taking up space

Colored Cotton, Walnut Wool, hanging at the PNW Quilt & Fiber Art Museum, La Conner, WA

I’m just going to start with the piece that was conceived for the space, as a way of introducing my art show, which has been up for some time, and has two more weekends before closing on May 1. The show is called Yarn, Cloth, and the Pull of the Earth, and it’s hanging at the PNW Quilt & Fiber Art Museum in La Conner, WA. It’s quite an experience to have a space that I can fill all by myself - an interesting, faceted, space, since it’s the third floor of a historic Victorian house.

One room of the show, on the upper floor of the museum, with me weaving by the far window.

The walls tilt inward, about 5’ from the floor, and this was actually perfect for what I wanted to do. Most of the pieces in the show involve two layers: a woven ‘ground’, hung against the wall, and suspended ‘lines’ of handspun yarn, which need to be higher and a few inches in front of the ground. Without this tilt in the wall, it would have been tricky to figure out, but the space had what I needed, so I could just hang the work. The colored cotton panels with bunches of wool in between make up the one piece that I made specifically for that wall, after visiting the space to scope it out. In this sense, “taking up space” means I used the space almost as a medium for the work, taking it up as one takes up a tool in the hand.

Handspun, handwoven cotton in natural brown and green.

The woven cotton is all handspun, essentially whatever I had ready to weave, supplemented with some new brown and green fiber from Vreseis and Traditions in Cloth. It’s all two-ply yarn, and I plied same colors together until I ran out, then some skeins were mixed, then I likewise wove until I ran out, so the color changes in the weavings happen by chance. They are interspersed with walnut-dyed wool, a gift from Devin Helman, spun rough with no prep and plied back on itself. In several of the pieces for this show, I’ve been exploring the expressive potential of strands of handspun yarn, the way they are like drawn lines or brushstrokes, handmade marks that have unpredictable voices of their own.

Coffee Lines - a handspun yarn based on the theme of coffee, hanging at the top of the stairwell before you enter the exhibit.

Handspun wool lines, with handwoven ground of walnut-dyed commercial 10/2 cotton.

Handspun wool lines (rescue sheep’s wool), handwoven ground of commercial warp, handspun Navajo Churro weft.

Taking up space is the real value of the show for me. Having this opportunity to fill two rooms with my work, my priorities, my ideas about what is important, and hoping to help others appreciate the wonder of yarn and cloth. The nicest moments have been just sitting in there, weaving in the light through the window.

Detail of weaving in progress, all cotton, at the museum.

A special day when I coordinated well with my weaving. Thanks to Dana Weir for the photo.

View from room 1 to room 2, through white lines. Cotton Strips on the right - more handspun cotton, in white and grey.

Caravan handspun, on ground of linen warp, handspun wool weft.

My Caravan yarn got to come out and play, hanging with a new woven ground. The pieces are all interacting with one another, creating something with their crosstalk.

I also included some microscopic images of fibers, taken when I was doing conservation study and using polarized light microscopy to identify fiber content. The images were so beautiful, I wanted them to be shown as artwork - and they emphasize the theme of looking closely. There is more I could say, but it has taken me long enough to post about this show, and I’d like to leave this here today.

finishing, and other distractions

We are getting into seriously lovely afternoon and evening light time.

This tiny snail was on the stem of my CSA broccoli, and I remembered I have a camera with a good macro setting. So I was diverted by looking at the snail and taking lots of photos as it scooted around on the stem. I called this one Snail Side-eye. That shell! The delicacy was entrancing. The shell is only about 1/4” wide, maybe 5mm.

You know that thing I said last time about how once I’ve finished something, it already seems old? That may be one reason why it’s hard for me to get around to sharing Finished Object photos. The other is the distraction factor, because the thoughts and images that elbow their way to the front of the queue are never exactly what I thought I might intend to talk about. Witness, the tiny snail.
But anyway, this weaving is finished, except for the fringe/edge treatment. I’m still undecided on what I’m doing at each end, but here’s three panels, joined with figure 8 stitch. It has been incorporated into the textile array in the low seating area that we call the majlis, our couch, where I am currently ensconced among weavings and pillows.

Bedouin style weaving, from handspun Navajo churro wool, 3 panels stitched together.

Now, I meant to include this next item with the petticoat details in the last post, because they are related. The Sarah-dippity skirt is, at long last, finished. The picture below is from nearly a year ago (this has been a long-running project). I tried it on when I had finished knitting the panels and put buttonholes in the last panel, whose shaping was made with short rows - and yeah, I could use some short row shaping finesse, but I decided what’s a little hem wonk among friends?

