Woven into the Robe of God

My last post on stitching was one I'd been thinking about recently. My first assignment for Thinking Through Design was hand stitching. I decided to go to town with this layout, and come up with a page idea based on stitching. Here was my process:

1. When I thought of stitching as the central focus for my page, I thought about a line from an essay by E.M. Forster called "My Wood." It's a text that meditates on the effect of property on people who own it. I'm making it sound more serious than it is. Here are his basic observations:

• "It makes me feel heavy."
• "It makes me feel it [the property] ought to be larger."
• "Property makes its owner feel that he ought to do something to it."
• "The blackberries" (I'll let you read the essay to see what he meant by the last point! It is so funny.)

A line from the first point he made says he wishes that he could be like the "slim camel passing through the eye of the needle and being woven into the robe of God." I LOVE that line. It made me think of my boys and how they're going through a Stuff phase (hopefully a short one). I wish for them to be less preoccupied with Stuff and more preoccupied with Being and Doing. And so the spark for this page began.

2. I imagined a couple photos of my boys at Lego Club (when they are completely surrounded by Stuff) on top of some stitched lines weaving across the page like a robe. I also imagined the title in those waves.

I hand drew the lines, punched holes, then stitched. When I finished, it looked sort of dull, so I hand cut the waves out, thinking to put it on patterned paper.

I tried, and it looked hideous.

So I left it on my lap desk for a few days to think it through!

3. I decided to stick it back on some white cardstock. This time, I misted it first, which I liked a lot. I got out my watercolor crayons and my blender pen, which my dog Lola ate later that week, and made a little bit of golden robe on the left. Then I started playing with punches and other stitches to link them together.

My final step was journaling and adding those wonderful lines by E.M. Forster. Here's the final page:

I really like the end result. Not a typical page for me, but tons of fun to make.

Be sure to go to Thinking Through Design and check out the other awesomely stitched pages!