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FUZZY GALORE |
Struck down by one of those sneaky summer viruses and confined to the couch, I tried to entertain myself in a virtuous and edifying way and read a really awful book, 'La dame a la licorne' by Tracey Chevalier. I had read her first best seller 'Girl with Pearl Earring' and felt ambivalent about it. While that had a lot of dreck about a supposed love thang going on between Vermeer and the oh-so-modest maid, all sheer fantasy since extremely little is known about him at all, there was a lot of good period detail. I liked the interesting sociological discussions of the painting business, patron relationships and all, and of the position and daily life of maids in a household. I mostly liked the descriptions of how paints were made in the 17th century, by hand-grinding different mineral pigments and mixing them into oil, with all the mastery needed by such an unreliable process. But frankly, I've read 'the Embarrassment of Riches' by Simon Shama too, and found it a much better book, better written even which isn't a good thing when you compare supposedly dry historical academia with a novel clearly derived from it... Do read that instead.
I've still been half-tempted to go see the recent Pearl Earring movie just for the costumes, but I hear that it's even worse than the novel, that in usual Hollywood fashion all the stuff that interested me was tossed out and the 'romance' vastly amplified, which doesn't bode well. And I find the supposed maid's grossly collagen-deformed lips difficult to ignore, I wince every time I see them and think of malpractice suits. In short, I'm likely to get out of this in a really cranky mood.
Speaking of movies, many weavers we know have been panting about 'Troy'. Supposedly this has nothing to do with the various hunks advantageously displayed whacking each other, but instead with the real natural dyes painstakingly used throughout. An admirable concession to historical detail indeed. There were no uniforms at that time, but supposedly here all the Greeks are decked out in indigo, and the Trojans in madder. Whatever. Maybe I'll look for some stills online. There is a lot to be said for rentals, so you can fast forward frenetically. We've been enjoying real old Hollywood movies lately, and for instance drooling on Tippy Hedren's delicious suits by Edith Head in 'Marnie'. Much more enjoyable, even if the movie itself was laughably Freudian.
But to get back to Tracey Chevalier, I had braced myself for another dose of imaginary romance in 'La Dame a la Licorne', but had expected at least some interesting level of technical discussion of the mechanics of weaving. Fat chance! This time, Ms C had noticed what was retained by her adoring public, and skipped to the chase. So we're treated not only to total fantasy about how the tapestries came about but to relentless stereotypes of skirt-chasing French men (don't think I'm bitter about this or anything...), with almost no detail of the period or the work. Worse, from the little I know almost all of these details are dead wrong. For one, the vertical looms (haute-lice) used for the Licorne tapestries called for wool warps, but we're treated to long descriptions of horizontal looms, which should have been using cotton warp, combined with working methods which would only work on vertical looms. Spinning and dyeing are disposed of quickly by mentioning sub-contracting. And she apparently never figured out that some of the tapestries are now at the Cloisters in NY. And, and, well, stop me before I work up my blood pressure unnecessarily... and don't waste your own time.
On the other hand, I had recently stumbled by chance onto 'Caramelo' by Sandra Cisneros, and loved it. I snagged it from a 'new book' display at the library because I knew I enjoyed her writing style. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the theme is the history of a rebozo-weaving family. There's a sentimental thread about a particular one, abuela's of course, but meanwhile we get to hear a lot about precisely how these things were made, how they've evolved over the last century or so, and about the lives of people who made them. This was my first inkling that different people specialize in the macrame fringe than the weavers of the main body. So I was delighted to find not only a good read, but some very meaty stuff in a fibery subject. We later went to a good talk about Mexican weaving at Loom and Shuttle, and this book very much added to my enjoyment of it, especially while I fondled some examples of the same vintage of rebozos. Three stars for that one!
Went to the Haight St Fair, where we had a good time checking out the
numerous fiber-related booths (and the barbecue, mmm). Seems bags
are the Object Du Jour, not surprisingly if you consider the
lack of fitting problems, small fabric requirements, and relative ease of production.
We actually broke down and bought one, from a nice girl who was talking
about quitting her day job, a laudable goal no matter what the circumstances :-).
