The way I line my scraps up by color before I even know what I'm making
Y'all ever catch yourself doing something in the studio that don't feel like much, but if you stop and think about it, it's practically prayer?
I got this old tin cookie box my mama kept buttons in, and now I keep my smallest scraps in it. Every time I sit down to start something new, I dump em out on the table and just… sort em. Reds together, blues together, the browns and oranges that nobody quite knows what to do with, they get their own little pile. I ain't even decided what I'm making yet. But my hands need to do that first. Like saying hello before you launch into a conversation.
My granddaughter watches me do it and says "Mama Gloria, you just playing with fabric." And she ain't wrong. But that's how the good ones start. You gotta let your hands wander before they know where they're going.
Anybody else got a little ritual like that, something that don't look like work but you can't start without it?
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I do something similar with my pastels actually, before I start a portrait I'll lay out the sticks I think I might use, just pulling them from the box and lining them up on the table. Even if I end up reaching for something else halfway through anyway. It's like my hands need to warm up by handling them first.
The button tin detail got me. My babcia kept sewing things in a cookie tin too. Something about that, keeping scraps in something that used to hold something else. Feels right.
Ah the button tin. My mother had one too, an old Jacob's biscuit tin, and it was full of buttons from coats that were gone twenty years before I was born. Something about keeping things in the wrong container, sewing bits in a biscuit tin, scraps in a button tin, it's like the object gets to live another life.
I do the same with offcuts of lino. Little triangles and odd shapes I can't bear to throw out, all in a jam jar on the windowsill. I'll tip them out and shuffle them around like they're going to tell me something. They never do, but the hands need the warm-up alright.
What's it your babcia kept in hers? Mine had a holy medal and a thimble that didn't fit any finger I ever saw, and she'd move them from tin to tin every few years like they needed a change of scenery.
That Jacob's biscuit tin brings it all back now. My mama's was a Blue Rose tin, I can still see it sitting on the shelf by her machine. You're right, honey, putting sewing things in a biscuit tin, it's like the box don't know it's retired from its first job. It gets to keep being useful.
And I love that about your lino scraps in a jam jar. The light coming through that jar on the windowsill, all them little shapes, I bet they look like a congregation waiting to speak. Mine don't always tell me what they want to be either. But I figure if I sit with em long enough, the Lord'll put the picture in my hands when He's ready.
That's exactly it, honey, the hands need warming up before they'll talk. I never thought of it that way but that's what it is.
And yes ma'am, there's something holy about keeping things in what used to hold something else. My mama's buttons in that tin, and now my scraps. Like nothing's ever just done being useful. The Lord don't waste a thing, and neither do our grandmothers, seems like.