The Mulligrub Blues

Here's a piece I've been working on. I sit in doctors offices and surgery clinics, outside of junkyards, here and there and I stitch. It waits a while and I come back and I stitch a lot more. I've about used up a spool of the black.

It's more a mark making exercise. I don't think you could call it quilting. I doubt the embroiderers would claim it. The black and purple threads are size F buttonhole silk. The turquoise, fine, cotton is just basting.

The cotton is an over-dyed reduction from Debra Lunn that I've owned since 2003. It started out as a fat quarter. Now it is in four unequal rectangles surrounded by black cotton sateen. I keep stitching and making marks on the black. Hoping that the colored rectangles will tell me how I'm supposed to stitch them. The binding is already cut, pieced, folded, pressed, and hung in the closet out of the way of playful cats. If I get done with the black stitching maybe I'll bring out the binding and see what it has to say to the rectangles.

The purple is hand dyed. For some reason it is always contrary. The fuchsia always strikes and grabs the fiber very quickly. The dark blue is more reluctant. Now, that's an interesting semantic coincidence. The Blues and Reluctance. Hum. That's something to think on some more. It's sort of like:

"I got the dismals. Not exactly the dumps or mulligrubs, more like moody and uncertain, as when you don't know what's going to happen next."

Someone has the a © on that quotation, if it is yours I would like to add attribution. It struck me so strongly one day that it got copied off the net and printed so that I would not lose it.