Weaving Hand

Once a week, Hand/Eye sends four or five articles to my inbox. Always interesting, but one this week really hit the mark for me on all levels. Annie Waterman's article about a Brooklyn weaving studio called Weaving Hand, that brings together community, culture and art therapy. Check out the Weaving Hand blog and website for some amazing images and stories.

What a wonderful logo!

Mid-Winter Colour & Creative Crisis

What every January in the Pacific Northwest needs: crocuses on the windowsill. A friend gave me the bowl of bulbs in November, I moistened the soil and kept them in a dark place 'til just before Christmas, when they looked like pale fingers pushing through the soil. I thought they were paperwhites, so was surprised and happy to see simple crocuses. And Mani-Neko is happy too, I think.

I have been pondering on a project. Ever since seeing the amazing drawings in the recently published Codex Canadensis, I have been wanting to render the images in thread. One thought led to another, and possibly since I was simultaneously reading Joan Edwards's book on Crewel Embroidery, it seemed perfectly logical to put 17th C. embroidery techniques together with 17th C. drawing, and to create large panels similar to 17th C. bed curtains. Bed curtains of that time were often worked in crewel-stitched tree of life motifs, and the Codex is a collection of the flora, fauna and peoples present in Eastern Canada when the European missionaries arrived, something similar to a tree of life itself.

There's lots more going on conceptually, and I think it could be a fabulously exciting piece, but I have had to get a hold of myself and think about the sheer logistics involved. It would probably take a couple of years to complete, working on it every day. Because of my back and hands, I could probably only work on it about four hours a day total, and it would be the only project going, with any of my other interests falling by the wayside. Could I keep up my interest and energy for that long?

And then there's the whole issue of what I would do with the finished work. I think it's a natural for exhibition in the public gallery realm, but I have been out of the trend-conscious straight art world for such a while now I really can't be sure. I used to get grants and exhibit professionally, but since my accident I thought I had left that world behind. I don't know that it's possible to re-enter that easily - it looks as though I didn't take my career seriously, whereas I think what happened was a shifting of priorities.

In any case, it's not like I have room in my house for a set of 17th C. bed curtains. Most of the art I have produced over the years is either sold, or left behind in the attics and basements of places I have lived. I have even been known to dumpster artwork. (Somehow what I trashed always seemed to be removed before the garbage collectors came. I smile to think there might be people out there who have rescued or re-purposed my work, and may be enjoying it in one way or another to this day.)

But maybe I am just getting ahead of myself. When I create a new piece I usually can "see" it complete in my mind's eye, and most of the process is simply production. I don't usually change a piece much as I go, although I have been trying to loosen up in that regard. Perhaps I should start with a sample to see what happens. How can I resist an image like this one?

Image from Library and Archives Canada. See a virtual exhibition here.

Philadephia Fiber

I had a nice note the other day from Diane Savona, an artist and curator who is putting together a show called Mending=Art as part of FiberPhiladelphia 2012. Diane was very kindly asking me for permission to include one of my mending posts in material that will accompany the exhibition. I said "yes" right away, and then went exploring the FiberPhiladelphia site.

Wow! I was impressed to see that FiberPhiladelphia is a city wide series of events and exhibitions focusing on the fiber arts. It looks like it will run from now through May, with many different events - check the calendar. And it happens every two years. It strikes me that Philadelphia must be a very enlightened and progressive city to feature the textile arts in such a way.

And Diane's gallery page is wonderful to browse through. Her work uses found textiles and objects to create evocative quilt-like pieces. In one recent work she has incorporated bits of debris from last year's Japanese tsunami in maplike patchwork, and in another series, "Fossil Garments", she layers deconstructed lace garments with embedded sewing tools and notions, viewing clothing as a kind of archeology.

A Gem Indeed

I have been reading Crewel Embroidery In England for the past few days. I was going to do a review, but Mary Corbet's Needle'n'Thread has a wonderfully illustrated review already done, and I agree with pretty much everything she says, so go read her thoughts first, if you like.

If you are wondering how such a book, printed in 1975 and with many fewer colour illustrations than are customary these days could hold my attention, I have to say the text was downright ROLLICKING! Vivid, opinionated and thoroughly knowledgable, Joan Edwards's words create the liveliest descriptions of embroidery I have ever come across. She lectured and taught embroidery for the Inner London Education Authority and the V&A Museum, and I bet her lessons must have been a treat.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the timeline at the back, which parallels the history of British monarchs, events, artists and architecture, and embroidery, tapestry and lace. One can clearly see how trends in textile design followed breakthroughs in technology and exploration over the centuries. Edwards also includes a generous bibliography titled "The pleasures of reading about embroidery."

I love the book's epilogue.

"From time to time there comes to every embroiderer moments of the purest possible pleasure. The particular piece of work on which she has been engaged is finished. She removes it from the frame and spreads it out between her hands, examining every detail with minute attention. It is as though she is seeing it for the first time. Out of her own skill, initiative, and invention she has created something that pleases her. Briefly she allows herself to savour her sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.

