Creatively speaking, I seem to be at a crossroads often. I do not understand this about myself. It is cause for quite a lot of consternation. I have been actively and professionally making art for 20 years now. Mostly paintings and drawings. Knitting and crocheting are at least equal passions that I engage in daily and have done so for perhaps longer than the artwork. Tapestry weaving was a recent devotion. And now stitching. The kind that uses a small needle with embroidery threads, fabrics, ribbons and the like. Why can I not just stick with one thing? What do I make of this?
It is as if I walk along the creative path and come to this crossroads with numerous paths leading off in different directions. They all look so interesting and inviting and my curiosity is peaked and I can’t wait to sketch something out, or cast on or make a few stitches. Before I know it, I’m completely ensconced in an enchanted world and my hands and heart are full with merry making in whatever mediums that world offers.
I do not stay in that one world for long. I’m back at the crossroads walking down another lane, sometimes doing so numerous times in a single day. Painting and sketching in my sketchbook, knitting rows on a poncho design, a crocheted one too, and transferring a recent drawing to a collaged fabric fragment, ready for a simple embroidery stitch. Oh. My. Heart.
Each time I set off in a new direction, I want a clean slate, a wide open, airy space in which to work. Designating a blog entirely to that craft seems a perfect way to at least mentally have a little focus. Never mind that I have a main blog that attempts to cover them all, a blog for my pilgrim drawings, another for the grace of knitting. Somehow weaving escaped having its own blog. Perhaps it didn’t stick around long enough. It must’ve been a very short little trail off the beaten path. I don’t know. Truly it all baffles me.
But this stitching work has taken hold. I have tried, over the last couple of years to think of it only as a side path, a small, every-now-and-then fascination. Perhaps in a month or a year, I will be walking another, quite different creative path. But for now, I am captivated by these lines of stitches taken straight from my sketchbook, translated into stitches on collaged fabric fragments.
I want to hang out in this enchanted world of stitching for awhile, and to write about it. This blog feels like turning the page for a new chapter. It might be a short one. Or long. Who knows? All I know is that this stitching path feels right to me and I’m hearing a voice behind me saying, “Walk in it.”
