Fine Craft

We have been in Lisbon almost a week….a wonderful week!  We are staying in a lovely studio apartment in the Alfama, the oldest part of Lisbon.  It was originally settled by people from northern Africa, so there is lots of Arabic influence.  A good number of the streets are too small for cars so it is quiet with lots of foot traffic.  Our apartment is in a small cluster of low masonry buildings that are perched up on a high terrace, with views of the Panteo Nacional.  It dominates our sky and is stunning at night when it is lit.

Our taxi from the airport dropped us off at one of end the nearest larger street (meaning one small car could navigate, and clearly he wasn’t will to do it).  We walked a ways up this street (up being the operative word here!)….and then we began walking steeply up a trail of narrow cobbles and steep steps to our terrace.  But what a reward at the end!

Each morning we have been walking down from our high perch to have coffee and pastry at Alfacinho coffee shop which has good internet.  The coffee everywhere here is delightful.  I don’t know why we cannot get better coffee in the US!  And the traditional sweet pastry is delicious!

There is so much to do here that it feels somewhat stressful making sure we see all the “important” sites.  So we have tried our best!  The well known tile museum, and of course the Gulbenkian, and both were as impressive as we could hope!  But the best part of being here is walking the tiny medieval streets, listening to Portuguese, looking at the views!

 

 

On the first day we chose sites that were within walking distance, and we walked a total of 8.5 miles.  I slept really deeply that night!  The next day we tackled learning the metro system and headed for the central part of the city, where we found a bank and the long walk uphill through the park to the Gulbenkian Museum.  Aside from most places NOT taking our Visa card, everything is going really smoothly.  We are a long metro from a bank, and of course there are limits on what you can withdraw each day…..so living on cash is going to be a bit dicey!  And who knows if there will even be banks in the smaller towns.

We went to the Castelo San Jorge, which (naturally!) is on a high bit of land where it could be well defended.  It was originally a fortress built by the visigoths, and then later acquired its current name.  Portuguese certainly know how to relax…. there are cafes everywhere, and in fact, at the castle there was even a wine cart, where we bought two glasses of wine and and sat on the parapets enjoying the immense 360 degree views of all Lisbon.  The city has sprawled out over a number of hills that rise up from the Atlantic and the Tagus river.  Walking anywhere involves much steep ups and downs…..feels like mostly up no matter which direction we head!  How can everything be uphill in both directions??

 

There were falcons and owls inside the castle, and a group of trainers who worked with the birds.  You could even pay to have your photo taken with one of the birds.  At one point a trainer let one of the owls fly about.  The owl was quite reluctant to come back, and after quite a long time the owl was still flying about the courtyard.

Last night was our first weekend in Portugal, and Alfama was a great place to spend it.  It is well known for many tiny taverna style restaurants with live traditional Fado music.  Fado is a type of folk song, always sad, always accompanied by guitar.  The place we chose last night had three guitarists; one playing 12-string, one on 6-string, and one playing mandolin.  The singers rotated between three men and two women.  They were all very entertaining!  At one point the two women sang a duet together.  I could not understand more than a random word here and there, but I definitely got the impression that the two women sang about loving the same man.  One of the men had a beautiful tenor voice.  It was a great way to spend the evening.

We are still sleeping later than usual each morning….perhaps we begin to show our age? Tomorrow we will figure out our way to Sintra and for the rest of our stay we will mostly be in smaller towns.  We hope to settle in somewhere quiet where we can make day trips to other locations, but stay settled in a quieter location than bustling Lisbon.

This fall I’ve participated in three workshops, more than I’ve ever done in such a short time!  Last week I spent three terrific days with members of my local guild, learning crimped cloth with Dianne Totten!

Weaving crimped cloth uses the techniques of woven shibori, but instead of dyeing the cloth (or in addition to dyeing the cloth!), you tighten the pull threads and steam the woven cloth.  Whether these pull threads are in the warp or the weft determines the direction that must also contain some thermoplastic fibers.  In this class we used orlon or polyester sewing thread.

Here is Dianne wearing one of her beautiful vests.  This is an advancing twill on 16 shafts, woven in a straight draw.

