Weather: One snow flake after another. So innocent. But then, how they add up and … need to be arranged. Some of the snow gets piled in drifts alongside. And that piling takes its own sweet time.

And with my art. All these little squares. They also add up and need arranging. When Jan was here, I was looking at them and thinking that it looked like a lot of arranging, a lot of sewing, but months and months worth?

But then I realized, the time isn’t in the amount of sewing for the final piece. It’s not even in the arranging. It’s the re-arranging, re-sewing and more re-arranging and more re-sewing (not to mention the dyeing/adding colors/shifting colors), on and on. All the ingredients for making decisions. Jan commented, “Oh, like editing writing.” YES! I thought, editing, like for writing. The time it takes to come up with the final piece is not directly proportional to the length of the piece.

For example, today I decided I wanted to add in a color to the left side. I had been planning this for a while. I thought it needed blue, acid blue, so I did my dyeing yesterday. I wanted it to play off the reds/pinks and offset the yellow-green so predominant on the rest of the piece:

I loved the color. Intense. The way I wanted color to show up BEFORE I was hanging the cloth, adding light.

I’d been seduced by the color itself. Today, I sewed it up. Oh man. NOT GOOD. I had to tone it back almost to full grey – just a hint of blue (the camera is inaccurate, but you get the idea):  

Sewing it one way, sewing another. Determined to find out how/if it will work.

Another exciting day with an idea that almost backfired. But I think I have that tiny shift that I want. It’s so slight. But it’s those subtle matters that can lift a piece. I hope I found one of them. I have to do a lot more sewing now to meld it all together before I’ll know for sure.

I want this work to feel like an oversized “haiku”. Who knows if I’ll succeed. Meantime, more squares of cloth piling up on the side. Drifts of cloth.