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The hat is made from 3-ply Falkland Islands wool which I spun; the dyes used were madder, Japanese heartnut, and black walnut. The pattern is medieval Egyptian, I think. |
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This is a sample of handspun handwoven natural-dyed twill cloth that I made. The yarn is natural grey handspun Swalesdale (Swaledale?) wool, really coarse stuff, which was purest evil to spin. I got it on sale for a ridiculously low price. I dyed half of it with black walnut hulls and then wove it in a balanced twill. From this project I learned a lot about the way twist affects the way the cloth will lie; a balanced, unbroken twill made of high-twist woolen singles will slant if the direction of the twist is the same for both warp and weft. |
I'm originally from New England, southwestern Vermont to be exact. I now live in San Francisco. I migrated here when I was 23 and off and on for the past 14 years have lived here, in Japan, and in New York City. I've come back to the place I like best. In my household are eight spinning wheels, one antique linen loom, a bucket of knitting needles, a skeining reel, and plans for a PVC silk reel. My partner, Tim, also spins, but in his case he spins records, not fiber. I spin and knit every day for at least an hour or two, the notable exception being these past three weeks, when we've been busy settling into our new place here in San Francisco.
The fiber scene in the San Francisco Bay Area is extensive. I have joined a weavers' guild here and also a spinners' guild. I am impressed with the quality of skills that I have seen here among fellow spinners, knitters, and weavers. Although Straw Into Gold, that fiber and yarn store of legend, is no longer open, and I do most of my fiber shopping online nowadays, there are many, many fiber workers in this area. My sense of community is partly maintained by participating in online interest groups such as spinning and knitting listservs, but since many of my fellow listers are located in the area, I have been able to meet many local people as a result of my online connections.
I learned to knit when I was a kid, taught by the adults in our house. There was always someone who was willing to instruct or assist with questions, and it was a general assumption in our family that as soon as a kid was able to sit up that s/he would gravitate to a craft; I quickly showed my proclivities for working with fiber. Even if I hadn't, though, I would probably have learned to knit and sew at least, since my parents considered these to be survival skills for their children ... you never knew when you might have to knit yourself a pair of socks.
Given this atmosphere, it was a shock to learn, as I grew older, that out in the world there were what in my family would have been considered arbitrary and peculiar gender-related limits on who could do what. Boys and men knitting? Sewing? Girls who could (and would) change the oil on the family car without a second thought? None of this flew in my family, where skill and desire and need were the decisive factors related to whether anyone knit or fixed cars.
I learned to spin when I was fourteen. I couldn't afford a spinning wheel, and neither could my parents, but I managed to learn to spin on a drop-spindle proficiently and continued to spin all my yarn after that. I first bought a spinning wheel when I moved to San Francisco in 1988, and I haven't purchased any yarn since then.
If I had unlimited income and time, I would probably spin, knit, dye, and weave for eighteen hours a day. I'd build a velvet loom and weave my own natural-dyed reeled silk on it. I'd start a spinning school. I'd buy my own muskox for qiviut. I'd grow and process indigo myself (currently I maintain an indigo fermentation vat, in which I use indigo [Indigofera suffruticosa] from the state of Oaxaca in Mexico.) I'd spin and knit a pair of linen liturgical gloves, based on ones I once saw at the Cluny Museum in Paris.
My current projects: a small knitted hat for a friend's new baby in Japan...it's made of handspun tussah silk 3-ply yarn dyed coral with madder root; I'm also trying to reproduce some tzitzit yarn (Avital Pinnick will attest to my ability to spin an enduring razor-wire yarn from the softest wool); and am planning a handspun tussah yarn to be woven into a tallit. I'm about to begin a new shawl-collar sweater for myself, for which I've spun up a mountain of variegated naturally-colored undyed fleece.
Although I admire all kinds of knitting, there are definitely methods or techniques that I avoid. Lace knitting, which I nevertheless admire, makes my head hurt if I try to follow a pattern. I love to knit with multiple colors. I relish long stretches of stockinette and letting my mind wander. I enjoy making fisher ganseys, though I only have managed to make two so far, because I'm obsessive about reproducing the traditional 5-ply yarn myself, dyeing it blue in indigo, etc. I seem to have inherited my mother's tensioning style, which means that I have to always 'think loose' so as to not end up with knitting that is as firm as boards.
