The Week that's Been

You may be wondering why I'm posting this on a Friday morning, because I should be in my drawing class?

Well, Ben's been home all week, and we've been gardening - or clearing, more like one small patch. On Tuesday and Wednesday we spent about 10 hours working on a small triangle rescuing small and not so small rose bushes from weeds, removing one blade and cutting off one dead branch at a time. It's been very time consuming; I thought a good day would enable us to finish this, but so far, 10 hours later, we still have a bit to go. And I've been enjoying Ben being home so much I took this week off. We'll be out the door in the next little while.

Jo, my friend from the drawing class but who is taking the term off, and I got to talking about the class yesterday, and I concluded that Ronette's drawing class, to me, is my weekly right-hemisphere massage. This is why I don't worry if my drawing skills don't improve. I get the most out of the weekly injection when I can get into the zone and let go of my controls and just let my legs and arms do their thing; that's my priority in the class. So some days, I don't enjoy the session particularly but I come home with OK drawings; some days I have a bunch of nonsense scribbles but still come home relaxed and even elated. Now I understand the discrepancy. For the most of this year, (roughly my third year in the workshop,) I haven't worried too much about sticking to Ronette's instructions nor what others may think of what/how do there, and this must mean I'm halfway in the zone by the time I arrive at the classroom.

I expect more talks with Jo next week when she's going to give me some lovely ground-cover plants - very sculptural looking wee thing, but i can't remember the name of it. She also thinks I am developing a style of my own; I wasn't aware of it and in fact flexibility and lack of commitment in how I draw was my strong point, so I must probe her more on this point.


This is something I did at the last session of last term; it was a long pose, so inevitably the model moves, which usually drives me nuts because I have to reorganize my entire drawing when that happens, but I came up with my own remedy. I was thinking of those flip-cartoon pages as I drew for 20 minutes. I enjoyed the drawing of it, because I was pleased with my problem-solution, but as far as drawings go, it's not one of my interesting ones.

So why did Ben and I not work in the garden yesterday? We had crazy spring gusts from all directions with some cold temperatures almost all day. In addition, my group, Marlborough Weavers, made the annual trip to come and visit Richmond Weavers just down the road from where I live. I believe these visits started three years ago when Marlborough visited Richmond in 2008; some members have known each other for eons and there are some new members; in this context, I'm still quite new. We don't have a formal workshop or meeting, but we have a detailed show-and-tell, sandwiched between morning tea and lunch. And the rest of the time, we mix and mingle and talk about the weaving, textiles, and travels that took place during the year.

Richmond weavers have small tables of stash reduction attempts; I knew this so I deliberately left my checkbook out of my backpack in the morning; the dirty yellow cone was hiding but "she" and I connected immediately, almost telepathically. These are reeled silk from a massive Swiss mill/yarn shop which closed a few years ago, and owner/Richmond weaver Julia Murbach acquired "a small portion" when she lived in Switzerland.

Julia told me the brighter yellow has a mind of its own; duly noted.

Conundrum! Quagmire!

A while ago I wrote about Japanese preference for Silver Ratio among other design-related preferences I read about. I remembered this last night, and wanted to use it; Ben said it's the square root of 2, so roughly 1.4, and I went off my merry way.

An hour and a half later, Ben apologized, saying it's in fact roughly 2.4, or 1+square-root-of-2. He was looking at English-language Wiki, where Silver Ratio is the latter, but Japanese Wiki cites both. No need to be able to read Japanese; I understood as much as you might, but the problem is, Ben couldn't find the distinction/definition for the two numbers.

It's not at all unheard of that Japanese translate Japanese terms and concepts into English, or other languages, using words which point to different terms and concepts in English, or other languages; we mean something different but use the words anyway. (I had an example in mind at 1AM this morning, but I can't remember now.) Or maybe there's more in math, but I cannot be bothered; I'm sticking with 1.4.

Why did I want to use this? I've been playing around with Ben's Happi jacket fabric. I bought some cotton cones, 3/12 according to their specs, in five denim colors; these were always going to be for Ben, and he's been asking for a Happi, so Happi it will be.

If you look at the two drafts below, which would you consider more Japanese-looking? Do they look different but neither more Japanese than the other?