She had a very nice array, many in fake furs and chinese brocades, a winning combination. I settled on this relatively small one (8" square, 20cm) because I was so enamored of the fur, even though I generally like larger bags. The lining is the same leopard fabric as you see in the handle. Leopard is always good. I am getting a teeny bit tired of the onslaught of it recently, and it's always disconcerting to see everyone wearing what you liked for years before against the grain. But I was so imprinted with Roman whores in early Fellini at a tender and impressionable age that I don't think I'll ever quite get over it. So leopard is fine in everything.
It turns out that this bag also has some very nice design features. The satin at the bottom keeps the fur from getting mushed. The larger version had Chinese brocade on one whole side to keep the bag from rubbing on your clothes, which is clever, but I agree it was unnecessary at this small scale. I also normally like bags that have depth, so that the contents don't look too lumpy, but this holds so little that no depth turns out fine. I can easily toss this in a larger bag when I know I'm going to need more carrying capacity, so it's actually quite practical, better than transfering the necessities every time I change bags. Also, the slick naugahyde of the strap is on the outside, and the short nap of the leopard inside keeps the strap from slipping, even on fairly smooth clothes. There is no inside pocket, but it'd be useless in this small thing. So all in all I'm really satisfied with the design.
And I do adore the look and feel. It's so cute! It fits right under the arm, and it's so cuddly. I'm naming it Fifi...
Finally managed to finish the spiky poncho.
Sheesh! This one was started as a sweater last winter, and never
got anywhere. It was one of those things where a subconscious
perception of a problem gets you to slow down to a point of
nothingness. We had eventually figured out that we were
using size 19 needles, and that even with 2 yarns it was
still way too loose. Consequently, the whole thing drooped
badly before we even sewed it together. Eeck.
While I was in France, Rose made a second attempt, at a poncho this time. But she petered out when she had another existential attack about how it was too heavy. I recently scratched my head about it when I tripped over the basket containing the remains. But I've lived on the East Coast, and I didn't think it was too heavy. In fact, the finished product is 800g, not that much more than a regular sweater for me. And it would be perfectly cozy on a snowy day, or even just a nippy Fall one. So, encouraged at last, I ripped through the end. We knew it'd be blindingly fast as soon as we could make up our ##$@ mind...
Tossed out another zigzag scarf,
surprisingly quickly. More colors by Nancy Finn ('desert'),
only 100% merino this time. I know she prefers to dye silk,
but I kind of like it better in wool, it's cozier to me.
Although it's true that in retrospect this color might be
a bit too subtle, even though some who have to look at me might
disagree :-). Still, I bought it at CNCH a mere month ago,
it has to be a record! Let's have a toast to decisiveness...
Rose meanwhile has been practicing some of her new silver skills.
Her little niece Annaliese is turning 10 this week.
The Beadissimo
class on wrapping beads with a wire herringbone weave is coming in handy for a
birthday girl who seems to enjoy jewelry.
Rose got some cute little orange Indian beads with millifiori that
can pass for floral enough. When wrapped with silver wire, they make
a girly enough bracelet without being tacky in the way that say pink plastic would be.
Sigh. That's a hard balance :-).. She's decided
not to add any patina, since that'll come naturally, and little girls
are likely to want more shine anyway. There was some hair-pulling
about size, since Rose has very small wrists and her niece is
even smaller-boned; it's always easier to make something
with the recipient on hand, but that totally ruins any surprise effect of course.
Since the birthday girl is growing anyway, the decision
was to make a closure that could be hooked between any 2 beads,
so we're sure that if fits now and will keep fitting later.
Toodled down to San Luis Obispo, to visit my best ex-roomie Anne, and her equally crafty husband Jay. We had a great time, walks with the dogs by the seashore, piles of incredible organic veggies from the garden, a solid day of show and tell (you know it's been too long when..). We camped in the garden to spare my fragile immune system the dander from unfamiliar pets, and it'll be a long while before I forget waking up to those huge sunny red poppies swaying in the breeze.