Since I haven’t been home long enough to actually warp a loom, I decided to be a virtual weaver by bringing my computer with Fiberworks software.  I’m so glad I participated this way!  I got to photograph Dianne’s samples, try on the clothing which mysteriously seems to fit everyone , take copious notes, and watch what the others were weaving.  I did a few drawdowns and have made a plan for my own crimped cloth warp.  I hope to get going on it the moment I return in mid-November!

This is one of Dianne’s finished pieces called “Garden Party.”  The fabric looks like Fortuny himself pleated it!….and the warp is a luscious blend of three different tencel colorways of Just Our Yarn’s “Almaza.”  I have my own stash of “Almaza” which has been ‘aging’ (as veteran stash collector and weaver, Kathi called it!).

Here is a detail of the sleeve that shows the weave structure used for the pull threads that created the pleats.

I’m very intrigued with inserting zippers into the front opening!

Several women in my area guild had taken this workshop with Dianne last spring when it was offered to the statewide guild.  They arrived at this class with finished cloth and spent days 2 and 3 begining to fit and sew their garments.  This added such excitement to atmosphere in class!

Dianne is an excellent teacher!  She is ingenious, creative, and completely open to sharing.  She spends plenty of time answering questions and listening to ideas from the students.  She’s not afraid to admit what she doesn’t know, and she’s not afraid to problem solve on fitting questions.  I think the best part of the class was fitting and constructing the garments for the women who had already woven their yardage.  There was so much to consider during that stage, and Dianne gave us all plenty of food for thought!

Tomorrow Bob and I are off to Portugal….for a month!  Lots of wonderful textile adventures to have while there.  I’ll be going to the tapestry workshop in Portalegre, as well as looking at handmade bobbin lace and embroidery in all the towns we visit.

And speaking of bobbin lace, I was very surprised to get a red ribbon (2nd place) for my little lace edging on my linen top at the Big E!  Wonders never cease sometimes.

And my wonderful lace mentor, Mary, has really helped me make progress on the never ending handkerchief edging.  I really intend to have this finished before the end of the year.

Time to get packed!  Hopefully I can post some wonderful textiles from Portugal!

Let me recount the amazing experiences of the past 3 weeks before they disappear into distant memory!

In the past 3 weeks I have had the good fortune to spend a week….YES! a WEEK….studying with Joan Baxter, who came all the way from Scotland to share her knowledge and her wonderful sensitivity in tapestry design with a handful of very lucky students across the US.  I was part of her first workshop in Rockport, Massachusetts.  Then she headed off for a week of teaching in each of three additional locations:  Santa Fe, San Francisco area, and the Atlanta area.  Lucky weavers all!

On the first day we spent the afternoon getting inspirational shots of Cape Ann to develop a design for a tapestry with images of the sea and/or the coastline.  This is the quarry at Halibut Point State Park.  You can see the Atlantic in the distance.

I took a lot of wonderful images that day….including some shots of the women in my class.  We are all members of TWiNE (Tapestry Weavers in New England).  I had not met any of them before so it was also a good experience getting to know women I’ve only seen as names on email lists.

Someday maybe these images will inspire something, but my tapestry design was already chosen before I got to class.  For me, this class would be about honing what I wanted to say with an image I already had in mind.

Joan certainly knows how to design works with multiple layers of images that create an entire story in one tapestry.  You can see her work here.  These are some of the samples she wove to blend colors for ideas for her designs.

She generously brought lots of yarn for us to try,  7/2 wool that she had dyed herself and every color of 18/2 wool that Weavers’ Bazaar carries.  It was a terrific way to get familiar with their yarns.

I started a little sample of a Portuguese Man of War.  I’ll explain why I’m intrigued with this in a future post, when I have more to report.

Less than a week after Joan’s class, I headed up the Hudson almost to Albany for the last regular meeting of the Wednesday Group.  It was a bittersweet gathering of the entire group.  Some people really had to jump hurdles to get there, but we all managed it.  Archie made a very touching farewell to all of us, but I don’t think most of the group realized what he was doing.

