ArgoKnot

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Time flies by so fast on these glorious spring days, when there are more chores than daylight!  The garden is calling, our boat needs attention before it splashes into the Chesapeake for another sailing season, and like the maple trees, my sap is rising so that I’m drawn to work longer during the longer hours of light!

I finished the loose-fitting, comfy sweater in time to wear it on several occasions before it gets too unseasonal.  Soon I will put it away until fall….or perhaps bring it along to Maine for the chilly nights when I want to sit on deck looking at the stars. (Turns out is it a Martin Storey design from Classic Knits for Real Women)

Here is the medieval spinner.  I’m really on the home stretch now.  A little praise goes a long way, doesn’t it? Yesterday I got some wonderful praise from Archie.  I wonder if teachers ever truly realize how much their comments mean to us students.  His comments thrilled me so much that hours later, at midnight, I found I could not get to sleep due to the warm glow I still felt.  There’s a famous quote I used to know about how our words to others carry far more weight than we realize.  Archie can’t possibly know how much I will cherish his input from yesterday!

I’m also carrying wonderful images in my head from yesterday’s gathering of the Wednesday Group.  We were quite a large group, crowded in spite of Susan’s generous studio space.  The diversity of the work was incredible!  Everything from a young beginner’s strikingly good re-interpretation of some Coptic designs, to a moving piece of autumn leaves floating behind the Robert Frost quote, “Nothing gold can stay.”  There was a vibrantly happy scene of frogs on lily pads, a very graphic interpretation of a bridge deck from an engineer’s drawing, a delicate (although large!) interpretation of a pencil drawing of a loved one’s head. 

There was such a wide range of emotional content, creative vision, and wealth of weaving techniques to convey these images, that I left feeling powerfully stimulated!  That’s the real strength of weaving in community.  Most of us weave in solitude, and I relish these moments with others!

Unfortunately I have no photos to share of these amazing works in progress.  So, instead, a shot of new growth in the greenhouse and the endless parade of amaryllii!

Albutilon (flowering maple) in the greenhouse. This is our most prolific amaryllis with four flower stalks! To springify the house I’ve brought in cut branches of forsythia, quince and pussy willow.  Outside the first daffodils have opened, surrounded by their earlier pals, the crocus and winter aconite.  Hoping for new growth and full blossoms myself this spring!

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the energy of our best days everyday!  I can’t seem to manage that.

I’ve made good progress on my current sweater, a design that I cannot give proper credit since I’m working from a photo-copy given to me by a friend.  It’s a cute design that has been fairly boring to knit.  Lots of stockinette that luckily I churn out quickly, but also lots of fiddly small items that had to be knitted separately and sewn to the sweater.  I’m almost there!

The button bands are knitted separately and sewn to the body (a task I detest). After I sewed on the first band, I sewed on the buttons. Then I made button holes in the 2nd band by

buttoning on to the first band as I knit in order to get the spacing just right.

Also, I’m up into the headdress of my medieval spinner.  I’ve been looking forward to weaving the intricate shapes of her headdress!

My friend Willa had an art opening this week, and her energy inspired me!  She is part of a group of women exploring their cultural heritage through their line of female relatives, all of whom immigrated here from other parts of the world.  The exhibit is called “Ah, Motherland!” 

Willa’s heritage is Japanese, and she found inspiration from the many noren (entrance curtains) on display at the Serizawa exhibition that we visited together back in early February.  She made her own set of noren and painted images significant to her grandmother in her unique, painterly style. 

My own head is full of ideas I’d like to pursue that were generated by seeing the Serizawa exhibit.  I wish I could work as quickly as Willa does!

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The second amaryllis to bloom this year is ‘Apple Blossom.’  It’s almost my favorite!  I cannot remember the name of the one that opened first this year.  It was a variety that I had to search out at the Philly Flower Show a couple of years ago, and now I’ve forgotten it’s name (no label in the pot either!)…

A few signs of spring in the greenhouse! 

More amaryllis in bud

Color in the greenhouse:
peach dragon wing begonia in foreground with peach blooming albutilon (flowering maple) just behind it. A few magenta geranium flowers in background, and a purple flowering bromeliad in the upper left. 

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It’s St. David’s Day, soon to be followed by St. Patrick’s Day! My English friend sent me photos of yellow aconite blooming in a church yard near her village in Cambridgeshire.

We are currently buried in snow with damaged trees all over our yard, but the house is unscathed.  Right now I’d relish the chore of cleaning up all our broken trees just to get outside, but that chore will have to wait until the snow melts. Our new view of the neighbors:

I saw my first robin this morning, in spite of the fact there is no ground showing for him to find food! He was hopping about on the snow!

