Culture Cloth

I am really fascinated by textiles. I am amazed by the way people use them and I am astounded by the fact that most people take no notice of something that is a vital part of civilization.
The culture I find most intriguing in regard to cloth is the Middle East. Here are people living in a desert, a barren, dull colored place and they produce the most detailed, most beautiful textiles in the world. And there is a lack of sources for making textiles. In the West are surrounded by plant and animal fibers which can easily be turned into cloth, yet our textiles are primarily functional. But in the hot sand of the Middle East they have rugs, robes, and tents. Some how they make more than enough textiles for shelter. And beauty. If I could do anything I wanted I'd go to the desert and study. I'd photograph the rugs, learn to dye and weave. I'd live in a spacious tent. I'd wear their robes and I'd fill my notebooks with a thousand tiny details. In place where there is nothing everything becomes magnified to great importance.
I think about my jeans and how they fit. I think about my white fluffy towels. I love my sheets that have worn down to perfect soft comfort but don't match anything in my bedroom. I love my purple sheets that do match because I like the way Kevin looks while he's sleeping. He looks stunning on my purple sheets.
I keep journals with magazine pictures taped to so many pages that the book just shut anymore. I cut out clothes I want but are impractical to wear- silk dresses with full skirts and puffy sleeves. I have National Geographic pages of gypsy wagons (another stunning textile culture) and art that I think would make good fabric designs. I have page after page of Celtic knots. I write down my thoughts. I have a graph paper pad of quilt blocks. I draw blocks over and over looking for the best way to put them together. I think about not only efficiency of sewing but also numerology. 12 is a great number for quilting. 12 is 3 and 4, luck and balance. 12 is also 6 and 2- goddess numbers, creation numbers. 3 blocks in 4 rows looks great. 24, twelve twice, is another great number. Not only does it lay out well, but it's a number of abundance.
I think about color. I like to put opposite colors together, red and green, purple and yellow, black and white. Placing a color next to its opposite make it brighter. Sometimes to tone down a quilt I place a color next to a shade or different 'family' member of its opposite- a bright blue and a pink instead of orange. I think about red for health, yellow for happiness, black for protection, purple for magick. I want to shape people's dreams.
I think about the meaning of the quilt blocks themselves. Log cabin is my favorite. A red square at the center symbolizes the hearth fire. A yellow square is the lantern in the window that will lead you back home. I have a red and blue log cabin quilt hanging on my bedroom wall. It's one of the first quilts I ever made. I stitched all the things I want in my home in the blocks. I stitched my dog, hearts for love, a moon for magick, roses for romance. I stitched circles, squares, and spider webs. I traced around my left hand and stitched myself into my work. I sewed on buttons. I pinned Mardi Gras beads to the corner. There's the whole story of me on the wall and I'm the only one who knows what it says.
Go look at your house carefully. Look at the curtains, the sheets, the towels, the table cloths. Open look closet and see what your clothes say about you. You spend your entire life surrounded by fabric. Better make sure you like it.