noticing...

"notice what you're noticing"

I read that in book lately, I think one by Ann Blockley

I just googled it to see if I was right but it seems it's a fairly common mantra as the list of references was long

suffice it to say it's good advice, especially when one is trying to figure some things out

seems I've been noticing water, and for a long time now

as I scroll through the stored photos on my laptop water appears over and over again... the southern lakes and rivers of the Yukon,  "The Little Lake" here in Salmon Arm, The Bow River in Calgary, a black-brown creek in Tillicoultry, Scotland, the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brittany, the English Channel at St. Malo, lake Windermere in the UK and on and on it goes

working with water as a theme began in earnest last year when I purchased a book on Japanese book-binding, which stemmed from a desire to upgrade my book-binding skills that developed during an online course on the history of book-binding in Japan that I had enrolled in after reading about the history of making paper which I started researching after learning about weaving with paper from reading a blog post referenced by an instagram post... 

that's how things happen in my world

the purpose of the box is to create a receptacle for a series of small books I want to make on the subject of water, but the box cover has taken a back seat since late summer

I finally got back to it this week

 if you remember, I was stitching feather stitch in a rather fragmented way... as I was familiarizing myself with the project I realized that it was flowing in the wrong direction for how I want it to appear when the box is constructed so I took it all out and began again

as I worked on it I was thinking that if done in a detached way, with a shallow curve, they could emulate the ripples on a lake - I'm very intrigued by that idea but did not have the heart to take these out yet again so that idea is being worked at on a different cloth

keeping it simple, at the other end some ferns - other than that it's only a bit of kantha stitching here and there, just enough to keep the layers from shifting as well as to add a little texture 

in other water work, I have been inspired by a photo I took of the Yukon River in 2018... sun glinting on steel-coloured water

{these are the little ripples I'm thinking of}

below is my initial stitched sample (done before the ripple inspiration hit me) along with a selection of silk fabrics that match the colours in the photo

{the stitched sample was also in last week's post but here I've pressed it flat with an iron to try and make the folds sharper, more like chop)

and then I thought about lake water and the trees that grow along the shore that eventually become the driftwood I love so much

it's been dull and dreary here with a lot of fog so I have been hunkered down inside working quietly on these small samples, feeling my way along, letting thoughts whirl and coalesce only to break apart again and send down other pathways 

the fog finally lifted one day last week and the sun was a very welcome sight - no staying inside!

I walked down to the Little Lake and though the snow was all gone, the ice was still on the lake... whilst trying to get a closer look at some cattails, I noticed branches from the willow trees that were caught in the ice, creating patterns that reminded me of free-form letters

tree-form letters?

within and without, partially submerged, frozen in layers, a range of colour and definition... it was absolutely fascinating to look at

I'm heading back down there tomorrow to see what it looks like now but I have these images, plus a few more, and they are enough to set me off on a new round of investigations and sampling

this has excited me beyond measure, like nothing has creatively in a very long time

I had thought this betwixt and between landscape would have nothing interesting to yield inspiration-wise but I could not have been more wrong

and so, water it still will be

or should I say "still water it will be"

however I say it, I've a feeling I'm just at the edge of all there is to see

and just beginning to grasp all there is think

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