My first Needlework Monday post in a while!! Oh, I have missed very much the sewing, the camaradery, the excitement of switching my internet on in the morning to find the treasures that others are working on…. We have been struggling without power for a while, what with the car cigarette lighter facility burning out from powering up our powerbank – and the dark, overcast days of this coldest part of the year meaning no solar charging… So only one thing for it: start an ambitious project for a beauuuutiful warm winter coat!
My original inspiration for making a coat like this (back before I’d made any jumpers-into-coat projects), was Miss Katwise O’Sullivan’s amazing style and sewing skills… She is a similar age to me, and I connected with her after having seen something via social media about her magical, colourful house in America… She used to make costumes and semi-cos-play garments, and has a fabulous background of synchrony, celebration, spiritual adventures and living freely. Like me!
So I bought a pattern from her, for the very first ‘sweatercoat’ that I made. I’d thought about making old wooly jumpers into a bigger garment, for years, but really couldn’t get my head around how to begin; so finding Katwise’s pattern was the bomb! I think that it was even the first sharing I did on Needlework Monday: and finding that article from 4 years ago, made me realise that I’d also been procrastinating for years before that of wanting to use the pattern….!!!
This in turn helps me to notice JUST HOW MUCH I’VE MOVED ON IN MY PRACTISE!! I used to also take many, many years to finish a painting! 10 or 15 years (!) So now, although we are surrounded by chaos in two houses, and our situation is quite messy – in that, we have almost zero income, we are not sure when we will be able to sell the Arthouse, and our home on the land in Molise is nowhere near ready for us to unhabit it (comfortably!). There is little stability in our daily routine, and a lot of what we have to work on are priorities for survival and scrabbling around to get very basic facililites in place….
This is not the sunny, spacious, calm and bursting-with-creativity studio that I used to have! But it is what we do have, and I am just beginning to get used to it. Though my ‘ex-atelier’ in Guardia Sanframondi is now full of half-sorted fabrics, it is not ideal for sewing in. Too cold, too busy. It is much nicer to take some pieces out of it, sit with them on the sofa by the wood-burning stove, and enjoy a step-by-step figuring-out of how a garment should unfold. It is VERY GOOD to come back to the bare essentials of my practise like this, which I might not have done, if I’d had a cleaner and warmer space to work in, is what I’m trying to express!
This is the core of my creative flow: ‘allowing’ rather than forcing a thing into being. I love this very much about Katwise’s vibe; she describes in her patterns the general way of constructing a sweatercoat or mittens or suchlike, and has beautiful hand-drawn sketches to clarify. This is my kind of Way; teach someone not the specifics, but the general idea of a thing – like Teach A Man To Fish, Rather Than Giving Him Fish For A Day…. Using one’s hands as a life-long artist and crafter, we become skilled not just in making a particular pattern or working to design, but we are able to apply this kind of inventive approach to all things we interact with.
I love this!! Just creating from the void! Just letting pure creativity plus the spontaneous abundance around us, to come together through us – and into a creation that has never before existed! This practise proves that the Universe is Intelligent, and that we are an Intelligent AND Co-Creative part of it: an essential aspect of divine alignment and harmonious expansion.
And that is how I will proceed with this ‘sweatercoat’; I am holding space in our next women’s circle, which will happen in a couple of weeks, in the home of a friend in a nearby-ish village: this is the first time I’ve held space, and my suggestion was for us all to bring something to work on with our hands, like needlework/ knitting/ crafting.
I wanted to suggest that we work on something more ambitious, and am making an example by doing so myself. It was not so easy to get out of the rut of thinking negatively about ‘I miss my sewing atelier’, etc, but this is a great step forward, and the way the bodice of this coat came together so quickly, is extremely motivating for me… I hope to work on it for the next days whilst we’re in Guardia sheltering from the cold damp in our land house, and then to be finishing off the details of it, in our sit-down circle meeting on the 9th of February.
Today, I will be hand-sewing with light blue wool, along several seams, and then, if I can get my serger/ overlocking machine to work, I will begin on the skirt of the coat.
