Superlative

Hand/Eye recently posted about Tawaraya's exhibition in Washington DC, which reminded me of my mother's favorite, (or mine?) Japanese textile companies: Kawashima Wool (?) Textiles, 川島毛織 and Tatsumura Art Textiles, 龍村美術織物.

Kawashima is a modern business touting environmental-friendliness as well as doing what they have always done; there is a museum, and a "textile school" with a blog. Tatsumura seems to have stuck with what they know best - super fine silk weaving in the Chinese-influenced 7C Japanese Imperial Court-style, though they, too, have an interior fabric division. They have an on-line museum showing cloths that are eerily familiar to me, (click on the tiny ENTER mark in lower right corner,) but their "blog" is a bunch of notices only.

I'm not sure if we had Kawashima products around us, (by which I mean, at my grandpa's house,) but I was aware of Tatsumura as long as I've been aware of cloths. Grandpa had their products all over his house under valuable ceramics, wood carvings, and stones. (We do that in Japan; we get interesting rocks, get it polished if that enhances the rock, have wooden stands made to order , and display it.) Because Tatsumura cloths are so expensive, I only saw what we call vase mats, (Japanese homes always had and still often have cloths under vases, but they are in themselves often works of art. sometimes more valuable than the vases on them,) but I wouldn't be surprised if there were larger pieces and tea ceremony accessories in his house.

Mom grew up with nice things, (though it was most definitely after the way and even more likely after she and her siblings grew up that Grandpa accumulated really nice things,) so I always thought she should have some herself, and when I was working I tried to give her nice things on birthdays and mother's days; one particular Tatsumura cloth among them.     

To me, Tatsumura epitomized the woven cloth, and that August day in 1995 when I first threw a stick shuttle on my Ashford rigid heddle loom, images of my favorite red Tatsumura popped up in my mind and in some ways it never went away.

When I went to a pottery show on my last morning in Okayama in Jan/Feb 2010, in a beautifully renovated roadside shop, I was flabbergasted/amazed/disgusted/most-envious that in this rather attractive-in-a-sad-way place were stacks and stacks of Tatsumura cushions similar to but not the same as my favorite red cloth!!! 

Seeing how carefully I was looking at each piece of pottery, staff suggested I sit down, and gasping, I said I couldn't possibly sit on a Tatsumura. After I made three rounds in the small shop, another staff approached and asked if I am a potter, and when I said I wasn't, she said, "but you must be a maker?!" When I confided I am a weaver, she smiled and nodded. Though she still might have thought I'm just a crazy Kanto-ite, someone from the new East, rather than the old West, Kansai, of Japan.)

When I went home and told about Mom the Tatsumura cushions, she was surprised I loved them so much, and she brought out the three she had and told me to take one; after a few days of oohing and aaahing, and considering declining the offer, it had to be the red one, the one I gave her some years ago. So this is in my special drawer in my stash room.

I should have it out somewhere I can see it every day, but it's such a reverent object I can't get my head around it. So much so this post has taken three weeks to write.

Anyhoo, here it is.

There is no visible treatment of the fringes, but I'm never going to pull on the first weft to find out if there is sometime done, or if the sett and the best keep the wefts in place. 

Here's another article on the exhibition in DC. Do please let me know about Inagaki if any of you have a chance to visit.

Sunny Sunday

After much gazing, mostly on Friday night, I decided this scarf will be in the olive green and pale gray purple. It quietens the warps and somehow make the yellows and greens in the warp look harmonious with the purples and pinks. And the olive green weft in particular gives the cloth that sheen, though it looks dead flat in this picture.

For the second scarf, I am contemplating using a 60/2 cotton in dusty orange; it gives the cloth a really luminous look, and the patterns pop up. Three potential problems: longer weaving time; a crispier/wire-like unfamiliar texture, though reminiscent of some Southeast Asian silks; and worst of all, the selvedge is much harder to control than 20/2 wefts. The color doesn't go as well with the yellow/green stripes, so I might use another color alternatively.  

Why am I showing you shots from a totally wrinkled sample?

Because I anticipate folks may want to bunch this series of scarf up and wind it like so, and I wanted to see how wrinkled it gets; the hard-working sample endured 36 hours under a box of drawing papers.

