Gardening.
I love to garden. I adore the smell of loam, the feel of the plants in their new home, and to play with flowers. I love getting the fruits of my labor: coming outside to pick peppers and tomatoes with chives and basil for dinner.
Gardening is one of those humbling tasks, because it doesn’t take a bunch of smarts. It doesn’t even really take books (though I think I have every gardening book known to womankind). It takes consistency.
Uh-oh.
It’s kind of like writing, in that sense.
Fancywork. It means fancy needlework or crochet, even tatting, that is decorative. It was popular during the Victorian era and brought us all sorts of neat things like tatted lace edgings and crochet doilies and such. For anyone interested in textile arts, fancywork comes up in the lineage of our art even if what we do now is ultra-modern.
Interweave Press, the popular publisher of many different kinds of textile arts books, magazines, DVDs, and sites (Knitting Daily is inspiring even if you’re an occasional knitter), re-released the historic needlework collection, Weldon’s Practical Needlework. What I found fascinating about the collection is its emphasis on figuring it out oneself. There’s a lot of knowledge that’s assumed, that for modern craftspersons isn’t necessarily part of the repertoire.
And then came Jane Sowerby, with Victorian Lace Today. She looks at several historical sources, including Weldon’s, and reinterprets them for modern artists. While the book focuses on knitting, it gives a fascinating look into historical craft and gives modern interpretations that are sure to have you reaching for your needles.
Piece from a kit; original company unknown. Embroidered by A. Catherine Noon. Photo copyright A. Catherine Noon, All Rights Reserved.
Embroidery. It was the first textile art I ever learned. Crewel embroidery is an art with a long history. The Bayeux Tapestry, in fact, is not a Tapestry, nor woven: it was, in fact, embroidered. The Victoria and Albert Museum in England has a fantastic page on the history of English embroidery, here. Embroidery has a wide history, not just in Europe, with some of the oldest references dating back to China 500 B.C.E.
I find it relaxing. I have started to work on my own designs, usually modifying an existing one as from a kit, like the one from the left (which is one of my oldest pieces, and I did not modify it; I think I made it around 1987). Embroidery artists are able to translate their graphic ideas into needle, thread, and fabric, and do so either from their own original designs or by adapting from paintings and other art. I find that pretty darned amazing, to be honest.
I confess, though, that I adore kits. I find ones that I like, and then it’s like coloring in designs in a coloring book. My mind relaxes while my hands are kept busy, and I get to play with color and texture. While embroidery seems intimidating to the beginner, needlepoint and cross-stitch are both needle arts that similarly have kits and can be done with little to no experience. If you’ve a mind to try embroidery, though, give it a shot – I made this piece before I learned anything from another textile artist, and was able to follow the instructions. Most of the stitches are fairly simple ones; the only more complex bit the French knots (which, in the spirit of full disclosure, I found horridly difficult – so after this kit, I made sure to pick ones that didn’t require them).
But for the adventurous artist, and for those of you who are able to translate flat, written instructions and graphics to the three-dimensional world of canvas and thread, the world is your oyster. There’s a burgeoning interest in needlework and some amazing books that have come out recently that are sure to delight both the novice and experience needleworker. My favorite of the new artists is Jane Nicholas, but beware: viewing her site may consume many hours of your time because her art is captivating. You have been warned. 🙂
From Alterknits by Leigh Radford, photography by John Rizzo
One of my favorite knitting books is by Leigh Radford, called Alterknits: Imaginative Projects and Creativity Exercises. She has a ton of really great ideas. One of the last of them is the best use of yarn ball bands ever. She covered a dress form with them. I think the effect is surprising in its simple beauty.
Until I read her suggestions, I didn’t know what decoupage meant. There’s a whole artform out there surrounding it and you can get special glues and papers for it. Basically, it’s covering objects with glued paper, then applying something that gives it a high gloss. There’s a great tutorial at WikiHow and a bunch of other links that I didn’t take the time to delve into, but if you google “decoupage” you’ll find them.
What I find particularly exciting about this particular type of art is that you can use ephemera and found objects from around the house. This can create unique artwork that is also a snapshot in time – catalogs, magazines, newsletters, those circulars that come from big box stores each week – anything can become grist for the mill. In today’s day and age, finding art that we can make that’s in line with the idea of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is a positive thing.
Crochet. All it takes is a hook. The textile world seems divided into Knitters and Crocheters; I’ve rarely met a Switch. I decided to try learning and this scarf is my swatch that, well, grew. The teacher provided us with a ball of bulky yarn and a hook, and I had a ball learning single crochet, half-double crochet, and double crochet (which really should be triple, since there are 3 chains, but treble is something else, and…)
Yeah, I’m a Knitter.
I mean, for one thing, I have a heck of a time keeping my stitches in order. I somehow end up with more, or less, depending on where I am in the project. I know it’s a matter of practice, but my knitting seduces me. I’ll say this: I’m really glad that I know some crochet now, because there’s this sweater I knit that has 4 crocheted medallions up the center, and I really want to finish it.