Ben and I were amazed at our absolutely preference for the right, a sample of rectangles being elongated using 1.4 vertically, whereas the left sample used Fibonacci sequence, which is roughly the Golden Ratio. We swapped positions of the printed drafts, looked at smaller portions of each, or in different orientations and from different angles, but we chose the Silver Ratio every time.

Fascinating.

A Title for a Post is a Left-Brain Activity with which I cannot be Bothered Right Now

Sunny Hemphill wrote on Facebook, "I think I try too hard. I think my desire to do great work becomes a overwhelming. My ideas seem too small, too ... me. I spend too much time seeking profundity rather than doing what I can. My challenge is to break out of the paralysis and be satisfied with my own muse rather than searching always for a better one." (Italic mine.)

It sounded so familiar, you know; the"it" piece, the big idea, the concept worked into textiles. And I was mildly surprised to find myself not there, and not having been there for a period. Though I never made a conscious decision, I've just been trying to do something relating to work every day. It was probably a natural progression, from my inability to live productively, to my mounting frustration, to a pragmatic resignation and a sober acceptance of something over nothing. Lame, yes, but that's been my life for a while; it is what it is.

And I haven't done much; only last week I needed to check when I abandoned my current warp, i.e. when I committed to doing Culturally Routed, and looked into the list of exhibitions I sent work to in the last few years; the last one was in a year ago when I took part in"Feel of Fibre". Lame.

I haven't kept weaving records for the last couple of years, even, but I can recall putting on four warps, five at the most, since the start of this year. Lame. Still, I've managed to do something most days, and that's a far cry from how I fared last year. So, not so lame. And somehow the concepts and the big ideas have fallen by the wayside, pushed back to the less urgent basket/drawer, or been put on the back burner in simmer, whatever other metaphors I can think of, they haven't burdened me nor interfered with my act of making. And that's got to be a good thing.

Some months ago, and I have no recollection of the context, I heard someone discuss someone's body of work, and I remember liking that concept: "body of work", cumulation of pieces, not going for Mona Lisa or Guernica with every warp, but practicing my techniques and designing consistently at the least, and making nice things to wear, and hopefully sell at best.

I try not to dwell on the point, but I think I've been shying away from left-brain thinking and been engaging in right-brain making for a while, which is a far indulgent and enjoyable experience. (Though I've made no progress in the design modules with Ali for too long, and paperwork, and updating of website, etc., have suffered. My hard-drive is in dire need of cleaning, too.)

So I've been enjoying weaving the current piece in which the main attraction is the movement of the areas of color. The warp is merino, the weft is merino/mohair mix; the yarns are by the same source and in the same variegated lilac/purple/dark green. On the loom, it is predominantly the weft color changes that is visible, but after wet-finishing, the warp colors will come into play slightly more. I am loving the simplicity of this piece. (I'll almost say "joy" except weaving with mohair-mix during the hayfever season isn't necessarily joyful, so I'll refrain myself.)

Having said that, I can't weave just now; this afternoon Shaft 16 is not lifting and I can't figure out why. I checked the usual physical points that present problems, and the usual software diagnosis; I need Ben to have a look, but I'm not looking forward to it because most problems with my loom's computer-control mechanism is sporadic and random and we both get flummoxed and frustrated at its... randomness.

* * * * *
About a month ago, I saw this book in Literarty, one of the secondhand book stores in town. I loved that this one was so loved, and remembered how badly I wanted all/any of Tricia Guild books a few years ago. I took some novels to Literarty on Friday and brought this home. Not only does the cover show the previous owner/s was/were maker/s, but there is "evidence" in the CSI sense the book was enjoyed; there were dried icing between some of the pages, as well as what I think is breakfast (coffee+eggs?) on the foreedge of the textblock (?? - the opposite of the spine). I'm enjoying browsing the pages as well as imagining others who have done so before me.

Saturday Daydreaming: Masked Parade and Summer is Here

The Week That Was, Almost

I wound my dyed skeins, in some cases with tremendous difficulty, because I accidentally ran some of them through a complete washing cycle in the machine!


Anyhoo, from left to right:
Far left, top: Mom picked cotton when she visited Uzbekistan some years ago, and spun a relatively thick single yarn; I dyed this in the natural indigo during the workshop.