Meanwhile, yesterday, the unbelievable happened, and our study bookshelf is now cleaned up. And the most surprising thing was, it took us only around 4 hours. We were ruthless in culling, and not as thorough in the cleaning of the shelves and the walls, but it's done and we even have gaps, and you can't believe what serenity it brings to me. We even had time time to sort through our map collection, (remember those? I used to be a big collector up until our 2003 trip to Scotland and Ireland; since then, of course, it's been GoogleMaps to wherever we go,) had time to put addition to my postcard collection into the plastic sleeve folder, and even mended a pair of pants! My stash room bookshelf has no space horizontal or vertical, but that's been culled several times in the last two and a half years and I don't foresee any more culling, or much addition in the near future.

And all this after I had a lovely mid-morning bubble bath. No wonder I'm knackered today.

I'm All Wound Up!

Kerstin showed us how to make a "correct" paper quill. Since the stick on my manual bobbin winder is tapered, I asked if it would make a quill with slightly changing diameter, to which she replied, yes, but only slightly.

This is my manual winder; the diameter at the base is 5mm, at the tip 3mm.

She also asked how I wind onto my homemade recycled paper bobbins made by winding paper around a pencil. I do that on my electric winder, which can take pirns, bobbins or quills of almost any size.

Except the straws/swizzle sticks I bought for my tiny Japanese silk shuttles; they are just a little too small for the electric,

It's also not big enough for the manual; even if I push one as far as it goes and tape the end to the stick, winding becomes uncomfortably wobbly; it's faster to wind it by hand.

Of course, I have a whole bag of them, and of course Mom was able to find baby bobbins, but Kiwis make do!

Production Line

I have photos of the two purple/pink warps dated March 27, 2011,so it has been a year since I made this one also. And what a peculiar one this is! No doubt my intention was to make at least one challenging warp; not so much "difficult" as it is not instantly harmonious to look at.

So there is scope for experimentation with the weft colors; so far, I only like the first two sampled.

The first is, once again, the nondescript mid yellow green that isn't all that great on its own, but works hard in combinations.

This time I recorded as I threaded so I can see how the warp and weft interact on the computer beforehand, if I am diligent, to prevent this sort of carry on, (third pic.)

There were fewer stripes than I had expected in this warp, making each stripe wider than the previous colorful warp, and a symmetrical block distribution of A-B-C-D-C-B-A so I'm having to make each rectangle more interesting. Which is a fun thing to do, but time-consuming.

And this wasn't the plan at all; the plan was to weave off three of these short warps, six scarves in all, relatively quickly and get on to the first October Exhibition piece. Ergo the title of this post.

Ho hum...

Good Weekend?

For all of you who needed to be passed over, I hope you were safely passed over, and those of you who went bunny-hopping-egg-hunting, that you found what you were looking for. For the rest of us, well, a breather and some down time. It's Day Four of Ben's long weekend, (he has until tomorrow,) and here in Nelson it's been disgustingly sunny, mild and gorgeous, bringing out all the neighbors out to tend to their gardens, except us. (To note, our neighbor to the north has chickens, to the northeast, rabbits, providing a season-appropriate variety to everybody else having gazillion cats; only one neighbor has two dogs, and one with occasional grand-dog.)

I was heading into a head-case/nut-job state and Ben has the sniffles AGAIN, so we read and slept a lot on Friday and Saturday; I've also been watching a whole lot of TEDs I've saved up. By yesterday I needed another approach to stop replaying the shall-I-stay-or-shall-I-leave, (not Ben, but Group R,) tape, so I tackled the ironing which accumulated. Anyhoo, the combination of  DVDs and ironing did the trick and I'm in a place where I can resume work today, but really, we should either tackle the bookshelf and finish the job Ben started, or make a gesture to the world that we do so care about the state of our domicile and be seen outside. 

Anyhoo, some delightful finds which may interest some of you:

Professor Hans Rosling, possibly the only man on earth who can make statistics relevant. Trust me you've never been entertained so much by infant mortality, poverty or CO2 emissions statistics; they come alive and become immediate and, yes, relevant! 
The good Professor on TED
His Gapminder website

Some background on T E Lawrence, (or Arabia) with an emphasis on abuse, depression, etc. Not recommended if you're feeling down, but an interesting look into the not-Peter-O'Toole part of of the man's life. 

And... oh, Cally might have Swine Flu, so best wishes for a speedy (and if not, pampered) recovery to her.

Residue

I wove off the colorful warp on Tuesday and washed the length yesterday. Here's the second piece; weft ends haven't been tidied yet. This is the one where I wove with mostly the darker pinks and purples because I thought they'd make a better merchandise.

