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….

Walnut ink

Two layer screen print using two mixes of home made walnut ink.

Walnut ink screen print on darned vintage sheet

After many failed and splodgy attempts at making and printing with walnut ink, I have finally worked out how to get ink that is thick enough to squeegee through a silk screen. It goes nicely onto fabric as well as paper, and my fragile scraps take it nicely.

This piece of cotton sheet came from my Nana's cleaning cloth bag. When you unfold it you can see where she got every bit of use she could from it. It started out as a sheet, was worn out in the middle, then turned "sides to middle", then reincarnated as an ironing board cover, and finally, after being worn out in this spot by the iron being stood on it, it has been relegated to the cleaning cloths bag. Talk about "make do and mend"!
And now I am playing with it, adding boro style darning, printing on it with walnut ink, stitching into it more. Who knows what it may yet become?

Part of the section of my jeans that inspired the screen print.

Walnut Ink

I am determined - I am going to do a silk screen print with home made walnut ink.
 So far I have tried two mixes of colour extracted from the green walnut husks I gathered on campus at Moray School of Art. The first try was far too liquid; although the colour was good and intense it just ran through the screen into puddles on my paper. So then I tried mixing some with acrylic silk screen medium. This worked to an extent, but the colour was too pale now.

So I have spent the evening pulverising more husks in an old coffee grinder, soaking the resulting powder in a wee bit of water then straining the dark juice out with a sweet old tea strainer. Although green walnuts (husk and all) are edible as a pickle, I am being cautious and only using tools and equipment that I reserve for dyeing.
I have the nearly full enamel milk pan simmering on my wood stove now to try and reduce the walnut ink down and make it thicker and stronger. It smells rather interesting! I'm not sure if I like it or not....
If this simmering doesn't make my ink thick enough, I have plans to try thickening it up with corn starch or gelatine, or even seaweed! Lets hope tonight's experiment works - I'm running out of time, we only have three more weeks before we have to hand in our work for the printing block!

Mending mending mending

The mission to keep my jeans wearable continues... Gradually the original fabric is disappearing beneath a layer of boro style mending stitches and a few surface patches. As they develop, I am loving them more and more, they have a really sturdy feel and are beginning to look really loved and real - like the velveteen rabbit " Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
That kind of says it all about my jeans :)

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!