Tapestry returns, stitching too

This is an elegant how to book on everything you ever needed to know on the art of Tapestry Weaving.  Rebecca Mezoff does a lot of teaching, on YouTube and elsewhere, and is very skilled indeed.  She got Sarah Swett to write the foreword, so that inclines me to study this book. 

Aside from the instruction, there's a gallery of tapestry art, from very modern, tapestry is art, and it changes as art does

all the way back to medieval, the Unicorn Tapestries.  There is a collection in the Cloisters, part of the Met, which I've visited, and another in the Cluny Museum in Paris which I totally failed to visit when I lived there, because I didn't know about it.

And here, harking back, is a stitching I created years ago, been exhibited and had a good deal of attention.  It's from a picture of one of the Cluny tapestries, stitched in a single strand of floss, on 38 count silk gauze canvas.  I just used the picture as a reference, working on a blank canvas.

 It's 6" x 4" framed in a little wood frame which works quite well for it.  I've also used this image, scanned it and taken transfer prints from it. Got my moneys worth, I'd say.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in tapestry, Rebecca covers every sort of loom, from the large floor loom to diy pipe looms and wooden craftsman made looms.  I don't think there's anything you can't find in this book.  She also deals with color and design, just everything.

Even if you don't plan on working in tapestry, it's a great book to wander through just for the visual pleasure of the whole thing.

It came upon a midnight clear

This is what happened on Christmas Eve, as I was looking for Christmas music on YouTube.  I just found in my feed another fiber prep video, this time not about pseudorolags, but about -- fauxlags!  And Spinning Sara, a great teacher, who knows exactly how to demonstrate, and when to explain and when to just show, introduced me to this wonderful prep method, better for a solid color than the  pseudos, which are a way of blending as you go.

Here's a dense chunk of roving, needing to be opened up and aired before working it.

Sara draws it out gently end to end, like this.  The black pants are a good background for this, but not a good choice for staying fluff free, but it's all in a good cause

So instead of a dense mass, you end up with this long airy fiber length

Which you roll, a single turn, onto something handy of the right size.  She has a wooden piece of a loom which works fine, and I went in search of something like it in my art supplies.  I rummaged through my pvc pipe bag of bits, and found just the thing.  Once again, pvc pipe is the answer.  Just the right length and diameter.

See how you roll, one revolution of the pipe before breaking the fiber, into hollow tubes?

And this is the whole length of fiber made into these fauxlags, just waiting to spin.

By this time it was after midnight, and I still had to try spinning them before I declared it a day, or night.

So here's the fluffy, airy result.  

Happy Spinner here.  And I did eventually find the London Brass playing a wonderful concert of Christmas music, out of doors, brass instruments standing up to cold a bit better than others.

And  proved yet again that makers are a little crazed as people go.

So here's what may send me off on a tangent

Just looking at the SpinOff newsletter, which suddenly shows up in my email now and then, and mostly isn't right on point for me.  But this one is.

See here Pseudorolags It's about a different way of preparing fiber for spinning and I think it might just be a bit of fun for me to try, given that I have quite a few different fibers to try it with.  Hm.

About the name pseudorolags!  Rolags are little sort of sausages of fiber, which you create with your carder and spin from.  I made them when I had that raw fleece and consequently tons of fiber to work with. These are made without any tools at all, just your hands and maybe a couple of pencils to roll them on.  Right up my alley.  Simple is good.

No sooner said than did.

Wisps of fiber layered

Several colors incorporated, then rolled up

And here's the resulting yarn.  It drafted very well, considering it consisted of many layers of short fibers.You see the parent fibers on the left.

And I'm quite pleased with the fineness of the yarn I was able to get.  I did this on my smallest spindle.

I think this will happen more.  You can design as you go, depending on what you put in the rolls.

Looking ahead at the solstice

 These are the books I showed you over in Field and Fen, and here's why.

The Winter Solstice today is the shortest day of the year, and as of tomorrow, the light starts to come back tiny bit by tiny bit.  So I think it's a good time to start looking forward hopefully.  And, if you're interested in learning something new, what better time to at least start thinking about it, than today.

These are four of my favorite books to show people and encourage them to do their own drawing, painting, observing, and making the means of preserving what they've made. 

The Practical Naturalist, an Audubon book, edited by Chris Packham, with contributions from a lot of interesting people.

Weaving Without a Loom, by Veronica Burninham, which has been printed with various different covers.  This is just the one I happen to have.

Handmade Books by Kathy Blake, which is a wonderful teaching book about a wide range of book types and binding and stitching, and very accessible to an interested beginner.

A Life in Hand by Hannah Hinchman, showing you how to go about using art in your journal, and how to lose your fear of doing it!

