travel

Whenever I visit a gallery of paintings, the works that depict textiles grab most of my attention.  Bob and I visited the New Britain Museum of American Art last week.  It was our anniversary, and I could picture us wandering the galleries together and talking about what we liked.  In reality, we were hardly in a room together.  He lingered over the landscapes, while I was drawn to portraits and landscapes studded with people captured in the daily work of living.

This is the prize winner.  I had to go back twice and look again.  It is a stunning landscape with the fog and the sheep in the background, and the spent flowers in the foreground. But these two girls are show stoppers!  I can feel the chill in the air, the blush on their cheeks from hard work, the roughness of their clothing.  And look!  One girl is knitting! Daniel Ridgway Knight, The Meeting.  1888.

I know you want a closer look, as I did.

And here, Thomas Eakins has captured an elderly woman doing handwork. He called this painting Old Lady Sewing. Perhaps she was younger than I am now when he painted her, although I’d at least like to think I look younger than she does.  At any rate, even 10 years ago, I could not do fine work by such light.

Closer, you ask?  My phone brightened the colors too much.

Whenever I visited the Metropolitan or the Frick, when I lived nearby, I would get pulled into the paintings that depicted lacework.  New Britain had a few examples. This is John Singer Sargent’s Miss Cara Burch, 1888.  While everyone else admires this young girl’s porcelain complexion, I am studying crispness of her silk dress and the frill at the edge of her ruffled neckline and bodice.

This painting was a pleasure with its riot of textiles.  Woman before a Mirror, 1918.
Louis Ritman

I recently saw this image connected to an Augusten Burroughs quote. Some things are so awkwardly true.

Earlier this week, my English friend Lesley sent me this photo.  She was staying at an inn in Belgium, where the innkeeper teaches lace techniques during the day and runs the inn in the evenings.  That would be a terrific get away for a few people I know!

This afternoon, as I write this, I have a pot of finely chopped carrot tops simmering on the stove.  I’m waiting for them to give up their color, which could take another hour or so.  When they do, I’ll add some alum mordanted, white wool yarn from Weavers’ Bazaar.  I believe it is mostly Leicester Long Wool, spun for tapestry.  Fingers crossed that I’ll get the lovely spring green that Jenny Dean got in one of her books. If there’s time, I’ll continue doing the finishing work on my little Portuguese Man of War tapestry.

And June is calling…. I want to get outside for a bit!

Although I was curious about weaving throughout my childhood, it was while I was studying ancient history in college that I finally pursued learning to weave.  I happened to be in the right place at the right time because my tiny college in the middle of New York state just happened to hire a weaver for one year of their artist in residency program. That weaver was Candiss Cole.

I continue to be most fascinated with what we can learn about the earliest textile remains, so I was mesmerized by this article from Science Nordic that I found on facebook yesterday.

You can read the full article here.  This is a wall hanging from the late 12th c. that was embroidered on  handwoven red fabric.  Most of the fibers used are wool, with some linen used in the embroidery stitches.  Back in its heyday it was full of brilliant blues, greens, yellows and white against the red woolen cloth.  At some point, perhaps around the Reformation, this wall hanging got rolled up and stored in the loft of the church, and forgotten, which saved its life for someone to discover and for us to learn about.

And what can we learn?  For one thing, that there were some talented embroiders in this area who were spared some of the drudgery of farm work in order to be allowed to work on this piece.  It tells us that they must have lived on farms that were prosperous enough to spare these few women to do this handwork. It shows that while making ends meet from year to year was not easy, beyond that there was a call to make objects of beauty. It shows that these women knew a wealth of stitches, and one in particular that is found only in Norway. This piece tell also tells us what dyes they used at that time.  Like woven medieval tapestries, it confirms the tradition of telling a story through imagery in a manner similar to today’s cartoon strips.  This piece is on display at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

And to achieve such a beautiful feat, these women had access to finely woven cloth on which to embroider.  They had colored threads to use in their embroidery.  They had needles.  They had the skill to envision the objects they wanted to depict and the skill to embroider them.  This is what always pulls me down the rabbit hole of history:  these women are still speaking to us from another millennium.

