some days, some weeks

some days can feel rather unproductive... this has been a full-on week of them

no particular reason why, just a whole series of small things that get in the way of doing any big things and at the end of it I feel as though I'm still in the place where I began

I haven't had much time for my work with the Gold Rush era of Yukon history but I have often thought of the clothes of the day... 

warmth and practicality to clothe the miners and travellers 

beautiful garments for the dance hall girls

silk, wool, velvet, lace, cotton duck, mackinaw

dresses from Paris, sturdy homespun

though how to use them?

wool appeared in the collages from the last few posts and I'm sure cloth and lace will factor in future ones but for now I just want to work with the cloth without it having to do or be anything other than itself

I cut random sized pieces from a variety of cloth in my stash, choosing textures, colours and patterns that appealed

looking through the stacks I discovered combinations that appealed and so I cut smaller pieces from them and began to layer and arrange them

this first one is a nod to the landscape but through the patterns of the cloth, not a pattern made by them

the uppermost layer is a dark green and black herringbone wool

trees - obvious, yes, but still...

the layer beneath that is off-white and black diamonds... mountain peaks?

also obvious but even so

I like the graphic nature of this and so regardless of any of how obvious it might or might not be,  I went with it

I have an idea for what comes next but there's been no time to act on it, nor will there be for a few days yet

the next one started with a scrap of heavy cotton, gathered by machine

cut from a sun dress I bought many years ago - the first of a few things I bought for the fabric and/or detail in the construction, not as something I would ever wear

 it was simply "fabric in a different form", not an article of clothing

and beneath thata scrap of wool and beneath that a dark greenish-grey linen, the same as in the piece above

these led me to remember some pieces I had begun several years ago using favourite scraps of cloth and lace

these have a "remains of the day" kind of feel to them

the linen for the base is 110+ years old, hand spun and hand woven in the Netherlands just after the turn of the twentieth century

vintage lace and homespun fabrics

as I said, there's a plan for the first two pieces shown here but as ever I'm not sure where rest are going and it may be they are kept just like this, folded and then bound into a book of sorts, snippets of imagined days and lives gone by

and if that's all they are it will be enough