Autumn stitches

Did you know the word text can be derived back to the latin texō, meaning I weave?

Willow, dolphin sleek and shark sharp, carefully chosen from the dock and pocketed in my bath robe on crisp October mornings.

The needle glistens in the mild September sun. Up and down, running stitches through the fabric. Wonky, no doubt, but joyful. Following the outlines of eco printed leaves, picked from piles designed by the wind, and pressed flat between the leaves of a book. With a flea market linen thread, I find and mend blurred and missing contours to keep the prints safe and remembered. Every sharp print has a mirroring faint one, front and back of the same leaf, carefully portrayed on the panels of a second-hand skirt.

I sit by the lake, stitches in hands and mind, needle piercing the weave, catching clusters of warp and weft to expose the shapes of the leaves, each one in its own silhouette. The sharp-angled pentacled Japanese maple, blown from the neighbour's tree. The lobular oak from our southern gable. Saw-edged cherry and rounded alder from, well, any walk around the park really. Vine and raspberry from our garden pots, generous and plentiful in their three-lobedness. Willow, dolphin sleek and shark sharp, carefully chosen from the dock and pocketed in my bath robe on crisp October mornings. I follow every curve of the shape, every visible expression of the edge with my needle, capturing the leafiness of each species. Where the print is too faint, I imagine myself as the leaf and fill in my own contours in the profile and manner I imagine for myself.

Leaves, fabric and thread have all been elsewhere, elsewhen. A skirt flouncing around someone else's summer legs before it came to me, a thread sewn through another fabric by another crafter. The leaves in other colours, blown by other winds in a previous October. The needle painting waves onto the fabric, with a hand that has hosted many stitches before. I wonder what places and memories they all bring to their new setting, what evocations they create together in their new space.

I look at the prints, some with sewn contours, some with edges of their own, yet some blurred beyond recognition. I watch how the ups and downs of the stitches lend a new dimension to the echo of a lost shape, hold it, confirm what once was, acknowledge it to the world. Hands exploring each shape, structure and profile through the stitches, marry them together into a state-of-the-art expression of the leaf. The print is lended a brand-new back side by the thread, a new dance by the wind in the skirt, floating, billowing. As I sew in the pale autumn sun, I weave it all into the leaves—the wind in my hair, the waves on the lake, the elements against my skin, reinforcing the prints with the nature they came from.

The sharp-angled pentacled Japanese maple, blown from the neighbour's tree.

If I hadn't picked those fallen leaves, they would have enriched the humus in the soil, become a structure for plants to grow in by the labour of the workers in the ground, lived on through new plants, new trees. A cyclic life in service of beauty. Instead, they became prints on a flouncing skirt, open to air and light that will sooner or later fade them. Chances are that even the brighter prints will dissolve with time. All that will be left are the contour stitches on the skirt and the words through my pen. Another kind of cyclic life for another kind of beauty. I wonder which one the leaves would have preferred.