small pieces

I am back to making small pieces and loving it. Periodically, I think I need to start making larger pieces. “They are bigger and better and more important,” my mind says.

But I have always loved the intimacy of a small piece. It pulls me in and gets me looking at the details. It’s like I become Alice in Wonderland and shrink myself inside the piece and live in that world for a moment or two.

They’re more feminine. Larger pieces are in your face, and sometimes that is magical, too. But smaller pieces creep up on us and ask us to pay attention to their quiet. 

I love to take the corner of a larger piece and turn it in my mind’s eye into a smaller piece. I have cut up so many of my larger pieces to create smaller pieces because they have a charm that is lost in the bigger piece.

I also love the freedom of a quick gesture, and that’s much harder to do on large pieces. In larger pieces, I need to think about composition and structure.  With little pieces, I can capture that intuitive spontaneity more easily.  And stitching big pieces can take months. I get impatient and bored.

So, I am back to small pieces and loving it.