Today’s letter, B, can mean many things. My favorite in terms of crafts is Bargello, the Italian needle art that resembles flames and waves. The image to the left is a common style, with the colors undulating back and forth across the canvas but all relating to each other in their pattern.
It’s a simple pattern to work, because it’s essentially vertical or horizontal. There’s no fancy stitchwork involved, just carefully placing the stitches neatly one beside the next, offset in order to create the characteristic wave or flame effect.
A quick search of Google images reveals many, many modern interpretations of this relaxing art; I recommend wandering around or, if you’re ready to take the plunge, grab a kit and try it for yourself. For the brave at heart, you don’t even really need a kit. Just select some colors and play with the wave effect across a swath of mesh fabric.
Alphabets are magical. Before reading and writing became ubiquitous during the Renaissance, it was the province of specially-educated people, usually men, who spent their lives learning to be scribes. The illuminated manuscripts they left behind are masterpieces of art, calligraphy, adornment, and design.
I learned calligraphy as a child and spent many years away from it. I’ve recently rediscovered it and have been having a ball playing with it. By “play,” I mean not taking it seriously. I haven’t used my dip pens, nor pulled out any of my instruction books, nor worked with my calligrapher’s drawing table more than a couple times. Instead, I’ve been doing the calligrapher’s equivalent of sketching – drawing designs on the page with quotes, or poems, or other things.
Quite by accident, I stumbled on something that I’ve been calling mandala; though, strictly speaking, it’s not really a mandala (the word in Sanskrit that means wheel). My designs are usually square or diamond-shaped, and are composed of words rather than shapes. But they are meditative, ask questions, or seek to answer something. Take this image, for instance: I was seeking what meant “home” to me, and trying to answer the question of “what makes a dwelling a home”.
Welcome to Thoughtful Thursday, where we chat about 3D and writing. Today I have a bit of a twist on the topic. Since Book 2 of the Persis Chronicles, Emerald Keep, is out on April 8th, I figured I’d share a little bit about knitting and 3D and use the opportunity to share about the book, too.
When Rachel and I created Persis, we wanted a world that valued handicrafts and the home arts. The job of a homemaker has become invisible and thankless, thanks in part to the fact that it’s largely women’s work. The women’s liberation movement in the United States did a lot to emancipate women from being chained to the kitchen sink, but as a consequence, their traditional work of raising children and caring for the home became less than laudable.
I have a friend who is about thirty-five years older than me. She decided to stay home and raise five boys of her own, as well as twenty-nine foster children. She told me that she’s endured a lot of grief from women friends who said that she wasn’t living up to her full potential, and that she was oppressed. That made me sad, because she’s an incredible mom and creates a home in which people enjoy spending time.
Because of that, we wanted the home arts to be elevated in importance such that they were considered to be a critical part of society. The job of the Keeper is a desirable part of the fabric of life. Developed to support miners and livestock farmers, the Keepers are trained to manage household bookkeeping, cooking, and various arts.
For our book release, we’ve both made scarves. The picture at the top of this post is the Emerald Keep Scarf. I knitted it because I love to make things, and this was fun to do because it was referential to my own book. I felt closer to the world we created by making something for the book, which is an unexpected side benefit.
I started this blog years ago on Blogger. Though all the information has been imported to this site, there may have been a loss of formatting. If you’d prefer to view the original blog, please click here.
Now that I’ve sorted out the design and simplified it, the Emerald Keep Scarf is coming along very nicely. Last week, I talked about the difficulties I was having with it and how the design process was coming – or, as it turns out, not coming. This weekend I got almost 18 inches done. At this rate, I’ll be done by the end of next weekend or the middle of the week following, well in advance of the start of the Keepsake Book Tour.
The stitch is a simple pattern from Barbara Walker’s A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns called Two-Color Star Stitch. I find her books invaluable in designing projects because she puts the knitter in the driver’s seat. Through teaching how the fabric works inherently, to how geometric designs are created by the yearn, a knitter can go from a basic student of the subject to a designer in very short order. I have a long way to go before I’m a master knitter, but I am a lot closer to the goal because of her books. I highly recommend them.
I’ve made this stitch pattern a couple times before, and I like its simple beauty. This time, I selected an emerald green dark tone for the main color and a light mint for the accent.
The more I work with this pattern, I find that I like the reverse of the fabric just as much as the front. It ends up looking almost beaded in texture, with neat edges on each side.
I cast on 30 stitches, since it’s multiples of 3; on size 7 needles the fabric is quite wide. There’s a lot of horizontal stretch to it and it will curl (which is why I had such difficulty with edging it). I don’t mind the curl in the finished design, it has its own beauty; I’ll still play around with some possibilities for edgings in future projects but since I needed this done for the book tour, I didn’t have the time.
I did have an interesting breakthrough as I was working it. It finally it me that the colors are tied to the stitch order; meaning that row 2 is always Color A and row 4 is Color B. I don’t need to keep track of the row count because I know which pattern row to work based on the color on the needle. All wrong side rows are purled, so it’s an easy pattern to memorize – even for me, with the difficulty I have with 2D to 3D translation.
Keep your eyes peeled for the Keepsake Tour; it starts March 8th. Emerald Keep is out on April 8th.