Backing up as I realize I may never have shared the in-progress bits, possibly because I was waiting until it was finished…..? Sigh. However, this is backstrap-woven fabric, begun in October 2019, 100% Harrisville Shetland wool yarn in a random stripey warp that was a bit of a circus act to wind, but satisfying to weave. I knit the intervening panels with the same yarn, using up the dark brown cone. I was sewing the panels together in February 2020, prior to knitting the final front piece. My waist-to-hip ratio required some more radical deductions in fitting the wedges to the straight pieces, which added to the delay in getting through that phase.

Shetland wool stripes in progress on backstrap loom, leather backstrap of unknown origin in foreground. Handmade bamboo reed in use.

Shetland wool striped fabric finished - about 8 x 100'“

What the skirt really needed, to be finished, was some elastic in the back half of the waistband, which I inserted in a sleeve of brown wool, a remnant from my lovely long skirt. And the buttons were pulling at the knitted fabric, so I wanted to add button bands. Another job for my new best friend, handwoven tape! I had some handspun tussah silk yarn in appropriate colors handy, and got to work. the cool thing is, being custom-made, the tape has woven-in buttonholes.

Hanspun tussah silk yarn, in natural, rust, and bronze.

I kept the skirt in my lap as I wove the buttonhole band, and buttoned each button as I went, so that the length between would be correct.

The skirt has already been recruited into use, but I don’t have fully-done photos yet. I’m sure you’ll see it underneath some weaving in progress eventually.
Meanwhile, how about some sleeve gussets? The next FO is actually a radical mending, or a reboot. A linen dress I’ve had for a very long time, love dearly, and never liked the fit of the sleeves. In sewing a linen shift, I learned a thing or two about gussets, and I wanted to apply that to this dress. But the sleeves were joined into the princess cut in such a way that merely adding gussets in the underarm was not enough. I had to cut the whole sleeve off and insert a wedge at the shoulder.

The linen dress on my work table, one sleeve reconfigured. The original sleeve is angled so low that anytime I raised my arms, it was too tight around the upper arm. Simply adding room below did not solve this problem - I had to reduce the angle from the shoulder, make it nearly straight out.

I’d been searching for linen of a harmonious color for these insertions, but my smart friend Ann suggested using a print fabric that shows right up, and carrying the insert all the way to the sleeve hem. Which sent me stash diving and gave me the joy of using more long-held fabrics to not only enhance function but jazz up this dress.

Whee, freedom of movement! I’ve worn it many a day since making this change. Seen here with a necklace made of weaving-enhanced driftwood, work of my friend Tininha.

It’s interesting to think about what counts as ‘finishing’ in my little textile world. I meant to show things that are done, wearable, no more work left until they need mending. But I realized that each plied ball of handspun yarn is also a small finished object. There are many stages of finishing, and the sense of accomplishment comes whenever I wind off a ball or a skein of yarn.

Four balls of handspun yarn, from top left cotton 2 strand plying ball, Corriedale plied, Coopworth 2 strand plying ball, Gnomespun dyed Gotland 2 strand plying ball. All of these have been plied since the photo - woot!

My life is filled with balls of yarn like this. And I never know what will strike me when sorting, or moving, or plying, or grouping them. As it happened, I went through the main ‘weaving yarn’ bin the other day, and found the Syrian silk in there. This stuff is heavy, in more ways than one. It has weight. Just holding three skeins’ worth was like a presence - I held them against my stomach, as if carried in the womb, and I remembered the market in Damascus. The Souq al Hamidiyyeh, a huge covered arcade of market stalls where I searched for the yarn shop a friend in Doha recommended.

I was there the end of February, 2011, only months before the rapid disintegration of what was then normal life for Syrians. It is sobering to think of these places now, and the yarn holds all of that.

Shelves of the yarn shop where I bought my silk, Souq al Hamidiyyeh, Damascus, Syria.

I wove some of this silk once before, along with some textured corespun yarn in the warp and an additional wool yarn in the weft. The resulting scarf was sold to a friend at an art fair in Doha.

Handspun yarn and Syrian silk scarf, modeled on the roof of my Doha apartment, 2011.