Years ago Bob and I visited the Metropolitan Museum in New York to view the exhibit of Leonardo DaVinci’s drawings.  It was frustratingly crowded, but there was still that sense of being pulled back in time, to be a witness to Leonardo’s hand making marks on paper.  There weren’t even pencils as we know them, or paper as we know it, back then.  He was using silver wire on linen paper.  The drawings and sketches were as personal as handwriting, and as close as yesterday, or today.

About a week ago, Bob and I visited two galleries on the Yale campus to view an exhibit called “Text and Textile.”  You can see it yourself, at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, through August 12.

This was a printed work on cotton of a jacquard weave pattern.  The printing process took numerous layers of printing to complete.  I enjoyed this piece, with its printed original pattern for weaving, being printed again in layers on woven cloth. There were plenty of clever and interesting things to see in this exhibit, which extends to another building on campus–the Haas library that is part of the Architecture School.

The curator summed up the theme of this exhibit so well:

Even as the Fates spin the thread of our lives, text and textile enshroud the body in the fabric of myth, the costume of the domestic or the exotic, the imperatives of the industrious or the industrial.  This exhibition draws on Yale University’s extraordinary collections to explore the intersections of text and textile in literature and politics, from Eve spinning in a thirteenth-century manuscript to the mill girls of New England in the nineteenth century.  Particular highlights include: Gertrude Stein’s waistcoat; manuscript patterns and loom cards from French Jacquard mills; the first folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays; the “Souper” paper dress by Andy Warhol; American samplers; Renaissance embroidered bindings; Christa Wolf’s “Quilt Memories”; Zelda Fitzgerald’s paper dolls for her daughter; Edith Wharton’s manuscript drafts of “The House of Mirth”; an Incan quipu; poetry by Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe, and Walt Whitman; and the Kelmscott Chaucer by William Morris.

What moved me from this exhibit?  Seeing a vest made for Gertrude Stein by Alice B. Toklas.  Now why didn’t I take a photo of it?  I guess I was struck dumb by seeing it! It glowed with love from Alice’s hand stitches.

This little book which includes the image of a Flemish spinner (attributed to Boccaccio) that I currently have on my Shannock tapestry loom, barely started.

This lace panel with an accompanying poem gave me such a sense of the passage of time, of women’s hands carefully and lovingly making these pieces that have long outlived their makers.

This display was particularly poignant–a cloth book made for recovering soldiers who fought in WWI.  They used these books to embroider their feelings and experiences.  The slow process of embroidering their thoughts must have been therapeutic on a number of levels.

It was a remarkable spring day in New Haven.  I couldn’t resist trying to catch it….I was about to write ‘on film.’ But that’s no longer the case.

And it was a perfect day for looking at windows and roof lines that always catch my eye!

We ended the visit by attending a lecture by Valerie Steele on the history of the color pink titled “The Color Pink:  the History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful color.”  Her lecture got off to a powerful start with this image!

Valerie Steele is curating an exhibit for FIT on her research on pink which will open in September.  Road trip, anyone?

I’ll end with some words from another weaver from the not so distance past…..

….two long weekends in row.  It was pretty wonderful to have these days away from the pull of house and garden chores, and even the decision  about how to spend my creative time.  While both retreats had themes–one was weaving and the other was bobbin lace–we had the option to bring whatever project we wanted.  Whatever my choice, I’d then have the ability to focus on that one thing for three days at the first retreat and four days at the next.

The first retreat took place in a small town in northwestern Connecticut.  It was a woodland setting that made me think we’d gone deep into some forest, when in actuality we were on a large property at the end of a couple of mostly residential roads.  This retreat took place at an Episcopalian center called Camp Washington.  The photos on my phone tell me I was in Lakeside, Connecticut, but my google maps directions took me to the little town of Morris.

There were seven of us, so we were quite an intimate group.  We stayed and worked in the smaller lodge that is nestled into the woods across the street from the larger campus shown in the photo above.

The main room is where we worked and ate and gathered together in the evenings for conversation. There is a dining table off the right of the photo, and in the evenings we pulled the couches closer together to have wine and camaraderie before dinner arrived.  All the looms are spread out behind me and to each side (so not in the frame) to make use of the great light coming in a wall of large windows.  Note that balcony upstairs! — a great place to enjoy watching the activity!

