Weaving a Web

But hopefully not a tangled one....

First three lines of weft going in! Many technical hitches are emerging and the usefulness of doing prior research into technique is made very very clear.... But I am still glad I chose to do little research into the practicalities of weaving, but rather to let the materials inform the direction and lead the show.

And yet... I love the sticky stubbornness of the lanolin-thick unwashed hand-spun, the rough bobbles and slubs created by using un-carded fleece and the clinginess of the shed created by those two aspects interacting. It all feels interesting and full of potent metaphor, though I have yet to tease out the strands of that into a form I can vocalize. I guess the metaphor is a bit tangled up and sticky too, it may start to emerge as the fabric does.

Red

The red shed strand has worked wonderfully in the visual sense. The contrast between wood, wool and cotton is visually poetic and satisfying.

But - from a technical point of view it's not doing its job. The shed doesn't shift smoothly and it's not possible to operate the loom as one person alone.

Yet.

I will persevere and work out how to make it behave as I chose!

Time

Sometimes you have to

I do enjoy yogi tea. Most times the tags have a gentle loving message on them, always an added bonus. Not this time! Face it: deadlines are rapidly approaching. Face it: you get out what you put in. Face it: do the hard things before they become impossible.

Red Thread

'All we love deeply becomes part of us.'

This is one of my Red Threads: the interlacing and entwining of the fabric of my jeans with the fabric of my self. Every stitch taken in the darning of my jeans involves the fabric more deeply and irreversibly with the beingness of my self. I am stitching myself a thick skin from the fragile and worn layers of the past darned into a strong fabric with the thread of present strength and determination.

Another of my Red Threads is gradually dancing into place on my loom. It's a painstakingly slow dance of hands, thread and warp. There is a sense of the Weaver becoming the Woven....

Weighting a Warp

For several years I have habitually chucked my coppers into an old vase as I like to be able to close my purse easily and never can be doing with footering about with coppers in a queue at a till. I remembered that if one takes coins to the bank to exchange for notes then both 1p and 2p coins go in one bag and they can tell how much money is in the bag by the weight of it. This means that 12p must weigh the same whatever the mix of 1s and 2s. How useful!

So as it turns out, that stash of coins is perfect for weighting the warp of my loom - 12p per 5 warp threads tied up in a scrap of recycled fabric.

Wonderful how the softly falling yarn becomes a taught and springy surface as the weights go on.



The next step is putting the 'shed' in to allow the weaving to progress a little faster than it might otherwise. I have chosen this red thread to weave the shed from for two reasons.

Firstly Red Thread has come to have a deep significance in my work;  it stands as a metaphor for finding one's way through the creative maze, for the concept of 'a common thread' and for all the connections of text and textile through language and myth and story. I reached for the spool of red almost instinctively. The other thread I had to hand in my studio was an indigo blue and there was just no contest.

Of secondary importance to the symbolism of the Red Thread is the aesthetics of the colours; red felt like it belonged with the white-blond wood and the dark brown yarn. Second reason, yes, but also very important to me as I am very visually sensitive.

Gathering pace

Warp weighted loom

I am moving! The hours and hours of spinning have gathered my thoughts into a strong thread that I can trace out in my studio practice. I want to weave a length of fabric with text in it I think... Text in Textile. Both words share the root Texere: to weave.

I have chosen to build a primitive loom to work on as it feels right with my primitive hand-spun thread.

I gathered the uprights from the huge driftwood piles down by the Findhorn river as I don't want to cut down living trees unnecessarily. The horizontal pieces were coppiced ash and hazel from my garden.

There was a deep resonance to the act of hunting for just the right pieces of wood with forks just so, cutting them to size and carrying them home balanced on my shoulders. Another layer of linkage with our distant ancestors who made every inch of their clothing from scratch. It deepens my understanding of the intrinsic value of fabric.

Spinning a Yarn

Teasing raw fleece

 Using spinning to find my way back into my Studio Practice. Teasing out my tangled fuzzy ideas along with the tangles in the fleece before spinning both into a good strong coherent thread.

Fragile Fabric

Fragility

Elderberry cordial

My jeans are fragile after lots of wild-food gathering this autumn. Scrambling through brambles and heather is tough on fragile old fabric! The layers of erosion and repair in my jeans make me think of the soil ecosystem: leaf litter building up is like the layers of patch and stitch, but without that constant rebuilding the soil wears thin and the bones of the earth show through.