He brought in one of his recently completed tapestries, one that we’d all seen in progress some months ago.  Typical of Archie, this tapestry is an experiment in meaning….woven in code.  He was testing the human ability to read many different fonts and handwriting styles. He wondered if we could as easily translate letters into colors, so he wove a poem with a coded color scheme. I think he wondered how many of us could decipher the poem….or would even bother to try.  Naturally, this brought out the puzzle solver in me and in one of my good friends in the group.  In the long run, I had to take a photo of it after Archie had wrapped it up to take it home. Hence the very bad image! Just a few minutes after class, two of us decoded the poem almost simultaneously! Then three of us got busy checking to see if we were right…and we were!  And it was a sweet farewell message from Archie to all of us!

I would love to tell you what the poem is, but I know he wants you to see this tapestry in some venue down the road.  He wants you to have a go at figuring it out, so I’d better not spoil it!

Meanwhile, our little band of friends wanted to let him know how touched we were, so we decided to sing our own version of farewell to him at dinner that night.  I know it’s corny….when we arrived at our favorite sushi restaurant, four of us surrounded him and sang a little  farewell poem back to him.  It was clear that he knew we had broken the code, and he was very touched!  Our goodbyes could not have been any sweeter!  All things must pass, and I’m very thankful for these last wonderful days together.

The Wednesday Group also had a final project. Almost everyone has now delivered their chopstick weavings.  They are a terrific statement of each person’s weaving style!  For the most part we could all identify who wove each one!

This was Archie’s ingenious idea.  For several years now we have all stayed together after class on Wednesdays to order Chinese take-out to share.  The number of chopsticks used on these occasions was rapidly growing, and Archie wanted to find a creative way to recycle them.  He devised a little loom with 15 chopsticks for warps, and he challenged us to weave a face.  He made a loom for each member in the group, and some of us had so much fun that we made a few on our own in order to weave more chopstick portraits! This is my “Chopstick Triptych.”

One member did a series of six maneki nekos (or maneki neki?  Who knows Japanese?).  Are you wondering what they are?  Well, you can read the official report here on Wikipedia, or you can take my word for it.  If you go to any Japanese restaurants or sushi bars, you’ve seen them.  They are good luck charms, or talismans, in the form of little kitties, and they have one paw raised in a gesture of beckoning.  They are beckoning all sorts of good fortune for those who pass by.  How apropos that one of our group wove a set of them on chopsticks! (Now don’t you hope we display these treasures in public sometime?)….

On the morning after I returned home I had to get out early for my monthly lace meeting.  I’ll save writing about that…as well as describing my upcoming workshop with Diane Totten for another post.  It’s been crazy around here, and I have loved every minute of it!

Unbelievably wondrous knitting and weaving things have occurred since my last post.  Now that I’m sitting here at my computer I don’t know where to start!  I guess I’ll just take a deep breath and tackle things one at a time…maybe this will end up being more than one post.

So, why don’t I start with today.  It’s fashion week in New York, and that is a guaranteed siren call for me to read the NYTimes.  Today was my lucky, lucky day because there was even an article about knitting:  “Grandma Never Knit Like This” is an article about Josh Bennett, who has a line of knitwear for men. He has designed knitwear for Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Bastion, and he has a pattern book of his designs published by Rowan and using their yarns.  In his Rowan designs, he designed sweaters that evoked the flavor of various New York neighborhoods.  This one is Hell’s Kitchen.

The article referenced SamuraiKnitter’s online brouhaha with Josh, so of course I had to check that out.  But really, who cares about that, when there is a world of fun on this site! What cave have I been living in??  Ms Samurai Knitter is the perfect anitidote to dearly missed You Knit What?  I could barely tear myself away, and had a good half hour of gut busting laughter reading the author’s insightful reviews of various issues of “Vogue Knitting.”  There’s nothing like  laughter to start a day!

And speaking of publications (as I think blogs are firmly in that category), earlier this summer I got to catch up on all the periodicals I missed while we were off sailing.  In this year’s issue #1 of “Vav Magazinet,” which was entirely devoted to the color white, I read quite a moving article by Birgitta Nortstrom.  Ms. Nordstrom is Senior Lecturer in Textile Art at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she received a grant to design baby blankets, with an outside layer  that would be a visually pleasing weave structure and the inside layer would be fulled to create the softest fabric to touch a newborn’s skin.

This alone would be such a beautiful idea for a project, but her idea went further.  Hang on to your hat…..  these blankets would be available at hospitals to be given to mothers whose newborns did not survive birth.  These blankets would actually be shrouds.

