Språng Waistcoat in Skrydstrup Pattern

språng waistcoat

I finished my språng pullover.  You can see it is more of a waistcoat than a sweater.  It is in the Skrydstrup pattern from Collingwood's The Techniques of Sprang, so four rows of S twist alternate with four rows of Z twist.  The pattern of twists cause the fabric to curl a little but not distort to one side the way all Z twist would.  The curl is visible in the edges of the armholes.  

I am more pleased with it off the loom than I was when it was on the loom.  

The drape of it makes the armholes look curved but they were done straight.  

The construction is a lot like what we used to wear in kindergarten to keep our clothes clean while fingerpainting, a plastic garbage bag with holes cut for the neck and arms.  Except you don't cut språng just anywhere.  I didn't cut this piece at all.  

The hole for the neck is a slit formed by treating the threads on either side as a separate section.  You work to the middle of the row, move the threads as if you'd come to the end of the row, move the next threads as if you were starting a row, and go from there.  I picked the easiest row in the pattern to start this on, row 7.

The armholes are formed by seaming the sides partway.  They look rather deep but they are correct because when you put on the vest, the fabric stretches horizontally and shrinks vertically.

Eight Feet to Propinquity

I steeled my heart to take the incomplete, lackluster språng pullover off the loom to discard it, and then I couldn't do it.  I like things to be useful and this project still has something to give.

So I ignored the loom as it sat out of the way next to the window of the wool room.

The last few inches of warp are the most difficult to complete, not mentally but physically, as there is little room to maneuver and interlink the threads.  This is why so many traditional objects in språng are not worked right up to the middle.

However, it turned out that it wasn't the interlinking that was holding me up, but the position of the loom in the room.  Once I moved the loom eight feet over to my desk within reach, I felt a lot more like finishing the project.

Of course, feeling like doing something is not actually doing something.  You'll know I've finished the project when you see one or two new språng how-to YouTube videos from me featuring a white pullover vest in the Skrydstrup pattern.

Speaking of making things convenient, stuck to the top of my loom is the pattern copied from Collingwood and on it a bobby pin marks the row where I left off last time.  I don't have to figure it out from the strands' positions in the last row.  Learned this from my weaving lessons.

I'm trying to think of a språng pattern where I would have a hard time figuring out where I left off, and can't.  Not even the Coptic turban pattern, you just have to count how many holes down from the apex of the diamond.  I have some trouble following that pattern.  It's easier now that I've improved the chart I made.

The next large piece in språng I make, I'd like it to be in the Coptic turban pattern.  I'd like to make a more polished piece than I've done so far, an eye-catching stole that would get people interested in doing språng.  Unless, that is, the next large piece I do is for my dad on the loom he made for a permanent installation piece.  Coptic turban would have too smooth a texture and too understated a look.  That loom needs something with texture, like Gothic arches.

Now, I have no use for a stole myself, so it would not in the least fulfill my goal of handspun wearables for me in natural colours.  You can tell I still lean toward making things that allow me and others to learn about techniques and tools.  I expect this to continue.

Started Knitting a Sleeve

By Christmas Eve, I had knitted the body of the Cullercoats sweater and started knitting a sleeve.  It's progress.

I don't know if I have firm fibre arts resolutions for 2015.

Assuming Cullercoats is not an absolute horror to finish, I'd like to knit another sweater, this time in plain stockinette.  Maybe a pullover in commercial linen yarn.  Or one in wool.

I need to wash the Gotland fleece.

We'll see how the rest of it goes.

Rose Bead Stitch Markers

Here's another look at the rose bead stitch markers I have made.

Funny things, beads made of rose petals.  They're rather nice.

Good-bye, Hampshire Wool

I gave away the Hampshire wool.  I'd washed some, combed some, dyed some, and spun a little but I never made any more progress than that.  I feel good about this move.

I also owned up to how much I dislike the yarn in my current språng project compared to the handspun in a couple of early språng pieces I did.  I could complete the project, show it off, and then shelve the finished object.  Or I could undo the piece and reuse the yarn.  Or I could skip any further effort entirely and scrap the project.  Decisions.

Let's say skip.  I have other projects to work on, and the piece did teach me some things so it wasn't a total waste.

A Brush with Cotton Towels

The other day instead of my handwoven linen Ms and Os bath towel, I had to use a cotton bath towel.  What a dismal experience.  I never want to go back to using a cotton towel.

The linen one was well worth the work and money.

This is one of the reasons to appreciate fibre arts, because the end product can be superior to mass produced common things in materials, structure, fit, or colour.

Now, to produce more fibre arts items and get more value.

Store-bought Hemp Yarn

I got some hemp knitting yarn from Hemp Traders delivered and straight away I wound a ball and knitted the start of a dish cloth.

I like knitting that particular dish cloth pattern because it's easy.  There's very little casting on and a lot of knitting with the occasional yarn over, or decreases after the halfway mark.  I can even knit it while watching subtitled videos.  The only thing I dislike about handknit dish cloths is the cotton yarn, so much so that I give all of mine away and never keep any.  This hemp yarn is a great improvement in my mind.  It has a crisp feel and a sheen, even in bumpy garter stitch.  I keep looking at it and feeling the cloth.  The yarn is skinny: I am using size 2 needles.

I'm glad I took a chance and ordered the yarn sight unseen.  I can knit dish cloths mindlessly and I can replace my ratty woven cotton ones.  I suppose it's the chatelaine in me, fussing about the state of the linen cupboard.  I've been putting off replacing the sad things because I didn't know where to get my usual brand, my old source failed me.  Now I can have hemp cloths and lots of them.  They should perform well, hemp is durable and doesn't moulder when damp.

I ordered a large quantity of white Romney roving from Qualicum Bay Fibre Works, wool that will be picked up and stored for me by a kindly family member until my next visit.  I have masses of unspun wool already.  This purchase is less about need that it is about my desire to support a mill that deals in local fibre on Vancouver Island.  I think it's important that an area keep the means of production.  The mill needs more sales to stay in business.

I have asked the mill to put my name in the queue for their spinning services.  At the proper time the roving will go back and be spun into yarn much like the stuff I'm knitting my Cullercoats sweater out of.  Ideally I would spin the wool myself but again, I have lots of other roving to keep my spindles busy.  Moreover, yarn from this mill gives a lot of what I look for in fibre.  It's not like buying mass-produced yarn from a craft store or yarn shop.  It's traceable to a region, undyed, and breed-specific, and it supports local producers and processors.

The hemp yarn is mass-produced and imported.  I am okay with that because it is good quality and I doubt it's possible to get anything comparable that's small batch and traceable.  The laws on cultivation in North America are restrictive.  I don't know about machinery to process and spin hemp, whether there are small-scale setups that bridge the gap between hand-processing and a factory line.

The Cullercoats sweater is coming along.  After getting stalled for a while near the top of the back, this past week I cast on the left front and knitted quite a lot of it.  Good thing I've made progress or I'd feel guilty about starting the hemp dish cloth.