Far left, bottom: cone of unknown origin, possibly silk but maybe cotton or linen(??), which I had for ages; one skein dyed carefully in diluted synthetic indigo during the workshop. I'm thinking of burn-testing after the hayfever season is finished.

Second left Stack: more cone of unknown origin; skeins dyed during Indigo Duty day in laundry net, and then accidentally "washed" in the machine. I intended for this and the next silk to be dyed very unevenly, but the contrast is smaller than I had hoped.

Second right stack: Italian tussah silk, treated the same as above, tragically.

Far Right stack: thick-ish Japanese cotton, possibly mixed with something else; treated the same as the previous two, but this is still usable in a weft for a garment.

I'll have to sample, but I hesitate to weave anything to sell with these yarns because they have been damaged in the process, so they might become something or rather for Ben and myself. Mom's cotton, I hope to weave something she can use.

To the right of the skein is a scarf I found in my samples basket I hadn't seen in a few years; it's a miniature of Paua.

* * * * *

Esmae Emerson is safely installed in her Melbourne home, and she sent me some pictures of her Wellington Wada workshop experiments. Either she is very quick to pick up techniques, or the workshop was better organized. (Or, I'm terribly slow to turn theory into action, which is the most probable explanation.) Look at some of the dye projects she got out of the workshop!! Phtos are posted with Esmae's permission.

Machine- and hand-stitched

Large-scale Lahariya

* * * * *

Recycling the warp proved to be tedious beyond belief I had to force myself to work on it, but it took three afternoons over two weeks. At least twice I nearly passed out from the tedium, and I'm not joking; see my serious face? And it was as if this warp was holding my loom hostage and I really, really wanted to weave, so finally, on Tuesday, I finished halving the shawl width and doubling the length.

I wove some samples using drafts from Handweaving.net yesterday, but nothing stood out. I looked at the sample again this morning; looked at some past samples with the same variegated merino warp/variegated merino/mohair weft combination; looked at more drafts on Handweaving.net, and decided I wanted to make an uncomplicated but in places slightly lacy draft. With this yarn combination, the weft does not change sizes after wet-finishing, so a plain weave areas become slightly lacy, and the overall cloth translucent.

When using variegated wefts, I like it when the changes of color suits the width of the woven piece so color patches are created and they move like clouds. OK, so it's not going to be my IT piece, but it'll be a nice scarf.

I also found this sample. I know I dyed the warp yarns, I know I had these weft yarns at one point, so this is my sample, but I don't recall weaving it. Chances are, I chose the warp/weft color combination based on this little piece and wove small scarves. But I have been thinking I would love to weave something in wool with many many bright colors, and I wouldn't mind using all of these colors, and even more, all in one piece. How I've changed in using colors.

* * * * *

Tomorrow our last term of figure drawing starts. I'm looking forward to it.

Tidying Up

I've been in something of a tidying up mode now. I've put away all my indigo-related stuff. The last task has been to wind my dyed yarns into balls. I'll show them to you when I'm finished with the job, but this has been a totally why-do-I-do-this-to-myself exercise. More on this in a few days.

I finished reading "Freedom". Finally. It felt like a long novel, not because of the number of pages or words, but the first half was boring in the nothing-is-happening way, and the second half, especially the last 100 or so pages, felt rushed and undercooked. There were some insights on depression, descriptions from the not-depressed perspective I found... insightful, but which also made me more frustrated in how I'm wasting my life.

It's been a while since I also persevered with a novel where the entire cast of characters were so unlikable; (well, I have, two in fact, but these stories took place in Italy, so what can I say, I survived;) and this lot was fairly bad. I could not feel sympathy, empathy nor pity, and laster in the book they became more caricatures than characters. I also wonder if this is because parts of the three main characters are like me, i.e. they were described as depressed in different ways, and I didn't believed them, not all of the time.

So, why did I keep reading, you ask? Well, a lot of it took place in Minnesota, and at one point very early on, I felt like Franzen was writing his story in the way I very much imagine I speak, as if he told me this story and asked me to retell it, so I felt a connection to the voice I've never felt in any other novel before. (Alas, the feeling disappeared rather quickly.) And of course because "The Corrections" remains one of my favorite books, and I did enjoy "The Discomfort Zone" and Franzen is of my generation.

