looking and listening

A little bit of weekend inspiration 🙂

This is a quote from the opening page of “The Twelve Dancers” by William Mayne, published by Puffin Books, 1964.

Blue is the colour of the sky. Marlene was in bed still when she thought that. It was the colour of the sky in a chalk drawing or a painted drawing, but it was not the colour of the sky this morning. The sky now was green over the hills, with silver clouds lying tarnished above it. Higher still the sky was bruised with overhanging morning.

[…] The hills were a different green from the sky. Miss Williams, down at the school, would never allow a green sky into a drawing. Marlene thought Miss Williams must be an artist, to see things differently from ordinary people. She could look at the sun, and make people draw it yellow. Marlene had never looked at the sun, except once. It had looked white at the moment, then black for the rest of the day. Nobody else thought the sun was black.

And I just discovered (via BBC News 24) Nick Penny’s Sound Diary 2008 – Nick Penny is a musician who’s been recording snippets of sound daily since the new year and posting them in an audio diary on his web site. Birdsong, creaky gates, wind and waves, bells, machines, even the sound of silence. Very evocative.

TIF Challenge May 1

Aside: a link to the story of The Wild Swans I mentioned in my last post.

Now, the Take it Further Challenge for May.

Sharon asked, “What do you call yourself and why?” when you’re asked to describe your creative activities. She said,

“The way I see it is if you can’t talk about what you do, or haven’t taken care in how you think about what you do, how do you expect others to respect the way you spend your time? Or how do you expect people to respect what you make?”

I’ve thought and thought about the question and I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, naming is important, but I want to be very careful to distinguish it from labelling. Of course we need shared labels – a kind of shorthand to help others to know how to see us, and sometimes to help focus ourselves, but they are, in every sense, limited. I don’t agree that respect is dependent on how we’re able to talk about our work. I agree that thinking and talking about what we do is important, but for me it’s an ongoing, open-ended conversation…

Naming is not defining, it is choosing. It’s the opening up of potentials and possibilities. A label often says more about what we are not. When I file something, I have to choose a slot for it. I might cross-reference, but I can’t afford to be too messy about it. It more or less has to be one thing or another. Whereas me myself I – we can be many things. At once. Or in turn. Or now and again. And a child is usually given more than one name – sometimes many – names with meaning, heroic or familial or mellifluous, or all of those things.

So I’m Fiona. I was Finlay now I’m Dix. I’m lovefibre. I’m a beginner and a student. And names I might give myself to play with, to see where I can go and who I can be – maker / textile artist / embroiderer / feltmaker / dyer / other; and because nouns alone don’t seem enough, I’ll add messy / creative / impulsive / colourful / melancholic / curious into the mélée for good measure.

Of course this might all be an elaborate way of saying, I don’t know…

my avatars

stitchin fingers, cyborg knitting, and the threads of story

A couple of things have caught my eye recently …

First is the new social network, Stitchin Fingers, started a few days ago by Sharon B of In a Minute Ago, and already looking like a great place for anyone who practises textiles to explore and enjoy. 

Next is Spyn. Alan brought a short flyer back from CHI 2008 about “a system for knitters to record, recall and share information surrounding the processes of handcraft”. It’s a prototype design using digital techniques to literally craft personal stories into the knitting.

That set me thinking about metaphors we use in English that link story and fibre – we talk about losing or picking up the thread of a narrative; of spinning a yarn; of unravelling the truth. Maybe others…

I was also reminded this week, by this post on Blue Beyond by Tiree artist Colin Woodcock, of a Hans Andersen story I loved as a child. The princess spins a yarn of nettles to knit shirts that will free her brothers of the evil enchantment that has turned them into swans. Her hands are burnt and blistered and she is forbidden to speak, but the pain and love she may not articulate is embodied in the healing garments she creates.

And something else comes to mind – I’m always a little overwhelmed by the fact that text and textile are actually, etymologically, related:

“The word text is a cognate [of textile], coming from Latin textus ‘that which is woven’, referring originally to a particular style of Medieval script which was so dense that it looked like weaving.” 
Quoted from Take Our Word for It Issue 33

I’m suddenly feeling very excited about the possibilities here.

knitting, with woven yarn

developing designs

I’ve been in a hiatus for months as far as my OCA Textiles course is concerned – stuck at the beginning of a module I really want to spend time on and enjoy – applied and manipulated fabrics. The exercise starts by asking you to select half a dozen previous drawings and develop them before interpreting them in fabric, and that’s the part I baulk at. I don’t know why I find it so daunting. Anyway, over the last couple of days, I’ve done it – six sets of design developments to inspire the fabric manipulation. I used the computer, and that helped, as did some suggestions my tutor had made about design methods in her feedback on the last assignment. I took ‘drawings’ to include photos and fabric printing as well as paint and pen.

sketchbook mosaic

1 2 3 4 5 6

The numbers link to the images on Flickr.

felt under fabric

When I was working on this quilted hanging, one of my aims was to use felt as the wadding in a way that made its colour a central element of the design. I’m still thinking about that, so today I’ve been stitching some studies for my sketchbook pages for the April TIF challenge (changing a piece of fleece in as many ways as I can). I collected a pile of sheer fabrics of varying opacity and made a small sample of each, layered with some of the pink felt I’d already made.

transparent samples

The best silk I’ve found for this is silk organza (top right) – it’s what I used on the front of my hanging; though I think you can get silk net and I’d love to try that. The manmade fabrics at the bottom – nets, voile and organza – are the sheerest of the samples but I really prefer natural fibres (although I confess I went and bought the finer net and the organza specially for this at Reticule today!). It’s partly because I like the feel of natural fibres so much more, but also because so many manmade fibres are petrochemical based. I think if I were to use them extensively I’d look for them in secondhand clothes and recycle.

In the middle are the cottons – an organdie on the right, and on the left my favourite – cotton scrim. I just love the combination of the open weave and the distortion from the stitching and the way the felt shows through and is furrowed by the pull of the stitches.

felt and scrim

I’m going to try a kind of nuno version on a partially felted base, and also with dyed scrim and different colours of felt.

And I just wanted to share these, because they’re so lovely…

tulip tulips