Looking Back: Quilts

This is an excerpt from a post on my blog “Quilting is My Addiction”.

Without getting too boring or pedantic, I want to say that what I love about quilts is thinking about the anonymity of all those who have thread their lives, industry, and economy into their art. I love imagining the stories they shared, heads bowed over needle, the hopes and secrets, surviving in the fibers, if we can only listen.

No quilt can be reproduced, not really, because it has time sewn into it.

There is an obsession with permanence and naming things that comes with Empires, stamping coins and art and contracts, (all with men’s names, never with the names of women or slaves which sometimes women were by law). But we never run out of the proof that there was always art that was made to gladden the heart, to ease the pain, to connect with hopeful birth and to commemorate loss.

And in a way these proofs that artists were there survive better than the art that is dependant on Dynasties or Holy Empires, because they borrow from each generation, each carefully cherished item and thread a different history, one that includes women and slaves and reaches out to a future undaunted by circumstance, for joy. 

Because Empires fall and art becomes fatuous.

But quilts become stories.

https://www.amazon.ca/Stitches-Time-Travel-Magical-Through-ebook/dp/B08RXJ4M28

Just went to a launch for this charming book written by Peter Reynolds. First off, Quilts! Secondly, thirdly and well, I lost count — Time travel, an only child with siblings, and a tale of family and traditions!

A magical story, nicely illustrated and told with wit and compassion.

A Billion Tiny Flowers

I have been technology challenged for about ten years.  Before that I felt I could hold my own. Now, age, concussion and recently, ambivalence have led me to the shoals, the place where many older adults find themselves, muttering and cursing and occasionally exclaiming “YuReeek Ha!” as some colourful object washes onto our shoal and makes us happy.

I spent an entire weekend, possibly the nicest weekend of the summer trying to sort out why I could not longer watch television (Star Trek) or googly or putz on the various devices in my home! I must say here, if you are patient with the poor techies they are appreciative. I may not be able to defuse racist Nazis but my Zen practice has taught me to be attentive and patient while on hold.

Mostly I want to have Star Trek, any version, playing while I do my sewing. I could put on the radio but sometimes (gottalovem) CBC radio is just dumb and my stitches get tight while my mind boggles. (Star Trek is often dumb but it is Sci-fi, come on!)

Last night while falling asleep I realized my dreams were of a billion tiny flowers, each providing a context for perpetually opening complexity, which viewed as a whole was breathtaking. From my perspective they were the flowers of a quilt that I painstakingly was appliqueing one at a time, made of billions of threads of cotton, manufactured and dyed, all by human hands from plants grown in sunlight and with water and tended by more human hands on a beautiful planet spinning within spinning galaxies.

So as glitchy as these entertainments are from my point of view, some things, important and awesome, never change. 🙂

 

I am re-blogging my blog

No excuses.  Well, I might have a migraine coming because just the way that sentence sounds makes me giggle.  Inappropriate giggling is one of the signs of impending migraine and also why I don’t drink wine.

And, yes I have to read everything I write out loud, or moving my lips. I have always done this.  It is particularly difficult when I have never heard a certain word pronounced out loud but have read it often.  I read a lot.  But I don’t read particularly well.

Perhaps you now understand why I am re-blogging my blog.  https://quiltingismyaddiction.wordpress.com

Okay it is funny.  Just switch the first letter or first two letters of blogging and blog with a different letter…never mind.   I can’t seem to link to it.  Oh well, you can see a bit of what I am up to, if you care to visit my other site, now that my brain is totally addled.  🙂

 

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while!

I’ve been quilting and nesting. You can catch a glimpse of the lastest over at my other blog, quiltingismyaddiction.wordpress.com.

As I have often said, quilting can a be expensive, but you meet nice old ladies when you go for supplies, so it’s better than buying CRACK, which I have learned is a type of cocaine. Buying crack, which is also HIGHLY ADDICTIVE btw, you might run into unsavoury types like Rob Ford.

 

 

Continuing to Dream in Color!

Continuing to Dream in Color!.