I have a språng project on the loom that's about two or three hours from completion.  I hope I gauged the width correctly.  It's hard to tell.

Weld Dye and Over Dyeing

I went to a natural dye day and got to dip some wool in the weld pot.  We dipped yarn and wool into large pots heated over a fire.  I discovered that I really like the colour weld dye gives, a clear lemon yellow.  I plan to use it again sometime.

Besides weld, I dyed with indigo, woad which I like better than indigo, walnuts mordanted with iron for black-brown, madder overdyed with indigo for purple, weld overdyed with woad for green, and brazil wood.  The base wool was Blue Face Leicester, a pound divided into two ounce portions.

I would have liked to have dyed the Romney wool I brought back from Vancouver Island a while ago instead of the imported BFL but I didn't get the Romney ready in time.  I pulled it out and washed it all but a considerable amount of grease remained in the locks, and the grease would have resisted the dye.  I need to pick and tease the wool thoroughly to loosen the locks so the hot water and detergent will penetrate when I wash it again.

I want to dye with woad over weld again sometime for Lincoln green since I didn't get that consistent or strong a result.  It looks like mottled lemon and lime.  Someone else got a beautiful clear green.  I think she got such excellent results because she dipped earlier when the dyes were stronger, more concentrated and also because she dyed skeins.  My wool was scrunched up in a cotton bag and the woad did not contact all of the fibre.

Not only did I go to a natural dye day, I went to a synthetic dye day before that.  I got a good result by filling up two cups of dye with the same colour tinged with a little black, then dividing a cup into two cups and topping them off with different colours, then using the resulting three related colours to paint a skein.

You may remember that I am off synthetic dye.  I had not intended to dye anything but rather knit more of my sweater, but a friend persuaded me to dye a spare cotton skein she had.  It went home with her.

I was asked recently why I avoid synthetic dye in my fibre arts.  I explained how I was influenced by the Fibershed project.  Later while I was at home finding links to the founder Rebecca Burgess' interviews to pass along, I watched one of the videos on YouTube about the 150 mile wardrobe.  It was a good refresher.  I still find the clothing and the philosophy meaningful and inspirational.

More Acquisition

Another week, another fibre festival.  I bought a fleece.  This is unusual for me.  I have limits and my rule is to buy wool that is at least washed if not processed.  Not to mention I've run out of places to stow fibre in the wool room.  However, the colour and texture was so very much my taste that I found myself standing in front of the fleece warding off other shoppers with my presence as I made up my mind.  The fact that it is a local product is a bonus.

Gotland fleece

I know that once it is spun into yarn, it will lose the contrast of silver against grey and thereby lose its beauty.  I know that I should have been satisfied with a photograph and left the fleece where it was.  But right now I don't care.  It is mine and my wool room is graced by it.

I helped people learn to use a spindle to spin yarn, and sent four people home with drop spindles and wool.  A couple of them, I let them struggle for a while.  They were trying to draft fibre after they'd allowed the twist to run up into the wool and lock everything up.  I was sitting beside them, spinning a little yarn or knotting handspun bracelets for kids, available but not intruding.  Finally I said, may I, and reestablished them at the place where the fibre drafted freely, winding the felted stuff onto the shaft out of the way.

I liked the setup of the demo area this year.  I was seated on my own between a table and a tent pole, with one empty chair beside me.  It was like a little nook.

Acquisitions

I haven't done much this past week, fibre-wise, except buy things.

Had the unexpected opportunity to buy the språng loom I borrowed before, so I took it.  May not be my taste in looks but it works and I don't have to take my chances trying to get a woodworker to understand what I want.  Plus I can fit it in the car and carry it with one hand, it was a good price, and språng looms are rare on the ground.

I got in the mail the most expensive textile I've ever bought, vintage Japanese hemp cloth dyed with indigo.  It cost about as much as a pair of pants, and is not large enough for making anything.  It is just for keeping and admiring.  The feel of it is crisp and intriguing.

Today there's a good prospect I'll be on the spot to help people try drop spindles.  I'm looking forward to it.

Foreign Parcel

I bought a copy of Fenny Nijman's Egyptisch Vlechten from the Netherlands.  It's a bit of a splurge, buying a book in Dutch, which I can't read, but it has pictures of finished objects and historical pieces in språng.

I tried making a pullover in språng.  The finished chest size came out at 76 inches unexpectedly, nothing like the small gauge swatch I made because it's harder to beat down a row on a wide warp and the rows are looser.  The piece looks better thrown across the back of a chair than it does on me.  At least I tried out false circular warp.

I made some stitch markers using fragrant beads I made from rose petals.  Here they are on my sweater.

rose petal beads

"Finish Him!"

My sweater is still very much an unfinished object and all urgency has gone from that project now that there is no deadline for it.  I have just done the armhole decreases on the back and that's all I have.

I am still using a kanban board to track the flow of work on my projects.  Each task is written on a card which I move left to right from the "ready column" to "in progress" to "done" by turns.  I'll get annoyed when a card is stationary too long, and do something about it.  The saying in kanban is, stop starting, start finishing.

I finished more Norwegian Sweet baby caps.  I assembled drop spindles that I painted with woad.  I posted YouTube videos that show someone processing dogbane and kudzu fibre, and someone spinning dogbane into yarn.  I pinned pictures of språng.  I dyed commercial yarn with tumeric and walnut.

Am glad I went to the kudzu fiber workshop.  Am probably cured of wanting to use kudzu.  Wasn't the smell of the composted vines, it was how little fibre came out of all that material.

I had another whack at the Tegle stocking språng pattern and still could not suss out the last few rows of the pattern repeat.  Oh, it's pretty though.

Once More, With Feeling

I finally got gauge on my sweater after a couple of false starts and a regrettable lapse into procrastination.  I have completed seven inches of the back and that's all, not counting all the knitting I did with too small and too large needles.

I am on the right track now for a handknit sweater in the correct size.  Sadly, I won't finish in time to enter it in the festival competition.  I'd like to aim to be done in time to wear the sweater at the festival but given my rate of progress I fear all I would have is the makings of a thick knitted waistcoat, if that.

Woad Oil Paint

Added woad powder to enamel paint and got a good colour.  The original glossiness turned flat from the powder.  My brushwork is sloppy.  It doesn't matter as it's a piece I'm assembling into a spindle to give away.  Next time I tint paint I will add less powder so the paint stays runny.  I did this in a hurry outside at dusk.

Hampshire Wool gets Dyed Indigo

Someone put on a dye day and I took the event as a spur to finishing up some fibre preparation.

I washed the remaining two pounds of Hampshire wool that had sat greasy in the stash for three years.

I dyed a pound and a half in the indigo vat, then took two ounces of that and over-dyed with walnut.  Here are thrice-dipped bags of fibre hanging to dry and oxidize:

The bags in the foreground are cotton and the other bags are polyester mesh.  Inside is the wool.  The zippers on the mesh bags were convenient for checking the shade of blue on the wool.