I weeded a small area we can see from our kitchen window; I estimated about 40 minutes for that area but it took four hours, and as if that wasn't bad enough, I was exhausted afterwards that I needed about four hours to recover that afternoon. Hayfever is in full swing, but the dust and the bugs bothered me more than I expected, more than my medication could help me, and at one point I was coughing like an old hag from a bad children's story.

I've got some ideas about weaving, and an updated To Do list with a few things I should have finished some months (if not years) ago. I had to go check something and was amazed that the last exhibition I participated was over 15 months ago. Either that or I can't even remember having participated in anything. It's really time to clean up my act and start living my lift.

Indigo Duty

I went to my second and last indigo duty this morning and dyed some stuff.

Yesterday, looking at books, Internet images and practices I'd done, pole-wrapping was still my favorite, so I examined the brown cotton shirt I dyed previously. What I liked about the way this shirt turned out is the soft shapes suggestive of autumn bellflower buds, instead of the sharp cool patterns more often associated with this technique. I remembered I didn't push the cloth as firmly as I thought I should, and instead of strings I used rubber bands.

I went searching in my closet and this was the only cotton-ish (20% polyester) shirt I had left, but I didn't think the strips would get in the way.
I wrapped it last night, careful to leave the bottom of the shirt, the collar and the cuffs free of patterns. I tried to make the creases even, but didn't push the cloth too tightly. Below are the backs of the two shirts.
What was interesting was while at the Polytech, after it had gone through one hand rinse and one machine-spinning cycle, it appeared to have only dark and pale areas, and the stripes were very visible. After I came home and hung it on the doorway, more nuances appeared minute by minute, and the stripes became less annoying.

I suspect that this shirt was pushed even more loosely than the brown one; I suspect it contained more air bubbles so I have more unseemly blotches. I also need a pole with much greater diameter if I am to continue dyeing shirts of this kind.

The funny thing is, when you're first learning and experimenting, anything you make tends to look great, though you may not admit it publicly; but once you've experienced the technique and try to replicate or improve on it the second time, they don't come out as planned. Or it is just me? I tried not to have any visions or intentions for dye projects, but I think the brown shirt has a nicer pattern, though it's hard to see in a photograph because the dye is so pale.

However, I have one area in this shirt on the shoulder that I really like!
Next is a machine-woven silk scarf Mom bought in a dye material shop in Japan. Before dyeing, it the woven pattern was very hard to see.
I started stitching on this one during the workshop, but I changed my mind yesterday. So I tried ple-wrapping but after four or five tries I felt needed a larger or longer pole to do the task properly. I also did not like the way the silk was going on the pole.

Remembering my favorite result from the workshop was an "unintended" design, I tried the same method. I got greedy and folded and refolded the piece half a dozen times, and then clamped different areas a dozen times, and the final result is this. I wanted large areas of totally saturated indigo color, but I am terribly disappointed with this piece.
Even though I folded the scarf in odd angles and divided the piece into odd numbered sections and every other way I could think of to make it irregular, the two Tiki-like faces came up surprisingly similar, and the three large designs appear almost centered, and there is nowhere nearly as many smaller pale areas I had hoped to see. While the large areas of blue are wonderful, the three skeletal images are spooky and so not in my taste. I prefer the brains. After a few weeks if I really don't like it, I might go dunk the whole thing in the vat again.

As regards dyeing with indigo, I am unclear the difference between rinsing to get rid of excess indigo vs rinsing to expose indigo to oxygen. Are they different? Can anyone explain this to me?

When the workshop was taking place, New Zealand had a cold spell, and we were dyeing twice a day, so there was a nice delicate bit of "flower" floating on top of the vat, (think old-fashioned suds-bubbles in the washing machine but in fabulous shiny indigo color). Today, when I first opened the vats, I was taken aback with the flowers covering the surfaces of both vats, but more to the point, even while I was dyeing, there seem to be more of it surfacing/gathering/popping-out-of-nowhere. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, does anyone know?

I dyed some yarns, too, but I was rather cavalier about drying/spinning them, and I'm not sure if I've ruined two batches of nice silk from my stash. You'll see them if/when I can use them in the weft.

