An excerpt from The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, by Kao Kalia Yang
Grandma liked to work by the window in the natural light. Sometimes she mended her skirts…. Sometimes she used her scissors with the long handles to cut plastic bags from Rainbow Foods, from Sears, from Kmart, from Wal-Mart,... the white “Thank You” bags from the Asian grocery stores, into long strips of light brown, mostly white, sometimes red and green. In the last years of her life, she would spend hours before the window twisting the plastic strips into ropes, carefully massaging the lengths of cut plastic into the exposed, wrinkled skin of her leg. Wearing her thick reading glasses, she spent her days making bags and bags of twisted plastic ropes. She said that there were always uses for ropes in life, things to tie together.
Adding twist to strips of plastic bread bags with a Bulgarian spindle. I did this about a year ago, trying to quit wasting so much plastic. I wanted to crochet bags from it, but then would need to learn crochet.
Such a fundamental process of skill, fiber, material, joining. Someone who cannot not work with her hands, make useful things. It got me thinking. Some of us have been focusing on the fundamentals for a while now.
Like Sarah spinning coffee filters
Sally breeding sheep and cotton
Neanderthal 3 ply plant fiber cord
Jude moving from old bed sheet to temple robe
Abby explaining traditional irrigation
Spindle made from half an avocado pit and a stick. Spinning cotton from a pill bottle.
Handmade bamboo reed - sleying with commercial cotton warp acquired in estate destash.
The essence of who we are, as people, can be seen in our use of fiber. We who have distanced ourselves immeasurably in 150 years from these processes of hands, from the knowledge that grows from handling plant stems, pods, cocoons, locks of wool, wriggling lambs --- from the intelligence inherent in managing various sticks, knowing their size, weight, heft, details of purpose and potential --- how many of us have tools that are worn into softness by our hands’ continuous use? Not many, in the industrialized world. I don’t - I’ve only been spinning for 15 years and weaving for 10, and I use lots of different spindles and sticks, not the same ones daily.
Flax singles on vintage Bugarian spindles….. need more practice with this.
We can look at a culture, at the clothing and use of fibers for multiple layers of shelter or containment, and know how these people relate to their environment, how the lifestyle developed in a way that honors the processing of fiber into cloth or basket, net, bag, rope, blanket, house wall or roof. The expressions of textile making speak the essence of a traditional community.
Sweater from a Spinner’s Eden Farm fleece - a CVM/Romeldale ewe named Glenda. Bow fleece sale, Washington. Whitehorse sweater pattern by Caitlin Hunter, modified.
The modern world’s depletion can be likewise observed, in the lack of understanding and skill in fundamentals of fiber - in the assumption that clothing is a ready-made thing to be purchased, along with bags, nets, rope. Fiber needs are manufactured at a remove, by machine, with minimal human intervention, and the only relationship the mainstream modern person has with cloth is as a consumer, who chooses using money.
Money and the abstract ‘economy’ have come between humans and cloth, driving a wedge that separates us from the knowing of hands. As industrialization progressively took humans out of the equation of cloth making, even a weaver became someone who operated a complex machine, and understood not how to work with fiber and yarn, but how to troubleshoot the machine.
Hand carded Shetland wool rolags, from a Marietta Shetlands fleece. Bow fleece sale, Washington.
Getting our hands back onto the fiber is crucial. It’s the only way to really learn. Touch, handling, and practice inform the neural pathways that give us skill. It is the way back to knowing.
It starts with picking up a stick.
Coyote brown cotton from Fox Fibre, spun on Mexican spindle made by husband/wife team (found through Cloth Roads.)
Spindles made by friends, cotton and wool/silk handspun, Gee’s Bend quilts, Indian and US handmade wooden vessels.
There’s an essay in here somewhere, waiting to happen. But at this point, it’s just a collection of thoughts, piled in with some images, in hopes of taking your mind toward the small, important, hands-on things.