layers

I do not recommend digging potatoes before sewing silk. As I discovered yesterday, the thoroughbred nature of the fabric disagrees mightily with the labourer’s hands, and whilst the crop is harvested, I have hands better suited to hemp than silk..

I found myself pondering the nature of soil as I worked and let myself picture the layers between me and the bones of the earth. Crop and topsoil, clay and rock and the mantle below. Mantle. The earth wears a mantle, a protecting, decorative cloak. It’s a fitting image in a textile blog.

The afternoon, being rainy, meant more time to contemplate sewing the fenland quilt. Here is the silk flap, folded over like the layers of the earth. In fenland, layer upon layer of time caught in the crops, the reedbeds, gravels of ice ages, the long buried vegetation in the oozy muds of prehistoric seas, the mantle.

If I peer through the window in the quilt, can I see eels returning from the Sargasso sea , Saxon jewels, mammoths? I am fascinated by the layers of history, natural and human.

Some of the reeds I stitched have had their stems sandwiched between the chiffon too. It seems to work. I have used a hoop for the stitching, but the surface is rippled. It needs what Karen would describe as a good bit of damp stretching, but I will finish all the stitching first. The ripples seem to suggest the way the wind moves through ripe wheat-I will enjoy the movement while it lasts. The silk is the most beautiful soft wheat green shot with gold-on my screen it looks bluer than in real life. The enlarged picture shows it better.

Thank you all for your visits and comments yesterday. I’m a bit overwhelmed really but I am so enjoying the What-iffing and I hope you are too.