If you have time, it’s always good to let your ideas and explorations settle a bit, while you focus on something else. Remember how in previous post I said I’d take a walk to consider all this? My time away from my studio was rather longer than I expected, though.

All at once, the next morning, with the cleaning lady busily and noisily vacuuming upstairs, the drains maintenance serviceman turned up and at the same time an architect came round to consult on something we’re considering doing to the house. Yesterday’s diversions included a service techie from the cable company to restore the signal to our upstairs tv, which it took him some time to discover apparently resulted from some problem in the line coming to the house. Relief that the inability to get the tv working properly was not due to either of us losing our marbles! We have tv again, but completely fixing the weak signal problem requires another tech team to come, at a time yet to be arranged.

So, I’ve had plenty of time to consider my love affair with this square+stitching.

Recapping, these are my earliest interpretations, stitch doodlings of an idea inspired by the works of pioneer generative artist, Vera Molnar, one example of which is –

I’ve used it a lot, but looking back at what I’ve been doing this past couple of weeks, I now realise as I focused on the actual squares (applique? hologram fabric? other fabric? stamped shapes?…) the stitching itself got neater and neater, in the process losing some of the lively, wild quality my earliest doodles had.

Here’s something I did a couple of weeks back, fiddling with an idea of ‘square nests’ – part of a larger concept I won’t go into here. It’s a pretty regular grid of stamped squares and every block is stitched with the same pattern – a rather boring result, but I may add many more lines to it, or to some of the squares at least, but I certainly won’t abandon it: