I Had A Dream

My dreams sometimes feature artistic works by me, but I rarely remember them in the morning. This one, though, I remember. It was an enormous needlepoint, like the size of a throw rug, but framed and intended for wall hanging. It was entitled "My Life, Unfinished" and depicted a mother fallen asleep at her sewing, with a baby at her side. Parts of the canvas were deliberately left unworked. On the left side of the canvas, where most of the unworked areas were, was a sewing box full of skeins of embroidery floss which were actual skeins of fibers tacked to the canvas. Some were more like embroidery floss and some were, inexplicably, eyelash yarn. The eyelash yarn worked well from an artistic standpoint, though, because it added texture. Near the mother's limp hand was an actual threaded needle attatched to some worked stitches and left tucked in the canvas, as if someone had been working on it and just forgot to finish it. On the right side of the canvas, on a whitish-bluish part of the background, portions of the word "December" floated by, almost under the canvas. The mother and baby were worked in a variety of needlepoint stitches in a style characterized by large blocks of color. The mother's hair, for example, was not shaded but was done in a basic needlepoint stitch in black eyelash yarn, and then only part of the mother's hair was finished, part being left deliberately unfinished with a piece of black paper set in behind the canvas to indicate the area where the hair should go. The hand, however, was shaded in flesh tones, and so was the baby. (The hand was the only visible part of the mother's skin, as her head was down.) The finished parts behind the mother were a crazy quilt of patches of wildly different colors and stitches, some of which were unfinished.

It was a brilliant piece of art. There aren't too many pieces of art I'd want to buy, but when one strikes me, it just possesses me, and this one did that. Too bad my life is so much like this piece of art that I'll never be able to actually make it.