Shelter: the finished piece

Building Shelter

 Degree show set up with my wonderful mum as a second pair of hands

Sampling Fleece

top to bottom: 1, 2, 3.

 Felting trials to see which fleece felts best and the different qualities: texture, colour, density, and ease of felting.

Fleece 1 felt wonderful when it was un-felted but was very hard to felt well.

Fleece 2 was quite wiry and was nearly as hard to felt as #1.

Fleece 3 felted like a dream with the same amount of rubbing and rolling as the other two.

L to R 1, 2, 3.

Fleece Heaven!

Second trip to get fleece from the Aladdin's Cave of the Wool Grower's depot. See what I mean about the wonderful huge bins full of fibre?

So much wool, so many shades and tones of colour = so hard to choose! I wanted to take it ALL home but returned with a sensible number for the huge project ahead. I limited myself to fourteen Moorit fleeces, mostly from Shetland sheep though some may be other breeds.

I also treated myself to one lovely soft brown Blue-faced Leicester fleece for spinning because it was just irresistible!

Moorit Fleece

Teasing and Carding

Moorit: a lovely warm brown with sun-bleached tips that occurs naturally in some sheep breads. This is my chosen colour to work with for felting a shelter cover.

I am buying my fleeces from the Evanton depot of the Scottish Wool Growers: first visit was really exciting, all those huge trolleys full to overflowing with wonderful raw fleeces and the freedom to rummage through and select what I like. Very heady!

The feel of lanolin-rich wool and the smell of sheep are strongly reminiscent of my childhood: my family had sheep and I helped tend them and shear them from a very young age.

Each fleece has to be teased out by hand and then carded on my drum carder before I can start the felting process.

Gathering Wood

 Lovely long rods for building a Bender...

Watch this space!

New Highland Contemporaries 2

My loom and film installation is on view in the New Highland Contemporaries 2 exhibition in Nairn this week!

 For details of times and dates please see here

Boro paper!

Boro - with a difference

I first saw this idea on pinterest (while hunting for images of fabric boro) in a fascinating picture of Japanese pawn shop wrapping paper made by pasting together old ledger pages. For images of the real deal please follow this link to Sri Threads.

I tucked the image away in the back of my mind for a rainy day, or even a holiday! Time was at a premium as I was in the midst of term time focus.

Finally I have some free time and got to try out this way of recycling paper the other day.

Boro paper

Piano hinge/coptic binding on my dye sample books

I really like the textural surface of these pasted layers, the random scraps of text and image that I allowed to remain or purposefully included, and the tone on tone of white, off white and cream.

I am smitten with the results! Here comes my next sketch book: 100% recycled from receipts, offcuts, old envelopes, posters, odds and ends, and old shopping lists.

My intention is to use a hybrid piano hinge/coptic binding technique which I developed as I find this emulates the flexibility of spiral bindings but has the added advantage of never sticking at odd angles when you try to open or close it. For me this is of supreme importance as it bugs me hugely when my sketch books don't open and close smoothly!

Spun Silk Warp

Stitching the silk warp

Silk warp waterfall

Today I finished warping up my hand-spun silk projector screen and stabilising the top with a red thread stitched through.

The flow of the silk laid over the table caught my eye. It reminds me of currents in a river.

Silk flow 1

Silk flow 2

Boro Jeans

It's just over two years since I began mending my one pair of jeans. The first two patches were over the kneecaps: on the left knee is a piece of my godson's traditional Norwegian naming day shirt and on the right a bit of tweed from his sisters' coat. I am very hard on the knees of all my clothes; I always have been as I love getting close to the tiniest details of nature and, for me, that has always meant getting down on my knees.

Third layer going in on the left knee, but the of-cut from my godson's shirt is still strong.

Inside my jeans is a crazy jigsaw of overlapping patches, made from another pair of old worn out jeans that didn't fit me any more. In a few places the old seams still show up with their yellow stitches.

 

Not much of the original fabric is visible from the inside any more.

 I love the visual texture of the boro stitching, particularly on the inside. As an experiment I decided to put one patch on the outside and do the darning from the inside so that the wonderful texture shows. Not a great choice of placement though - right in the middle of my backside!

Back pockets - nearly gone.

 I have a habit of ramming my hands into my back pockets when I'm thinking. If I want to continue having that comforting thinking aid I will need to do some creative mending here... But visually I'm enjoying the disintegration of the fabric unimpeded by mending.

Interesting contrast between new patch and disintegrating original fabric.

The rhythm of stitch blends well with the rhythm of thought: I sit in my studio and muse on next steps for the evolution of my practice and catch both thought and patch into place with neat tight stitches.

Ouch!

Just have to remember not to stitch while thinking or talking about things that make me angry: Blood is always the result! My own I hasten to add...

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!

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.

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.

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….

Studio Practice

I am settling into "Studio Practice" at Moray School of Art; it's starting to feel like I'm heading in an interesting direction through my explorations with printmaking, and just generally finding my feet in this second year. My studio space is constantly evolving and changing, and my tutor suggested that I keep a record by taking photos each time I take stuff down, put stuff up or just shuffle things around as I make new connections. This is the first photo of my evolving visual thought process, complete with pictures and quotes from artists who inspire me, and a whole mix of mono-printing, eco-printing, transfer printing and notes/mind maps. Bit of a jungle really, but sense of purpose is emerging gradually!

Looking at this photo, I notice that I haven't taken down the bright orange number two that told me which was my space in the room! Must get rid of it and put my name up instead.

As for the "Make do and Mend" mission - my jeans are still holding up!

The next part needing darning and reinforcing is the backside.... As you can see, it was getting a wee bit thin here and there!

Time to step away from the laptop and pick up the needle again...

Eco- printing

L to R - black turtle beans and rusty tacks; spice tea and tacks; steamed walnuts; steamed black turtle beans.

We are doing printing this semester, and I decided to experiment with eco-printing as part of my exploration. I am thrilled by the colour and pattern you can get from simple materials and methods. Next I plan on over-printing with other plants on top of some of these.
I was fascinated to see that my cold-wrapped Black Turtle beans SPROUTED during the week I left them to release their colour! No, I hadn't meant to leave these 4 bundles for a whole week, but I went down with a coldy virus and was at home in bed while my bundles mouldered at uni... I just about needed gloves and a mask to open the other 3 bundles as they were VERY mouldy and slimy. Considering the yuckyness of the bundles as I opened them, I am very pleased with the end results!