Also convenient was having someone else manage the indigo vat but someday I am going to have to learn to do it for myself.  Out of a feeling that I should do some re-skilling, I made my first ever madder dye bath on my own and dyed some more Hampshire.  It came out a red-orange colour.

indigo overdyed with walnut

A Close Deadline as a Strategy

Since I hope to enter the sweater in a competition a couple of months from now, I'm not going to post photos or write about my progress until afterward.

It is hard to tell if I have a chance of finishing on time.  Have heard that a sweater can take a month or as much as a year or more depending on whether it gets regular attention.  I do like a deadline and figure it is better to aim for a close one.  Even if I miss the cutoff, I will be closer to done then than if I pick a distant date like Christmas and slough off.

The Simple, Complicated, and Complex

The rate at which I do fibre arts projects, it can vary.

I'll stall and drop momentum until I can get help or get in that useful state where desire for the finished object exceeds the reluctance to face the technical problem.  It is usually a technical problem, like getting gauge or sourcing materials.

Simple and small or weird and complex with original stuff to figure out, somehow with those I'll move along at a good constant clip.  I've made quite a few babies happy this year with Norwegian Sweet Baby caps.  I tried weaving overshot and found it as easy as promised.  My experiments in the technique of språng were diverting.  Unfortunately they are the sort of projects that don't get me moving directly toward my goals.  If velocity matters, value matters too.  I want finished objects for me.  Actual wearable clothing, not accessories, for me, out of local traceable materials that are naturally coloured.  Anything else is practice.

What I want is complicated, by which I mean complicated to achieve.  It means a narrow choice of materials, long-term projects, and realization of a specific aesthetic and fit.

I have begun a sweater for me, in natural grey Romney commercial aran yarn from the Salt Spring Island Wool Co.  I picked Alice Starmore and Anne Matheson's Cullercoats, a cabled sweater pattern published in the early 80s.  The cables and border designs are attractive, the lines are dated.  I mentioned the pattern on this blog a few years ago, writing, "I don't know if I have the high level of understanding and stern degree of determination I would need in order to alter it to suit my taste."  

I've written the modifications, I've gotten gauge, and I've started a sleeve.

Norwegian Sweet Baby cap, swatch for sweater

SSI Wool Co.'s sheep pasture with Romneys

Portrait of Anna Codde

I happened to pick up a book of a hundred paintings held by the Rijksmuseum and saw a portrait of Anna Codde by Maerten van Heemskerck.  It was done in 1529 and shows a woman spinning a fine light-coloured thread from a distaff on a double-drive wheel which she turns by hand.  She is not looking at her hands as she works, and she wears fine clothing.

Open Sesame

Some time ago now, I looked at Dagmar Drinkler's pdf "Die Rekonstruktion eng anliegender Bekleidung aus Antike und Renaissance,' online at www.teppichfreunde-norddeutschland.de/de/img/treffen/Drinkler-Sprangtechnik-09072011-72dpi.pdf.

This summer I went looking for more primary evidence that would bear out her findings on form-fitting sprang pants and sleeves in the ancient world and medieval Europe.  It was like knowing that someone before me had said "open sesame" and seen a treasure trove, as it were, full of exciting information.  All I needed was to find the right place and the right keywords to search with.  I found some form-fitting pants shown in tapestries from around the 1500s.  I did a broad search of Attic pottery on the British museum website and saw hundreds of images of pots, mostly showing fillets that might have been made with the språng technique.

I saved my place and didn't get back to it for a while.  Then one day I picked up the search again and came across a reference to an Oriental, a rather dated way of saying someone from Asia.  The figure, on British museum number 1912,0709.1, wears pants and sleeves that correspond with Drinkler's research.

From there I searched with the that keyword and found more examples, then I searched for Persians and Amazons and found many more.  A couple were wearing form-fitting garments on their upper bodies that looked integral to the sleeves, for example numbers 1867,0508.941 and 1837,0609.59.  The patterns are a lot of fun to look at.  I've pinned as many as I could on Pinterest, here http://pinterest.com/thesojourningspinner/språng-leggings-and-garters/.

Paddington Knits

Was reading a old English children's book full of dry humour, Michael Bond's More about Paddington:

Paddington's convalescence had been a difficult time for the Browns.  While he had remained in bed it had been bad enough, because he kept getting grape-pips all over the sheets.  But if anything, matters had got worse once he was up and about.  He wasn't very good at "doing nothing" and it had become a full time occupation keeping him amused and out of trouble.  He had even had several goes at knitting something–no one ever quite knew what–but he'd got in such a tangle with the wool, and it had become so sticky with marmalade, that in the end they had to throw it away.   

Sheep in a Meadow

Sheep in a meadow.

Emulsion Woad Paint

I bought some Bleu de Lectoure woad powder from Maiwa.

Bleu de Lectoure also produces ready-made paint tinted with woad, beautifully-looking in the advertising photos.  Maiwa just carried the dyestuffs.

Knowing woad paint was possible made me want to try to make some for myself.  The powder didn't incorporate into the paint that well, though.  The dark blue smudge on the top of the wedge of wood is woad plus boiled linseed oil.  The greyish-blue sides are painted with woad in linseed oil with egg and water.

I wonder if it would mix in better and give a better result if added to regular, ready-made white paint.

one hundred, eighty-sixth and eighty-seventh skeins

I spun up the Gale's Art Blue Face Leicester wool in the colourway velvet Elvis.  That is, I spun up all that I could.  The bag got subjected to friction, the wool felted, and I had to leave an ounce or so undone.

That, I believe is that.  All that remains in my fibre stash is naturally-coloured and naturally-dyed, apart from an ounce or two of mohair.

Summertime

Let's see, what have I been doing.  I saw some beautiful white Romney wool that had been put through a drum carder in small quantities, then rolled for woollen spinning. 

I acquired some madder, cochineal, and woad because I had the opportunity and I do mean to try dyeing with them sometime. 

I've set aside the white Targhee wool for a while and am spinning the last of my supply of synthetically-dyed wool, some Gales Art BFL in Velvet Elvis. 

I bought a hemp shower curtain meant to resist mould naturally by virtue of the fibre properties.  

I got around to taking out of the stash a certain sealed bucket of wool and re-checking for insect infestation in the sealed bags inside.  All was well.  But I won't be tying up the necks of cloth bags with wool yarn again.

Rukinlapa

A foreign word or phrase can mean all the difference to finding out information about fibre arts tools.

Take for example rukinlapa for distaff in Finnish and ручная прялка (ruchnaya pryalka) for distaff in Russian.  Run them through online image searches.  You'll get some unrelated results but mostly you'll see bat-shaped distaffs with carved designs.  Imagine a man carving one for his sweetie back in the day.

The search results are a lot more satisfying than results with the other Russian word I found last month for this sort of distaff, lopastka, which is more like the word blade, shoulder blade or trowel blade.

