Bridging Gaps and Healing Wounds with Weave

As a group of us continue to "Consider Weave" over on Jude Hill's "What if Diaries"  one member compared weave to scaffolding. When I thought of scaffolding my mind went straight to bridging, then bridging gaps and how bridging gaps often leads to healing.

My husband had an accident a few days ago that required stitches so I wanted to explore taking a piece out of the cloth and then using stitch and weave to put it back in place. So I cut a large hole in a piece of cloth that I had dyed with rusty objects and then began to weave it back together with thread. I'm seeing the hole in the fabric as a wound, or interruption of some sort, and the woven threads bridging the gap and filling the wound. The same way a Japanese potter does with kintsugi (connecting broken shards of poetry with gold). As weavers our threads can represent our gold, filling the places we are broken or empty, making us stronger and more beautiful that we were before.

After continuing on with the weaving and stitching for a while I felt very sternly that it needed something very delicate and transparent. Something with words to sooth the soul, so I cut a teabag into tiny strips and embellished it with script and then wove the pieces together. I stitched the woven teabag piece into the upper circle. The circle below it has a web woven into it with very fine wool thread, it feels like a dream catcher.  

It is a very difficult piece to capture in photos because of delicacy of some of the elements so I took photos of it in various settings.  It is still a work in progress......