I often wonder about all the birds that have ever flown through the airspace above our property. All of them. Since forever. A thread for every flight path, how dense and richly woven would that map be? What is the colour of a bird's flight? How does a thread measure or reflect speed, height, trajectory, landing and takeoff, life and death? How does the invisible become visible again? Sitting, most days, and simply observing has brought immeasurable rewards - quietly learning to look more closely at what is and is no longer in plain sight. Line, light, scale, proportion, depth. Generating ideas for my journals where ideas percolate, fabric is created and quilts are made. This juvenile magpie is the third generation baby sharing time with us. I love watching them play, I miss them when they head off for a life out of their parent's territory. So smart. So capable. So engaging. Grateful for her visits.
Three or four hundred upper thread and bobbin changes over the past four weeks. There's a textural effect I'm trying to create with the quilting - that compliments the imperfect shapes of the pieced fabrics. Something akin to wabi, sabi and shibui. The infinite ways that dense, linear quilting can be used to create story are coming to life, one piece at a time. Sometimes barely visible, sometimes contrasting. There is an uneven fullness in the seams that help create miniscule bumps at the end of each line. There are also the seamless directional changes absorbed into the looser weave of some fabrics. Every change and every bobbin. Testing tensions, adjusting for the different threads as each shape submits to the process. It is a peace-filled activity, permanently set up so I can work for several minutes at a time. Never wasting moments. I get immersed in the meditative quality of the quilting and thinking only about the stitch. Some of the combinations I use: using the same ...

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