six and a half stitches

A SERIES IN 1 SENTENCE

You know how sometimes you have a great post all lined up in your head and it sounds oh so witty and special and clever and then you take some photos and think yes! this is fantastic and then you sit down and write the post and you think, oh-oh, that's not right, why don't the words and the pictures all match up and look good and sound great and what will I ever do now, except to rewrite and rephotograph and hope it comes out slightly better the next time round because really what you should always do is let the post ride on the strength of the thing being shown which in this case is a little dress which is part of a series which who knows, maybe someone will want to maybe perhaps buy one of, which is about making with linen and screenprinting on linen in simple clear forms with a little doodle sketch that got transformed into a screenprint via the wonders of a P-G5 Print Gocco and which I love completely for the fact that the series is in itself a series of hand done items because I made everything - the printing of the material, the bias binding, the tags, the finished article and that to me is the essence of hand-done and so, to be all arty and call upon clever little things like spatial sequence drawings, I will show what has in part been shown at flickr, and that is the series of a dress, of which this is the first complete item.

IN DEDICATION

I'm dedicating this post to my grandmother who passed away peacefully and calmly late this afternoon. She never got to meet Pia. Even if we had taken Pia to see her, she wouldn't have had any recognition there was anyone there. She died after years of Alzheimer's, and in the end she didn't know who anyone was. She stopped recognising me years ago. I am glad she had a chance to meet Max, and to vaguely understand his existence within the family unit. But I am sad that on reflection our families are so fragile, and that all you want as a mother is to have that sense of belonging, and sense of place within - that your children understand themselves as part of a whole, and have a chance to know who their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents etc are, because there is a part of all of them within their genetic makeup as well.

I will always wonder with both my children, how much of their grandparents are in them, how much of their great grandparents? How much of my grandmother will be Pia? Somewhere she will always live on. My grandmother sewed - there were sewn toys which arrived with perfect little stitches. So Pia's outfit today - Liberty print top with little elasticated pouch pocket, and charcoal wool trousers, is for her. The Liberty for the english in us, the charcoal for the northumbrian mining town heritage. And probably I should have had a little bit of cake, because she liked a little bit of cake, at any time of the day.