Anne's evolution is quite something to be admired. We've been through
our share of traumatic moves to horrible jobs together, ups and mostly down,
of times when brushing your teeth seems like the most you can possibly do.
But she's managed to do something seriously arty through it all,
decades of overtime at the day job and really steady artistic production. We met
as fellow sewers, but she got burned out with the production from
an overly-successful startup alas. However that didn't stop her entirely -
she merely redirected her energies and
went on to do things like painting on silk, and making incredibly elegant gourd work,
including masks that are regularly shown at the
San Luis Obispo Art Center.
I also very much like the gourd jewelry she does, and I'm showing
you an example I have on hand.
She and Jay do very well at the yearly Open Studio thing,
and they're the closest I know to real people getting along
as real artists..
I've always admired Anne's patternmaking skills, but we agreed in advance that we'd try not to do what we usually end up doing together, and just work on patterns with few concrete results. In our defense, it's hard to find someone you can trust to adjust things for the better, so you can see why we usually can't resist Of course, these trips mean I bring down as much stuff that I'd like to work on as can fit in the trunk, but I rarely manage to actually sit down and do anything because we're always so giddy with throwing stuff around and talking about books and shows and new media etc. This time, I was more focused, I'd decided I really needed a shirt with a good glass button. We have several sweaters with very nice buttons to show off, but it hasn't been good weather for sweaters lately, far from it. And the dress I made is too arty to wear to an ordinary event, not to mention it's a dress, which I usually only wear when it's over 90o. Unless the laundry has reached a tragically urgent state, of course :-).
Anyway, I had a pattern-buying trip earlier this spring and
came home with this Burda 8627. I don't think you can tell
from the picture, but it has a nice curved seam that goes
right over the bust and elegantly hides darts, something
which I associate with the best of haute couture. And
the back is interesting, another rare thing to appreciate.
I had the perfect piece of orange linen, both the perfect summer
fabric and the perfect color. But alas a quick check on the
dressform showed the seam to be not quite on the bust.
I know from bitter experience that one needs a button
right at the bustline to prevent gaping, and in this case
it promised to be monstruous gaping, with nothing above or
below to help anchor it. So I ground my teeth and futzed
with the pattern, but I'm glad to report that the seam
placement on the finished product is perfect.
In retrospect, I should have brought my own machine - not that Anne's isn't perfectly fine, but figuring out a new one does add a certain energy overhead, not to mention feeling guilty about preventing her from sewing her own stuff at the same time. I did fine really, with only a couple of the obligatory rippings. But toward the end I was talking when I should've been paying attention, and I dropped a couple big splotches of Fray Check right onto the back. Ouch. And I'd been thinking how esthetically pleasant it was to have half the shirt wrap around the other half in the same direction. But as soon as I tried it on Jay saw the stain from across the whole front yard, so I flipped the back panels and hid the mess underneath the other side. I should count myself lucky, it's not often that you get a spare part to cover up something. Years into it, I'm still wearing a fleece turtleneck (also orange, quelle coincidence!) that got a large pinking gash right near the neck before its first wearing, I've been in denial about how obvious it is since then.
Apart from all that, I'm very happy with the shirt. Good pattern, easy enough to put together, and the result is very nice. Of course, I had to clutch my stomach like an ulcer victim as soon as I got back to San Francisco and its ocean 'breeze', it was threatening to fly over my head. It was predictable that this wouldn't do at all well in windy situations. But it's not like it's a serious problem. If this is a show-off shirt, you know I'll mostly be wearing it indoors...
Whew. I don't know if we're cut out for this show thing at all. Enormous anticipatory stress, and then a big letdown as the event itself is in progress. Of course, other people might not have as much of a letdown :-). But I can't fathom people who do these things all by themselves, what a horror! I half laughed when our friend Linda told us at Stitches that she was doing very well, selling out to the point of cancelling a later show, and that she had gotten to pee early that day, at 4pm. But the realities of too much success without having any help would wig me out totally. I must remember never to attempt anything like that alone. But fortunately in this case (MoCFA) we had not a hint of strain about distributing the load :-). In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that most people around us did rather badly too, we'd be totally depressed about it. Ah well, we got to spend a lot of time looking at what other people were doing, and that was really sensational stuff, so we're inspired.
