This is a story about listening. To the cloth. To the voice of inspiration. To the energy of the season, and to my own moods.

It started months ago, when I was perusing my local buy nothing group and saw someone giving away a sheer, deep blue scarf. It wasn’t the type of scarf I usually wear, but the color appealed to me so I expressed my interest, and picked it up the next day. Then I forgot about it for months. 

After Samhain, as winter settled in, my color cravings shifted from the rich warm tones of autumn to the deep cold of winter. My thoughts turned to the beauty of the dark time of year. And as I created my list of prompts, “light in the darkness” spoke to me of moonlight and stars in the dark sky, and to the cold wet of our Pacific Northwest Winters. I remembered the deep blue scarf, and pulled it out of my fabric storage. The sheerness of the fabric captivated me as I thought of how I might layer it to make it interesting. I thought about adding some beads. I thought about a moonlit sky. I tested the sheer blue scarf over various other fabrics. But nothing clicked. 

Then I went to put in a load of laundry, and spotted a used fabric softener sheet in the empty drier. Sheer white, with an ineresting texture … 

I’ve used these sheets in my junk journals before to good effect, but I’d never tried adding one to a stitched piece. But I picked it up, took it to my studio, and laid the blue scarf over it … and I knew that somehow this was the perfect choice for the effect I was looking for. Or maybe it wasn’t even me looking for it: maybe it was the long-idle blue scarf with ideas of its own, tugging at me for a new life, asking to be appreciated again.

I stretched and manipulated the drier sheet until it was the shape I wanted, and added some strips of vintage tulle from my wedding dress to create variations in the brightness and opacity of the white that showed through the blue scarf. I backed it all with a rectangle of black linen, and sandwiched a circle of white silk, reminiscent of a full moon, between the layers.. At this point I wasn’t quite sure what I was creating: I was just following the nudges. I made a few false starts with the stitching, not quite sure what the piece wanted. 

There’s always a moment when the answer becomes clear, and I can’t quite describe the sense of exhilaration that comes with it. But in those moments, even the simplest, most repetitive stitching feels kind of thrilling, and the project seems to emerge from my hands more quickly than I’d expect. I had such a moment with this piece, and did all the stitching while listening to music and cuddling under a blanket.

When the piece was finished, I showed it to a dear friend who immediately said it was a moonlit river, and I laughed because yes, of course it is. But I didn’t know that’s where we were going until we arrived there. Which happens often when you work with found objects and intuition.

This piece was hard to photograph, partly because of its shape, and partly because there’s no way to capture how the blue fabric changes depending on the light, sometimes appearing deep navy or even black, other times showing an almost cobalt shade of blue. Much like water itself. But I’m so pleased with the feel of it under my hands, and the changeable beauty of the colors. I could never have planned it this way from the beginning, and that’s part of the joy of the process.

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