Author: allkat24

Week 2 Overview

This week, organizational work took up most of my time and it proved to be very productive work. I was able to connect with multiple different fiber artists in the area and located a wheel spinning and beginning weaving class that I’ve added to my list of “field study” work. I was lucky enough to meet several knowledgable women at the Arbutus Folk School in downtown Olympia who were more than happy to provide me with their emails in case I should have any questions regarding the practice and history of fiber arts. I also reached out to Olympic Yarn and Fiber Mill in Montesano and received a very positive response – I’ll be paying a visit to the mill and the 20 acre alpaca farm that it sits on at the end of the month.

Another focus of mine was to make sure that I had some sense of direction for the following weeks. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by just how large of an area I am choosing to cover, so I wanted to have a way to ensure that I was following some kind of common thread during any given week. Because of this, I created a week-by-week syllabus for myself detailing the subject that I will be focusing on. I do expect myself to get distracted and to follow different threads when the peak my interest however, I think having a solid plan to keep in the back of my mind and to fall back on will be helpful for me during the course of this quarter.

I also used this week to begin delving into some podcasts that seemed interesting to me. I started by listening to an interview with Robin Balser, the owner and founder of Vinokilo – a pop up shop that sells used clothes by the kilo and serves wine to visitors during the shopping process. Vinokilo’s products are pulled out of trash that is set to be sent to African countries and are then redesigned into one of a kind pieces and sold at their pop-up events. Balser argues that when Western countries dump their used goods into countries like Ghana as “donations,” instead of helping people become clothed, it destroys the economy because small businesses and craftsmen have no market anymore. So, instead of creating more textile products to be dumped overseas, the business just recycles and reuses what is already there. Because the product is made at such a low price, the retail price is accessible to people of all walks of life – another of Vinokilo’s values.

fast fashion landfill, recycling, waste
Fast fashion in a landfill. (source)

The effect of American and European waste on African economies is not one that I had considered before, but after looking into the costs associated with surviving as an artisan and understanding how much waste is resulting from modern-day disposable fashion, it does seem like a very plausible situation. I’m interested in finding some numbers to back that claim though, so my research in modern day fashion next week with be further dedicated to looking at issues of waste and where it ends up.

Another significant realization that I came to this week is just how separate the world of handicrafts is from every day goods. It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that in today’s society, local crafts are considered a luxury item while what we wear is just something we get from overseas. There isn’t much thought put into the durability and quality of products and how it relates to sustainability and labor practices because we were never aware of how they have been made in the past, much less how they are made now. I’m very excited to visit Olympic Yarn and Fiber because I believe it will help me understand how things can still be made locally in a very “crafty” way while still using machinery that doesn’t require hours of tedious work and pricing that is completely unaffordable.

Overall, this week held some pretty significant discoveries regarding the way textiles come into this world and what happens to them when they leave our sphere of awareness. I’m looking forward to continuing to shed some light on that area and to ask the question of whether or not mass producing any kind of textile at all is necessary when we already have so much floating around.

Using Computer Algorithms to Generate New Patterns for Antique Lace

Lecture given by Dr. Veronika Irvine

Notes:

  • Computer scientist & fiber artist – using both to create art
  • “tatting” – lace making

Bobbin lace –

  • 500 year-old art
  • Portrait of Margherita Gonzaga – lace collar constructed of bobbin lace, much of original bobbin lace has been broken down
  • The only way to know what historical bobbin lace looked like is through paintings
  • Chantilly lace is a specific kind of bobbin lace
  • All one continuous piece that take on different appearances in different spots
  • 100,000 people left that know how to make bobbin lace – most over the age of 60

Science and Textiles:

  • NASA turned to traditional textile weaving techniques so that the material on the cone of spaceships would not stretch
  • Carbon fiber – New material for architecture – Lightweight but strong – 3D printing uses this material – can code lace-like designs to print and fill spaces

Practice of Lace-making

  • Always work with 4 threads at a time – either do a cross or a twist
  • Cross – cross over two middle threads
  • Twist – twist left thread over right
  • Does not matter what combination of cross/twist you use, threads will always have over and under pattern
  • Threads always travel in pairs, lace piece can have hundreds of threads

Comparison with weaving –

  • Weaving – threads are always vertical or horizontal, decision is which is on top and which is on bottom – creates a pattern based on which color is on top and which is on bottom
  • Jospeh-Marie Jacquard – created mechanism to lift one thread at a time for weaving, each thread segment represents a pixel
  • Only need one color with bobbin lace
  • Use “holes” to add different dimension and color

Mathematical model –

  • Single line for each pair of thread for pattern
  • Arrow to indicate the direction
  • Dot indicates some combination of cross and twist

5 Key properties –

1) Two pairs come in and two pairs leave – directed graph

2) Patterns repeats to fill any shape – doubly periodic, wrap around a torus

3) Lace is one connected piece – connected graph with combinatorial embedding of genus 1

4) Lace is a braid – crossings have a consistent partial order. No contradictable directed cycles

5) Threads are conserved – use the top of the thread all the way down to the bottom, no broken parts – partition graph drawing into a set of osculating paths, each path homotopic to a (0,1) torus knot – requires knowledge of topology, graph drawing, homeomorphisms 

  • Infinite number of lace patterns
  • Glueing together lattice paths creates a lace pattern
  • Increasing the number of rows and columns creates increased number of patterns
  • Auxetic material – hinging effect where holes change, difficult to do with weaving, lace makes it easier

Reflection:

This lecture was incredible intriguing and actually quite a lot more relevant to what I am studying than I originally anticipated. Dr. Irvine gave a brief history of bobbin lace and the significance of it’s versatility as well as it’s difference from traditional weaving methods which proved to be very useful to my deciphering the different textile practices.