I collect antique textiles. My collection focuses on antique Chinese and Mongol textiles (some of which date back to the twelfth century CE, and one of which dates to the third century BCE), antique European pieces (silks, mostly from the Renaissance and later), and pre-Columbian textiles. My collection is not large, but I enjoy it very much.
I am currently assisting a silk-weaving workshop near Lyons, France, translating their website into English. I'm very jazzed about this project; not only does the workshop produce silk textiles woven on antique Jacquard looms, but the directors are also working very hard to ensure that the long tradition of French silk handweaving, which nearly died out completely over the past century, does not disappear. From a larger point of view, their website is really a web portal, whose purpose is not only to sell the products of this workshop but also to provide a point of convergence for otherwise abstruse textile workers all over the world with similar interests. This is why I'm so excited about helping them.
I suspect that an important impetus in my textile work is a kind of anthropological voyeurism; perhaps by collecting the remains of what was, and learning to work as our ancestors did, I can almost reach out and touch the past. I can visit ancient buildings and marvel over them, but somehow being able to touch something that was more intimate to the humans that made and used them, such as textiles, I feel closer to the ages than I would in an old building.
Along with my interest in historic textiles goes a lifelong fascination with dyeing. I exclusively use the so-called 'natural' dyes, which more accurately should be described as pre-aniline dyes. My specialty is indigo, and I use three traditional methods for its application. I do not feel that 'natural' dyes are more wholesome or better for the environment; in fact, some of them are plenty toxic, especially the mordants. And I could get any of the old colors from synthetic dyes if I tried. But what I do get out of the 'natural' dyes, and I revisit the past here, is perhaps being able to see color as people through the ages were able to see color. It's a limited palette, but a timeless one.
Of course, another reason I do these things is also to preserve the craft traditions and to help make them relevant to the present and to the future. In all, I somehow figure that I can knit the past and the present together.
We live in an age when textiles can be cheaply and quickly made in factories. Learning to do it all from the ground up has taught me what people had to go through just in order to have basic clothing needs met, and perhaps lets me see into another time in which textiles had a different value. I'd like to pass this sense on to people alive today
"Gossamer Webs" is the only book-length study of Orenburg lace shawls. This is both its strength and its weakness: its strength, because it stands alone in the field, and its weakness, because it attempts to cover so much. This is a specialist's book. If you're a serious lace-knitter and are obsessed with Orenburg shawls, this book should be in your collection. But if you're looking for nice shawl patterns, you'd be better off with Cheryl Oberle's "Folk Shawls" or Meg Swansen's "Gathering of Lace."
This book's agenda is very ambitious, as the table of contents shows:
1. A Brief History of Orenburg.This book fills a great need, superceding articles published in Spin-Off and PieceWork. The techniques and stitches are so unusual that even expert lace knitters will find new material. The stitches themselves are not as simple as they might appear (at first glance, they seem like primitive variations of Shetland stitches). For example, in most lace knitting, large holes ("cat's eyes") are made with two consecutive yarn-overs. The Orenburg large hole ("pea"), which closely resembles the "cat's eye," is actually a variation of the faggoting stitch, formed by a single yarn-over worked in two consecutive rows. An even larger hole ("fish eye") is formed by a single yarn-over in three consecutive rows.
The designs themselves rely on the principle of negative space--designs formed by holes rather than by stitches. I tried charting several shawls in the book and had difficulty rendering the meandering, diagonal trail that occurs in several medallion frames. I realised that if I charted holes, rather than white space, the pattern was easy to discern.
History, anthropology, sociology, economics, knitting, and spinning--this book tries to cover it all, with varying degrees of success. The interviews with the knitters, the photographs of the shawls, and the stitch dictionary are, in my opinion, most important contributions. I would have appreciated more information about the "warm" shawls (the book devotes only one paragraph and two photos to these shawls), but this is a book about the famous gossamer shawls. I hope that other authors will accept the challenge to write on Orenburg shawls, focusing on different aspects and drawing on their individual experience and interests, as Don, Amedro, Starmore, and Korach have for Shetland shawls.
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