This little wall hanging was starting at Tracy Stillwell's art retreat.
Last year.
Not this year.
It is meant to be a self portrait of myself smack in the middle of middle age. It's busy, colorful, scattered, and a little... intense.
Like me.
Over the last ten years, I fell out of favor with fabric. My love for drawing and painting seemed to sweep aside the fussiness of fabric. Who has time to measure, trace, cut, take out the machine, match up seams, sew, press, and do it all over and over again?
A creamy white sheet of watercolor paper, a pencil, brush, some paints, et voila: art.
So, it was with great shock that I found myself buying fabric again, and wandering through the aisles of an AC Moore with cohort in crime, Kathy Nesi, buying embroidery floss, needles, and a little white box to keep it all in.
Especially since I once had plenty of embroidery floss, needles, and a little white box, the whereabouts of any of it, I know not.
I seem to have recaught the handwork bug. I am happily pulling a needle through slubby linen, squinting my eyes and looking under my reading glasses to thread the needle, and massaging my hands at night when the arthritis makes itself heard. I am collecting colors of embroidery floss like pieces of hard candy and pulling fabrics like daffodils from a spring garden.
It's fun again.
So have no fear that my self portrait has been languishing. I think I've been languishing along with it. It's been a tough year. I've sealed myself off from most of my artwork in little accretions of sadness, disinterest, and frustration. It was a slow freeze out, unintentional and thoughtless.
Fabric and thread are accumulating in little piles around my house and with it a recollection of how I got into this artful mess in the first place. The young wife who wanted nothing more than a bunch of kids at her knees and lapful of quilt to sew; the young woman whose pulse quickened when she walked into a fabric store and thought nothing of making a wedding ring quilt for her sister's wedding in between caring for two toddlers and practicing law.
It's nice to be connected to what is for me the most feminine of pursuits. It slows me down, makes me smile, forces me to focus, and allows me the excuse to buy silly rick rack trim and chenille fringe and beautiful beads to thread on a needle and lay down on a piece of cut pile velvet in a line that curves from my hand straight into my heart.