Our chef Ben delivered meals to us three times a day, and they were way beyond what you’d expect to get at a retreat center.  Take a look at this–grilled shrimp and grilled zucchini.  To the right is grilled polenta topped with pesto and grilled peppers and onions.  YUM!

It was a great way to kick off the weekend! (Now you can see a bit of our equipment set up in front of the windows in the background.)

Here’s Ben setting out the goodies. He took such good care of us all weekend.

Even breakfasts were a large spread.  This was Mother’s Day brunch.
Thank you, Ben!

And lest you think we did nothing but hang out and eat, I did manage to get one photo of progress on a loom.  This Marjie’s project, a multi-colored warp in cottolin with a twill design that represents fish scales.

I was so busy working on my Robert Frost text that I neglected to take photos of the work others were doing.  Clare and Julia were working on braids on their takadai, and the other three women were weaving on floor looms.

Here is my progress.  Good stuff/bad stuff.  I’m disappointed about the rippling in the area of the ‘F and A’ of fact, but I got control of it by the end of the word.  Hopefully it will steam out when it’s off the loom.  I am happy with the the ‘T and H’ of the next word…which is the.  I am enjoying the process of weaving this simple phrase that’s so poignant. I’m not telling what it is.  If you love Robert Frost’s work, you already know where this is headed.

After getting home late on Sunday of Mother’s Day, I had a busy three days to unpack, do some chores, and welcome Bob home from his long voyage from Antigua back to the Connecticut River!  Then Thursday morning I hit the road again, this time with my friend Janet–off to spend four days doing bobbin lace north of Boston.

This was a much bigger gathering, although I can’t tell you how many of us were there.  We were at a new retreat location this year–Rolling Ridge retreat center in North Andover, Massachusetts.  It was quite a different setting than the previous weekend!  This is a Gilded Age mansion on a large property near a lake.

I couldn’t get a shot with the entire place in the frame!  We stayed in the larger section on the left.  There was a round courtyard to drive in to unload our stuff.

Happy arrivals to the retreat!

The dining room with beautiful views into the woods near the lake.  Each table had a vase of flowering branches of dogwood and appleblossoms.  The food was far better than standard institutional fare.  Lucky!

My room was at the top of the main staircase–so grandiose! My actual room, not so grand!–but plenty comfortable.

What did I work on during the four days?  I tried my hand at a Torchon edging.  This is my beginning attempt at a cloth stitch trail with a rose ground filling.

I learned such a lot over the weekend, under the guidance of Holly VanSciver.  For one thing you may notice that I did not start at the point suggested in the background pricking. There are several new techniques for me in this pattern.  The best thing I gained was a better understanding of Torchon in general so that I can make my own decisions about how to do the lace.

The last dinner of each retreat is a fancy affair where those of us from Connecticut wear our tiaras and our lace sashes. We hope this will eventually impress the rest of the New England participants to follow our lead in future years.  So far, they resist!  This year the dinner happened to occur as the newly married royal couple, Harry and Meghan, were attending their evening bridal reception. Let it be known that a number of us rose at 5 am that morning to watch the wedding event live on a big screen in the conference room!

We have a man in our lace group, and he needed something more appropriate than a tiara. Those are printed lace panels on his shirt. We do love to get in the spirit at this dinner each year!

I certainly had a great time over the past two weekends!  And now it’s Memorial Day weekend, and Bob and I are home together to celebrate. The gardens are calling!

 

The next two weeks have a lot in store, and I’ve been looking forward to these events all winter! First is my local weaving guild meeting tomorrow.  I haven’t been able to get to one of these meetings since last September, so this is a big deal for me!  We are taking a field trip together to the Rhode Island School of Design to see an exhibit of Mayan textiles.  Isn’t that a wonderful way to get back in the groove of weaving?  The exhibit is called “From the Loom of a Goddess: Reverberations of Guatemalan Mayan Weaving.”

