Dearest Needleworkers and Hive Friends,
This has been a week of much mystical movement in our lives and work: in case you didn’t hear, 
and I finally found our dream homestead a week ago, and are preparing to TODAY move into a tent on some glorious land over in north Molise…. And I’ve been using my sewing practise as a means of grounding the extreme excitement!!
Every time we get even a wee bit het up, I pick up my threads and pieces of garments, and get on with some stitching – even at night by candle or solar lamp, it is a profoundly calming exercise. It helps my mind rest into the quiet rhythm of fabric art, and my holistic senses to soften and flow.
Also, I happen to have been working on two particularly fun pieces of clothing this past fortnight!
I love humour in clothing; there is an art to not taking it too far, and I sometimes go over the line, but generally people need to have more fun with their clothes – even to make fun of themselves a bit more! So if I create things that are a bit oltra it is probably needed by the collective conscious ;-P
The short dress, in pink gingham and white embroidered edging, is coming together after a very long period of creation – several months, or perhaps over a year. It is still not easy to finish, but I have a clearer solution now, and am enjoying feeling into how the buttons should sit, how the front can close better, and handsewing all the edging on the sleeve and neck holes.
And it is coming to a nice shape; I may wear this dress if I were going to a party! It has been a rather complex structure to complete, as it began with the full pink gingham bodice and skirt, but it looked too much like a Scottish supermarket uniform, so I wanted to shake it up by adding embellishments and pockets. However, it did take a lot of musing over it, before it came into the final stages.
The ‘skort’ is another party kind of a garment: a pair of funky shorts (way too small for me, and I almost couldn’t fit them on the mannequin!) with a complimentary/ dramatic extension of flared exotic fabric. I had years previously made an experimental skirt out of the flared material, but it never sat how I wanted it to, so it was a great pleasure to find a nicer outlet for its magnificent flora… The idea of flared extensions to shorts comes from the flared bottoms of the white ‘vintage cushion covers’ trousers that I sold recently to the young american woman: I love the theme of jazzing up something that is already nice…. but not (yet!) fabulous :-D
In contrast to the dress, the ‘skort’ was a fairly straightforward 1 + 1 construction – I used handsewing for several seams, as the machine lost it on the lighter fabric of the flares, and tangled up stroppily. But it sewed the legs to the shorts nicely (so I haven’t lobbed the machine out of the window - yet).
It is always good for me to have one mega-simple project to work on whilst I am also doing a super-complicated one. I suppose this is metaphorical for having the sewing to do in general, whilst we have this immense task of moving our lives-work-homes to a new location (which is not in a pronto da entrare state as yet!): being able to rest into easy work whilst a very complicated task is also underway, is relaxing. If we pace ourselves in this way, we’ll come through each and every step of the move with harmonious unity!