A journal doesn't have to go on forever unless you want it to.  I've made journals of drawings done every day for a month, then bound them into little booklets. Or you can do on entry on the first of each month.  Whatever suits you, it's your book.

The Practical Naturalist may go more into the study of nature than a casual person wants, but it's very good indeed on learning to observe and just enjoy for its own sake, when you go out walking.   You don't have to have wonderful surroundings in order to see interesting things and try drawing them. Whatever you come across is material.

Pro tip: get up your courage to draw out there in the open.  Your drawings, even though they may be a bit beginnerish at the beginning, why not, will have so much more life than if you take a photo and work from that at home.

It took me a while as a teenage kid to get brave and draw out of doors.  Then I found people were interested and the problem then was to try to work while being peppered with friendly questions, and stories about how their relatives draw out of doors, and so on!  But it's really okay as an experience.  People are uncritical, and just admire you for doing it. So there's that.

A Life In Hand is a great way into nature journaling, or just adding bits of drawing and painting to any journal you keep.  This is open to an important chapter: Finding Your Own Voice.  Vital stuff.  Whatever you do is fine, it's all about discovering your own talent and wants.

Then, why not create your own book to keep the work in?  You can draw and paint and later compose the pages into book form, or you can make a simple stitched blank book with paper you can paint and draw on, and bravely work straight into it.  A lot of people are a bit timid about this, and would rather make the book later, or cut out their images and glue them in.  Your choice.  Nothing's right or wrong here.

Then you might need a bag, see mine below, to carry your materials and your journal in, since you'll be wanting to do rapid impressions and sketching while you're out walking or observing, or just sitting on the sofa looking out at the bird feeder.

Veronica Burningham's Weaving without a Loom is one of my favorites for introducing people, including me, to the freeform approach to weaving.  You can weave great stuff using a piece of cardboard you've notched top and bottom.

And you can do weaving with sticks.  I've done this, and since my sticks are craftsman made and expensive, you need a cheap alternative.  I've taught kids to do stick weaving using drinking straws.  You can make lovely things this way.  The youngsters I've taught, ranging from 7 to 10, made bookmarks, and went home all prepared to do more weaving to make belts, guitar straps, headbands, you name it.

Card looms shown here, for making table mats, but anything you want to make, really.

And here's a bag I made using the  instructions you saw a couple of pix ago, from this book. The strap, which goes round the whole bag and works as a shoulder strap too, I made using my weaving sticks.  Note the nice decorative area in the middle, very simply done, but makes it so much more interesting.  I made this donkeys' years ago, and various beloved cats have got into it, playing and snagging the threads.  Cheap yarn, just what I had on hand.  Warp and weft from same yarn.

So maybe you'll be tempted to start thinking about this.  Today would be good.  And please leave your critic at home when you go out on a drawing expedition, which may be one block away. Or just outside your front door. She will try to put you off, and you just need to invite her to come back later, many years later, when you're ready.  Right now you're just pleasing yourself.

As a wise art teacher many years ago said to me: this work is better than you realize.  This will be true of you, too.

One of the things that my adult students used to be amazed about when we did critique, was the strengths I pointed out in their work. Everyone has them.  It's just a matter of letting yourself find your voice.  You don't need to show your work to anyone, except if you want to email me pix, that would be a treat, just to share, not to expect critique.  Don't look to anyone for praise, though, since this is your journey, not theirs.  Art is about coming face to face with yourself.  Like the archer aiming at the target, you're really aiming at you.

It's a lovely journey.

Pressing flowers and other discoveries

 I was attending to the birthday bouquet, and needed to remove a couple of tithonia, aka Mexican sunflower. If you've ever grown these, you'll be aware that the stems break easily. Beautiful flower heads on frail stems.

And I wondered how they were holding up so well here. Then found out why. See this?

 Little plastic tube, works like a splint. Brilliant. As the stem takes up water, it swells and fills the tube firmly.

And I decided to press the two heads I'd removed, once in a while I like to do this.  Emily Dickinson used to press flowers a lot, in fact there are notebooks of them, pasted in, annotated, in Amherst.  Very keen on botany. 

And I was thinking about this while I got organized to press these flowers, my method being to put them between layers of paper towel, insert them in the bookcase under a stack of books, and quite often forget I've done it.  I was humming and thinking about this,when I suddenly noticed, between the books I was pulling out, a paper towel. And exploring further found this

Pansies and maybe primrose, from years ago.  I wonder if Emily ever had this issue. Anyway, it was the exact same books I'd used years ago for this purpose, and I now realize why.

The stack included a book on dyeing, using plants, and the lovely Edith Holden's Diary, a facsimile of her real country diary for 1906. She was a botanical illustrator, and her work is just wonderful to revisit.  Since this is a facsimile, it's not just a reprint, but an actual photographic version of her own handwriting, drawing and painting, and the browned edges are exactly true to the original.  I've had this for ages, and it's just a lovely form. So it seemed like a meaningful book to help me press flowers.

If you love good illustration, and diary forms, and interesting poems and quotations added in where they fit, take a look.  I will now reread this. 

Here's a double page spread, look at the composition as well as the colors and shapes. This is way beyond meticulous copying.

 And here's the main page for December.  If you can get hold of this book now, I've had my copy for decades, not sure it it's out there, you'll be glad you did.

Needed a rest from knitting, so there's spinning..

 This is a pretty challenging fiber.  I think it may be silk from saris.  At any rate, it's a lot of parallel slippery parts, with little to no fluff to catch.  So it's the very devil to spin, short staple, very tricky.  The black and white threads are the strongest, but the red parts falls apart if you breathe on them.

Anyway, I persevered and adapted my spinning and drafting to accommodate it, and I am getting actual yarn from it.  I will have to be sure and ply this with a wool single, so as to have a yarn that will hold together in handling.

It's all an interesting journey.  I need to spin more so as to keep up the supply for knitting. This much knitting has used about three quarters of my supply of yarn.

Diagonal update

This is where I am. Few more inches and half the back is complete. And about half my spun yarn is used up. So much faster to knit than spin. Imagine women in earlier times spinning as fast as they could to keep weavers supplied.  

When I get the two halves knitted, I can decide how to relate them. This work is reversible, so I can have herringbone pattern, either  pointing up or down, or I can run the stripes in the same diagonal direction. Once done and the ends woven in, I'll be able to see better what's best to do.

Once the high side reaches 21" I'll bring the other side up to complete the rectangle.

New discoveries, new solutions

 It's good to be knitting again, feels like a long time.  And here are some discoveries I've made in the last day or two:

My spinning has improved quite a bit, which means my singles are finer and more consistent, which means my plied yarn is less chunky and random.  Which means I'll have a range of quality in the finished product. Which is okay, but will be interesting.  Possibly I'll be the only person to notice, as often happens.

Anyway, I mentioned that I will be using diagonally knitted rectangles, and I thought since this yarn is chunky and knits up fast, that I'd better get cracking and do some measuring and thinking before I get much further on.  So I picked a jacket I like for size, and measured the various bits I need to know about. And made a very small diagram of what I think I'm doing.

That 5.5" on the sleeve tells me the size, which will be multiplied by two, for the sleeve opening, when I stitch back and front together. And the measurement across the neck reminds me how to set fronts onto back when I assemble the pieces. You'll notice that the back is two inches shorter than the front.  It's good design, the original jacket maker, not me, allowing for the rounder shape at the front than down the back.  Often missing, I've found, in Asian dress patterns, where busts are not quite as much of a feature on the body as western ones.  At least that's my guess.  I've noticed some wonderful Japanese designer patterns with not a single dart anywhere.  Made for a different figure than western ones, where darts are what makes the garment hang well.  I had a western friend who was straight up and down, no waist, tiny bust, tall, and she was given Japanese designer clothes by a designer friend, just because she could wear them so wonderfully.  And she did.  Total elegance. Not a dart in sight. But people with more shapely bods use different design approaches.

Back to the jacket.  Right now I'm working on the rectangle for the back.  And I've found another interesting item: my long needles won't accommodate enough stitches to do the back in one piece.  I don't have any circulars this size, even if I didn't hate circulars with the hatred of a thousand burning suns, not that I have any strong opinions on them, really.

Sooooo, I will do what people did in the past when they only had access to narrow looms and small tools.  I'll make the back in two pieces with a decorative seam up the middle. Is what I'll do. As you see, the needles just about hold half the stitches the back needs in total.  The thing about chunky yarn like this is that it doesn't squash up the way fine yarn does.  So you can get fewer total stitches onto the needle.

Here you see (disregard the sticking out bits, they'll be finished neatly at a later date) the rectangle starting to take shape.  It's mind bending thing, trying to figure out how to knit a diagonal rectangle.  Knitting a diagonally square diagonally is a piece of cake, just increase every row till the sides are the required size, then decrease on every row back to a point. And you have a square.   A potholder.  A dishcloth. A facecloth. The side of a purse.  Pockets for my jacket, even..

Rectangles, however, don't work like this. So I studied Sarah Swett and various YouTube videos on the subject, not all of them helpful, and it seems as if I'm getting this sorted pretty well.

The jacket will be kind of broad tweedy stripes in every color you can think of.  And what I'm doing, since I already designed the plies in colors that work together, is just to randomly plunge in my hand to the bag o' yarn and work with whatever emerges. All the way to the end of the ball of yarn. What looks like a blue stripe above is a nice blue and grey mix, very restful after the black and yellow that happened before. But it will be a kind of lucky dip affair.

