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.

Dyed and Plied and thoughts of weaving creeping in

Since my spinning is more about making raw material for weaving, the attention I've been paying to better consistency and fineness of yarn is about artisanship more than about immediate use.

But the plying, or playing, adventure has continued and now I think a weaving needs to be made.  I plied together two yellows, one from turmeric, very strong color, with a subtler one, from I think yellow onionskin.  I also used up the rest of that fluff I showed you yesterday, and plied it, correctly this time, with the fluffy blue, which is why there are two balls of that in the pix.

And, since readers do like a bit of insight into the creative (!) process, I thought you'd like to see what's up on the future weaving scene.  I was thinking about the landscape possibilities of the colors of yarn I've woven and dyed in the last few weeks, and have some ideas here. 

But, rather than force them on you, would you like to take a look and see what the colors and their placement and relationship seem to say to you, about subject matter? as you see, I moved them a bit from one pic to the other, looking for balance.

You'll notice that the red and white variegated yarn is about the same sort of thickness as the yellow variegated one.  This is funny, because the red and white are what's left of spinning I did ages ago as a beginner, after dyeing the roving with KoolAid, and that was the best I could do for singles.  Quite ropy!  then the yellow one is now two of my singles plied together.  So it's a quick visual of how I improved my single spinning.  And I'd welcome any reactions to this very raw beginning of an idea.

Plying goes incredibly fast compared to spinning, and I keep on being left behind by it, needing to wind on before I realize it. And I found that though I can ply with my left hand, to get the z twist I was supposed to do yesterday and forgot, I have a lot of trouble winding on with my left. I'll keep doing it, though, to get the skill up.  

And then I found I can in fact spin either s or z with my right hand, now that I come to try it, yay.  This is very useful. So I ended up spinning z with my right hand.  All this is handy for many purposes in life, aside from spinning.  Always good to keep up dexterity if you can. And to avoid over using one part of your body and having to compensate for it.

Anyway, I was upstairs poking around the studio looking for looms (in my case this means cardboard bits with notches cut in them, for small works, picture frames for bigger ones).  Simple rules. I found that my favorite has some weaving on it, in gold foil thread, so I left it alone, and it might be incorporated into what I'm going to do, we'll see.  Anyway, I found the cardboard backing of a large drawing-paper book, opened up all the notches and now have a new loom ready for action.  I'll warp it with cotton crochet thread, strong and easy to handle.  Before I warp it, I will just see if I can manage a Fibonacci ratio in this work, always good for results. That's where one side is in a ratio of 1:1.6 to the other side. As in a 5x8 or 3x5 index card, nice immediate balance.  This is more likely to be 8x13, though.

I usually like to weave tapestry, which is where the warp threads, the vertical ones, are completely covered by the weft threads, the horizontal ones.  The other sort of weaving, where both are equally important, is fine for functional items, such as most of our clothes, but doesn't appeal to me for art purposes.  I've made purses and belts with the regular tabby weaving, but to make more visually interesting work I don't think you can beat tapestry.

And I usually create it the way I do all art: alla prima, meaning just plunge in, no calculating or presorting or sketching or any of that.  Not my style at all. It's surprising what images emerge from weaving done this way, where you just let things happen and go with what seems interesting.

I might look at my transparencies, too and see what suggests itself from there.  So this is my Solstice thinking!  Happy Solstice, everyone, and the nights will creep back a little from now on.  Except for friends in the antipodes, where summer will start to retreat before too long. Always hard to imagine you steaming hot when we're whining about ice!