Tapestry and theology - well, nearly!

Over the past week I have been working a tapestry I started a while ago and left in a desk drawer where I regularly came across it and always intended to finish it. I suppose the difficulty was knowing how to finish it. The design is entirely out of my head (don't do tapestry kits) - one of my favourite birds, the redstart, standing on a moss covered hillock against a sky at dusk. How do you capture a sky at dusk on stranded cotton thread, most often separated and mixed in a textile equivalent of pallette working, and the intricacies of colour, tone and shade on moss and heather, and the shape and proportion of a small bird, and all this using only a half-cross-stitch which is by definition a technique dependent on angles of mathematical precision, and on canvas with 20 to the inch guage? Easier to write and preach a sermon - sometimes.

Well it's almost finished and I'm as satisfied as I've any right to be given the outrageous daftness of trying to do this in the first place. There is a Celtic cross on the other frame which is coming along more slowly, a form of contemplative activity that allows reflection on the meaning of symbol, colour and pattern as itself a form of theologising. Mind you, tapestry is also a good tension guage - stitches pulled too tight, a tell-tale sign of stress reaching even to the fingertips. But the co-ordination, the practice that makes it possible to find precisely a tiny hole from the back of a canvas and so working blind, the gentle rhythm of making and allowing to become, is all very therapeutic. Which is just as well - they weren't kidding when they said relocation and house moving are up there in the top three of the premier league of stressors!

When the redstart is finished I'll scan it and post a picture - be a wee while yet. Meantime I need to start thinking about those other forms of tapestry - like life, work, relationships and all the other strands that make up the pattern of our days. Oh, and by the way, on my visit to the craft shop I'll need to buy a stitch remover, a small needle-like tool with a sharp delta blade for cutting out wrong stitches, removing evidence of mistakes, allowing the chance to get it right. Wish life had one of them too! :)).

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

I think the psalms of lament might be such a tool - (I am almost through a translation of Lamentations 4 - a bit out of season) But laments don't remove evidence. Instead the one to whom the lament is addressed makes the flaw into a part of the pattern. Some stitches may be moved - not removed. But our frame is rather more flexible than what you are dealing with. Moving is what you have just done - itself a painful process. I always found that it was my wife who managed to make a home out of a new house. There's a warp and a weft in that sentence.