The Story of the River

What a journey I have been on over the last three months.

Regular readers know that I usually blog twice a week.  This year I have managed one post: Lets Start a Conversation.  In that post I told you how I was stricken with anxiety attacks and unable to do much creatively.

In order to finish the textile piece I had started in mid-December I attend two studio days at Littleheath Barn, taking only this piece to work on.  The choice was to sit all day doing nothing or actually working on the piece.  I did the latter.

Towards the end of February I managed to do some handstitching at home without too much anxiety.  But there were days in between when I was paralysed by anxiety and unable to pick up the work.

Last Friday after another anxiety attack midweek, I finished the piece.  And miraculously, all anxiety left me completely and I have experienced the best week of 2024 so far.

But let me tell you about the background to the piece before I show it to you.  I have had this picture of a river in my head for around 55 years.  I know! A long time.

When I was at teacher training college in the late 1960s, one of our assessments was to write a cross-curriculum project introducing a piece of classical music to 7-11 year olds.   I have no idea how I came across this piece of music but it has appealed to me ever since.

Vltava is the second of six symphonic poems by Bedrich Smetana.  He described it: The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small springs, the Studená and Teplá Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer's wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night's moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St John's Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe.

Inthe 1990s we were singing 'The River is Here' quite often and I had this picture in my head of making a textile piece about the journey of a river through rocky land, desert and into lush greenery.

                

I eventually made the piece as part of my City and Guilds course.  I dyed various types of fabics and cut them up into rectangles and sewed them onto a backing piece.  I really didn't know much about dyeing at that time.  Whilst I finished the piece I was never totally satisfied with it.  I felt the greens were all wrong but didn't have time to do anything about it.

It hung in my office when I was a church administrator but when we closed down the office I threw it away.

Both that piece and the new piece was inspired by Bible passages:  Ezekiel 47:1-12 and Revelation 22:1-2.

So drum roll please!  Here's the finished piece:

It is 20 inches wide and 56 inches long.  As a river it would perhaps read better in landscape format but that would need a really long batten and would present a difficult storage problem.  And although my husband thought it was about a waterfall, it isn't!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice