Petal Zen

PETAL ZEN-THE YEAR OF THE SCISSOR

It has been a strange year. It was certainly a year of social isolation and a time of "lost and found" for many. For some, it was a year we learned to bake bread or make a mean cocktail. It was the year we were not able to be together for the holidays. In our textile studio, it was a Year for Scissors.

Digging through our bags, bins, and boxes of fabric bits left over from 30 years of garment cutting, we were able to stitch and shape these textile stories into masks and then into bigger, inspired one-of-a-kind garments. Our hand-dyed and printed scraps became our entertainment, our feast, a review of the past and linked to our journey forward.

The pandemic may have stunted our shop’s sales and made us wonder if our previous business model would return to some sort of normal, but it also gave us time to rethink what we do and how we create. What did people want and need now? Certainly, masks were the early on imperative and necessity and became the early on focus and distraction. Soon to follow was the stay-at-home loungewear that enabled the many zoom meetings to present in something other than pajamas. What really captured our desire to continue to create beauty and experience the joy and satisfaction of a purely artistic realm, we started cutting flowers from our indigo-dyed scraps. We created a garden of fabric flowers. They grew in our dye buckets and on our courtyard drying racks and put sunshine into our anxious days. We couldn't go out and buy flowers so our newly created bouquets sufficed for the loss of color in the paired down existence.

Our cut flowers became a solution for navigating the isolation and the remotely operated future. This set us apart to offer comfort, joy, and a bit of happiness for our muses and fans. In our business of creating one-of-a-kind wearable art, it was a year when scissors became our new friend.

Now, don’t get us wrong. We’ve always used scissors in our textile business, but it was just second nature and we applied scissors for mainly basic tasks. But the pandemic gave us Time. Lots of Time. And with Time, we put our heads together to create new designs with old materials. And in the midst of all that, we eventually found ourselves holding scissors on a regular basis, cutting and cutting, shaping new textures and designs, and giving life to the bolt of white canvas that had been all but forgotten. We chose indigo dye for the color palette which produces endless different shades of stunning blue, and always leaves a unique texture that's never perfect. We started cutting patchwork shapes out of the indigo-dyed canvas and layering the spectrum of blue fabrics on the table. We slowly arrived at cutting out these little flower shapes and inadvertently created a fabric that looked like hydrangeas.

The next thing you know, we are making cuffs that are covered in flowers. And entire pieces covered in individually cut-out flowers. Maybe it was something that crossed our minds in early times, but Covid 2020 fostered a new connection with an old tool. The process of cutting out each flower, sewing each one individually to the pattern panels, then sewing a bead into the center of each flower was a repetitive, meditative action that gave a bit of much-needed routine back into the chaotic energy of the year.

Henri Matisse, of course, inspires all of us with his bright-colored cutouts. In his final years, his weakening eyes and unsteady hands forced him to think of a new creative outlet. Maybe we had him in mind, sitting in his bed shaping dancers, curvy posers, and undulating flowers. He used blue paper a lot. We like blue and use it in our fabric. Blue and white. They always look good together.

The happiness we created was in the process of revival and rejuvenation of our past work. Working and reworking one-of-a-kind remnants and being forced to reinvent what our small studio was producing. Our project for submission is a set of jacket, hat, and mask made from the "Hydrangea" textile we made with our Fiskars, the fiber flora garden with its impressionist style of seeming whole from far away, but when you inspect the details you find every individual stitch, decoration, and imperfection.