Elderberries to keep flue at bay

Wild mushrooms

It feels really good to stock up the larder with free food to keep me going through the winter. I should have enough Elderberry and honey cordial to keep me cold and flue free through the winter term with luck, and the Ceps and Boletus, dried into crisp slices, will enrich soups and stews all the way to the next wild harvest.

Boro and Travelling

Darning on the train

Journeying from Scotland to Norway and down the back of the left leg of my jeans. 

When in the middle of make-do-and-mend, travelling by train is good. There is a wee bit of room to spread out materials and tools - scissors, needles, patching material and darning threads. There's even a wee bit of elbow room if you are small like me!




It's also an intriguing social experiment: some of the reactions from my fellow travellers were very interesting. One older man asked what I was doing and when I explained about my 2 year shopping fast / make-do-and-mend challenge he looked at my beloved jeans incredulously and said 'well those are only fit for the bin aren't they?!'


No. No they aren't 'fit for the bin'. They will last me a long time yet if I tend them with care.

Retrieving fragility

A journey's worth of darning

Every stitch I put in to rescue another small section from disintegration makes these cheap, second-hand jeans more and more precious  to me. The layers of time and attention make them more and more priceless and irreplaceable.


The time invested is visible here in this block of stitching, all one colour, neatly filling a gap between three previous patches. Not even a whole hand-span it's true, but no longer a raggedy hole on the back of my leg!

Nothing to wear!

The other day I had one of those moments... You know the sort - I looked in my wardrobe and there was NOTHING to wear!!!

Nothing that is except things I didn't feel like today, or were too thin and light for the dubious Scottish weather with hail and sleet mixed in with the lively glimpses of sun. Nothing that felt like it matched my mood that day. Nothing interesting or new.
So I put my darned jeans on yet again, and grabbed the least worn-out jumper yet again, and headed out for uni. All day in the back of my mind was the question of what to do when you are buying nothing new (not even just "new to me" from a charity shop) for another year and a half….
That evening I had a good dig through my stash of "not worn out but not wearable" things (jumpers shrunk in the wash, shirts that don't fit right, trousers that are too big or too small and so-on) and also my "worn but beloved" basket and tried to come up with something inspiring!
Two identical green lambswool jumpers caught my eye. They never fitted flatteringly so I had felted them in the washing machine and saved them to making into something as I love the colour.

Time to get the scissors out!
I think if I combine the two I can make them into a tunic top/dress. Watch this space for the next steps!
I am also working on mending my favourite jumper, a lovely natural brown homespun that was my very first big knitting project. The elbows wore out because the yarn was too thin on that section of it. So I undid a throw I crocheted that had some of the same wool in it, and am re-knitting both arms from the elbow down. I can't wait to be able to wear that lovely jumper again! I am finding that I actually quite like knitting too, I used to find it such a drag, it took toooooo looooooooong………. But now I find it a good way to wind down at the end of a busy day. I hope to finish one sleeve today or tomorrow, and if I do some every day I may have my jumper back up and running by next week. Something to wear that is fresh and "new"!
Maybe I will find some time to piece the green jumpers into something new this weekend too! Two times "something new" in one week! That should keep me happy for another six months ;)

Musing

Sorting through my fabric stash I re-found a bag labeled 'cleaning rags' in my Nanna's handwriting. Several of the pieces have holes worn right through, some have obviously been recycled several times prior to being consigned to the cleaning rags bag - I found pillow slips mended round the edge with a slightly different fabric; ironing board covers hand made, presumably from old sheets; lengths of fabric with a 'sides to middle' seam up the centre. Many of the pieces of fabric are fragile with places worn right through and many other places that are almost see-through.

I am touched by both the fragility of these fragments and by the careful frugality of my Nanna who used every little thing to it's full potential.

I tried darning the white piece above and later printed on it with my walnut ink. However, I felt my stitches were large and clumsy (just for scale - the black thread is sewing cotton). When grumping about this to one of my class mates, she suggested that it was my way of looking at the world that made me see my stitches as large clumsy - she reckoned they were TINY and tidy! So as an experiment I took a fragment of torn fabric from my old quilt and darned it onto a bit of calico. At first as I worked my stitches looked tiny to me, but as I went on they looked bigger and bigger…. It's an optical illusion caused by my state of focus. When I go back and look at this wee bitty scrap the stitches look like fairy work!

I am off to do more fairy stitching….