There's a china pattern called Rukinlapa by Raija Uosikkinen‏ based on these distaffs' shape and carving designs.

British Museum no. 1756,0101.485

In my delightful forays into online museum collections, I found a piece of classical Greek pottery decorated with a closeup of a woman's head clad in a cap.  It is British Museum no. 1756,0101.485.

The cap's structure looks similar in at least three ways to some styles of extant Coptic språng caps that were made a thousand years after the pot was painted.

A quick look at thumbnails for the same search results shows there are more pots like this.  It's exciting.  Most everything I've seen to date has shown figures head to toe not close up, and as often as not with the cap-clad head positioned at a spot on the pot that curves away and can't be seen easily.

It's exciting not so much because this information will help me make a cap.  It's more that I am starting from a premise that the Greeks used språng for headgear and I'm out to find primary evidence.  The premise comes from research-driven authorities on språng construction and ancient Greek culture, for example, Peter Collingwood in The Techniques of Sprang, Margrethe Hald in Old Danish Textiles, Elizabeth Siewertsz van Reesema in her works including the article "Old Egyptian Lace," and Marina Fischer in her thesis, "The Prostitute and Her Headdress: the Mitra, Sakkos and Kekryphalos in Attic Red-figure Vase-painting ca. 550-450 BCE."  I like to compare and contrast things to draw conclusions.  In this case, a Greek picture compared with a Coptic piece.  I'm following clues for something is a bit of a mystery.  It wouldn't be if we'd had an unbroken widespread tradition of språng.

If and when I do plan out the specs for a cap, I have dimensions for quite a few existing Coptic pieces and I think I can estimate the dimensions of the looms on a few pieces of Greek pottery.

Spinstokje

I recently came across the word spinstokje, meaning a stick for spinning.  It is a spindle without a whorl, shaped slightly thicker in the middle.  I am not sure if it is spun in the hand, suspended, or rolled on the thigh.

The Dutch word stokje means stick, bar, or wand.

I've been told it is used as the word for double crochet, and that makes sense for the long slender shape of a double crochet stitch.

Elizabeth Siewertsz van Reesema's second edition of Egyptisch Vletchwerk includes the word stokje in a chart's key to indicate a similar thing in sprang, where two threads twist around each other multiple times creating a slit on either side.  An example can be seen in the Whitworth Art Gallery's Coptic cap T.9864.

How I Feel About It and What I'm Going to Do

After my recent post full of analysis and conclusions about my efficacy in my fibre arts projects, you might wonder, how do you feel and what will you do.

I feel okay.  It's better to know how work flows and to know what to change.  It's understandable why I have the WIPs I do.  It's a given that the opportunities that move me to action involve gathering, understanding, and giving out information.  But my motivation for learning to spin yarn was to re-skill, to learn to meet a basic need independent* of fossil fuel or as close as I can get.  My hope is that, by subordinating the scholarly WIPs to practical WIPs for handspun clothes, I will make what I learn into something tangible and visible, and the experience will make me better able to pass along knowledge about how handspun clothes are made.

I should say, my post only discussed prioritization and limiting WIPs but kanban has more improvement areas than that in Anderson's book, Kanban.

For now, these all look like places to start.  I have some doubts about being able to stick to them, but I will name them.

• reduce the amount and the depth of fibre arts correspondence I initiate
• reduce the time I spend searching for språng items in museum collections
• maintain blog posting but cap the time spent preparing posts
• set a minimum and maximum number of pages to read per day in whatever textile book I have going
• spin yarn on a more regular and consistent basis, yarn intended to go into a finished item for me
• look at the two WIPs that are at a standstill and get them going again somehow instead of starting new ones
• either delay working on the fixed date WIP, since the deadline is far in the future, or work on it soon to get it off the kanban board, making sure it results in a wearable handspun item for me
• look for opportunities to fix dates for tasks that relate to my goal of handspun clothes
• stop fixing dates for tasks that fail to result in handspun clothes, with the exception of a weaving class project

*a good thing to remember today on the Fourth of July.  The thirteen colonies in British North America that had a revolution went for textile independence among other things.  So did colonial India under British rule.

Cost of Delay and Class of Service

I posted last month that I'd set up a kanban board for my fibre arts projects in anticipation of getting clarity on what I do and how, so that I could improve my efficacy.  Efficacy, producing the right thing at the right time, is something a person can't get enough of.  It's right up there with being healthy, wealthy, and wise.  I set up my board the way I'd been shown and was happy, putting my task cards in columns for backlog, to-do, doing, and done.

Then I read David J. Anderson's Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business.  Turns out kanban is more sophisticated and more capable of making workflow visible than I thought.

I was particularly struck by his use of cost of delay and classes of service to prioritize tasks.  Certainly we all know the four classes of service.  We are taught them as children and we are told to mind the cost of delay.  There are some tasks we must do on time, some we do roughly in a first-in-first-out manner but not on a deadline, some we do whenever we like, and some we expedite when the cost of delay is exceptionally high.

For me and my tasks–I make yarn, make things out of yarn, learn new yarn skills, and pass on what I learn–whatever the cost of delay, it will be arbitrary.  No one in my household will go cold if I fail to knit mittens before winter sets in.  No one will set herself down on my stoop and wail because she can't learn the obscure art of språng until I help.

I'd been posting for ages here that my goal is to make handspun clothing for me.  I'd been wanting to wear clothes made with my own handspun, preferably un-dyed and local, for a number of compelling reasons.  And I hadn't made any.  I'd hardly spun any yarn to the purpose.  I had to figure out why.

Across the three columns of to-do, doing, and done on my kanban board, I put four rows for the classes of service which Anderson names expedite, fixed date, standard, and intangibles.  Then I put my task cards in their places.

Of my works in progress (WIPs), I had one expedite, one fixed date with two pending, no standard, and six intangibles.  Two of the intangibles had red Xs on the cards to show the tasks were blocked by difficulties I hadn't resolved yet.  They'd been blocked for a long time.  The fixed date card had recently become unblocked, and hadn't been around that long.  The higher the row, the faster WIPs were progressing toward completion.

Also, the higher the row the more the WIP involved a third party and thus an extra cost of delay, loss of face.

I didn't see my goal of handspun clothes reflected in the expedited or fixed date tasks.  The standard class was empty.  I had an unrecorded expedited WIP, "search museum collections' databases for språng items."  That search might move me closer to my goal if I find an item I'd like to imitate or interpret, but the search has more to do with intellectual curiosity.

I had an unrecorded fixed date WIP: post daily one blog entry about fibre arts, with the exception of Sundays and days when I travel or fall ill and my capacity contracts.  It contributes a little to my goal because my blog is where I record my progress and think through what I do and learn.  But as they say, fine words butter no parsnips and time writing on the blog is time not spent spinning yarn.  I had an unrecorded standard WIP, correspondence about fibre arts.  It's a chance of coming across information that will aid me as I spin yarn and make clothes but it's more about my goal to pass on what I learn.

