was right handed, (I’m left handed) I learned to knit right handed as well. I’ve often wondered if I should try to reteach myself to knit left handed, but then I think, “Why?” Besides I’m closer to the end than I am to the beginning of life, why jostle the waters? And I knit pretty quickly right handed, so there doesn’t seem to be much point. And, added plus, any instructions and videos are always written for right handers.
My mother would have approved of my dream, though I don’t think she cared for the color emerald green, but even so, it would have made her laugh. She loved to laugh. So today, I will remember her laughing and am grateful to have my dreams of her when she was still able to speak, when she was still able to move about easily and painlessly, when she was happy.
In 2015 or was it 2016(?) things were in flux. I was re-evaluating what I was doing, where I was headed, what I wanted… There were a number of things going on that led to this, but it was one of those moments that didn’t seem particularly extraordinary or even interesting, but in hindsight I see that it was a pivotal moment. A moment when I re-found hand stitching.
My mother taught me to embroider with crewel and a hoop at an early age. This is the Christmas creche we made together. It was while making one of those sheep that I came to truly appreciate the diversity and beauty of the simple French Knot done hundreds of times.
Christmas Creche embroidered with my mother
Since then I have gone down many paths, but the hand stitching path is perhaps the most surprising, to me. While at Parsons School of Design I would do anything I could to avoid hand stitching. And then I discovered draping and for a time it was my new love. Draping is a whole art in and of itself. Cutting fabric on the bias and then draping it onto a form and manipulating it so the fabric falls in specific ways was something I loved, but it was also time consuming and I was young and impatient and so my love for draping was set aside.
Funnily enough when I moved to Los Angeles straight out of high school and before I went to Parsons my first job was in a tailor’s shop in Beverly Hills. My favorite thing to do was to sit in the back room with the master tailor, an Armenian man who tried to teach me the fine art of tailoring. Hand stitching hemlines and buttonholes was something I never quite mastered during my time there, but I loved it never-the-less.
Hand stitching can be slow and arduous and very, very time consuming, and it can also be meditative, serene, calming and restorative, depending on one’s perspective. These days I find hand stitching to be all of the latter and none of the former.
A detail of my most recent work hand stitching on Pat Pauly hand dyed linen using Stef Francis threads, Painter’s Threads, House Of Embroidery Threads, Mulberry Bark from Stef Francis, Sari Cording from Stef Francis and wool roving.
When I began hand stitching again I followed other people’s patterns and instructions and while that was interesting and I learned a great deal, it wasn’t completely fulfilling. I have always gone off script and the farther I go, the happier I am. So when I began doing what I call “Improvisational Stitching” I knew I’d fallen into something important. Not only was I creating original pieces that didn’t look like other things I was seeing out in the hand stitching world, but it was an expression of my moods, my thoughts, the things that were going on in my life. Hand stitching is the way I express myself.
A few things I’ve learned through hand stitching, which can be applied to the piece I’m working on, but also to life:
Any emotion is fair game and can be expressed through stitching.
Any emotion is okay and when expressed through stitching creates a vibrant, interesting piece.
Impatience is a frame of mind and a choice.
When I don’t know what to do, stand back, take a photo and get a new perspective on the situation.
Compare and despair.
Everything has its own timeline.
Divas can be fun, but they also can silence everyone else.
Diversity makes anything and everything better.
Rules are helpful, until they’re not, in which case, break them or ignore them.
“While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.”
The Daily Stoic
When we returned from Africa, I had a livestream scheduled for the next day and a Zoom meeting that couldn’t be rescheduled shortly after that. As my computer had crashed and then been wiped out while in Africa, I really, really needed to get it working again or get a new computer, which is no small undertaking, especially if you’re someone like me who is basically computer illiterate and the very idea of migrating information leaves me in a cold sweat. So I went to the nearest Apple store only to be told that basically I should hold on to the computer I had and try to migrate from my time machine. Only my time machine hadn’t backed up since last April. WHAT???? I know, I know. Evidently time machines need to be periodically checked to be sure they’ve backed up and do not always do so automatically. News to me.
So I went home and backed it up and then had endless problems resulting in tons of phone calls with various tech people, as well as realizing how much information I had lost, and then in the midst of all of this I was overcome with a combination panic attack, grief (my mother had just died) and despair; I went into our bathroom and sobbed. To say I “cried” wouldn’t do it justice. It was more a cross between a howl and uncontrollable sobbing.
“While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.”
And that was the thing. I was taking all of this personally. The computer, my mother, jet lag, grief, panic… All of it felt like an assault on me. But it wasn’t personal. It was life. So I’m trying hard to remember that. It’s easy to remember when things are going along as I expect them to or when things happen that are unexpected, but are welcome events. It’s much more challenging to remember when things happen that I don’t like or want.
