Sheepskin Gloves

It's taken a few days, but finally my new fingerless gloves are made. Many tweaks of the 'pattern' (I drew round my hand...) and adding in of gussets and, though they look as elegant as plaster casts, they are WARM.

The wrap-around flap had to go. Just didn't work.

 A wee note of caution - it's really not a good idea to use Stanley knife blades without the handle... I have a few fine cuts in the surface of my skin to prove it, but got away without slicing my fingers badly. Surely I have a handle SOMEWHERE if I have blades in my tool box????

Beyond Repair

Worn to a Ravelling, I am undone..... 

My beloved fingerless gloves, a present from my dad, have had it. I haven't got a fine enough yarn to mend them so it's time to get inventive with what I do have in my fabric stash.


I have a bit of a sheepskin coat that I picked up in a swap-shop. I have bees wax. I have strong fine cord. I have leather stitching needles. I have an inventive imagination.


Let's see what will emerge....

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.