I looked in the intangibles class, trying to find a practical WIP like "spin wool for pullover."  However, even there I found all but one of the WIPs were tasks way off in the rhubarb like "read textile history book" or "knit small object with yarn I didn't spin and won't use myself but give to someone who can get along with store-bought."

There was one intangibles class WIP that related to my goal.  It had recently been a fixed date class WIP: I was going to make something in time to wear it to an event.  The event passed, so the cost of delay dropped to almost nothing.

Some productive friends were kind enough recently to talk to me about their fibre arts projects; I realized most projects were fixed date class while the rest were treated as standard class, given sustained attention.  Moreover, their projects were congruent with their goals.

As a side note, the Tour de Fleece on right now is an example of a fixed date commitment that handspinners make.  For Tour de Fleece, you spin yarn daily while the Tour de France race is on.  Miss a day too many times and the delay costs you something to show, making you ineligible for the prize drawings.

Many fibre artists arrange their year around fixed dates for project completion.  Examples include an agricultural fair needlework competition, guild challenge or competition, gift-giving holiday, conference, fibre festival, commission work, gallery show and sale, charity collection of knitted goods, knit-along or spin-along, and month-long or year-long cold sheep resolutions.  In a knit-along, people knit projects from the same pattern in a given period of time.  Cold sheep is like cold turkey except you avoid the yarn shop instead of the tobacconist's shop.

Intangibles class tasks have no deadline.  In the backlog I had more intangibles-class tasks than any other class by far.  Some related to my goal.  My capacity was allocated to expedite, fixed date, and standard class WIPs with no room for intangibles, so the good tasks weren't moving from backlog to priority queue.  All of those faster-moving WIPs, they bypassed the backlog.  I need to tell them what we used to say in school, no budging.

I've been saying that deadlines are good.  And research is good and so are projects done in the public eye.  But they're counterproductive if they move you toward a lower-priority goal.

Språng by Correspondence

I have been corresponding about språng with a number of people.  Sometimes it's a brief exchange and sometimes a sustained effort.  Last week I got to answer a puzzler about historical språng items partly by using a quote from Shakespeare's King Lear.

To pass skills and information back and forth, ideally people stand shoulder to shoulder and model things and talk about things in real time.  That is not always possible so I'm using a few different methods to deliver my content.  Am using email, online discussion boards, my YouTube how-to videos, and my Pinterest pins.  And now, I present, sprang by mail.

Specifically, I made a warp and sent it to someone by post.  In a small way, it's similar to chess by mail which I read about once in a novel, except I am supplying physical parts not just a charted or written move and I don't expect the warp to come back.  To change the game metaphor, it's like an assist in hockey.  The recipient has a goal, and I'm setting up the conditions for meeting the goal.

This is targeted at the skill of interlinking only.  There are a lot of skills to learn with sprang and it's the recipient's goal to eventually be able to do all the steps in sequence independently, to plan a project, select suitable yarn, calculate the warp specifications, warp a frame, interlink threads, and so on.

I put yarn on a frame in two colours.  I chose a flat sprang warp setup because I thought its best chance of arriving intact would come from having the yarn loop tightly around the sticks, and that means flat warp not circular.  I changed the arrangement of the colours from AABB to ABAB, so it will be clear to the recipient which threads go in the back and which in the front.  Then I tied up each cross with green yarn and tied the warp with blue yarn.  Here it is, ready to go in a padded envelope.

It cost less than two dollars to make and two dollars to mail, and it arrived quickly.

I Sing the Song of My People

Happy Canada Day!

Another Old Believer Belt Tool Sighting

I spotted a photo of another weaver-tensioned cloth beam used by a weaver in an Old Believer community in Oregon to weave belts with tablets.  It looks cut and carved from a single piece of wood, and more irregular in shape than the ones I had made after the original I saw in the film Old Believers but otherwise very much the same.

Good-bye, Google Reader

Google is about to shut down Google Reader.  Thanks if you read my posts in your feed.

Have a new RSS reader and want to subscribe to this blog?  You can with the URL feed://thesojourningspinner.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Why Beauty is Truth

I read Ian Stewart's Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry.

Triangular numbers (p. 21) look like they should be applicable to patterns of holes in sprang, which often run in triangular shapes.  That is, I think you could use them to predict how many holes you'd have per row after braiding so many rows on the loom and increasing the width of the triangle of holes as you go.  The series begins 0, 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28.  You should be able to calculate outlines as well, not just solid triangles.

Galois' symmetries (p. 118-123) look like they should be applicable to tablet weaving, because they have to do with rotation.  The illustrations look much like those for triangular tablets.  I think you could use the symmetries and a series of transformations (turning the tablets) to plot out the final position of a tablet and thus which coloured strand rises to the surface of the woven strap.

Strømpelegg!

Strømpelegg!  Part or all of this word translates from Norwegian as stocking leg, that is the leg portion of a stocking.  I'd been hoping to find online images of the Viking-age språng stocking found at Tegle and now I have, through the Norsk Folkmuseum using the search word Teglefunnet.  There's even a schematic diagram of the S and Z twist språng triangles.

ETA: I originally had strømpelgg from the catalogue description but I think that was a typo.

Språng Sashes and the American Civil War

I chanced on evidence that points to språng sashes in American Civil War uniforms, mostly in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.  It's not conclusive, not without seeing the pieces, but in the pictures they look very like.

Most are red, with a few in buff for the rank of general and in green for medical officers.  Most are silk; the wool sashes are for lower ranks and are in relatively poor condition, possibly from moth damage.

I feel rather pleased with myself, and fairly cross-eyed from sifting through online records.

Curation on Pinterest

You can now find me on Pinterest, curating images of språng.  You can see it without an account of your own.

In previous posts here on the blog, I've put links for språng images.  It's not the greatest venue, it requires a person to click through to see something they aren't sure they will like.  Pinterest's boards are a more efficient way to show many images of extant pieces or looms, to help people see at a glance what used to be made with the språng technique.  It's like finding images all over the web and pinning them to a bulletin board.  Copyright is maintained, which I like.

I thought I was out in front blazing the way by pinning språng images and then I discovered someone else's collection of pins.  It has much of what I have on the topic, plus more.

I just gave the facts in the captions, no breakdown or commentary on the structure and construction of the pieces.  I could add such comments since I do understand the structure and construction, but I'm doubt that would benefit those who see the pins.  One of my favourite books is Suzanne Martel's The City Underground, where the residents never map the nearby caves in order to give everyone a chance to experience the twists and turns for themselves.  Also, språng terms are not standardized and many of the pieces are sophisticated, so commentary might seem like abstruse code.  Moreover, there's no way to draw attention to a part of the picture to describe it.  Finally, it looks better when the words are at a minimum on Pinterest due to its intensely visual format.

