Patterning, sampling, patterning, sampling, grading, cutting, snipping, piecing, stitching, pressing, stitching, piecing, pressing, stitching, snipping, stitching, pressing, piecing, stitching, pressing.
Making is chaotic, progressive, repetitive, inevitable and essential in the process of creating any thing.
The definitive thing materialises from logically disorderly beginnings. Making beauty isn't typically beautiful. I’m hard pressed to think of any thing coming into being without firstly having to ramble across a few complex terrains, scramble over a few molehills... pins and needles.
Making our way along the same paths, over and over, again and again, makes each undertaking a little more familiar, more knowable. Though not less demanding.
And it’s comforting that within this pace and pattern, whilst we're immersed in the snip snip stroke of scissors and the beat beat stitch of the sewing machine, we discover space within the whirring and find small moments to adjust, tweak and improve.
It’s really only in thinking about this that I realise it is what happens.
It was watching the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi that made me think of our own making process.
“I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit,” says 85 year old Jiro Ono, sushi shokunin (artisan) who has been practicing his craft for more than 60 years.
Daunting... yet strangely comforting.
Early days for us yet. Back to the stitching hearth.
- R
