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.
I M Perfect lady 