Then, on Friday, I will attend the Connecticut weaving guild’s annual weaving retreat.  I’ve never been home in time to participate in this, so I was ecstatic to learn that this year’s retreat was moved to May.  Even better, the retreat takes place over Mother’s Day weekend.  That was probably a non-starter for most of our members, but I’ve now been alone on Mother’s Day for six years–with my kids living far away these days and Bob far offshore sailing home at this time of year. I wanted to find something fun to do, and this fits the bill perfectly.

The following weekend I’ll go to another retreat, for bobbin lace. It’s almost too good to believe, having three wonderful events all in a row!

I finished a small tapestry yesterday that has spent two winter seasons onboard Pandora in the tropics.  It feels like quite an accomplishment to get it done.  Deciding that it was, in fact, done was one of the hardest parts of working on this small piece.  That is often a problem for me.  It would be awful to cut a piece off the loom and then wish I’d woven another 2″ or so before calling it quits.  On the other hand, I am usually so thrilled to finally finish, it’s quite a chore to stick with those last few inches before the end.  By this point all the ‘important’ decisions have been made, and I’m usually just weaving background.  Then I realize that deciding where to end is a pretty decision in its own right.

Yesterday I had a very small ‘cutting off’ party–just me and my iphone camera.  I figured if I could send a few friends the photo it would be almost like having them with me for the event.  All along I’ve been saying that I rather like this piece as long as I see it in dim lighting from about 10 feet away.  In other words, I don’t really like it.  So, I was a little relieved to find that I don’t hate it, now that it’s off the loom.

I could not see the whole thing as I wove it because I decided to use as small a loom as possible, since it was going on our sailboat.  Around the halfway point of the design I had to advance the warp around to the back.  Yes, I could still see it if I flipped the loom around…but I could not see the two halves together, and that made me wonder if I would like the thing as a whole.  Also, the often-changing humidity onboard wreaked havoc on the warp tension.  The selvedges got incredible loose while the middle remained tight.  There were probably other factors than just change in humidity contributing to this problem. A boat is not the best to store a loom.  I am happy to discover that the selvedges don’t look nearly as bad as I predicted.  Note the scissors in the upper left.

The whole thing.  It is 21″ h x 7″ w.

This afternoon I tried a couple of edge finishes for the warp threads, finally deciding on one from Peter Collingwood’s book that he calls “Indian Edge,” a variation of half Damascus.  I will now tack down the warp threads that have been moved to back of the piece after finishing the edging.

I don’t know anyone who likes the long process of finishing.  I have to force myself to do it, and today I also realized that while it feels like such an accomplishment to finally complete a project, it also feels a little sad.  It’s a little like death.  My relationship with the piece is over, and we will never interact with such intensity again. It is also time to tackle the next big idea, and with that comes a fair share of insecurity about a whole new set of important decisions.  No, it’s not rocket science or brain surgery, but these decisions are vital to the success of a piece.

So, on Friday I’ll be off to Camp Washington Retreat Center in the beautiful Litchfield area of Connecticut.  I’ll spend Friday through Sunday working on my text tapestry that is a favorite line from the Robert Frost poem “Mowing.”  The finished piece will go to our younger son.  Think of me sitting here when I’m in my room (I have no idea if this is actually what my room will look like, but I hope so!  This photo from the website looks so inviting!)

Meanwhile, every chore completed (the Indian Edge finish) needs a little reward!  Don’t you agree?  I spent the late afternoon spinning on my brick terrace, with a great view of gardens and woodland and with the sound of about 1,000 song birds all competing to be heard.

And I learned that spinning from a rocking is not that comfortable OR easy!

Today a friend of mine helped me realize that I am always happiest in May and June.  I hope these two months don’t fly by too quickly.  I want to savor all the wonders of this season.

 

 

 

It’s the first week of May, and I’ve been back in my ‘real’ world for about two weeks.  It’s been glorious here, in spite of the cold and all the rain.  We’ve just passed through two days of insanely hot temperatures, but as of today it’s the real deal, gentle spring temperatures and gentle rain.

I got home just in time to make it to the fiber art exhibit in Jamestown, Rhode Island, called “Con/Textile/Ized. ” My friend Jody came with me, and we both thought the show had a successful range of works.  We both found that there works that sang out to us–by artists Mo Kelman, Kate Barber, and Valerie Ann Phoenix.  Then there were works that I would not have put in this collection at all, and works that feel in between these extremes.  I think the sharp contrast between the works on display made it a success.

