The owl hoots to his mate every morning around this time at 6 am. Sometimes he calls from within the garden or from behind the house over the road but always, the owl has the same call. Within seconds, the response comes. I like to think that the two callers are mates but I don’t know anything about owls except that their calling is something that I love to hear before any other nameable sound, when I wake.
Yesterday, I started collecting leaves, without having a prior plan. It is just that when I come across fallen leaves of deep beauty, they were too hard to leave behind on the city street. The varying red leaves covered the cobbles in the city centre, by the Peace Gardens. I don’t know what species of leaves they are, but I collected a bag full with an aim to sew the leaves. It’s a spontaneous idea, responding to the season of falling leaves, and this is why I find myself here, sitting in bed at 6:30am, in the darkness hiding where the owl is hooting and I’m beginning to sew leaves.
For the purpose, I’m using the Japanese silk thread that I bought when I was in Kyoto, a tiny needle threader and a Japanese needle in the hope of maybe that using them may evoke some tactile connection between Japan and my red Sheffield leaves
Beneath the dim light of the lamp beside the bed, I go through the leaves without priority and started to sew them together with running stitch. They’re not wet. They’re not dry. They have a moisturised feeling to the facing top side of these beautiful different leaves. I know that I could put them in some glycerine / water liquid to make them last and be more flexible but that would take me too long. The leaves, are after all, right here, right now.
What’s interesting is that I started sewing the leaves in a running stitch with a single thread but then the thread has fallen out of the needle at least three times so I think it’s best to sew using double thread with a sturdy knot at the end like my Grandad showed me how to do. That’s one finding and the other is my eyes are not as good as they were when I was younger and so I now need the help of a small wire needle threader and then the other thing is that from the age of 14, I was sewing all the time, anything even dresses and later, I did a lot more sewing when my children were young – I even made hand smoked dresses for my daughter. I was busy being a young mum but I still did a lot of sewing. I haven’t done any kind of sewing for over a decade but recently, about a month ago, I treated myself to a new sewing machine and I’m really excited to be able to start sewing again but the other thing is I realised that even if I haven’t sewn for years, that tacit knowledge comes back through the hands and through the sewing thread and how I hold the needle. My hands know how to move and hold. It’s quite hard to explain but if you give me a needle and thread, and if I could thread it easily, then I’m away and running – fearless. My hands go back to the knowledge that I have stored within the core of my developing years for over 50 years.
I’ve noticed that the leaves I’m sewing are building up in the centre because I didn’t make a plan. I recognise that I am placing them too tightly but when I move the growing sheet of leaves in my hands, it feels like fabric. They haven’t dried out to be crisp. They’re floppy.
I add more leaves to the little bundle and the owl is forgotten until tomorrow before dawn. I’m finding that I’m looking at the juxtaposition of the colours of the leaves against each other and how I look at one colour behind the other so that they stand out – just like knitting. The pack of leaves gets thicker in certain sections and my running stitches I think are too long. And, I find that the red thread is lost against the red of the leaves so I think I will go and choose a contrasting colour but at the moment I’m just experimenting.
I put a knot in the silk thread at the end and chose a scarlet colour and then I started a gentle running stitch through the leaves. The leaves are so fresh, only having fallen yesterday that they are easily manipulating in a pliable way just as if fabric. I just set off sewing around the edge of the first tiny leaf and then kept adding leaves behind and enjoyed the feeling of sewing through leaves. The act of sewing quietened me. It made me slow down because of trying to place the leaves and I just kept adding there was no order to it as such and this is the first time I’ve done it so I just wanted to experiment. I’m thinking of doing sheets of these leaves just to see how they work but also that they may work really well as a coating to my paper pots.
Another of my findings is that sometimes although all the leaves look the same some, more than others, can tear when the stitch is pulled through the leaf. After the red, I’m using an orange thread now which is more visible and shows more mistakes. I’m not sure which colour thread I prefer.
Sewing leaves is a very slow act and I’m really enjoying it without any aim or goal other than to see what happens.
Let me know what you think
tracey doxey 