I’ve been traveling. Though I must say that though this trip to visit my mother and sister is a long one, involving connections and then an hour and a half drive, it was about as flawless and easy as traveling can be during these bizarre times.
First off, the La Guardia Airport has done an impressive job with its renovation, they even have a water feature with Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York, playing. Hilarious.
We arrived to an almost empty airport and though the plane was packed, not a single seat left unoccupied, the airport was calm, clean, well staffed and easy to navigate; even the TSA line was easy to move through with no lines or delays.
With one brief stop and connecting flight we then picked up our rental car, also no line, and drove the hour and a half to my sister and mother’s. I’m always relieved when a rental car has a gear shift that isn’t a button under the radio. It’s the small things… so yeah, this was a breeze. My son drove, while I provided the navigation. There was only one “incident” involving a rotary, ambiguous signage and some panic on my part, but after the second or was it third go around, we made it out to the correct exit. Props to my son who took it all in stride and kept calm.
Once at my sister’s we were greeted with this.
Buck’s Moon, which was much redder and larger than this photo is able to show. It was beautiful.
The moon was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, glowing red and enormous by the time we arrived. It’s called a Buck’s Moon because it’s the time of year when the bucks grow their new antlers.
The quiet and beauty of the land is always striking when I come out here to visit. Because of COVID it’s been two years since I’ve been able to come out to visit. It’s wonderful to see my mother and sister again. And then of course there are the animals. Lots of dogs, chickens, horses, and those are just the animals that are raised here.
Life is good when surrounded by dogs.Nora
But what about your stitching? you might rightfully ask. Never fear. I brought three projects with me and my GoPro, which I’m hoping I will figure out how to use during this trip.
Linen hand dyed and gifted to me by my friend, Pat Pauly.
This piece is just about finished, I think. Though as I look at it now I am already thinking – well, what about that blue area in the upper left, I could add something there and then there’s that red/magenta bit to the right, maybe I should add somethingthere… For now though, I think I will move on and let this sit for awhile. One follower had some great ideas regarding the brown wool strip at the bottom, which I think I might experiment with. Right now it’s looking at bit like an “add on” and not really part of the rest. I’ll have to think more about it though before doing anything. Oh except I brought this thread that might be perfect for it and I could… and so it goes.
It’s lovely to see my mother and sister again after so long.
As I mentioned in my last post, I put my hand stitching aside in order to take a Pat Pauly virtual workshop. It was all about line, setting, composition and boy did she pack a lot into those two days. So much fun!
I’m not a quilter. I just have to say that. I mean I love quilts and I love seeing what others do, but I cannot sew seams so that they meet perfectly, nor can I manage to make those points that people do with ease, and a 1/4″ seam on any kind of regular basis baffles me. If I manage to get one, it’s a gift, and I appreciate the beauty of it, even when using a 1/4″ seam sewing foot, I still don’t seem capable of it. The fabric bunches up, the little guide line gets in the way, oh right, it’s there to help me, but it never really does. Anyway, the whole thing ends up as a disaster, but Pat… Pat’s work is much more fluid and isn’t exacting, it’s improvisational and she talks about how the various parts need to speak to each other. This is exactly what I say and do when I’m hand stitching. Is this area having an interesting conversation with this other part? Is this thread bossy and taking over? This is a language I speak!
But then there’s the whole using a sewing machine aspect to this sort of work. I get the appeal, it’s a whole lot faster than hand stitching and one can do things that you just couldn’t do hand stitching, but it still comes with its own set of pitfalls. At least it does for me. On day 1 of Pat’s workshop everyone was racing ahead with the next set of instructions on setting a shape into another piece of fabric and things seemed to be going well. I mean the whole 1/4″ seam thing continues to elude me, but I’ve made peace with that, so all was well.
And then my machine ran out of bobbin thread. Now normally this wouldn’t be cause for great distress, but in my case, this is a newish machine, having traded in my Bernina 880 (which was in the shop more than it wasn’t) and so here I was with my new Bernina 790. It’s a beautiful beast of a machine that uses different bobbins and a different bobbin case than I’m used to, so after a little struggling I managed to wrestle the bobbin out of its little case and then tried to put it onto the bobbin winder on top of the machine. Except that it didn’t fit. I could hear Pat in the background giving valuable information that I would no doubt desperately need, and yet here I was with a bobbin that I couldn’t figure out how to refill. No one must ever know, I thought as I desperately tried to make the bobbin winder work. Finally in a moment of panic I jammed the bobbin onto the winder and then manually held the little lever so that it would wind. Sort of. I then yanked the thing off, put it back into the machine and tried to sew, only now I started getting an error message.
Having now completely missed the last important instructions from Pat, something I knew was vital information to have, but never mind, getting the bobbin to work was taking all my time and energy. What to do? So I did what I do when my computer or phone starts behaving oddly, shut the whole thing down and reboot. Every now and then Pat would say, “So how’s it going _______________” and I would say a silent prayer that she wouldn’t call on me and then I’d have to confess to everyone that not only was I incapable of sewing a 1/4″ seam, but I also had no idea how to refill the bobbin. I could hear everyone else in the background, machines purring happily as they created tiny works of beauty, while I, in all my shame and humiliation, couldn’t manage something so simple and basic!