Valerie Ann Phoenix’s work in this exhibit was a dress made of interesting materials that I cannot name.  Some of it seems to be thick mylar.  There are strings of lights wrapped around the dress that respond to noise.  The louder the noise, the brighter the lights.  Well, who can resist that?  Both Jody and I spent time making soft and loud noises, and I tried singing some high notes.  It was a fascinating piece, and it required that I venture out of my comfort zone in order to interact with it!

Here is Jody talking to the dress! Note the purple lights.

There was a second exhibit at the JAC, that filled the large entrance and the hall leading to the main gallery.  As we entered the center, we were greeted by two large walls filled with small white garments, like the plain underslips of  christening gowns, overlapping and filling the walls.  It was a mass of small white slips in varying fabrics.  There was a vintage 1970s Singer sewing machine on a white-draped table in front of the larger wall of tiny garments. The name of the exhibit was “Re-Dress: On Memory and Being Remembered.”  Each little underslip represented 1,000 Korean babies and youth who were adopted by US citizens over the past decades–sorry, I missed some of the details. There were more than 250 little white dresses. I have just done a search for the info I saved from this exhibit, but I did not come up with the name of the woman who made all these tiny dresses/slips, and who is herself a Korean American adoptee.

I’m so disappointed that now I do not have her name, even after checking on the art center’s website and doing a Google search. Each dress had two tags attached it.  One was an official tag that had the administrative number of the adopted child, and then there was also a plain 3×5 note card on each slip that had a handwritten memory about a child’s birth family.  Many children were adopted at such a young age they have no memory of their family life before coming to the US.  And that was the point of the exhibition–that our memories of family are so important to who we are, and yet many children don’t have that.  It was a moving installation, done by…. I seem to have lost the information about the woman who made this installation.  I took her card, but that was now two weeks ago!

Here is a quote from the artist’s introduction to the exhibit:

I am often asked whether I have memories of Korea, ald although I have a few fleeting images of a dusty courtyard, a chain-link fence, being fed sweet persimmon on a spoon–I don’t know whether these are real or imagined, and there is no one currently in my life who can verify.  These images remain in the province of dream.

Beyond my own memories, I often wish for the stories of being remembered as a child in Korea.

Being remembered is a way of being loved.

Near the end of the exhibit there was a table with note cards and safety pins for writing down your earliest memory and pinning it to a table draped in white cloth.  It was a moving installation.  I wish I could find the information about it, because the artist has also written about book about on this subject. (I searched for that as well, with no luck.)

Jody and I capped off the day with a visit to a well known Rhode Island nursery called The Farmer’s Daughter.  What a place!  If you are within driving distance of North Kingstown, you must go!  They have unusual varieties of common plants, they have UNcommon plants, and they have masses of creative ideas of what to do in containers, in the garden, in the house.  We spent more time and money there than we meant to, and we’re not sorry!

 

This trip to Rhode Island was a wonderful way to kick off my season at home–getting back in touch with the things I love and have missed in the Caribbean.  Just this weekend, I enjoyed another such day out and about, in Vernon, Connecticut.  It was the 109th annual Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival.  Wow!  109 years!  It was my first visit to this small event.  Small, but definitely memorable.  There was an array of fleeces that had been judged and were now for sale.  I could actually walk along the tables and look at each of them without being crushed in a human sea of shoppers.  In fact, it wasn’t even the first stop on my tour of the event.  At Rhinebeck and Maryland, if you don’t get to the fleece sale at the crack of opening you might as well forget it!

The vendors were fascinating! –mostly small operations focused on beautiful yarns and fibers, or creative, hand made things.  I bought this elaborate orifice hook from the Red Hart Bunnie Farm who obviously also sells angora fibers.

I bought some bamboo buttons with a design of knit stitches burned into them at this booth, Katrinkle.  What a great name, and clearly it was a fun shopping experience.

ColeMama Creations is a one-woman operation making different styles of coiled rope containers.  I fell in love with the bucket, and had such a dilemma choosing a color.