I can look at an image of a språng piece in a museum and know the structure (or at least as much about it as I care to--complete understanding would mean reconstructing it) so I don't need to put the facts down as an aid to my own memory.

I may change my mind.  I want to see people make good språng objects and right now many people either don't know the braiding technique exists or they don't know the methods.  Many people like it when you break down components, draw connections to corresponding techniques, and lay out the steps.

Wild Color

Happy longest day of the year!  I am at the 37th parallel; I wasn't able to manage a trip home to the 49th parallel where the longest day really is long, but I like to mark the occasion.

I finished reading Jenny Dean's Wild Color: The Complete Guide to Making and Using Natural Dyes.  Back at Christmas, around the shortest day of the year, I read three quarters of the way through a borrowed copy and then had return it.  So now I've finished up.

I hope to use Dean's instructions for madder and for woad sometime.

The book has good photographs of dye plants.  I should spend some time memorizing the names and corresponding leaves for hawthorn, blackthorn, buckthorn, sumac, dock, elderberry, rowan, and tansy.  Not that I want to dye with them.  I just never know when I'll be out for a walk with family members who are given to starting brisk games of "name that plant."  I can never remember if it's tansy or yarrow.

The book was originally published in the United Kingdom.*  With all the plants the author discusses, many are familiar to me because I'm from Vancouver Island, Canada, a place with a similar climate and a landscape shaped by English and Scottish settlers in the 19th and 20th centuries.


*I had to buy a version revised for the U.S. market so its title is missing the 'u' in colour.

"The Cost of Cheap" news report

"The Cost of Cheap," the National, CBC News, June 17, 2013, www.cbc.ca/player/News/TV+Shows/The+National/ID/2392112307/

"Susan Ormiston returns to the site of a collapsed garment factory in Bangladesh that killed over 1,100 people, to find out who really deserves the blame."  Video runs a little over 15 minutes.

Diversion

I am done spinning my two ounces of Sweetgrass Targhee, finally.  Progress didn't just seem glacial, it was: it measured a month from start to finish with many days where the spindle sat untouched.  Some of that was understandable and some was sloth, for which I blame the expedient handknit dish cloths.

Now to ply and then make another two ounces of yarn after that.  That will finish off my supply of this wool.

I'd expected that this along with the existing four ounces of Targhee handspun would be enough to make a monochrome språng scarf.  It would have been too, except I diverted half the yarn on hand to another purpose.  A friend went to a dye workshop and kindly took my skein along for three dips in the indigo vat.

Isn't indigo attractive and restful looking?  I got to see some of the workshop results with woad on another skein and I think woad looks even better, but indigo is good.

The dye vat's warm water caused the yarn to expand in diameter because the crimp of the wool revived, much the way naturally curly hair gets curlier after washing.  If I eke this out with yet more Targhee handspun for a project, I will wash that yarn so it will be in the same state.

Thinking about Efficacy

I'm thinking about efficacy, choosing the right project for the right time.

Mind, I'm thinking about it.  Application hopefully will follow.

Usually there is a cost to not doing a project.  Therefore, you know the project is the right thing to do at a certain time when it will save you money or net you profit.  However, the warmth and budget of me and mine do not depend on knitting and other craft projects.

Vintage Burnt Orange

Wool is sometimes the wrong fibre choice because moths and carpet beetles like it too much.  I like to manage risk, not court ruin.  So, there's linen.  It would be ideal to spin by hand all the yarn I use, but I don't spin linen yarn yet.

A long-time weaver was selling her extras.  I got these two cones of vintage burnt orange on the off-chance that the yarn might suit a future project, a språng wall-hanging that someone in my family has requested I make.

Rosepath Twill Placemats, After Washing

You may be able to see in the top photo that I wove the last part of the second rosepath twill placemat correctly.  I concentrated on the treadle sequence, I checked my work frequently, I knew what errors to look for, and I didn't weave while tired.

In the bottom photo, you can see the Ms and Ws section, where the diamond is stretched with a line inside.  When I went through the process I had what, when I was a kid, we called a conniption but the product is attractive.

Rosepath Twill Placemats, Before Washing

My rosepath twill sampler placemats, before washing:

Little Blue Cotton Språng Bag

I made a little blue cotton språng bag for a gift.

This is the finished object I posted about that does not relate to my goals for fibre arts at all and therefore must serve as a fearsome reminder to me to choose projects that are more in alignment.  It's attractive and all but the bag is not for me, it's not wearable, and it doesn't reduce my stash of fibre or yarn supplies.

"Yes, We Kanban"

I've transferred my list of current and future fibre arts projects to a kanban board.

It was satisfying to move a task from the "in progress" column to the "done" column last evening.

I grouped projects together in categories and assigned their stages to colours.  This makes it easy to make sense of the situation at a glance.

I'm using an electronic system which automatically records the date I put a task on the board.  That means I can tell how much time passes between inception and completion.  Until now, that information has either been unrecorded or too much trouble to look up.  I think it could be good to know.

The board has allowed me to separate the overall goals from the tasks.  One goal is to "reduce inventory," to use up the wool I have on hand.  By keeping the goals in front of me, I have a better chance of picking relevant tasks to work on.  The one I just finished was pretty irrelevant to my goals.

Rearranging a to-do list isn't going to get things done, but it can give me more clarity.  Impetus often follows clarity.

Fibre Prep, Spinning, and Nalbinding Videos from Russia

I came across some videos from Russia about nalbinding.  Both sources refer to it as knitting with one needle.

"Вязание одной иглой," [trans. knitting with one needle] http://kizhi.karelia.ru/culture/crafts/vyazanie-odnoj-igloj.

"Marina Korshakova (Center for Traditional Crafts, Petrozavodsk) shows knitting on one needle technique," www.kareliancraft.com/en/crafts/4026/.

Both state that hunters and woodsmen would make their own mittens.  I got that in the printed description on the first webpage using an online translator and in the narration in the second webpage's video.  Also, both state that horsehair was incorporated for durability.  I've heard elsewhere that horsehair and sheep's kemp (guard hairs) were used in mittens like this because they did not soak up water like wool did.

On the Karelian Craft webpage, there is another video about combing wool and spinning with a spindle.  The presenter calls spinning clockwise (Z twist) as "along with the sun," and spinning counterclockwise (S twist) as "against it."

At the 7:30 mark, Korshakova refers to a rustic L-shaped style of distaff this way, "Of course you have seen old women in villages spinning.  This distaff," and she motions with her left hand from shoulder height downward to the hip and then in toward her body indicating the position, size, and shape of the distaff, "was made from a whole tree trunk from a root, to put it on a bench, sit on it, make it comfortable."

I wonder if they used this part of the tree because it was durable.  I like to know how things were done and why things were done.

