Synthetics To The Side & Balance

Waiting at the check out in the grocery store, a line on the cover of a magazine caught my eye. HAIR! This year's accessory. Oh - of course - that would be the way of it. The one time that I might actually be right on trend ....  I'm not.

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that how my hair looks is more than just a little bit important to me and now - after years of this menopause crap - just when I think I should be nearing the end - my body decides to click into a new phase - the one that I thought I was going to skip - because I only got the odd one now and then - the phase of hot flashes.

Three weeks ago, something shifted and now, I get my hair all fluffed up and pretty in the morning and one hot flash later, it looks like a limp dishrag. By the end of the day, multiple hot flashes later, it is neither fun nor pretty and... to add insult to injury...

... I can't wear any of these. They're way way way way way too hot. I've pushed all the synthetics to the side of the closet but as you can count, that's seven tops plus whatever is downstairs in the laundry. That's an entire week's worth and I was already short of tops with the faded black t-shirt saga. Hmm... sew faster ! ! ! is the obvious answer which is why - LOL - I'm working on...

... a little girl's coat. There were enough bits and pieces of the bleached t-shirt left to make something else and it seemed silly to put them away when I was already in bleached t-shirt mode so I started on  Simplicity 2745, one of my all time favourite little girl patterns. Above, I had one more black t-shirt left to recycle and chalked out the right and left front pieces from the back.

I created a mosaic on the right front by first arranging the shapes in a pleasing format and then stitching and zigzagging them into place before cutting out the shape of the pattern piece. The goal was to create a combination of lines and shapes that worked well together, that were balanced.

That goal expanded to the left front. The shapes on that side needed to be arranged in a pleasing format that was both balanced within the piece and with the right side. This step was progressively harder than the previous one. There was more to consider.

While the back and front of a garment will never be side by side, they still need to work together. The shapes within the back needed to be pleasing and balanced to each other and the back section needed to balance with the front sections. The more sections, the more levels of complication. With this project, there was the added factor of a dwindling pile of pieces to work with. It might seem like more trouble than it's worth but if you enjoy art as much as I do, all these parts of the puzzle are FUN!

In the image above, the back garment section is upside down. When the elements within a design are balanced, the canvas - or in this case the garment - can be rotated to all four positions and the composition will remain balanced. This is an especially delightful aspect to work with in abstract designs and is much harder in realistic ones IF you are unable to see beyond the obvious of what it is to the lines and shapes beneath.

One thing I'm working on in the studio is transferring my skills and abilities with textile art to creative clothing. In clothing, balance is a component of proportion. In her blog posting yesterday, Carolyn linked through to an article on proportion featuring her garments. It's well worth reading and if you're like me, you'll be analyzing your legs and arms and bust point and hems and wishing Carolyn could come for coffee!

Talk soon - Myrna

Grateful - perhaps the hot flashes ARE a sign of the end... please!