Thoughts on Noticing Stripes
I’ve been noticing stripes in the landscape around where I live for a long time.
It might be because this bit of Norfolk near the Wash is so flat. Being flat the lines are straighter. It makes it easy to see the stripes of fields, one behind another, hedges, lanes with houses on, then the sky and stripes made by the clouds.
I remember the first time I realised that the landscape was stripy. I was 16, and on a trip to Ely with the church choir.
This was when I lived in London, and Ely was this mystical place I’d never been to, except in a book called Tom’s Midnight Garden (it’s a children’s book, but if you haven’t read it and you like books, I recommend it. It’s really lovely).
Because of Tom’s Midnight Garden, I even went up the tower of the cathedral. I am afraid of heights and this is not something I would normally choose to do! But I wanted to, because the characters in the book do. And yes, it was terrifying!
I remember buying a postcard of the cathedral. It was a little watercolour painting, and the artist had painted the stripes of the fields and the hedges, with the cathedral on a hill in the middle.
Then, several years later, after I was married and we moved up here, and the boys had arrived, we were on the beach at Hunstanton, and again, I found myself noticing stripes. Because it so flat, and the Wash is shallow, the tide goes out very far. What is left is lots of sand with the sea in the distance, and sandbanks and dips where there is still water. Then beyond the sea is the expanse of sky again, often with its own stripes of blue and clouds.
I felt inspired to make something then, and I made a felted picture which I’ve never finished. I’d discovered wet felting where you layer bits of roving first one way, then the other, then the first way again. It lends itself to stripes quite nicely. I started embroidering it, but it’s still unfinished.
The landscape might look different where you are, especially if it is hilly. But there might well still be stripes, although they might be more like grain in wood where it goes round a knot.
On a smaller scale, there are stripes elsewhere in nature. Shells of all different kinds often have stripes, sometimes straight bands, other times curving, especially if the shell is curved, like a scallop shell. Feathers too will sometimes have bands of colour. There are sometimes stripes in tree bark, on petals and leaves, and the way seeds grow on certain types of grass.
Shadows can form stripes too. Telegraph wires, where there are several travelling in the same direction, can make stripes on the ground. Shadows of fences and shadows of trees can also form stripes across a path. And shadows on trees, where one half of the trunk is in shadow, and the other is in the light. If there are several trees, and the light is in the right place, it can make a pattern of stripes, with the shadows on all of the trunks and the light, and what is in between the trees, whether it is grass, a park, or a city street.
There is lots of potential for using the stripes we notice in creative projects. I have a half finished Attic24 ripple blanket upstairs, made from a yarn pack inspired by the Yorkshire moors. And somebody I know crocheted one row of a blanket each day of her son’s first year, and chose the colour based on what the weather was like that day.
Plenty of knitting and crochet patterns call for stripes, and when choosing colours to use in a stripy project, we could take inspiration from the stripes we see around us.
Sewing and patchwork projects sometimes call for stripes too. There are stripy quilt blocks, or a freer kind of patchwork can be made by sewing strips of fabric. Colour blocking seems to me to be a fancy way of describing stripes!
So although a trip to the sea might require a clear day and nice weather, there is plenty of inspiration to be found where we live. So I encourage you, while you are out, to take a few moments to notice where there are stripes.
If you like the ideas in this post, you might be interested to know that The Wild Blossom Companion is a seasonal, creative guide filled with gentle inspiration drawn from nature, and includes themes, prompts, and ideas for noticing and making. You can find out more here. And if you particularly like the idea of stripes, it is the theme for June’s Wild Blossom Companion, and it is available as a standalone month in my new Etsy shop, Gather and Bloom.
