Stitched on felt

Planned to make this a plane to defuse light. In the process of laying thread on the hand felted rectangle, saw how brilliant a single thread could be. When I started stitching them into the felt, they lost a lot of their brilliance, though you could still see parts of them.

I began to equate that to what happens to many -- burdens, obligations, outlooks can take hold, and diminish the glow. Of course, some obligations are pleasant, burdens are commonly necessary, and outlooks often change as we encounter things/thoughts. I remembered something that my friend Candace had said about a mustard seed of hope, that little bit of hope that a person needs sometimes to turn despair or less dour a circumstance into to a more uplifting spirit.

So, in the next section, I stitched in a mustard seed, and surrounded it with some of the threads, stretching to the top, or meandering on offshoots. The next section has the threads un-stitched, to a large degree, allowing their potential to be most free.

All of this is subtle, mainly because I chose very thin threads, and of course conceptually it is a bit obtuse, at least visually. And, yes, positive thought does not always guarantee excellent outcomes, nor is worry or despair useless, avoidable, or whatever. However, uncool or not, hope is my ally, not blind, not unaided by action, but there.