The real stitching is well underway now. I have plotted and planned the sweep of them, marked them with pins, adjusted a few, then stitched their stalks… one long simple stitch, to mark place and direction. Now the thinking has been done, my stitches from now on are repetitive and mindless… I can let my thoughts wander while I do them…definitely the best sort of stitching.
They are taking quite some time… the first eight stitches took me a couple of hours, as there was a bit of unpicking and colour changing. But now I’m speeding up.
I was asked “Why 200 seeds?”
Unable to think of anything meaningful very quickly, I told the truth:
“It seemed about the right number to create a sweep of them as if blown across the coat” and my air fare is about £600 so I thought £3 per seed would be a manageable amount for people to sponsor me for”
Not a particularly art-based answer, I know, but it was the truth. The decision for 200 seeds had been made in a fairly arbitrary fashion, based on a vague idea of the aesthetics, coupled with a need for the numbers to make sense to fund the flight.
Strangely, a fellow blogger here, Sharon Hall Shipp looked up “facts 200” on google and up popped this article on QI:
And there it is in black and white:
“Each dandelion flower head produces 200 seeds.”
Sharon called it a retro-fit. Thanks Sharon!
I love this idea that I can work at something seemingly randomly picking numbers or words or images, then something pops up out of nowhere, a mad coincidence… and adds another layer of something to the work.
Coincidence is a marvellous and curious thing.