Maybe, she concedes, it is not of quite such surpassing excellence as she had hoped to acheive when she made the design, chose the threads, and decided exactly where to place the first stitch, but on balance as good as or even a little better than her previous work.

Will anybody else, she wonders, realise how much thought and care has gone into it? Will it by some happy chance be miraculously preserved, forgotten but not destroyed, eventually to become a treasured family heirloom, and even perhaps to find its way into a great museum, where scholars will document it and embroiderers study it as an interesting example of historical needlework? Surely, she reflects, it is not asking very much to be remembered as a woman who was clever with her needle.

Even as she plays fondly with her pipe dreams, she knows in her heart that its chances of survival are minimal; that although it is here today, pretty, fresh, and colourful, by tomorrow it will be faded and grubby, the threads worn and the colours faded; and that because the present sets very little store by its immediate past, the next generation is as likely to destroy as cherish it. Perhaps she will comfort herself with the thought that, like a garden, much of embroidery's charm lies in the fact that it is completely ephemeral.

But to finish one piece of work is only an excuse to begin another, the idea for which she has been turning over in her mind for a long while. She cannot wait to get on with it for she is irresistibly fascinated by the art of working intricate stitches and by the variety of decorative effects she can obtain with them; by watching a design develop along the lines and in the colours she has chosen for it; and by the knotty little problems she is constantly being called upon to resolve.Absorbed in bringing into focus all her technical expertise, taste, and ingenuity, and balancing them on the point of her needle, she has neither regret nor hesitation. The past and the future may take care of themselves. Time becomes meaningless. Only the embroidery she is engaged upon at the present moment is important."

Spinning the Unspinnable

This is really interesting...
Spinning the unspinnable is an article by nanotechnologists at The University of Texas at Dallas. They have invented a "broadly deployable technology for producing weavable, knittable, sewable, and knottable yarns containing up to 95 weight percent of otherwise unspinnable guest powders and nanofibers. A minute amount of host carbon nanotube web, which can be lighter than air and stronger pound-per-pound than steel, confines guest particulates in the corridors of highly conducting scrolls without interfering with guest functionality for such applications as energy storage, energy conversion, and energy harvesting."

The yarn structure is based on "Archimedean and Fermat spirals and spiral combinations found in nature and revered by diverse cultures for thousands of years." Amazingly, the yarns are thinner than a human hair, and have applications in things like lithium-ion batteries and biofuel cells, as well as clothing that could store or generate energy.

I've always said that spinning infuses yarn with energy, but I had no idea it could go this far.

B&W

I finally got the beast of a warp onto the loom and am now at the satisfying, soothing stage of weaving it off. I couldn't believe how difficult it was to thread and wind on, but given that it has been 15 years since I was last weaving seriously, and even then I never used such a fine yarn (16/2) and so many ends (614), I guess I should have known. But I probably wouldn't have started it if I HAD known, so I'll just consider it an exercise in patience and give myself a gold star.

It is to be a traditional butcher's apron for my sweetie. He could buy a perfectly serviceable one from a chef's supplier for under $20, but this is a slow cloth for a slow foodie. It has already taken me about 20 hours to wind the warp and dress the loom, and will take about the same length of time to weave off the six yards of cloth. I at least had the presence of mind to wind enough warp for two aprons, thereby getting two for the time of one.

But working with black thread at this dark, gloomy time of year is a real challenge. It's hard to see with the middle-aged eyes. Happily, next month I am signed up for a weaving workshop with Jane Stafford that focuses on colour and design, so I hope to get a good fill of bright colour then.

Meanwhile, the pile of grey yarn is growing. I figure it takes about 2 hours for each skein, from fleece to finished yarn. I have sixteen skeins now, and will probably need another sixteen. Too late, I remembered Stephanie complaining about knitting for a big man in one of her Yarn Harlot postings. Wish that had come to mind before I decided to knit a sweater for the chef! It will probably take over 100 hours of spinning and knitting - good thing that's what I like to do.

And, thinking about the endless hours of repetitive handwork and how soothing and centering it is for me, I realize I would probably be stark raving mad if I didn't have the textile arts in my life. Not only are they therapeutic, I have something to show for it at the end. Positive all round!

Following Feathers

I just checked out Jude Hill's Magic Feather project slide show. I clicked on it, not knowing what to expect, and discovered that each of the 639 stitched feathers are shown. I wondered if I would see my contribution, and as the amazing variety of feathers wafted by, found myself making comparisons and finding favourites. My little brain also started to wonder how Jude is going to put them together - where to begin? When my eagle feather showed up 2/3 of the way through, I felt a warm glow of participation, of being part of something special.

A truly lovely project. Magic, indeed!


I actually saw the sun rise today - a rare event for me as I am usually quite slothful in the morning.

Happy New Year, Every One!