One thing I think we have to stop doing is to mix the fun stuff
like the hairy bags we full from commercial yarn, and
the hand-dyed-spun-knit items (like the recent zigzag scarf)
which are obviously much more
expensive and don't appeal to the same people.
We should decide ahead of time if it's the
kind of show where we need only a few samples and we'll mostly
be selling kits and needles, or whether we're going totally for the
handmade crowd. In this case there were some problems because
a show that was supposed to be entirely handmade actually
featured some clear examples of sweatshop labor. Tasteful,
well-done, sweatshop labor, but all the same, stuff that
undercut the rest of us so dramatically that they were practically
the only ones to make real money. Sad, eh?
Ah well. At least we got some really good bags out of getting ready,
and I get to put up the patterns.
I had seen the
fairly recently published 'Folk bags' from Interweave, and was
quite struck by the Irish creel bag. Some sort of sentimental
residue no doubt, since I remember the French version of those
shaped fishing baskets, as you can tell my parents were using them
centuries ago :-). Even at that age I was more than a bit put
off by the concept of suffocating in a basket, but never mind that.
I've mostly done bags that have symmetrical structure so far. But I have
a French bag that I adore, donated by my little sister years ago,
which has interesting points of structure.
I've come to realize that part of why I like it so much is because
it has seams, darts really, that angle up on the outside, so that the load tends
to stay close to the body, thereby preventing the syndrome of sticking
out 2 feet into the bus aisle. I think that the shape at the
bottom of a creel is similar, and tried to reproduce that.
I'm glad to say that as I use it it seems that I've got it.
A good principle to remember...
Have been working hard on the upcoming wearable art show at the
Museum of Crafts and Folk Art
on May 15th, in just another week (yikes!!). Some of what I like best so far
are the hand-spun zigzag scarves
that I've been making from a motley assortment of hand-dyed roving
I'd accumulated,
in various proportions of silk and merino. I've really gotten
into shorter moebiuses, which act as kind of a cowl neck. I was happy
I had a bunch of 2oz skeins which work just about exactly, I don't wear
hats so much any more. These are very good
for stuffing in your pack in case the fog comes in, very practical, and
quite good looking too.
All this led to more profound reflexions on improvisation, as I was trying to get that 'handmade at first glance' look. No point in working hard to get something that looks like you bought it at Wal-Mart, eh? But just as true random numbers are one of the hardest math/computer problems, I'm beginning to think that truly improvised textiles take a lot more art than meets the eye.
Spent most of the weekend at shows, getting quite wrung-out in the process. CNCH on Friday, where I tried to be a good girl and only came back with a bit of painted roving by Nancy Finn (Chasing Rainbows, Willits CA). However poor Paula, who was freshly ladden down with a lot of the Treenway silk chenille she uses for her wonderful shawls, was dragged to the Habu booth and suffered pretty much the same fate than we did at Stitches a couple months ago :-). It's hard to explain on the visual-only web the irresistible attraction of plain brown even yarn. But to have something that feels a bit like a brillo pad and yet is very soft is so utterly mind-boggling that few are able to resist. None of us anyway.
Paula, who always has some profound fibrous insight to contribute, talked about (and demonstrated) how much better her shawls were getting. She's been following Judith McKenzie's advice (always a good idea no matter what the topic) and has been working on the same theme for a bit. It's very true that, every time you finish something, you can always think of something you could have done better. Those of us who are together make notes in their project notebooks, and often go on to forget them right along with the less organized ones who merely think of these things temporarily. It makes a lot of sense that doing it again right away, incorporating those tricks, would lead both to further insight, and to engraving the good things into Judith's 'crocodile brain', the part that works on instinct.
