Don’t think you are on the right track just because it’s a well beaten path
It’s not the first time I’ve started my blog with a Permaculture Principle. There are twelve in all and I find some of them more relevant and useful than others. This one aims to teach people to ‘use edges and value the marginal’ and like most Permaculture Principles, you can apply the ethos to all aspects of your life, not just the garden. I know this because last month I gave a talk to a local gardening club. No-one there admitted to knowing anything about Permaculture but when I mentioned the principle above, everyone in the audience nodded in silent agreement.
I confess I often find myself on a well beaten path but doubt that I ‘m on the right track. I struggle to explain myself to friends, relatives or complete strangers when all I can say is ‘it doesn’t feel right’. The clue to what is going on is in the word ‘feel’. It indicates that I express myself in a tactile world so when I find myself in a quandary, the best way for me to work things out is start stitching or creating a design for some textile art. Of course not everything I make is the result of some inner doubt; some things I do because I’ve come across a story which inspires me. This, for example, is my reaction to an old Welsh legend surrounding a standing stone called The Lonely Shepherd.
I made the hanging about 4 years ago but as I got a bit more skilled at needlefelting, I stopped being proud of it. The wool hadn’t been worked into the backing fabric enough and I didn’t even like the colours much. When I was sorting through my work for exhibition at Wonderwool last month, I was a bit distracted because I wanted to create a new range of craft that wasn’t the same sort of thing that I’d done before. My problem was that I knew what I didn’t want to do rather than what I did want to do. This was all bubbling about in my mind as I pulled out The Lonely Shepherd and realised that, as a wallhanging and as an expression of my own creativity, it had outlived its usefulness. I ripped out the offending needlefelted wool, poured a jar of acrylic paint over the backing fabric, turned the piece through 90 degrees and reworked a lot of the embroidery stitches with additions of needleweaving and scrumbling.
I loved the result and, it turns out, so did loads of people at Wonderwool, many of whom had seen it in previous years but didn’t recognise it, reincarnated. What I also loved was that the repurposing of something which was no longer relevant – as opposed to throwing it away or leaving it, unused and unloved, in the bottom of a cupboard – summed up the underlying principle of what my new craft range would be. I still can’t explain what it is I’m after, but I can see it and I know it. And if I can see it and know it, then do I really need to label it? After all, a rose by any other name is still a rose.