May there always be work for your hands to do.
May your purse always hold a coin or two.
May the sun always shine upon your window pane.
May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.
May the hand of a friend always be near to you and
May God fill your heart with gladness to cheer you.

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I have to interrupt my weaving and knitting updates to comment on the weather.  What a lot of snow we have gotten this month!  Supposedly it is going to snow here for  three days straight.  I’m not sure that has happened in my lifetime!  It snowed heavily all day yesterday, and is snowing lightly this morning.  Will it really continue through tomorrow?

When my husband uses the snow blower, he loves to make a wall of snow.  Can you tell he is quite proud of his creation?

I’m looking forward to staying home today, nestled in to weave! Meanwhile, spring arrives in the house with the first of the amaryllis in bloom!

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I cannot count the times I’ve heard or read a reference to tapestry that has annoyed me because it is obvious that the author of the statement has no idea what tapestry is.  Ugh.

But now I think I need to put pettiness aside and relish every reference to this ancient technique because it is not a given that it will stay in our vocabulary, which might mean the real activity might also, someday, disappear.

A couple of years ago on public radio I was listening to the program that Patricia O’Connor hosts about language. Someone called in to ask her what ‘tow head’ means.  They had been called this as a child, and the caller had always presumed it to be an insult. He wondered if it had something to do with tow trucks.

Ms. O’Connor actually didn’t know what the term meant.  I remember I was driving in my car and had to find a place to pull over so I could call in to set the record straight.  My call was taken, unfortunately after the show had ended, so the man never heard from me what the term meant.  I hope he knows by now.  Ms. O’Connor and I had a lovely conversation about phrases that go out of use. Interestingly, she noted that if an idiom is based on political or social situations it stays in use longer than if the phrase is domestic or agricultural.  Our domestic situation has changed so drastically in the last hundred years, and here in the US, very few of us have any notion of farm terms.  Idioms from these areas have passed into the forgotten. Personally, I didn’t know that ‘tow head’ was out of use.  I don’t hear it often, but I still do sometimes, as well as corn silk, to describe blonde hair.  My husband is a tow head, and I briefly had corn silk hair when I was young…

So, while the word tapestry is being misused a lot in recent times, at least it is a word that continues to pop up in descriptions and conversations.  I am thankful for that!

Here is what’s happening on the tapestry front in my studio this week:

Yesterday I had my monthly visit to Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei.  That always gets my creative juices flowing, and here is the result of my work today:

Slow, but steady, work on Rob:

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Crazy mix of stuff, but that’s the week I’m having.  I’m stuck on my medieval spinner’s face and have walked away from it for a couple of days.  Actually, I had something I had to knit.  That happens to me every now and then.  Like a good book I just have to read cover to cover, skipping meals and sleep, sometimes I just have to knit.  I’ve churned out a lot of knitted fabric over the past week.  The second ‘Shadow Baby’ sweater has been mailed and received.  I have knitted the entire back and half of one front on the ‘Scallop Trim Jacket’ from Classic Knits for Real Women. (it’s the first of the thumb nails)

And in the midst of all this knitting and thinking about tapestry, I have been listening to the BBC’s production of “A History of the World in 100 Objects from the British Museum.”  It’s a wonderful podcast!  I’ve always felt a kinship to the ancient world through my weaving.  I can’t say why.  Maybe because I learned to weave just when I decided that I would pursue a degree in Latin (which I’d studied every year since 7th grade) along with a degree in Greek which I was just learning as I learned to weave.  Maybe it’s that language and weaving are literally connected, coming from the same IE root, text. 

For whatever reason, I find listening to this podcast about wondrous artifacts, that not only come from the ancient world but from the dawn of human history, to be rather an act of reverence while I am knitting or weaving.  I am participating in what human hands have been doing for countless millennia, and I am experiencing how connected we all are.

Here is the carved
mammoth tusk depicting swimming reindeer, from 10,000 BCE, that I learned about today.  A beautifully delicate carving, found in France. Curiously, the narrator mentions another carved piece from another part of Europe, same time period, that depicts a mammoth and is carved on deer antler.  He also mentions that from this time period objects convey realism, abstraction, perspective, ie, many different ways of expressing oneself.  The same area might yield finds of realism and abstraction, so it is believed that each artist was expressing his sense of his surroundings, incorporating his emotions into this expression. Every episode of this series has been mesmerizing.  I will be sad when it ends.

And in other news this week, our new daughter in law was featured in local news and newspapers in southern Connecticut for her work rescuing dogs.  She and my son have a houseful of pitbull mix dogs that all live happily together, some available for adoption….but not Chili who is shown here! The next photo is Lauren with Chili and Rupert.

