Tag: quilting

• Uncontrollable me.

  My Art Quilt group was challenged to work with silk and yesterday we shared our experiences.

  If you all have seen or felt or worn silk, you know that it is a moving fabric, it is slippery and slides like it has a life of its own.

  As I played with the silk, I enjoyed it self-expression, its fluid nature lent itself to being used for water and it stands out instead of laying flat pressed neatly like the typical cotton quilt fabric. Used for Lady’s skirts it was fabulous, for it moved and flowed easily.

  It stretched our imaginations to use this alive moving fabric, for you can’t cut it easily, it doesn’t lay down stiff, it glides and wiggles, so in order to make it behave, you have to put a ‘stabilizer’ under it.

  I sat and listened to how some ‘controlled’ the silk to make it lay down like cotton and I was confused. How they added a straightener to back side to take out the fluidity and light airy movement.

  I didn’t quite get why they wanted to take away what is so alive and electric…yet did understand in order to make it fit into their patterns, they had to.

  Last night as I was about to fall asleep, it came to me. They were trying to control the delightful movement it naturally has, the way it just is uncontrollable and instead have it perform like cotton.

  It isn’t cotton, but if you add a foundation of interfacing or another lightweight ‘controlling’ fabric, it will now act like cotton.

  Then a thought came in that the silk fabric represents how live moves and flows and how we all want to put a ‘stabilizer’ on it so we can know how it will go or so we can ‘control’ it better. We are not comfortable with the unknown or with the flow speaking to us, we like to speak to the flow and tell it how to move.

  So, as children do we arrive like silk, flowing, moving, uncontrollable and not easily handled, and then our parents and society add ‘stabilizers’ or straighten us out, and we become rigid and flat. We may have a shiny surface, but we don’t move with the freedom from within, our natural self has been hardened for control.

  We may look the same, but we don’t move the same or respond in our natural free expression, we have been added layers of beliefs and programs so we fit into the pattern of society, we line up and become a piece of the quilt our family has been creating long before we arrived.

  When I played with the silk fabric I was extremely excited about the way it moved and slide around, how it challenged me to find ways to adjust to its nature, I never once thought to make it work differently and I was so shocked that others found a way to settle it down.

  While it does lend shimmer and shine to the cotton that lays next to it, it somehow made me feel sad for the silk to see it so lifeless, its wiggle unwiggable, its flow flattened like being in a straight jacket.

  I love that now I feel more like silk, I move in my own natural way, I don’t want or need ‘stabilizer’ that comes in shades of religious beliefs and societal conformities.

  I want to be the wiggly uncontrollable me.

  May 15, 2011

  art, children, life, movement, programming, quilting, quilts, Religion, silk, stabilizers

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• The Artist Way

  On the CD of “Romancing the Ordinary” by Sara Ban Breathnach, she mentions Julia Cameron a few times. She is the author of the book, “The Artist Way”.

  My brother sent me the book and notebook that went along with it a little over six years ago to begin discovering the Artist within me.

  Julia wanted us to write “Morning Pages” just a simple practice of writing a few pages each morning, putting to paper our thoughts.

  They could be just stating what we had to do that day, how we were feeling, just ramblings but getting them out of our heads and on to the pages, cleaning up the space to be creative.

  I was a beginning student to this Way, when all hell broke lose in my life, and what surprised me greatly, is that I clung to these morning pages, which often grew to day long pages, for sometimes I wrote morning, noon and night.

  I filled that first book in a short time and then bought my first journal and after four years of writing longhand, I began a blog.

  I still write most days, sometimes more depending upon the unsettledness of my soul; writing is now part of who I am.

  What is so synchronistic is this book came to me just a week or so shy of a major event in my life, and it helped me find my way.

  What also has happened simultaneously my Artist arrived, she is having a ball playing with ladies, fabric, colors, designs, and is going places Artists go and her work is in an Art Gallery.

  I don’t know the way, but it seems to happen anyway.

  Perhaps that is the Artist Way.

  (I will have to go back and read in her book to see the marks I hit unbeknownst to me.)

  February 13, 2011

  Artist Way, Books, colors, creating, fabric, Julia Cameron, learning, life, quilting, Romancing the Ordinary, sarah ban Breathnach, soul, writing

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