There's something about live music and stitching...I've sometimes remarked that a perfect afternoon is sitting outside at a music festival, stitching in the natural light and hearing live music.
Well, yesterday was a variation on that theme. The church down the road has a free Sunday afternoon concert series, and yesterday they featured some chamber players from the Baltimore Symphony. I walked down, small handwork project in my pocket, and found a seat next to an open window in the afternoon sun.
The first piece was a trio by Carl Reinecke, a 19th century composer. Performed on French horn, clarinet, and grand piano (an unusual combination), the music swelled to fill the space in the brick sanctuary
- especially the horn. I was working at that point in a purple overdye, and the deeper tone of the floss somehow matched the tone of the music - not too bright, full, rich. A color that fills the eye in the same way that the music filled the room.
The second piece was Bach's Cello Suite, #1, performed by an extremely accomplished cellist. Wonderful! This was not so much about color, as about the thread itself wandering through the cloth, just as the solo instrument played threads of music that moved through the air, sometimes doubling back on itself, wrapping around a core....but never knotting! (I should be so lucky...)
After an intermission, the clarinet, cello, and piano played a Brahams piece that was full of late winter/early spring end-of-day light...perfectly suiting the changing slant of the sun's rays coming through the window. I had switched at that point to a green overdye, and it, too, suited the music...with the promise of spring to come, the fertile loaming of fall's dead leaves feeding the sleeping bulbs and roots, all the shadows still lurking, but soon to be banished as the sun strengthens and days lengthen with approaching spring. The green I was using wasn't a bright or rich color - rather the graying/brownish/olivish pre-sunshine-and-chlorophyll-production green of the earliest shoots.
A perfect early spring Sunday afternoon!
sue