As I realized then, this silk (I call it silk, it may have some viscose in it, but they said it was silk, even when my Arabic speaking friend bought it,) needs something to stabilize it, something less slippery and lighter weight. It occurred to me to try weaving it with plain, white, handspun wool. This juxtaposition of flashy, shiny, bling yarn and earth-grown, undyed sheep’s wool parallels what I encountered in Arab culture. There is a deep history of pastoral connection to land, animals, and hand-worked materials, which coexists with a love of gold, sparkling jewels, and lush adornment. Very broad strokes here, but I could give examples if this post were not already getting lengthy. Suffice to say, this combination felt right, as an honoring of the yarn’s place of origin.

Syrian silk yarn and handspun CVM/Romeldale cross wool from Bellingham, WA.

I probably want to make something large-ish, as the yarn allows, but first I needed to sample my idea. I spent much of a day working up this sample, and I can’t even express how much I adore the fabric.

The sun was shining on this day, and I enjoyed the glint of sunlight on silk immensely, broken up with all the little dashes of wooliness.

A small sample, a tiny little piece of fabric, but I love everything about it, the hand, the texture, the rhythm of bright and matte surfaces, and the way the light shines through.

The rug in the background is also from Syria, bought on the same brief visit. Through my own weaving, my heart honors and hopes for the place and the people, that they (and we all) may thrive in some new form.

motley

Dahlias, zinnias, rudbeckia and friends from a local farm stand.

I’ve come to accept that I always have a motley collection of intentions, a patchwork of projects, each inching along at its own pace.

Warp-faced strip of two handspun merino/bamboo/silk yarns who have long awaited being woven together to see what happens.

The slow pace can sometimes drain the excitement, so that by the time I share or finish something, it’s already old to me.

Handspun cotton accumulating in the to-be-washed pile.

But maybe the slow pace is the excitement, or the importance of the thing.
Not rushing can be a subversive, significant act.

Linen shift stitching in progress - felling a seam.

Valuing flashes of brilliance over steady accumulation of skill and knowledge is part of the prevailing illness today —- why not glory in taking a long time to slowly make a thing?

Which I do. In several different directions, all at once.

Twisting some fine cordage from long leaves. Love the fineness, but the fingers get tired, and my joins need work.

Closeup of backstrap woven bath mat in progress, with weft of cotton t-shirt strips and carved Allen Berry sword beater.

I wanted to share an update on my 18th century-style petticoat skirt, mentioned at the end of this post. The fabric is so light that the skirt simply crawled up my legs when I walked in it, so something needed to be done. I thought of adding a handwoven hem band, probably getting the idea from Lao skirts and the separate hems they often add to the main skirt fabric. Looking at the photos, I realize now that even when a separate hem is not sewn on, the additional woven decoration at the bottom adds weight (as in the second photo below.)

Lao tube skirt (pha sinh) - the ikat upper part is the main skirt, the brocade weaving below is a separately woven hem section.

These pha sinh are woven in one piece, but the borders are decorated with supplementary (brocade) patterning.

One of my narrow woven wool bands looked good against the skirt fabric, but I wanted the hem band wider. So I scaled up the pattern using my handy Inkle Visualizer app, and wound a warp in the same colors, closer to 2”/5 cm wide. As often happens, I miscalculated length because I don’t have a good sense of takeup percentage (how much length is lost in the weaving), so I ended up with a nice hem band that was about a handspan and a half too short.

Backstrap-woven, handspun wool hem on petticoat.

What to do? Standing in my studio, the stacks of folded fabric catch the eye, and in my life “patchwork” is more than just a metaphor. The solution was obvious.

Patchwork fabric infill, at the back of the skirt hem where the woven band did not reach.

I actually padded the patchwork strip with batting, and put in some quilting stitches along the seams for strength, since the patchwork needed to be equal to warp-faced woven wool. Solving these little problems of durability, weight, and behavior in garments teaches so much about how and why people made clothes in various ways, throughout time and place!

And the tiny bit of quilting sparked something else, the memory of my love for that act, that set of skills and motions. As it happens, I had a fully assembled, partially quilted project handy to get back into the joy of hand quilting. This is a 20-year-old piece with its own story, which I will feature at another time. Suffice to say it has a theme of colonization, refugees, and war, which unfortunately never ceases to be relevant. Meanwhile, I also find it beautiful and highly evocative, with memories of Dharamsala, India, where it began.

Patchwork quilt in hoop and on the floor below, big basting stitches and quilting stitches shown in the hoop.

Hand quilting in progress, red thread on cotton and Tibetan silk fabric patches.

Even these photos are already a few months old, because I somehow got distracted from working on this, as well….. As I said, it’s a constant, swirling dance of discovery, my inching along with each project as the mood strikes. But the stitching here may have fed into the stitching on the linen shift, which is nearing completion. It’s all moving, deepening and spreading like water filling a dry, rutted patch of earth. Something will grow here, surely.

