Defining Beauty

True beauty has little or nothing to do with fashion or age and a whole lot to do with being comfortable in your own skin, with your own skin. Folds and crumples and worn bits and all.

My jeans become more and more beautiful to me as they age and evolve.

I know this is contrary to what most of our culture is based on, after all, if people were happy with ageing they couldn't be sold so many products, and people being content with the old and worn would damage the fashion industry.... Can't have that.

Studio wanderings

 Just looking at the interactions between space, shape and colour...

Fresh-cut Alder wood/Crottle dyed yarn

Big loom/tiny looms

soft lines/hard lines

Yarn stretched tight/yarn hanging soft

Spinning Silk

Spun silk: doesn't that conjure up something luxuriously soft and lovely? It sure doesn't make me think of something likely to slice my hands as I make it, but I have come so close to doing just that as I learn how to handle this delightfully soft but fearsomely strong cloud of fibre. The finer I spin the sharper it becomes. I can only work on this in short bursts as I have to rest my hands frequently: the strength of silk taxes my hand joints and muscles and I'm risking a flare-up of RSI. But it's so beautiful, so soft, so warm.... And I want it to make a projector screen from in my studio.

Red Thread

At the beginning of the school year I traced the word 'Desire' on my studio wall in red thread and pins. It felt important at the time. But now it's time to take it off.

As I pulled out the pins the thread made these wonderful crazy lines unravelling across the surface.

I couldn't resist keeping the mass of sharp angled thread, so unlike the usual soft round curves of thread off a spool. I hung it on a pin that was holding something else on the wall and later on the sun came in and showed me it anew. I like the shadows as much or even more than the thread.

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....