meaning to stitch 16 - another shift

after a burst of activity in autumn, winter has set in and stuff has got in the way to stop me - but plenty of thinking has been going on, trying to work around an obstacle and move on

the screens for printing my word tangles arrived 

i feel that the patterns they make reflect the messy spiky nature of pain and damage,

like barbed wire or thorny bushes

first attempts showed that my idea of discharge printing was not going to work unless i put much more effort into developing my skills in that technique - even then i was too uncertain of the outcome to feel comfortable about going ahead

then health issues got in the way but now i feel like resuming and need to progress

the new approach involves printing on white organza, i have both cotton and silk - but that won’t work as an underlayer, so it has to go over the top - more clearly expressing that the damage was imposed from the outside - a layer which clouds and distorts perception of the people represented on the gown

during a group zoom we discussed the use of white on white as a way of expressing something subtly - since i have already used that for the stitched initials, it seems to be a good fit

so now instead of a black lining revealed i am planning a translucent shift, over-slip or "overall"

this seems to be becoming more like a ghost, appropriately for something i find haunting and which lurks in the background of my family