Lastly, when I’m not listening to the podcast from the British Museum, I’ve been watching and following online my first season of American Idol!  Talk about extremes!  The son of some good friends was picked up at the Boston audition and made it through the first cut in Hollywood.  He was eliminated tonight during the group singing.  I thought he had wonderful stage presence, but the group as a whole did not perform well.  They picked a song with really challenging lyrics! The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani.

Bryce is second from the right. He is already making quite a name for himself in the NY metro area as a solo artist and with his band “Stealing Jane,” so the Idol experience should only help!

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Look at this wonderfully woven face! These lips would make any weaver proud, and I hope to benefit from studying them. This tapestry fragment was found in a burial site in the Tarim Basin, and fascinatingly, they had been fashioned into a pair of trousers and found on the body of warrior in a mass grave.

An excerpt from Kris Hirst’s archaeology blog: “The tapestry trousers of Sampul are a pair of decorated woolen trousers, likely dated to the first or second century BC. They were found on the legs of a person buried in a mass grave at the Silk Road oasis of Sampul in the Tarim Basin of far western China north of Tibet. The trousers had been fashioned from a tapestry which, scholars believe, once hung on the walls of a palace or elite residence in one of the cities in west central Asia which fell under the influence of Alexander the Great.

How this tapestry became trousers and ended up on the legs of a person who died by violence in Sampul far from the tapestry’s origins, is an entertaining, if somewhat scholarly, puzzle. But it also sheds a glimmer of light into the life of nomads and the interactions of the cultures that were affected by the opening of the Silk Road. The origins of the tapestry trousers were discussed in late 2009 in a scholarly article in the journal Antiquity, by a team led by Mayke Wagner of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI).“

The warp sett on this tapestry is considerably finer than my sett for the Medieval Spinner, but my attempts at her mouth still seem quite pathetic to me.  I’m embarrassed to share photos of what I’ve done, but I shall swallow my pride and do it, mostly as a learning vehicle for myself in future tapestries.  The following shows what NOT to do!

Version 1: I was in NY with the Wed. Group when I wove this, and I did not bring a wide enough variety of skin tone colors.  She’s horribly pink.  I thought her mouth was not good enough, although it was better than my next two attempts!  Archie’s sage advice was to make sure that the two points of her upper lip were woven on a ‘high’ warp with a low warp in between for the dip between the points.

Version 2 got unwoven immediately.  I felt the lips were too pale and did not show up from a distance.  This is version 3 where I continued with the pale lip color and used a grey outline.  I think it’s only getting worse!  The outline is too ‘cartoony’ for me. However, one thing I did learn is that the upper lip point that is closer to the viewer (the right side as we face her) is slighter higher than the lip point that is away from the viewer.  This involves putting both upper lip points on a high warp with one low warp in between, but also doing an extra wrap on the closer lip point to raise it slightly.

I feel strongly that her mouth is too low and too far away from the end of her nose, but it does match the original painting so I hesitate to change that.

Today I will unweave again and do something closer to version 1.  At least I’ve given her a much better skin tone now! The face from the Tarim Basin tapestry has a wonderful highlight on the upper lip.  Also the break between his lower and upper lip is the darkest color, and that is true of my spinner’s lips so I need to go darker! …and make her upper lip redder!  I hope I get closer today!

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It’s not fair to talk about an exhibit after it’s closed, so I will apologize right up front!  I got so much inspiration from this exhibit that I have to mention it, and I will at least share images of the pieces that moved me! The exhibit was “Serizawa: Master of Japanese Textile Design” at the Japan Society in New York. (The book, which I bought, is available at the link above.)

These are all dyed works on silk, hemp and cotton cloth (I believe handwoven cloth). This is a traditional technique known as katazome, which involves stenciling with natural dyes and natural resists. Serizawa was a master of this technique and is a National Treasure in his country.

I am particularly interested in his use of lines and brush strokes.  Many of these images are so similar to ideas I’ve imagined weaving in tapestry.  It was a thrill for me to see what he did with dyes!  I have a small folder of Arabic and Hebrew script which I’d like to weave, and this image of Japanese characters is going in the same folder! 

Awesome, Awesome!

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Some intriguing examples of exquisite corpse.  This first image has a strong sense of collaboration, but the next two have a cohesiveness that gives a sense of ‘whole’ to the works.

There are many images here

JD Salinger died a couple of days ago.  I realize that is quite a non-sequitur to exquisite corpse (well, in a very morbid sense, perhaps not), but he’s been on my mind. Catcher in the Rye made quite an impression on me in my teens.  It was my first exposure to story telling through what is not said, not written.  My younger son loves the story “For Esme with Love and Squalor” so it’s time to read it! I’ve just learned that “JD” stood for Jerome David.