the slow choice

While Karen has been thinking about definitions of story cloth or picture cloth or poem cloth, I have been questioning the why of my work at all. I've been doing this, making quilts or cloth pieces, for many years and I've always done it by hand. I don't have a machine. I've never considered having one.

I've always enjoyed the process of creating with my fingers and hands and preferred the flexibility of the mobility of the projects. I still do.

As the subject continues to come up and even my husband is wondering, don't I want a machine, I've started to question what is the point of what I am doing? So I haven't been doing much of anything creatively.

Today I read a post about folk art by Pam, whose blog I regularly read. While nothing I'm working on is as spectacular as what she's working on and she uses a machine and I still choose not to, I was reminded of a quilt I started a few years ago and then put away.  I need a new project and maybe embroidering, embellishing and finishing this old one will be it.

collecting instead of creating

Lately it seems I've been doing more collecting than creating.

no regrets

While we still miss our large tree, after last Thursday we no longer have any regrets about the decision to take it down after a limb had fallen. This is the view from the front of my house last Thursday.

Looking to the right:

Across the street and looking to the left:

Our neighborhood of tree-lined streets is not looking the same.

summer solstice

Happy first day of summer!

This is the back of my altered erosion bundle book and features my latest favorite quote.

erosion bundle book sneak preview

My Erosion Bundle project has become an altered book.  It's about metamorphosis, a book of change. I've been sewing quotes (about change) to pieces of the bundle contents along with some paper pieces and fastening them into the book.

While change is constant sometimes it is more drastic. Losing this last tree was a loss. Nothing looks or feels the same about our house. Of course, there is more to it than that. Our family used to sit under it on the patio, often having dinner out there. First we had fewer family members and now we no longer have the tree. I've been thinking about the cumulative effect of loss and (finally) it occurred to me that there is a difference between moving on and moving along.

dream pieces

This is slowly coming together. A few additional elements added each day.

folk art dolls

I don't know what came over me. I noticed this dollin what appeared to be a bag of folk art, mostly cloth, dolls.

I'm not a doll collector although sometimes I am drawn to cloth or folk art dolls. I bought them without examining all of the contents. It turns out there are 23 of them and my favorite, at the moment, is the one at the top which is one of the ones I found at the bottom of the bag.
Now the question is, what am I going to do with them?

buttons and rows

putting the pieces together

Wrinkled during transport, this is something started

on New Year's Day that has been languishing since then. I'm in the process of adding more pieces to the "puzzle" and then I have some embellishments in mind. 

uncontained

A few beads are following the trajectory of the pattern but are not contained in the center of this atc.

Mollie is happy on the dock but would sneak away for a walk in the woods if she could get away with it.

don't know where

this is going but lately I've been working on these. I'm still making them.

And enjoying our flowers.

cloth collage for Mrs. Moen's tcc

Today is June 1 and this is the result of my cloth collage for Mrs. Moen's table cloth challenge.

Using an embroidered tablecloth as a base, I added vintage nine-patch blocks, crocheted doilies, yo-yos, bits of fabric, beads and buttons.