Here, on the stash room floor, (because the living room floor is littered strategically out mapped with wool skeins, cones and balls,) is the warp-end fabric on the right with only the olive green and gold wefts, and the most interesting sample at top left, in which I compared a mostly-light-yellows-and-greens combo against a mostly-darker-purples-and-pinks combo. You can see my second shawl above was a mixture but with the darker wefts in greater proportion.

The thing is, in a warp consisting of both lighter-and darker-valued colors, the value of the weft does interesting things. Using lighter wefts make the darker-valued area look bleached out; the weave designs are easier to see, but the center of the cloth is not as nuanced as I like. Using darker wefts make the two sides with lighter warps look scrappy. (Mind you, the hues are different in this swatch, too; you don't see pale purples/pinks in the weft, nor dark yellows/greens in the warp.) When you think about it, is so obvious one shouldn't have to weave meters and meters to know this, but with a colorful warp, it was hard to see the whole cloth instead of getting sucked into obsessing about each little rectangle. The short answer is, I don't like either, so a good mix of values in the weft yields best balanced results, i.e. "Prayers" more so than Eddie's above. But add hue to the mix and the discordance should subside. 

The other problem, of course, was because I didn't document the threading, there are a few of these unsightly boarders between blocks..

As soon as I finished "Prayers", I dreamt of  of weaving cloth more harmonious, so for one day I had the mostly purple warp hanging on the breast beam. But it looked too prim and proper and the pink stripes made the cloth symmetrical, and I couldn't permit such behavior. So being  mildly surprised by my own somewhat OTT reaction, while Eddie's scarf et al bathed in the washing machine, I wound the one colorful warp on the loom. Now, this was supposed to be the highfalutin' color experiment when I made the warp I-don't-remember-how-far-back, but now it's going to be more fine-tuning of what I learned from the wide warp. One difference is, in this narrower warp, each color stripe is made up of pairs of two similar colors, and that's going to introduce a slight divination from what I learned.

Thankfully, all three warps are short; I think around four or five  meters each. I'm going to try 42EPI instead of 40. And this time I am going to record the threading so the boarders between blocks don't get messy.

I can't tell today if it's the camera behaving badly, or my monitor showing totally different colors of the same pictures via Windows vs my editing program, but the old samples in bottom left of the second picture is about right; all the rest seem "off".

Collaboraitive Book: Self-Portrait? Seriously?

I’ve become seriously interested in the idea of self-portraits in the most vague and detached way, with the possibility of ending up with something for the collaborative book for the October exhibition. It started with this drawing, though this was someone else; I was drawing passers by while waiting for Ben to pick me up.  

I can't understand why I'm not appalled by the idea. I've never liked my face and my body every since I've become aware of them, and I've wished, ever since that one 4.30 PM, late August, aged 12, I could exist in spirit only most of the time, and utilize available body parts so I can write. But quite apart from that loathing, , after three+ years of figure drawing, perhaps I started to look at my own self, (not so much "body",)  as an object, a shape most accessible to draw and study.

I wonder if it’s a kind of resignation, about being older, having less energy and more health problems, and not having head space and energy to do anything about it. Or like an old T-shirt, where once the fabric is so worn and the colors so faded, it’s too comfortable to throw it away. It's too old to give to charity, you know. Looking back, perhaps my 40's was when I thought this T-shirt was in its “too old, must throw away” stage, but this side of 50 has it become simply too comfortable?

Unlike a T-shirt, it doesn't mean I have the luxury of not having to think about health and do something about it, but I've been really taken aback at my willingness to stand/sit in front of a mirror, let alone stare and record! My mini-project for April has even been one self-portrait a day, either drawing, photographic, or tampering with these results.

Even when looking at portraits, mostly in paintings, I've never been interested in the face or the body of the shape, but clothes/hair/accessory/fashion, the surrounds/interiors/knickknacks were my primary interests, and the "codes/messages" in these elements we in different times and places can't decipher. I'm curious to know which part of a portrait I'll be looking at the next time I happen upon one.

Get Out of Your Depth

Group R met again yesterday and it was a short, sharp meeting; we made a whole bunch of administrative decisions, divvied tasks, and updated our time line. All necessary evil, but fun.

We also touched on the issue of artist profiles and statements.  I don't go for long stuff, (though I love to read other artists' long and detailed bios,) so I scribbled down mine.