Self in linen shift, showing finished neckline and cuffs, in nice afternoon light.

ball winding

Naturally dyed cotton yarns, wound and ready for backstrap weaving at Mone's place (see The Weaving Sisters on Facebook)

I just spent the better part of an hour winding two balls of yarn. Particularly gratifying in this case because I went to Luang Prabang's Phusi market on my own, completely forgetting to arm myself with a sample of what I needed, and yet ultimately succeeded in buying black yarn. I wandered agog through warrens of clothing and shoes and plastic goods fruitlessly for some time, trying to squint into the tarp-covered distance to discern anything yarn-like or weaving related.

Phusi Market, Luang Prabang, Laos (ground is wet after a rain storm)

Finally I stopped at a booth carrying elaborate, gilded skirt borders because she had thread, which is close. I gestured at the thread and said that I weave and needed this... big, weave.... Then I showed a photo of Mone warping with the balls of yarn on the floor. She pointed me in the right direction, and I eventually came upon the shelves of yarn. Soon after, Iwas happily winding balls back at the guest house, to the sound of neighboring roosters and the distinctive, musical ringing of the Lao mortar and pestle, wood against clay pounding papayas or chili paste.

Whenever I wind balls of yarn, I can't help drifting into philosophical musing about it. It's one of the things I do differently from most of my weaving/knitting peers in the US (who tend to use a ball winder and swift), but in a similar way to traditional weavers around the world. Weavers spend an awful lot of time winding balls of yarn, especially if we also spin the yarn, and ply from two-stranded balls.

Handspun wool, wound into balls after plying.

Handspun wool in Doha, Qatar. The distinctive shape of the red ball shows how it was wound onto the spindle shaft after plying.

I learned my affinity for global, traditional ball-winding on my first visit to Luang Prabang, when I met my Katu backstrap weaving mentors, Keo and Mone. I'd been hanging out watching Keo weave, and when I started to wind some cotton I bought into balls, she offered to help. When Mone arrived and was able to translate between us, Keo told her "Look, she winds balls like we do." I was surprised and happy to hear it - I'd known that weavers in Ladakh, Arabia, and Peru used balls wound in courses, and that was more or less what I tended to do, but had no idea it would be identified as a recognizable style, especially since I wasn't that good at it.

Handspun wool in Ladakh, India, wound into two-ply balls in courses, ready for plying.

My handspun singles, wound in a ball to free a bobbin, and awaiting a second ply.

It seems appropriate that the first time I met another weaving mentor, Laverne, we immediately set to winding balls together. I could see that she was preparing a number of little yarn balls, and I offered to help. As we wound, she pointed out that it is really a learned skill, and one can't count on people knowing how to do it, even if they knit or weave. She advised teaching it as part of a course in spinning or weaving. I see it as a very basic fiber skill, but obviously part of the knowledge necessary to be an independent weaver, not relying on an array of complex tools apart from one's body to manage yarn. There is a technique to starting a yarn ball from scratch - I noticed that even Mone preferred to wind onto a ball already in progress, since starting from the beginning is fiddly.

My favorite ball of yarn, though, has to be the tiny one found at a recently excavated Bronze Age site in the UK known as Must Farm. Seeing this ball of (probably) linen, wound in courses some 3,000 years ago, adds another dimension to the sense of ball winding as part of global textile tradition.

a handmade tool

Well, I finished this at about the same time as finishing my Master's thesis, and I don't know which one I'm more proud and excited about.

It actually spins, which is amazing to me because halfway through this process it was just going blup....blup... in a lopsided manner, and I picked up one of my Ladakhi spindles and just marveled at the speed and smoothness of the spin. I have a new appreciation for hand-carved spindles that spin well.

But as I said, this one does spin, and the yarn I'm making with it proves its success as a tool. It's definitely not the most beautiful spindle, and mistakes were made, but for the first time I've turned a stick into a spindle with my pocket knife, and that speaks of promise!

The pith is showing in the photos, and it's on the side like that because this stick was slightly curved. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get a straight, balanced spindle out of it, but my whittling mentor David Gowman said it was possible: I just needed to 'find the straight line.' This is why it was lopsided for a long time - I was reluctant to remove too much of the bulge, because I like phang-shaped spindles that have wide, substantial swells to them. But on the bulky side, more had to come off to allow for the spin.

This one wee project taught me so much, and I see my Ladakhi spindles and those made by my friend Janet completely differently now. I'm wishing for more willow sticks.