Great vendor displays and easy crowds made the day so enjoyable!

One of the owners of Aisling Yarns makes Shaker boxes out of fallen trees that would otherwise get burned as logs in his fireplace.  He had a selection of sycamore boxes that were my first choice, but since those were already sold out I easily made peace with this honey locust box. It has beautiful patterning on it.  It’s a small box, which this photo does not really show.  It now holds small embroidery scissors along with my small bobbin lace tools.

I also succumbed to some things that don’t fall into the fiber category.  I came right home and crocheted this necklace of fresh water pearls and Swarovski crystals.  It was almost instant gratification.

I also found my 10 sheep gifts for the December party of the Flockettes!  But I’d better not show what they are….just in case….

I drove up there by myself, and ran into lots of people I know from both my weaving guild and my bobbin lace group.  I didn’t see anyone from my local area there so I didn’t feel guilty about driving that distance alone.  I was able to see the entire show in somewhat less than a full day. You can’t say that about Rhinebeck or Maryland!  No, there weren’t drop spindles perfectly balanced to spin for several minutes, and there was only one vendor selling one brand of wheel (Kromski, I think), but the wealth of fibers on display,  the creative use of fibers, and handmade items to help make your own fiber experience better was plentiful.  It was a good day!  I’ll go again next year!

At home things are progressing too.  I am so close to finishing my small Portuguese Man of War tapestry.  I have refrained from photographing it.  It is the one of the first times I have made a warp that has to advance around the copper frame, and I am not happy that I cannot see the whole work at once, now that I’ve pulled the piece around to weave the 2nd half of the image.  I have no idea if the piece will work as a whole.  I just can’t bring myself to photograph a partial piece, even though I do it all the time when I’m in progress on a tapestry that doesn’t get pulled around the loom.  It just seems weird not to be able to get an image of what I’ve already woven, along with what’s in progress now.  I will be cutting it off soon and then there will be photographs.  I have a strong premonition that I am not going to like it.

I’ve been spinning.  It was one thing I missed this winter while I was away.  So I’m getting that out of my system.  I bought some cashmere and mixed fibers at the festival last weekend, so of course I am spinning that.  I bought a 1/2 ounce each of 100% cashmere, 50/50 blend of cashmere and merino, and a 50/50 blend of cashmere and silk from Boreas Farm in Vermont.  I’m finishing up the last of the cashmere/silk and will probably ply that tomorrow.  So far I think I prefer the two blends to the pure cashmere.  I am thinking about how these fibers might take dye…..how they might knit up….what to knit.  If something calls out to me, I will buy more! What a coincidence that the woman who owns this farm used to work with Jody before retiring to raise cashmere goats in Vermont.

It was a lovely day for spinning on the deck, and I managed to make it fairly comfortable since I cannot get out the summer furniture on my own.  A few cushions, a small table, and a big water bottle.  The black flies are a bit of an annoyance this year, but mostly the breeze kept them at bay.

A close up of the singles 50/50 cashmere/silk.  Yum…

It’s quiet here without Bob.  Luckily we have gotten to talk at least once a day during this time we are apart.  He sailed from St. Lucia to Antigua with a friend after I left, and they made stops in Martinique, Les Saintes, and Guadeloupe on their way to Antigua.  After that he had a week alone before his crew arrived yesterday for the trip home.  They are enjoying some late season events in Falmouth and English Harbour, and will leave for home on Sunday morning.  There will be a mandatory stop in Bermuda to wait for better weather to make the trip up to Connecticut.

I’ve been to Baltimore to see my son and his family–and my adorable 15 month old granddaughter.  She is about to be a big sister to twins, so things are busy at that house! Our younger son turned 32 in early April–I don’t understand how he could have reached such a mature age….. what does that make my age?  He was supposed to visit at the end of April, as part of a business trip to New York,  but the plans changed.  I licked my wounds last weekend by indulging in a few souvenirs from the sheep and wool festival. I have puttered a bit in the garden, and I’ve got some seedlings hardening off outside during the day and still  living indoors for the evenings.  It won’t be long before they go into the ground.  All in all, things are very good–it’s May, and I’m home!