I've heard about this sort of rustic design in one other source: The University of Innsbruck's article about spindle typology in the entry for Russia, www.uibk.ac.at/urgeschichte/projekte_forschung/abt/spindeltypologie/russia.html.  To quote, "A traditional Russian distaff is L-shaped and consists of two elements: the lopastka or blade, a vertical panel with wide flat top to which the bundle of flax or wool, called kudel is fixed, and the dontse, or base, a horizontal oar-shaped board on which the spinner sits and stabilizes the structure with the weight of her body. Sometimes the distaff is carved from a single piece of wood - a tree stump with a root protruding at a right angle.  In some areas of Russia the upper part of the blade has the shape of a comb, and the kudel was mounted on the teeth."  There are photographs and a detail from a piece of 19th century art, though not of the whole tree trunk style of disaff from what I can see.

Similarly, a Doukhobor spinning board forms a L-shape with its detachable interchangable pieces such as a forked distaff, post for paddle combs, and flax combs.  This setup is of Russian origin as well.  It's difficult to see in this photo taken at the Doukhobor Discovery Centre in Castlegar, B.C., but the flax comb held by the mannequin is toothed.

Made Errors in Treadling I Must Live With

When I help people start to spin yarn on a spindle, I advise them to keep their forward momentum.  They always want to stop to fiddle with mistakes trying to fix them.  I understand, the yarn gives you instant feedback in the form of lumps that demand to be addressed.  I think it's more important to get used to the motion, gaining control and skill through practice.

I should probably follow this advice with the placemat I'm weaving.  I finished the first placemat and am half-way into the second.  The first placemat contains many different treadling patterns, in two-inch sections.  Also, the warp and weft are almost the same colour.  Weft mistakes are difficult to see and I haven't gone looking.  

For the second placemat, the one in progress, I picked one treadling pattern and stuck with it.  As I wove I saw an occasional pick of weft that didn't pack down as tightly as the rest and I thought it peculiar.  When I stopped weaving, I discovered that those spots each had a pick of weft missing in the pattern which means my foot pressed the wrong treadle thereby raising a heddle with the wrong threads.  The twill diamonds look squashed.

I could unweave it and reweave applying more concentration and frequent quality control checks.  There are threading errors going vertically, though, so taking out the picks of weft would only partially improve the placemat.

In the first placemat, I had to treadle a section of Ms and Ws.  For the M you start treadling from the left and head right depressing each of the four treadles by turns.  Then you reverse partially, and reverse again, then go back all the way to the left.  It's similar to the directions a pen takes when writing the letter M, but done with treadles 1 2 3 4 3 2 3 4 3 2 1.  The W follows, 4 3 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 4.  I got quite lost, repeatedly.  I took it with ill grace, too.  I suppose ease might come with practice, like learning to drive a manual transmission car.  I chose an different pattern for the second placemat, one that was easier and to my eye looked better.  I suppose I relaxed my guard.  

Oh, for a nice quiet bit of plain weave.

The thing to do, I'm told, is to weave twill in two different colours both for looks and for the way mistakes show up more clearly than they do in monochrome.

Carol James on the Question, Why Do Språng

http://youtu.be/HTmePKnVhxw

Not only did I get to attend Carol James' presentation on språng recently, I got to talk to her one-on-one.  Here she is answering my question, why do språng.

Carol has spent a lot of time doing språng, trying variations, looking at historical pieces, talking to experts, and teaching students.  Her answers, her reasons why språng is worth time and effort, are even more full and apt than I thought when I was recording and paying half a mind to the camera.

I hope you will watch the video but if you prefer to read the list of benefits in brief they are, if I may paraphrase: språng's enduring nature, elasticity, variety of possible patterns, variety in possible garment shaping (shawls, mittens, hats, socks), beauty, suitability for clothing, adaptability, and efficiency where you get two rows for every one you make.

Carol's book, Sprang Unsprung, is one of the few how-to books for språng that are in print, in English, readily obtainable, and affordable.  The book contains patterns, with directions for what yarn to use, and how long and wide to make the warp to get hats and things.  She has an article on språng in the Summer 2013 issue of Spin•Off magazine.

She refers in the video to the Braddock sash and the Tonto shirt.

Carol James' Replica Braddock Sash

I had the pleasure of meeting Carol James, språng artist, teacher, and author of Sprang Unsprung.  She gave a public talk and displayed many of her finished objects.

If you read the paper she presented to the Textile Society of America in September, 2012, "Re-creating Military Sashes: Reviving the Sprang Technique," http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1697&context=tsaconf, you will get some of the same content as the presentation I attended.  There is some information in the paper about how the yarn was traditionally spun, on spindles and not plied.

I got to see her replica of the Braddock sash.*  The full-scale replica is enormous and done in very fine silk.  Laid out, it took up the top of an entire banquet-style folding table.

I liked sitting at an angle opposite the window and seeing the way the light struck the surface of the sash because I could really see the difference between the cloth on one side of the meeting line compared to the other.  Even though the yarn was all dyed evenly in madder and over-dyed with cochineal, the difference in cloth structure caused one part to look darker than the other.  The sash was worked in one piece in a circular warp, so all of the interlinking on one side of the meeting line, that is, one half of the sash, had small twists of threads all over its surface twisted in the Z (clockwise) direction and the other was twisted in mirror image.  That's why the light struck them differently.

There were patterns of holes, including some in the shapes of identical men standing in a row and some in the shapes of small triangles.

You can read about the original sash here on the Mount Vernon site.  The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association now has Carol James' replica sash in their collection as well.

There was a fair amount of collaboration that went into the project.  She had friends (and I think I remember family as well) assist her with warping and they must have borne her a lot of good will, as she said it took five hours to complete that step.  She advocates seeking grant funding for fibre arts work.  It was interesting to hear her speak of the Association's position on copyright, the limited license they gave her, and the conditions under which she got access to the sash and by extension the information about thread size, pattern design and placement, dimensions, dye shade, and so on.  We were asked not to take photographs of the sash because the Association has copyright.  To hold something like that in a collection is certainly valuable, and so is access.



*The original sash had the distinction of being owned by George Washington, the first president of the United States.  I gather that one of the reasons people regarded Washington highly was his military leadership as commander of the Continental Army during the American revolution.  Before that, he was a member of the British forces in the French and Indian War, where General Braddock gave him the military sash and the command that went with it.

"We Need to Learn How to Make Things Again"

I listened to a radio interview, "Dov Charney shames the fashion industry," Q on CBC radio, June 3, 2013.  "The controversial CEO of American Apparel calls out other clothing companies for paying what he calls 'slave wages.'"  Audio runs 20 minutes.

Here's a quote on local production: "The infrastructure's not always there.  I'm very lucky that Los Angeles still has some infrastructure.  I own two dye houses which I purchased, I have my own knitting facilities.  I am one of the largest producers of textiles in the United States, I am the largest garment producer in North America, and I have the resources to do it.  But others will.  I was at a flea market here in Montreal on the weekend, and there was at least thirty stalls somewhere in the mile end where people were producing things and selling things themselves.  There's a movement to make things yourselves, to own their production, to know the face of your worker, to know how things are made.  And it's more efficient."