When I come to knit the fronts, if I knit them and don't weave them, not positive on this yet, I will abandon the diagonal when I get to the neck shaping, and just knit straight, decreasing as I go to fit the shoulder area. I'm really telling myself all this, so I won't forget what I said!  Good teacher, not such an attentive student at times. 

The knitted fabric already feels very cosy in my hand, so this will be a nice winter jacket, I think.  

As you see, informality reigns in the knitting projects chez Boud.

In other words, leap and the net will appear!  

Spin, ply, KNIT!

I've started knitting my sweater or jacket or whatever it will be, for a couple of reasons.

One is that I don't know how much to spin to make enough yarn, so I'll start to knit and find out how far I've spun. If (when) I run out, I'll resume spinning and plying more yarn supplies.

The other is that I can't wait any longer to find out how this yarn knits up or what gauge I'm going to get.

It's going to be diagonally knitted rectangles, which is why you see a triangle here. 

The loops at the end of the rows are yarn overs, which will be a lacy seam when I construct it. Credit goes to Sarah Swett for this cool idea.

I'm working on #8 straight needles, gauge looks like 4 stitches and 7 rows to the inch.

This gives me the option of doing math to figure out the ultimate size of this piece, which will be the back. Or I can just try it as I go, a more likely procedure for me. I have a jacket to use as a template if I get all carried away with notions of accuracy. 

But this is a warm casual item, size only matters as far as  being confident it's big enough.

I'm doing it in diagonal rectangles, two for the front, one the back, and the sleeves will be straight knitted. Or possibly woven. We'll see when we get there. And maybe the fronts will be shaped at the top to create a v opening. 

Endless opportunities for indecision.

Current yarn, and a guided tour

 Ages ago, I offered to do a guided tour of my art materials, after showing you the drawer for the goldwork set aside for the moment, and here it comes. One thing I noticed very quickly was that it's in three of my four rooms, and that there's more than I realized, maybe that isn't such a surprise.  But this is after the Great Winnowing.

Anyway, here's the current yarn output, with cardboard rolls ready to ply

Here, in the kitchen, under the counter, is the area for dyeing and papermaking tools

In a nice old oak dresser in the living room, are the tools for paper piecing

And some of the fabrics useful for piecing

 

Under the coffee table, left, the raw material for spinning, on the right, tools for plying

Upstairs in the guest room, in the drawers under the bed, materials for crewel, knitting and weaving. In the rightmost drawer, on the bottom left corner, is a handspun ball of llama yarn from Bolivia, which cheers me when I look at my own spinning.  The llama yarn is much more rough and artisanal and irregular in twist, and full of bits of grass and debris, than mine, and it's okay.

And in the walk in closet in that room, old artworks, image transfers and paintings, waiting for places in future artist books or other ideas yet to be had

And paper, including some with image transfers in place, for origami and artist book making

Handmade paper waiting for new homes in books or frames

And a taboret for knitting and crocheting tools

Tools for weaving, painting, in containers, and stamping in the tin box, see also the rigid heddle loom stored there, with the heddle to the left, drawing board against the wall

Supplies for stitching, goldwork, silk embroidery

This also made me realize how many arts and crafts I tend to get involved in. Bottom right of that last picture is a small printing press for postcard size printmaking.

This is as small as I seem to be able to get my supplies.  I have a compact set of materials and tools for every craft, easy to find when I'm ready to use them.  This is one big advantage to having done the Great Winnowing.  I can find stuff, wheee!  On the shelves above these containers are frames and other materials a bit dull for pictures, but ready for when I am.

I should explain that these are all part of my exhibiting life.  I've had solo exhibits in all of these media at different times, and had works juried into group shows, too, so it's pretty serious to me.  It looks pretty humble when you see the origins of the works, though!  The rigid heddle loom is on longterm loan from the Princeton Embroiderers' Guild, to whom it was donated, with the understanding that if anyone wants to try it, I'll hand it over. No takers up to now, though.

I'm leaning back to stitching and to piecing, and I think I'll have to sort of organize my time to fit them in.  That Robe of Many Colors is still waiting for me.

Morning spent in heaven

 Today's presentation from the textile museum was so worth the time. Two Sotheby's colleagues, with a combined 80+ years of knowledge and experience in rugs and carpets, sharing memories and knowledge.

I just want to give you a little gallery of what I saw. They responded to questions promptly, and another expert, not on screen, was quick to pick up on the q and a.

This is a treasury of knowledge and textile history and preservation. And I think everyone with an interest in making can get ideas from these designs and colors. And I bet you've seen some of these motifs in contemporary fabrics and rugs, too.

All natural dyes, they predate the aniline processes of the 19th century. Some silk, some wool, all masterpieces in textiles.