The last day of April completes another month on the stitch journal.
April brought us news and worries of various kinds, some it partially resolved and some still ongoing. Daily stitching in a designated place like the stitch journal has helped to bring calm and focus, and to get a sense of the bigger, wider picture.
Each block is about an inch and a half or so, thereabouts. I don’t plan the stitches or draw a pattern, I just choose a colour and let the needle carry the thread wherever it needs to go. Some blocks turn out to be quite literal or pictorial, like the rapeseed fields and the lilac. Most turn out to be a little more abstract, which I prefer. I like the way abstract marks can mean more than one thing, and the way they can mean different things to different viewers.
A few people have asked what this is going to be, or what I’m going to do with it, and the question puzzles me a bit. To me, the stitch journal is a kind of visual diary, so it’s a bit like asking someone who writes a diary what they’re going to do with it or what it’s going to be. The answer in both cases, I think, is that it already is something. It is itself, a visual record of my voyage through a year, and that’s enough for me.
In the pagan calendar, the first day of May brings the start of summer: a season of growth and expansion, of colour and light. Everything in our garden has already grown enormously this last week or so. The hedges have grown more leaves to hide and protect the birds’ nests. The insects are multiplying to provide food for foraging animals, flowers are producing nectar for the bees and pollinators, tadpoles are swimming in the pond, and the circle of life is all around. Everything is connected, and everything depends on something else for its survival. I love being part of this beautiful pattern. And so May lies ahead in the blank space that is the future, and this particular future starts tomorrow.
Just splendid to see and to know the calmness it brings to make.
Thank you, I hope it continues to be a source of calm over the next eight months until the end of the year. It sounds like such a long time! I expect it will fly by like the last four.
It always amazes me when people ask–What are you going to do with that? I loved your answer. I sometimes say,(but only if I really know the person and they won’t be offended). “Why do I have to anything with it?” I get some amazing answers. Does everything have to have a purpose? Can’t it just be BECAUSE.
Exactly! Yours is an excellent response too. It’s a fascinating (and slightly frustrating!) question.
We live in such a left brain world.
I think my question would be less “what are you going to do with it” than “how do you manage to do the abstract sections?”, because I am really not good at abstract pattern!
Ha, the abstract blocks more or less make themselves. I have to think about the more figurative sections. Interesting…