The moment I finished reading the article I wrote an email to Ms. Nordstrom, telling her how moving I found her project and that this project that should be done everywhere.  I asked if she might consider writing a book about the blankets.  It was late July before I heard back from her (she was away in the remote north for a holiday), and it turns out she did write a booklet as part of the process.  She asked for my address so she could send me one.

So now I feel quite driven to do something with this marvellous idea.  Anyone want to join me? Stay tuned….

Here is Birgitta’s description of her project:

Is it possible, by making shrouds for the smallest, to ask questions of grief, touch, and the wrapping of bodies?

Weaving, inch by inch, has been practiced for thousands of years.  Out of both need and desire.  It is a patient process, repetitive and deceptively simple.  In the end the weaver’s patience is rewarded, producing fabrics far greater than their humble beginnings.

We have aimed to weave a series of blankets that are soft, shimmering, unique, and quite simply the most beautiful blankets we could imagine.  In the process we have asked ourselves and others about the need for ritual and meaning.

Can a small, exquisite blanket be a language of touch?  Can it say something where words fail amidst the grief of the loss of a child?

Humianity has often understood both life and death through metaphors and references to textiles.  Through history and myths they have helped us understand and navigate these moments.  They anchor us, as threads, to both joyous and difficult times.  We have chosen to follow these threads.

I think I’ll stop here, except to include a bit of our lovely Connecticut River scenery.  I know this post has been a bit weird, going from snarky knitting reviews that had me rolling, to the subject of grief and loss…. well, maybe I’m thinking of summer turning to autumn….There are only 10 days left in summer, but since school has started, and since it’s past Labor Day, most people think it is already fall.

Yesterday evening, Bob and I took a dinghy ride up one of the estuaries near where we live on the Conneticut River.  It’s a narrow and winding stream with water hyacinth and tall grasses on both sides.  The grasses were full of red winged blackbirds that all took flight as we passed.  This swan family opted not to fly away….maybe the younger ones aren’t good flyers yet.  So their tensions were mounting as we all headed up this little estuary.  In the end the mother and cygnets turned a corner too shallow for our dinghy, but not before the father tried some diversionary tactics to lure us away from his family.

And didn’t it become obvious to me that we are all more similar than not.  The family made a phalanx as best they could to protect the cygnets, and when that failed the father tried to draw us away.

Along with the swans and the red winged blackbirds, we saw a great blue heron fly low and slow right above us to land at the edge of the marsh grasses.  It was a beautiful evening.  It’s almost time for our boat to head to warmer waters, so it will be another spring and summer before we see sights like these again.

 

In spite of the bad lighting at the Rhode Island Convention, and perhaps because of the smaller exhibitions of HGA events, I came back quite inspired to get down to work.  I had the much-awaited black 16/2 linen spool in hand to finish weaving the napkins on my lunch tote warp, and I got right down to it!

This was really a fun project!  Yes, there were comprises.  I needed to design a fabric that would be sturdy enough for the exterior of a tote bag, but also be soft enough for a napkin.  I thought I had struck a middle range by adding interfacing to the wrong side of the tote bag fabric for a little sturdiness.  Well, that worked out quite well…..but the napkin is a bit firmer than I’d like to use myself.  Hmmm…. they do say that linen softens over time with repeated washings, and the napkin will get washed a LOT more than the tote bag.  I guess that’s what I’ll mention to the recipient.  I am pretty certain she’ll like the tote, but maybe not so much the napkin!  I now have a set of four napkins myself, and I’m not sure what to do with them!

 Once again, here is the mug that this project was designed for:

I promised the 8-shaft group on Facebook that I’d share what the draft for this project was and how the bag was sewn.  Here goes!

Huck Fabric for Mug Lunch bag napkin 2

 At the moment, I am writing this while onboard Pandora in Narragansett Bay.  To say that there have been distractions does not begin to describe it!  First, we are having the mildest summer of my entire life!  Beautiful weather greets us everyday with cool breezes and deep blue  skies with giant cumulus clouds.  Then there are all the beautiful sights along this bay…. I plan to do a post in a few days that will have a smattering of the lovely sights we’ve seen.

I will try to post the actual wif file for the drawdown when I return home in another week, as well as some info on making a tote bag with a flat bottom.  Wordpress doesn’t like .wif files!