Silence

The posts about September, particularly about the workshop, was exhausting to write, and yet I felt driven to report back, in all its disparate parts; it was another of my self-imposed responsibilities. I'm comfortable being the newbie in any workshop as I wrote here and here, and in that respect, I think I've come to be completely open to any eventualities. I thought was getting better at it.

My state of mind during that workshop, I hope, points to my having had different expectations for this workshop, albeit most probably unrelated to the outcome of my projects. Something around how I expected myself to behave? Alternatives are a bit scary to contemplate.

After I posted the post with shots of my projects, I felt a tremendous relief, of having met my obligations. And was ready to move on. The sky suddenly opened and I discovered sitting in a sunny warm Nelson summer afternoon. (Last weekend was the first spring/summer weather we had this season.)

But not for long. By Sunday evening I was once again wondering why I have this compulsion to spell out almost everything, (believe it or not, my posts were censored by my standards;) why I blog and what it's for, (therapy is definitely a big one;) and whether I should just zap everything on the Internet and forget I existed in this current incarnation. But I've gone around this circle many times before and knew I wouldn't arrive at any practicable solution. So that's why I spent most of yesterday ironing; I find ironing very mindless and yet I have to concentrate to do it right, so a good practical/escape task. And I had most of Ben's closet in my basket.

I buy books when I feel insecure or stupid, because the act of buying books gives me the illusion of having learned something. These are some of what I bought in September - I finished one, and have started on five, but am trying to concentrate on "Freedom" to deflect my attention from myself. The two books on brains, I bought in the hour before going to the Wada lecture; they are so not what I'd normally look at, I was very interested that I was interested in the subject. Earlier in the month, I had to abandon Rutherford's "New York"; I feel guilty not finishing a book I start, but I convinced myself my life is much too short for bad fiction.

I have indigo duty tomorrow, so I'm supposed to be preparing a couple of items to dye today.

Oh, I found another breathtakingly beautiful blog here, a la Doni's Deli, called Shipbuilder, courtesy of and a friend of Sampling's, and apparently a weaver!

A Little More of Yoshiko Wada

Never utter the word "bleach" in Yoshiko's presence. Ever.

For her, shibori is not only about dyeing, and certainly not about tie-dyeing, which is why she used the words "shape-resist" in the title of her first book. Maria in class tried pleating by pole-wrapping without involving colors. Yoshiko repeatedly reminded us of the different characteristics of cericin and fibroin of silk and the potential to sculpt textiles. Which naturally led to different shrinkage of different yarns, a subject familiar to us weavers.

I can't remember how exactly she phrased it, but she kept repeating something to the extent that "fiber is twist".

Even though it was a Boro workshop, those of us who tried shibori techniques had more (i.e. numerous) visually spectacular results, whereas those who stitched diligently, well, many pieces were overdyed and their efforts somewhat obscured. Which, in a perverse way, made me happy I am a weaver because without the weaver, there is no cloth to dye.

For now, I still love my multicolored cotton cones, but New Zealand wool (i.e. merino) and delving deeper into the chemistry of it excites me.

* * * * *

I wrote the series of posts about the workshop over several days, hopping from one post to another, reordering, reorganizing, and splitting longer posts, hoping to find between the lines or in the gap between the words some kind of an answer or resolution for myself. By Sunday morning I was starting to feel pretty desperate about finishing the lot, because part of me felt tardy in reporting back to you one way or another, and another part of me wanted that lovely convenient concept that allows us to proceed to the next phase: closure.

While still in bed Sunday morning, I picked up Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" which I started the weekend before the workshop.

"... depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: ..."

I got out of bed thinking it's an astute observation, but it's not me.

On a Totally Different Note...

My friend Conrad's post on Facebook prompted me to think about stuff in my life and to do something kind of lame but slightly challenging: I'm giving away 100 things within 100 days starting yesterday to charity, some of which will be handwoven pieces specifically woven for this purpose.

You could say I needed a diversion from my current conundrum, (no, not the identity issue, but the warped warp); you could say it's an easy way to unload some stuff and enjoy light-hearted making. Whatever it is, I'm doing it, and I'll tell you when I've done it here.