Profile: Born in Japan, Schooled in the USA, discovered weaving in New Zealand.
Statement: I weave cloth in my basement all hours of the day. 

If asked to add more, I could muse about being run over and defeated by the Concept Truck, but I hope I don't have to sound serious or mature; that is so... 

I had a couple of hours to kill and a free coffee card, so I went to a cafe I don't often go, and this is what was on the wall.

Beginnings: Projects

Keeping in mind "Beginnings" is also a working title for the exhibition at this stage, though we might keep it, here are some ideas I have.

"Big tubes like Titanic's funnel/smoke stacks hanging from high above, and folks possibly walking into and/or standing inside them, looking up" idea split into two when I realized my maximum reach on the loom is a tad short of 80cm, with which I can weave a double-weave tube of less than 50cm in diameter; too cozy to stand inside. So:

"Tube"
This is the stand-inside piece, which will consist of a few pieces of wide cloth, say 70-80cm, hung from the rafter to create a tube/tent with a minimum diameter at the bottom of  90cm. I want to weave something that will make people look up, but I haven't figured out why I want folks to look up when they step inside my tube, while outside it there's a lovely 3.60m to the rafter, almost twice that to the apex of the ceiling! For now, some of the ideas are bottom-of-the-sea/tsunami and kaleidoscope, but very early days for this one.    

"Pillars"
This is the funnel/smoke stack half: a series of tall white tubes/banners hanging from the rafters in harmony, looking big and pretty. While I'm still attached to the original picture, and even though I swore off concepts, it has been impossible for me to escape the Christchurch/Japan events and I find myself unintentionally combining this project with photos from these devastated regions. (No, Ronnie Martin, the irony is not lost on me!!) And I can't stop thinking about this project.

As of this morning, the main concerns are:
1) I prefer banners over tubes so I don't have to sacrifice shafts and banners are easier to hang, but are these the right reasons?;
2) I prefer five to seven not-so-wide banners over fewer, wider ones, but that means longer weaving time;
3) Size/proportion is crucial in this project so I'll probably have to go into the gallery with several widths of paper, and finally;
4) Where do I aim on the "pretty"-expressive/picturesque/realistic spectrum; again, much sampling required.    

Collaborative Book
We are going to have one collaborative piece, each of us creating two smallish pieces which will be combined to create a "book". Though it's up to each individual to come up with theme/subject, Ronnie threw in the idea of a self-portrait at one point, so I've been investigating that possibility in the most general terms. This is the piece I would feel most comfortable straying from my "pretty" creed. 

"Friends(hip)"
This is the project based on the collection of one yard/meter of your yarns. I had a vague idea of making a talisman or a small bag, something small I can carry with me but not a fashion item. But with unfamiliar exotic yarns arriving, I have no idea where this is going, so I made guidelines, which may or may not be changed later:
1) All yarns are to go into one work;
2) The finished piece will not be a convenient wall piece where all your yarns will be used as wefts in a generic warp, and;
3) I hope, I hope, it can make it "pretty".

The yarns looked so cute and copy in one zip log bag but this weekend the time came to start thinking about this seriously so they morphed into an ever-changing mind map.   

Items to Sell
I'm thinking of weaving small facsimile versions of the "Tube" and/or "Pillar" panels as scarves.

"Father, Professor, Patient"
Time permitting, I might consider picking this up where I left off and see if it can become a piece that will fit into the exhibition. I might have to use super thick yarns for "Tube" and "Pillars" to get that far.

Six months minus three days to go.

April Spools Day!!!

In appreciation of one of the least celebrated weaving tools, we proudly present to you our bobbins and pirns and whatever else we improvise to work with.

Happy April Spools Day, world!

My second set turned by a local turner to match the first set I bought. Every piece has a different wood grain design and looks and feels lovely. Because the shuttle which takes these is heavy and I don't weave with thick yarns too often, these babies tend to be stuck in a drawer.

My default prins. When I first got them in the mail, I was shocked because they were so ugly compared to wooden ones, but I got used to them and I mind less that they are made of plastic. 

Heavier-than-cartridge paper I intended to use the back of, wrapped around a pencil. I can get around three of these from an A4 sheet and I can cut the length to suit three shuttles of different sizes and weights. I never realized each one would last over ten years when I first made them.

Here's Dianne's basket.

And here are Sampling's.

And Cally!

And Kerstin!

And Margery!

And Laura!

And Geodyne!

Thank you for your contributions, weavers! (Anyone else I haven't spotted?)