On Saturday, we went to the Northern California Bead Show in Oakland. As usual, I got quickly overwhelmed. I guess this is the principle of modern art galleries: the client lasts longer when you just give them a couple really large objects to look at, rather than a whole lot of small complex stuff. But we seem to have learned from those experiences, and we'd managed to do some sorting ahead of time. We came home with some stuff to extend my handmade glass beads, a good thing. Even better, some of my mother's old jewelry is going to get restrung and spruced up a bit, so it'll be wearable. For some odd reason my neck seems to be twice the size of my great aunt's, for instance. I'm particularly pleased with the upcoming mix of vintage smooth caramel bakelite with new snot-green turquoise chunks. We even have enough to experiment with multiple strands, something I'd been hoping to branch into (if you let me get away with that...)
What's this Pantone birthday color crap? I get Lotus, 'soothing, receptive, nurturing'. Sheesh. Loathe that dusty lavendery pink too, equally trite and dull. They only very partially redeem themselves with the day color, 'great sense of humor, know how to read people with profound accuracy' (too bad that's wrong too), and with a marginally better color, although cool blues are not my thing. Thanks to Priscilla, who suffers from the same stereotypes (we were born a week apart) and turned me on to the perfect antidote, Chinese astrology. Snake: 'cold, cruel, and calculating'. Double snake at that. Ha! Let's have nice bright Chinese true red to go with that. Take that, lotus people...
Unquestionably the highlight of the French trip was the
Elsa Schiaparelli exhibit at the
Musee de la Mode
in Paris. Wow! I've always loved her stuff, and own a precious
copy of 'Fashion and Surrealism'
with many of her works. I've also seen many real pieces in New York in various
exhibits at the Met. I was totally aware of the things like the lobster dress,
and the circus collection, the shoe hat, the hairy shoes,
all kind things which I adore almost by definition.
She's a big part of my arsenal of defenses against people who think that I don't
dress enough like a grownup: "but I could have paid thousands for this,
Schiap was doing it in the 30s!". This is a general tactic I've found extremely helpful
against the dictates of LA color matching for instance: "YSL has been doing
navy and black for 30 years, what's wrong with you?" or "Lacroix is
making a fortune on Rajnish colors, so there!". Definitely shuts them up,
even if it doesn't change their mind...
But seeing so much more of her entire works together like this is something else! Yes, there is something about how this exhibit should be subtitled 'and embroidery by Lesage'. While no doubt Schiap drew much of the imagery, there are a whole lot, dozens, of the same little fitted jackets with pocket variations and incredible embroidery, which should be credited as much to Lesage as to her. Many of the pieces would have been ordinary without the embroidery, and we could certainely revive the little cape thing next Fall from what I see of the couture collections, only in pink fake fur perhaps. But I appreciated Schiap's incredible buttons as much as the embroidery, now that I make my own and know the difficulties of a larger scale. I'm inspired to go much larger, and chunkier. It also looks to me like most of the buttonholes were bound, and some of the hairier designs, the most 3-D, had snaps concealed behind. I think the latter is frankly cheating, I much prefer the Ericson approach of just wrapping a cord around the button, it works better and looks less artificial. I didn't mind the obviously hand-made buttonholes of the early years though, so I won't be embarrassed any more about mine, even if miles of them show to the sides.
It was interesting to see that, at least in the 30s, Schiap did things with cut just as complex as anyone else, even Vionnet, and pulled it off really well. I'd seen pictures of and liked things like the dress with the skirt flap zipped over the stomach, but in the context of innovative uses of zippers, I didn't quite appreciate the complexities of the whole, and the mastery of grain that she displays through that whole period. Her wwII stuff also goes back to that emphasis on cut, since embroidery was too hard to pull off on both financial and social levels. And of course the 50s were pretty simple, and I like much of the asymmetrical approach she had then, which recalls her 30s. I think she must have definitely designed by draping, there's no way she'd have succeeded with much of this otherwise. Funny how one gets those impressions - I wonder why I'm decided that? Must be because her stuff has a lot of back interest, and maybe I'm projecting but to me that can only be because of really seeing the whole picture, ie working on a form. And of course that same back interest is completely lacking in most contemporary clothes (Miyake excepted of course, but does he drape?).