As I waited for the machine to turn back on, I went in search of my instruction manual, only I’d done a very thorough clean up just the day before and so who knows where that thing was!? Finally I located it and saw that I’d put the bobbin upside down onto the little bobbin winder. It’s a wonder I didn’t break the machine! But never mind, eventually I got the thing working and off I went, making tiny skinny lines in various places. cutting up new pieces, placing shapes within shapes and having a blast. Even better, no one seemed to notice that I was having a tiny crisis!
I would show you the whole thing, but that will have to wait until another day when I have something that’s not quite so “work in progress”!
I have this dream that one day I will be able to keep my sewing machine out all the time AND have my hand stitching and threads all out in another part of the room so that I can seamlessly move from hand stitching to working on the machine and back to hand stitching without having to put everything away each time!
I’ve always worked with my hands. As a child it was embroidery with a hoop and sewing my own clothing. At around nine years old my mother taught me to knit, then there was a brief macrame obsession in the 70’s where I decorated my bedroom with intricately knotted macramé pot hangers into which I hung plants of various kinds. Later, when living in LA I worked for a tailor and watched how he would transform yards of material into the most elegant suit and was taught how to assist. Hollywood’s finest came to him.
Later is was fashion design, draping was particularly appealing because you could manipulate the fabric to hang in interesting ways on the human body, and then I began designing knitwear. Jewelry design and learning to solder and manipulate metals of various kinds, then hand stitching and now textile art, improvisational stitching, and all along the way there were forays into other things such as origami, painting, collage, throwing clay onto a wheel; always there’s been something to occupy my hands.
And then this morning I saw the following on my facebook feed:
“Grandma how do you deal with pain?”
“With your hands, dear. When you do it with your mind, the pain hardens even more.”
“With your hands, grandma?”
“Yes, yes. Our hands are the antennas of our Soul. When you move them by sewing, cooking, painting, touching the earth or sinking them into the earth, they send signals to the deepest part of you and you calm down. This way she doesn’t have to send pain anymore to show it.”
Are hands really that important?”
“Yes my grandchild. Think of babies: they get to know the world thanks to their touch. When you look at the hands of older people, they tell more about their lives than any other part of the body. Everything that is made by hand, so it is said, is made with the heart because it really is like this: hands and heart are connected. Think of lovers: When their hands touch, they love each other in the most sublime way.”
“My hands grandma… how long since I used them like that!”
“Move them my love, start creating with them and everything in you will move. The pain will not go away. But it will be the best masterpiece. And it won’t hurt as much anymore, because you managed to embroider your essence.”
By: Elena Bernabe of the wall of San Arte
Our hands. A friend of mine told me that she met a man who could tell the age of anyone who came to him. She said he didn’t look at her face or her eyes or her body, he looked at her hands, held them in his and then announced her age accurately.
My husband and I read and contemplate a philosophical reading of some kind every morning. Every now and then there is one that is so helpful it stays with me, like this one from The Daily Stoic:
“A long To-Do list seems intimidating and burdensome – all these things we have to do in the course of a day or a week. But a Get to Do list sounds like a privilege – all the things we’re excited about the opportunity to experience.”
Yesterday I was again reminded of this powerful reading as I sat waiting for my husband to be released from what we both had thought would be a minor surgical procedure. Until it wasn’t. Until things went wrong. Until this minor medical procedure turned into an all day long nightmare for him. A day in which I kept saying to myself, because of modern medicine he gets to have this procedure done, no matter how awful it is. Because of the times we live in, we get to call a car in 95 degree heat and have someone drive us to where we need to go. When stuck in traffic we get to consult WAZE and take the most expeditious route. And while waiting in the waiting room I get to have uninterrupted hours of stitching to calm my nerves.
He is home now and recuperating, for which I am extremely grateful. A big thanks to all of you who reached out to me and wrote such nice comments in my Stitching Circle.
And now I get to go do some work with my daughter and then I get to do a whole lot more stitching on my current project!
Someone commented on my Youtube channel about messiness, saying that she was happy my work area isn’t pristine as that would be intimidating. And it made me think about the various stages of messiness.
The gradient scale of messiness, because this is important.
1. Kind of “messy”, but it’s not a problem and anyway to my mind, this is actually incredibly neat. Everything has its place, I know where things are, it’s easy to work on my current project and all is well with the world.
2. Okay, okay, things are getting “messy” but really it’s all subjective and yes, I’m having trouble finding things, but nothing I can’t handle. Besides, I’m working here and a certain degree of messiness is to be expected and even necessary.
3. Messy is to some, what neat is to others, I tell myself, and I’m working and anyway I just grab whatever is easiest and closest and call it a “prompt”. However if I’m being honest it’s starting to be a problem and I can’t find things I want to use, though I will never admit this out loud.
4. The tipping point: things have gotten out of control. I know it, in my heart, but I still continue to work, despite the mess, because the work takes priority and anyway I know what happens once I start “cleaning” things up. Still this has gotten beyond “messy” and I’m spending more time looking for things than actually stitching.
5. Clearly something has to change. I can’t even find the piece I’m working on and so resolve to clean everything up… tomorrow.
6. A thorough cleaning is done. I carefully put things in places that seem reasonable and make sense to me at that moment. It’s all so neat and tidy, I hardly know where to start!
7. My work area is clear of everything but the piece I’m working on, only now I can’t find anything and spend hours looking for things that I knew were “just over there”.
8. Begin ripping the place apart in search of various much needed items.
Repeat steps 1-8.
You’ll be relieved to know I’m currently hovering at around a 3. Totally doable!
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