Meandering

Definition, according to the Cambridge English Dictionary:

Moving slowly in no particular direction or with no clear purpose.

This is how my creative interests tend to go. It is unsettling to me. I often wish I could say of myself something like, “I am a knitter.” Period. Or “I am a weaver.” End of story.

But no. I cannot, try as I might, stay in one place. From spinning yarns to knitting, then crochet to weaving, from drawing to stitching, I meander from craft to art and back again.

So here I am, finding myself dreaming in hand stitches on fabric, even knitted fabric, and trying to see if I could draw with a sewing machine.

A recent attempt has left me wanting a better machine. I picked up this little thing at a local Goodwill store. It is alas, a toy, and therefore doesn’t really afford the ability to draw as I would like to. Fun to try, but loud and clunky and the cheap threads that came with it break easily. My 1965 White machine does better than this, though the bobbin thread gets mixed up when you change directions too much.

As much as I would like to stitch in a meandering style on a machine, I’m itching to pull threads through fabric by hand and so I’ve picked up a nearly finished fragment and have ideas popping in my head for embroidered sweaters, stitched tea towels, and a large piece of stitched words.

We shall see how this goes and where the meandering takes me. The cool thing about this word Meander is that it is from the name of a river in modern-day Turkey called Maiandros. The word is often used to describe how a river winds and wanders on its course to the sea.

Yeah…that’s it…creativity winding and wandering on its course to the sea. I’ll take that. 😍