Since there were not that many people there (a lot of foreigners though, including some older Italian ladies who seemed like they really knew the ropes), I snuck around sketching many of the designs I liked best. For some reason those are never the ones that make it in catalogs, everyone prefers pictures of smashing embroidery to boring old asymmetrical backs. But I definitely have a few that I have to make... that tobacco-brown 50s barrel jacket with zig-zag front covered with big buttons, yummm!!
Back from the land of frogs. Have you seen the frogpond yet? Great stuff :-), wish I'd found it before I went. Knitting was just... sad. Utterly disappointing.
Stores that purport to be about knitting carry lots of dreary little US calicoes for 'le patchwork', the kind that you can hardly find here since 1975 (mercifully), in dusty pastels, my favorite colors. I saw a grand total of 2 batiks, and they were hidden under a counter. Even if I'm already tired of them, they were like water to a thirsty camel. There are also lots of cross-stitch kits in those knitting stores, almost all complete kits with matching thread, very expensive, many of the best from Holland or Denmark. It seems that 'la broderie' is now a synonym for a cross-stich kit, there's nothing that hints that it's a much wider field than that, and could actually be fun. Maybe it's the bad influence of TV, that everything must come pixelated? I almost got a teddy-bear kit for Rose as a joke but thought better of the $100, got her damask dishtowels instead, much superior in the cheesy souvenir category.
To add insult to injury, every bit of knitting yarn I found was smooth and fine. The largest needle was 3mm. Just what I love!! This is making me feel so like an old curmudgeon, or at least a frustrated baba cool... One of my young cousins in Toulouse did say on the last day that she knew someone who was learning to knit, which is encouraging, it's not just a rumor that the young are getting into it. But what do the poor things get? Do they have to mail-order every bit of eyelash from Germany? I saw one single copy of Rebecca and nearly kissed it.
On another level, it's a good thing that I'd finished my wool pants at the last minute, hemmed them just before leaving for the airport. I wore them all but 2 days.... And I'm thoroughly sick of the one wool top I brought too, it got just as much wear. To think I had the orange cashemere turtleneck in hand, and put it back down! It was a classic case of packing for the week before - it had been 15-23oC, even in Paris, for a couple weeks, while it was 80oF in San Francisco and putting me in a summer sewing mood. But it was 3-8oC once I got to France, even in Nice where my poor sister was freezing her feet with broken heating. I also really appreciated the silk undies that kept the perpetual woolies from smelling too badly, and added a much-needed layer of warmth. I think even in summer it's a good idea to bring silk undies on every trip - if nothing else you can always wear them on the plane.
The one who's really been doing good work is Rose, who's still
assiduously taking classes to polish up her silver skills.
Beadissimo,
our local best bead shop, has been offering a great series this spring
and she's been getting quite a complete education from them.
I wore the bracelet she also finished just before I left every day,
and I'm not sick of that at all :-).
By the time I came back, she'd taken another class and made the big
silver snake with embedded crystal beads, which still needs to be finished up somehow
(a large glass bead? a smaller chain?). I'm glad though that we both agree about
finishing - why would anyone want their silver to look like it came
right out of the mall? It was a big hassle taking the 'new'
looking stuff, dipping it in a smelly sulfur bath, and polishing it
back up with much elbow grease, but I like the results much better.
It's taken a while to
train my eye to appreciate the nasty shiny stuff at all, to imagine what
it'll really look like when we're done with it. Kind of like many
people are horrified to see a sewing work in progress, bristling with pins and
bastings and single sleeves. But finishing is important no matter what the media.
I made a small contribution to the jewelry thing too: as I wandering aimlessly in the streets of Bourges, I came across a stamp place that advertised that it exchanged old French Francs coins for Euros. So I went in to ask if they also sold them, and we're now the proud owners of tons of 20 and 10 centime coins, with Marianne flying her hair in a very martial way. We're thinking of an Indian velvet shirt for Rose (a dark red one, naturally), and I've been keeping my eyes open for good coins to make buttons with, I think the liberty theme will be just fine in this case. Although of course I've also been collecting the obvious Pocahontas dollars, but those will have to go on something a bit heavier.
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