I’ve been waiting to get my sewing machine back for over a month now. A friend gave it to me for 500kc. It’s a singer tradition, which apparently is the most basic singer you can find. Anyway, so far so good! I think I’ll cut up some canvases and sew them together with patterns and colored fabric. These could also be stretched on canvas as well. I’ve enjoyed the fabric stores I’ve visited and learning about the basics. One nice thing with fabric is that all the colors are preselected. Both for thread and fabric. That makes it quite different to painting in this respect. However, sewing is also fairly permanent. Of course I have already used a razor to cut out my terrible first attempts, but there is a permanence with fabric that paint doesn’t seem to have. With paint you can always paint over it. Another aspect of textiles I like, is that with all the fear swirling around AI and the future of painting, these clunky hand made items are something that AI still coikdn’t make. Even a machine programmed to make a bad drawing with a sewing machine would be too precise. Perhaps that’s where we’re headed. Art and painting will have to retain some elements of the painterlyness and chance and that will be their allure. As AI just continues to improve.