Sutures, silk & bees...

'Listening to you approach,
       The press of each footfall, soft absence inbetween,
  I feel a kernel of utter completeness.
            Then time hustles forward, trailing us like silk.' *

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Between waiting for my layers of priming gesso to dry last night in my studio, I nestled myself down deeply into the old sleeper-couch in my reading/research nook, just yesterday covered by an old pink sari that has travelled all around the world with me. One month a gauzy bedroom curtain, the next - adorning my bed, or covering the diningroom table in time for a lazy sunset supper with friends.
          Opening up one of my trillions of visual diaries, I found a piece of old woolen felt, the colour of clotted cream, and softly warm beneath my fingers. I'd discovered it at the bottom of an old box of fabric scraps given to me by my sister's very Yorkshire mother-in-law. The lace was from my other sister's wedding dress, which I'd handstitched onto the rich duchess satin years before, and which I painstakingly - full of memories of her - stitched on with the thinnest of needles and white thread.
                                 I used to have an untameable fascination with bees (moons ago...) I'd photocopied this dead bee, then transferred the image onto the most diaphanous of silks - cutting carefully around its outline with my sharpest scissors, fixed forever flightless onto the felt with almost microscopic sutures.

*The quote was found on the page in the visual diary, sandwiched against the felt/bee piece.