And yet, here I am writing this post on my new laptop, which has taken some adjustments and came with it’s own set of challenges, typing away!
I’m teaching my last workshop, Improvisational Stitching, of the year and am making new Youtube stitching videos and am getting back to creating and incorporating my travels into my latest piece. I can feel my energy returning little by little.
As long as I don’t take things personally, I’ve got this.
Oh, and look!!! Remember I said I so regretted not purchasing some Kuba bark cloth while in Africa, but that I remembered there was a guy who sells African fabrics on the street? Well over the weekend, I found him and here are the pieces I got from him. This first was badly damaged, but I was able to repair it and even figured out and copied the stitch originally used to stitch the seams together.
Bark Cloth From The Democratic Republic of Congo
And look at this one!! I just love the colors, all natural dyes, made in The DRC.
Kuba Cloth
And finally this one, which is by far the most typical, from what I’ve seen.
Hand Stitched Kuba Cloth made from raffia, hand dyed and sewn from the Democratic Republic of Congo
And here is my improvisational stitching piece where I’ve begun incorporating some of the things I saw and loved while in Africa using Pat Pauly hand dyed linen.
Okay, first things first. My computer crashed on the 3rd day of our trip. As in blank screen, nothing working, enter password, little wheel spins around, weird lights flashing in the upper left corner and then back to asking for my password screen. I don’t know if it’s just run the course of its computer life or if the brown-outs caused it to malfunction, this is obviously not my language or within my skill set to parse. Coupled with the iffy wi-fi and after trying a number of things, I finally gave up. That was what seems like weeks ago, but actually was on August 17th or was it the 18th? It’s impossible to know because each day has been so packed with adventures that it feels like years and at the same time, just seconds all at once.
So I’m on my husband’s computer writing this post, having finally contacted my friend and the person who pulled this site together and made it actually work, our tech guru, Kai of Hostingforwriters.com. She’s amazing, especially when it comes to all of this stuff, as well as being an all around lovely, kind, thoughtful human being, who also happens to be a very talented writer! Thank you Kai!!
So here we are, thanks to Kai, and I’m finally writing a blog post, way overdue. So where was I? Right. Gorillas! As in these amazing creatures.
Nothing can describe the thrill of seeing these beautiful animals in their own habitat. All money collected from the gorilla treks in Rwanda go back to protecting the gorilla population, the community, and education. For example, former poachers become porters and protectors through tourism dollars.
Once I have been able to figure out (if I can) how to log into my youtube account, all passwords were lost due to my computer crashing, I will post videos. In the meantime a little visit with the gorillas in photographs, which does not do them justice, but is better than nothing.
Look at this little guy! There were so many frolicking about.Do you see the baby on his Mamma’s back?I wasn’t able to capture the Silverback, the Alpha Male, very well, but I did get some video that shows off just how large and spectacular he is.Isn’t s/he wonderful?A moment of quiet reflection and some self-grooming.
While trekking with the gorillas we stayed at the Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge set in the Virunga Mountains. Sabyinyo is also the name of the oldest volcano that looms above the mist and low laying clouds and means “tooth.”
Our home for 3 nights at the Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge.Each day a little arrangement of leaves, flowers and in this case, 2 carved wooden gorillas greeted us. Thank you Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge for helping make our visit so wonderful.One of many beautifully appliqued and hand stitched pillows in the main lodge.Applique with exposed seamsHand stitching with shellsOne last pillow. I just loved these. They’ve inspired so many ideas!
There are still spaces left for The Basics Workshop! This workshop is for any and all who want to learn basic design concepts, techniques, stitches and have lots and lots of fun. Hurry and sign up now before it fills up.
I did a livestream for my Patrons yesterday using my newly organized space and I have to say, it’s working! I did a few tweaks, because of some suggestions from all of you, and have purchased a little side table, I think people use these for working in bed, as it’s an L shape and has two shelves at the bottom, so I am thinking/hoping that will help with the thread storage and needing/wanting to see everything situation. I’ll report back!
In the meantime here is the revised sewing area.
And the revised stitching area. I tried to put the plastic bins vertically, but any time I pulled a thread from one of them everything came tumbling out, so I’ll have to rethink that.
But all in all I think this is doable. Of course, like any true New Yorker, I’m always secretly coveting the empty elevator shaft that is directly behind the wall I face now while stitching. Recapturing it has proven to be more than a little challenging, but I do continue to hold out hope.
So beyond my various stitching projects, I still have my Pat Pauly quilt that I began and haven’t done much with since taking her class. Still it’s hanging here on my design wall, waiting for me. Oh! And I’m determined to test out my GoPro before going on our crazy African adventure. More on that next week.
I just had to add this Youtube video of cats interrupting people as they were being televised. Too funny. My particular favorite is the cat who crashed the fashion show and struts down the catwalk!
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