Mind the gap

"This gap between the impulse and vision, and what actually happens, can be so frustrating" I wrote recently in an email. I was thinking of what had happened on Sunday afternoon, when I ran across a picture of some Mbuti bark cloth, a "map" made by a tribe in the Congo.

Years ago it was one of these cloths that gave rise to my Fissures quilt (the one that got left on the train in 2006) - and during the month or so of making it I was so happy to be hand stitching -- it all just flowed ...

Maybe it was this feeling of flow and contentment that I was hoping to achieve on the wet Sunday afternoon. It didn't happen, and thinking about why it didn't might help the "flow and contentment" happen in future.

Hit by the impulse, I thought "yes I want to hand stitch but also I want to finish it this afternoon, so it has to be small - ah, a chance to do a journal quilt!" So I got out my "journal quilt kit", intending to use black fabric for the background and cream or maybe ochre stranded cotton. As I was looking for the thread came the thought: "these JQs are a series and have common components; they include circles, buttons, text - how to combine that with stitching - well maybe I'll leave the stitching for another time and do another spontaneous JQ out of these preselected fabrics" and before you could say Jack Robinson, I had two laid out, using up the bit of black I'd planned to use for the handstitch piece.

That's how it went wrong. I quite enjoyed messing about - but it was messing about (with some less than ideal choices/decisions - variegated thread, for instance), rather than following my intention. One of the JQs did get a bit of "map" into it, from which arose its title Across; the other was done entirely in hand stitch, including the invisible circles quilted onto the black and the diagonal quilting, also invisible. It "Could" have been different - in fact, it will be different in its finished form because it doesn't "feel" finished to me; more work needed.

So, back to that gap - I tried to jump over it, rather than taking time to build a bridge.

The Fissures quilt worked because the vision for it boiled down to "stitch over quilting", and before I got to the stitching stage, I'd done a lot of preparation of the surface - finding cream-coloured cottons, washing them, cutting them up roughly, laying them out to cover the wool backing (two moth-eaten trouser legs!), attaching them with careful machine stitching. All that to make a surface that would be congenial to hand stitch. Then, gathering various dark threads, navy blue and dark green as well as black - cottons and rayons and even some wool. Only then came the pleasure of starting to stitch. I made it up as I went along - all I knew was that some lines should cross the gap, and the two sides should look more different than alike.

I used to carry around a small sewing kit with material for my ongoing "stitch marks" project. It would have been a better use of that wet Sunday to do some more on that....