de/reconstructing

 at the bottom of one of my baskets, the one I carry back and forth from studio to house, and back again, containing several small 'cloth projects' various needles, a pair of strong reading/stitching glasses, a pair of sharp tiny pointy snipping scissors, lots of small strips of cloth and a multitude of threads all caught together, in said basket I found a small bundle of assorted fabrics Jude had sent me more than a year ago, one of several she sent me in fact, tucked away in other baskets no doubt! to my shame I must now admit I had completely forgotten about this particular bundle, which is kind of weird as I do remember being quite excited on unwrapping and unfolding it, to find tucked in there this patched piece and thinking to myself: from the hand of our Teacher, here for me to observe and learn from!

And I had done nothing with it for over a year now......that was about to change

I looked at the piece,and noticed it was machine stitched, which surprised me a bit, maybe it was an old piece, maybe not even stitched by Jude, anyway all of a sudden that no longer mattered; how to make it mine as it were, how was I going to use it? I first tried sewing it onto another thin bit of fabric, I actually did, looked at it and it just didn't feel right

so I pulled out all that stitching and undid the machine stitches and started to hand-stitch the parts back together again, Jude-style so the seams fold flat of themselves, thus making it mine in a manner of speaking, something I could work with

 then for my favourite running stitch in 4 directions, the patched piece was sewn onto a thin piece of cotton, lovely to work with; it had now become a 2 layered piece, the start of a new small pillow; I looked hard for a piece to match this one and found a hand-dyed piece from I believe Maria's though I'm not quite sure; this was sewn onto the same thin cotton cloth, again running stitch in a square, starting in the middle; colour wise all very subdued; for a final flourish, a dash of colour: threadbeads and I miscounted thinking I had made 7 red ones adding on 7 orange and 7 green ones only to realise once I started with the blues I had in fact sewn 8 red ones! 8 blues then....having made up my mind that the patchwork was out of kilter as well, so asymmetrical thread beads were imperfectly perfect; I also thought it needed a bird, stitched one and thought the better of it, cut it loose...hmm sounds friendlier than it was: there no longer exists this particular bird

front and back the two sides are united and stuffed, and there we have it: another Small Pillow