Pouch Croatia

The Beginning

When the result satisfy me, than it’s good. That is a marker for me.

I will not make two of the same pouches as each start of a piece of fabric is really organic, so to speak. Or unstructured. I not always have a design in mind and it often changes by pulling threads out. Usually a piece of fabric finds its own way, and to make two of the same would be boring to me.

It all started, embroidery, when I was on a dull stretch of journey. I was cycling in Europe, in winter. Mist and cold wrapped around me and I needed something to do while warming up at camp fires. I’d cycled to Turkey. This was in a period when my mom was battling cancer, and I ought this destination secure enough. If need be, I could jump on a train and be back quickly. The journey to Istanbul on a bicycle was more of a gap which I wanted to close: now I could say I cycled from our doorstep to India.

Not that I ever said it to anyone. Nevertheless, on this cold wintry European beginnings and closures of days, I was inspired by nature. I wanted to draw the fig leaf I carried from Croatia on to a piece of fabric and perhaps use the sheep wool I found along the way, and carried all the while in my panniers.

I was cycling back from Istanbul, via Croatia, through Italy to the Netherlands. I did take the possibility to speed up the process and be with my mom. Embroidering at camp fires may be all romantic and precious but I’d decided I much rather wanted to be with my family.

And so, with the Croatian fig leaf already outlined and placed in a pattern on to a piece of satin, I not happily but surely satisfyingly, finished this tiny piece of creativity while we took care of our mom, my dad, my sister and I.

The tent was replaced by a bed and the camp fires were gone, instead came round the clock care, many visits to the hospital and hope always molested. The willpower in my mom’s becoming tinier being was remarkable and so is looking at this pouch. It resembles no sadness nor negativity at all, only the goodness of a decision being made.

This pouch has found its way out, to a new owner, to someone I know and even visited. I met the person who bought this pouch when I bought the bicycle I toured with for 5 years. She and I wanted to cycle the world, and we both did. More about Gerry can be read in an interview I had with her.