Recent Activities

I have been doing yarn-related things, most of them not worth a blog post in themselves.

I have watched more film adaptations of Shakespeare than is even usual for me: the old yet timeless Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet, a recent Stratford Festival production of The Tempest played for broad laughs with Christopher Plummer in a clever robe with electronics sewn in to simulate static sparks, an austerely staged King Lear with Ian Holm, a brutal modern British adaptation of Othello, and a live production of The Winter's Tale where the thief Autolycus stole the show as well as the wallets.

It's been quite enjoyable, and I will shush that part of me that regrets not spinning yarn while I watched.  I may have said before, Shakespeare is compatible with handspinning because understanding depends more on listening than watching.  I can watch my drafting and not the screen.

I've seen Coriolanus, Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, the BBC Titus Andronicus, King John, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus again but with big actors and modern military uniforms, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, another Macbeth, more than one version of Twelfth Night, Two Men of Verona, and the BBC Much Ado about Nothing.  The more I watch, the more I see themes and patterns in the work.  I would post about that, but we're here for yarn and cloth so I will restrict myself to talking about Desemona's handkerchief and the like.

With that list, you can begin to see why I've put the task off into the future and so compounded the work as the titles have piled up.  It's best to do things as they arise, certainly.

The larger, heavier fibre arts books on my reading list are languishing behind the smaller ones, with bookmarks fifteen percent of the way in and not budging.

I had a conversation with some weaver friends about how we put off the larger projects that take more planning and involve more steps.  Weaving gets edged out by knitting and dyeing projects, and simple small knitting projects edge out complicated ones.

Sometimes large complicated plans just fall off the to-do list.  I had a good look at the yarn that contributed to the tablet woven strap I started at a demo.  I asked myself whether I like the colours and the fibre content enough to warp more for the body of a small purse.  Or rather, the question was whether I was willing to overlook my dislike of earth-tone cotton and go to extra trouble for the sake of making a slightly more interesting finished product.  I found the answer was no.  Soon the cones of donated yarn will go back from whence they came and the floor of the wool room will get a smidgen more tidy.

I finally sewed hems on my handwoven linen bath towel and hand towel in Ms and Os.

I learned to hemstitch on the loom and loved doing it, better than sewing hems.

I read Anni Albers' On Weaving (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), and learned more about art and what it means for a textile to be weaverly.  Here is a small but representative quote: "our stamp is or should be immediate or implicit lucidity, a considered position, a reduction to the comprehensible by reason or intuition in whatever we touch." (p. 72)  There was one plate of a Coptic textile in the book that I am sure is språng.

I knit in public at an outdoor market, where a man came up to say his mother used to knit and he hadn't seen anyone knit in a long time.  He said she could knit and carry on a conversation without looking at her knitting.  I like that about knitting in public, people talk to you where they never would ordinarily and they tell you stories of family.

I got to see a old darning egg scarred by darning needles.  It was originally used, so the story went, by the mother of someone's grandmother or great-aunt.

A member of my extended family will have a child this year, so I have a reason to make small knitted things if I wish.

I listened to an online archived radio interview of the author of Overdressed about the consequences of fast fashion, including the recent collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh (called the "world's worst garment industry disaster" by the CBC), and ways people can effect change.

I have been keeping a reference list of interesting third-party events for the handspinning guild I belong to, and I recently switched from a text-based list to an electronic calendar.  It has some advantages.  Anyone can copy an event easily into his or her own calendar account and with a few clicks arrange to have an email arrive in their mailbox to remind them a day ahead or a week ahead.

It was a bit of a thrill to get the embedding code, and put it on the guild website and have the calendar go live.  I was also able to integrate calendar entries from two neighbouring guilds who also use the same electronic calendar system and were kind enough to share.

The new calendar suffers from the same problem as the old: guild members have to remember to go and check the website or check their subscription in their own electronic calendar.  There's no help for that, as far as I can see, except perhaps occasionally posting a digest of the latest additions on the electronic discussion board.  The calendar's there if people want it.  When I was a newcomer to the guild and to handspinning, I had to gather this valuable information gradually through conversation, learning what annual conferences there were, and what festivals were on, and what craft schools offered classes.  Now you can see at a glance.  Might take away the fun of discovery, but it accelerates access to opportunities and I like that.

I have woven half of my first placemat ever and it's waiting in the class studio for me to get back to it.  Or I'm waiting to get back to it, take your pick.  There are two places where my threading error is plainly obvious.  The other two errors recede from notice.  I regret not fixing the threading.

I did have the wit not to make the same error with the treadling.  The pattern is twill variations, and the spacial relationships in the treadling patterns looks a lot like those of the threading.  I overlapped the places that would have given me two picks in one shed if I'd depressed the treadles in sequence as written when I transitioned from one variation to another.

I cannot say that I care for many of the twill variations that are appearing in the cloth.  As expected the only one I like is the bird's eye.  I am particular in my taste and consistent.  If I was going to thread the warp again, I would thread it for only bird's eye.  It's one of those situations where you can plan and guess how you'll receive a finished object but it's only when you see the item in the concrete that you know for certain what you think of it.

I found my missing, well-loved linen jacket.  It was hanging in the clothes closet which is deep with two rods, one in front of the other.  I need more linen clothes and linen bed clothes.  I have had to be out in the sun and heat more days than I have changes of long-sleeved linen shirts and slacks.

My språng bog hood that went to a medieval re-enactment event for display was well received, if the accompanying kind tokens of approval and comments are anything to go by.  When I talked to someone who'd been to the event and who had stood near the display, I realized that in my documentation I'd neglected to include the basic information about how språng works.  I feel fortunate she was there to tell people who asked.

tokens of approval left with my språng hood

Shuttle-craft Book of American Hand-weaving

Finally, I have gotten around to reading through to the end of Mary Meigs Atwater's The Shuttle-craft Book of American Hand-weaving.

There is a lot in this classic little book.  Some of the details of the techniques are beyond me, and I expect to re-read this book at a later date.

Some techniques I don't expect to ever pursue because I dislike the products and suspect that the processes would irritate me as well, but it's good to have a passing familiarity with them.  Specifically, I do not share the author's enthusiasm for coverlets.  "A beginner's first weaving should, I think, be in four-harness overshot.  The thing is surprisingly simple and effective, and a first piece will be an exciting adventure, like seeing a little flower garden spring into blossom under one's fingers." (p. 125)  I do bow to her experience and am prepared to believe that she finds much of interest there.

The author throws out strong opinions and advice.  I appreciate that she backs these up with reasons, so that I can see what criteria she used to reach her conclusions.

As a beginning weaver I can say that it's good to read a book from someone intent on conveying a specific tradition.  She draws on her study of the craft, her experience, and her association with other weavers, and lays out what was done historically and what is worth pursuing.

The book is also helpful to me because it associates different yarns with the types of weaving most suitable for them.  This information is absent from the book of patterns I have.