Cedar Bark Hats article

I am reading a stack of secondhand Wild Fibers and Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot magazines.  They're great, if you can get over feeling insignificant because you are not herding yaks in remote places and promoting your artwork to galleries.  I copied out several quotes defining art, design, and craft.

There was an article on harvesting, processing, and using cedar bark for fibre, Carol Ventura's "An Ongoing Haida Tradition: Cedar Bark Hats," Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot, Spring 2002, p. 40-45.

Cedar bark is a topic I've paid attention to previously because it is a naturally-occuring fibre source on Vancouver Island (where I'm from) that is used for clothing and I am interested in local fibre, what is around that can be utilized.  I am more concerned with flexible cloth, though.  This article presented the fibre used un-spun for the stiff hats I associate with the traditional dress of the Nuu-chah-nulth and Haida.

Over Christmas I got to read most of Edlin's Woodland Crafts in Britain and was surprised there were references to various wood fibres commonly twisted and used for cordage and clothing.  When I was in school, bark cloth was presented as peculiar to First Nations culture.  Presented as entirely peculiar, really.  Not according to Edlin.

Urban Weaver Project

The Urban Weaver Project is a Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation program that teaches people to use invasive plant species like English ivy around Vancouver, B.C. as materials for baskets and other woven items.  Website is here http://theurbanweaverproject.wordpress.com/

There's an audio news piece about 12 minutes long by the CBC's North by Northwest on the Urban Weaver Project here http://www.cbc.ca/nxnw/2012/01/14/urban-weaver-project/.  When Todd Devries is interviewed, he says that he was separated from his Haida mother when very young, then reunited much later, and the day he wore his first woven hat in public was when he felt Haida.  If you're not from B.C. and you don't know what that means, Haida is one of the many First Nations people groups in the province.

On the Urban Weaver Project's website you can find more about ways to use local invasive plants in fibre arts by going to the project's About page and clicking through to the individual artist-weavers' sites.  For example, Sharon Kallis' Materials Process Enquiry page gives among other things her experience with processing nettles and using them, unspun.  Good to know that nettle was traditionally harvested after the first frost.

Cedar Lining

What's that scraping noise? Me, sanding the cedar planks that line my hope chest to release fresh cedar oil.

I'm worried that I've been lax with all the wool I've accumulated for spinning, leaving the fibre around open to moths in their original plastic bags and cardboard boxes.

Moths, destroyers of wool!

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destoys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:20,21 NASB

Ain’t Necessarily Historically So

When I spin in public (SIP) and talk to people, I like to tell them about the drop spindle’s place in history. I tell them that before five hundred years ago, all fabric and all clothes started on a drop spindle. People say, “Oooh!” and mentally begin to calculate how long whipping up a toga for themselves would take.

The trouble is, it ain’t necessarily so.

Could spin with a twisty stick, which looks in The Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning like a smooth straight stick that’s slightly thick in the top third with a hook on the end. You’re supposed to twirl the stick on your thigh and stretch the strand out as long as you can. Not sure about winding on; I don’t think you can. I’ve heard that nalbinding could have been done with twisty-stick spun yarn, since nalbinding is formed with short lengths spliced together as you go.

Could spin on the thigh, unaided.

Could wear furs, sheepskin, and buckskin. Or hats woven out of rigid fibres.

Could have used a great wheel, which I hear were around much earlier than five hundred years ago, though they were not in widespread use.

Could have used a rakestraw spinner. I got to try one out at Knotty by Nature in Victoria, at the urging of a clerk who could tell I’d be interested in the novelty factor.

Could have fused fibres into fabric. Fusing, I think, is the most interesting pre-industrial alternative to a drop spindle. I read about a method in M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time:

[Miss. B] took us over to a small house to look at some fabric….In the Kwakuitl village of Mamalilaculla, on the west coast of British Columbia, this old, old woman of the tribe was making South Sea Island tapa cloth out of cedar roots. The cloth was spread across a heavy wooden table—a wooden mallet lying on top of it.

I am not quite sure how tapa cloth is made. But I believe they soak the roots in something to soften them—lay them in a rough pattern of dark and light roots, and then pound them with a wooden mallet into paper-thin, quite tough cloth.

I am finding it enjoyable to go back over old books like the 1927 memoir The Curve of Time and read with the new aim of getting practical understanding of spinning. I’m going to have to drag out my copy of Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene and look up that passage where the knights get captured by a girl warrior and are forced to spin, imprisoned.

Cedar Dreams

One of the fibres I aspire to spin is cedar bark. Weaver Melody Oakroot, in Spin•Off’s September 1986 interview, recommends pounding the inner bark lightly with a mallet before spinning cedar wet on the thigh. She spins two strands, staggering their lengths.

Oakroot finds her cedar bark ready pulverized on logging roads,* but I knew from school that First Nations traditionally harvested cedar bark sustainably from living trees. A quick search on Youtube turned up a video of just that. The bark was stripped vertically, leaving a smooth surface on about a quarter or less of the tree’s circumference. (Never strip bark horizontally: you would girdle the tree and kill it.)

I looked and I looked at that smooth surface. Its height, its width, the edges of bark, they all gave me that same frisson of recognition I got in the lower level of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston when I rounded a corner and saw a Tsimshian bent-corner box. (Also cedar.)

“You know me,” the tree said, confidently. I mentally added lots of silvery-grey weather-beaten patina on the surface, and agreed that I did know it. I saw trees like that as a teenager living on the North end of the Island. “Hello,” I said, absurdly pleased.

The ‘Namgis First Nations surveys blocks of forest land that local forest companies select for harvest in order to identify and protect culturally modified trees. They list these trees in a database, as evidence of their traditional territory.

To be sensitive to this considerable significance, I’m not going to be out culturally modifying cedar trees.

(Also, harvesting wild materials period should only be done with a mentor to prevent over-harvesting and damage.)

I've noticed similar sensitivity on the Ravelry group Cowichan Inspired, about the Ravelry members' concerns over fair use. They question whether their desire to make a Cowichan sweater could lead them into co-opting traditional Native designs, profiting off a people group's cultural heritage (or doing them out of a sale), treading the thin line between borrowing and exploiting, or simply using something one is not entitled to. If you are not West Coast Salish, can you make an authentic Cowichan sweater?

I am not after anything authentic with cedar bark. I just want to experience and understand its spinning properties.

Again, logging waste means a tree died, whereas removing bark involves less disruption of local ecology. On the other hand, as the lady with the fur coat said, it was dead when I got it, and up-cycling industrial waste can be environmentally virtuous too.

Hmm. At any rate, cedar spinning will have to wait until my next trip back to the Island. Cedar trees in Virginia don’t look anything like what I’m used to.

* My esteemed father knows of a mask maker on Vancouver Island that sources his materials the same way.