I make a habit of cleaning the house on December 31 so that I don't drag my dust from the past year into the new one. In that spirit I offer the following opinion, recognising that while nobody wants to end 2011 on a sour note, it's better than carrying it into shiny, fresh 2012.

I should preface this admittedly cranky review of Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery with a couple of comments. First, I paid full cover price for this book, at my wonderful local independent bookstore, Watermark. I am glad I did, since I believe it means a few more dollars stay in my community. Second, I could have been in this book. So could you, if you had seen the posting asking for submissions. I didn't send anything in, because I don't believe self-selected collections of unpaid artists are a valid indicator of what's out there, and I think artists should be paid for their work if we have any hope of being taken seriously, either by ourselves or others.

On the other hand, Hoopla contains the work of several artists who I know and respect. The brilliant Betsy Greer contributed the foreword. Sherri Lynn Wood is featured, as is Jenny Hart. Although I have never met Ray Materson, either in person or on-line, I have been in awe of both his story and his talent for several years. I have great admiration for the work of Penny Nickels and Alexandra Walters. That they are included here gives the book more legitimacy that I think it deserves.

Sad to say, Hoopla falls short for me on several fronts. Maybe author Leanne Prain tried to cover too much, or maybe her publisher didn't give her the editing or design support she needed. My biggest criticism is of the how-to section. God help anyone trying to learn to stitch from these instructions. The diagrams are confusing and in several cases, just plain wrong. ( And I'm not talking about an alternative way of making the stitch, either. Couching, chain stitch and French knots are all screwy here.) There is no excuse for this since so many clear, accurate instructions are available, on line and in print. Prain states more than once that embroidery skills are passed on orally, but her verbal instructions are not any clearer than the diagrams. (I don't know where she got the idea that embroidery is learned through oral tradition, since pretty much everyone I know learned it visually, by being shown.)

The design of the book causes some frustration as well. There are numerous sidebars, some with useful information, some not. For example, there is a sidebar that helpfully lists some possible containers for your embroidery project: an old eyeglass case, a 1950's ceramic planter, a cigar box, a typewriter case, a coffee tin. (Huh? If you can't think of something practical to store your project in, this list is not going to help.) Then, in another sidebar, buried in a list of six other hints, is some of the most valuable information for a new embroiderer: to separate your strands of floss and recombine them in the number desired before threading your needle. I believe this technique is commonly known as stripping the thread, although Prain doesn't use that term here.

A full page is given to a warning not to lick the end of your thread to point it for insertion into the needle's eye, lest the moisture cause your needle to rust. Funny, I lick my thread all the time, and have never had a rusty needle. There is a great deal of mystifying information on transferring patterns to cloth, involving needless steps (ie. "Trim your pattern to 1/4" from the edge so you have something to hold onto." Huh? A quarter of an inch is not much to hold onto, why make it hard for yourself?) There is not a lot of discussion about thread, but vintage thread and floss are suggested without the caveat that cotton becomes brittle and dry over time. Depending on how "vintage" your thread is, you could be facing a lot of grief with breakage and tangling.

Odd bits of instruction abound. Prain advises that stitches be no longer than 1/4" when doing satin stitch, otherwise the shiny, smooth effect will be lost. She says cross stitch is always best worked on Aida cloth. A project of counted cross stitch is called needlepoint. Securing your thread on the back of the work isn't necessary because the stitches will stay in place on their own. (!)

The photographs are of an uneven quality and often more attention seems to have been given to the settings and photo styling than clear details of the stitches. Overall, the look of the book is cute, fun, and (they tell me) hip, so it may be that I am just out of touch. (Which reminds me of a woman my age I saw yesterday with a button that read "I may be too old to understand your music... but that doesn't mean it doesn't suck!" pinned to her very cool, vintage black leather motorcycle jacket. But I digress...)

Although I confess to not reading every word, what I did read revealed many typos and formatting inconsistencies, which are more the publisher's responsibility than the author's. It's frustrating and sad to see contemporary embroidery, a field so close to my heart, not given the care and respect it deserves. Obviously, the intention here was for a popularization of innovative embroidery, and a debunking of the idea that needlework is all quaint hearts and flowers, but, excuse me, The Subversive Stitch came out in 1989, and artists like Hannah Hoch, Sonia Delauney and Sophie Tauber-Arp were making textile art that challenged notions of gender roles back in the early 20th century.

There are quite a few projects featured here, none of which I would ever make. There is no bibliography, although there is one page of nine (count 'em) website listings . For all its claims to inspire innovative stitching, I don't think Hoopla is going to be regarded in years to come as the definitive volume of the current generation of stitching in the same way Therese de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework or Erica Wilson's Embroidery Book or Mary Thomas's Embroidery Book were for their respective eras. However, many of the artists included are very worthy of attention, and their own words are probably the most inspiring aspect of the whole book.

I recommend checking Hoopla out very carefully before purchasing it - that is, unless you are feeling flush and want to contribute a few dollars to your local economy.