The comparison between lace and weaving was particularly interesting to me because I realized that what I had been doing with my hand-stitching pattern last weekend was actually a very, very simple lace pattern that I was stitching down onto a piece of material. Through this, I noticed that the art of creating knotwork and that of creating lace are actually quite similar – in fact one could argue that quite a lot knotwork patterns are just enlarged segments of lace that aren’t necessarily always represented on thread. This is because both arts follow the same basic properties: An “over/under” pattern, a single thread runs through the whole design, and lines that function in pairs.

I also was very intrigued by the complexity associated with creating designs through weaving and the comparative simplicity of lace making. It’s quite easy to think of textile crafts and mathematics/computers as mutually exclusive entities. However, when you really look at the mechanics behind those crafts, it’s very obvious that textiles are, in fact, their own form of mathematics. With this knowledge it’s suddenly easy to understand why and how that particular craft was industrialized so quickly as well as how the knowledge behind how things have been made in the past in fading at a rapid pace.

 

Cancelation Improvisation – Hand-Stitching

This weekend, I was meant to attend a wool felting workshop at a local farm using wool from their heritage breed sheep (a breed originating in the British Isles), but unfortunately the event was canceled at the last minute. Felting happens to be one of the oldest forms of textile art found in Ireland, so I was incredibly disappointed to have missed the opportunity to learn a bit more about the art. But, I improvised and still completed some hands-on work with an art that I had a bit more experience with.

I began by reading the book Contemporary Irish Textile Art: The Women of Annaghmakerrig, small anthology of textile art done by women of different backgrounds at the Tyrone Guthrie center. The book shows pictures of the women’s work alongside explanations of the history behind different techniques and inspiration used in each piece. I was particularly inspired by the decorative stitching used in many of the pieces, as well as the themes of knotwork that were present. With this inspiration in mind, I decided to try my own hand at decorative stitching in the form of Celtic knotwork.

(some very messy freehand drafting of knot work patterns)

I chose a faux sheepskin vest that I had thrifted the week before and began drafting a pattern to follow on the back of it. It seemed appropriate for me to transform something that was originally created to be worn a few times and then disposed of into a piece of wearable art (a concept called “upcycling” that I’ll be looking into more over the next 10 weeks). Over the course of the weekend, I dedicated roughly 12 hours to drafting and sewing and not too surprisingly only barely scratched the surface of the vision I have in mind for the piece.

`

(Progress after drafting the main knotwork piece – about three hours in.)

The Women of Annaghmakerrig talked of the hours of solitude that is often accompanied by hand-rendered textile art. That is an experience that I have not been unfamiliar with in the past, however this weekend it was particularly poignant. As I was locked in my room, completely absorbed in the work I was doing while the hours flew by, I thought a good deal about the transformation of these crafts into social scenes for women of the Irish islands. I thought about the spinning circle that I attended myself when I was in Ireland earlier this year and the quiet presence that everybody enjoyed while absorbed in their own craft. This experience made it even clearer why those arts were able to endure through the industrial era and onto modern times. The shared culture and vision of people together but separately working on their own artistic vision does make for a very enjoyable and very nearly meditative experience that machines cannot replace.

(Progress as the weekend came to a close – almost done with the centerpiece at 12 hours in)

My lack of expertise in the area of hand-stitching was definitely responsible for the amount of time it took me to get the measurements of the design just right. However, even if I had more practice and was able to cut the production time in half, the amount of labour involved in the finished design that I have in mind would likely put the price of this garment at well over $200 in order for me to hypothetically make a living wage off of this particular art. As I continue to hypothesize about and participate in hand rendered crafts, I will keep the hours of labour and pricing in mind.

(the completed main piece after putting a couple more hours into it)

Week 1 Research Overview

The brunt of my research for Week 1 has been something of a process of getting a feel for the niche areas that I am going to focus most of my studies. I’ve spent the week diving into textile traditions from three different regions: India, the British Isles, and the Andes.

I found a tradition/economy/history comparison most easily when researching the khadi cotton industry in India and found the book Cotton Khadi in Indian Economy to be particularly helpful when examining the impact of craftwork on rural economies. One of the most interesting finds in that book was a comparison that Gandhi made between the unemployed of India picking up the work of spinning and the island people of the Hebrides in Scotland. Both are rurally-based, colonized peoples who had no other means to provide for themselves than to sell traditional crafts to both their own people and their colonizers.

I am still familiarizing myself with the geography of the indigenous cultures of South America, but after a bit of reading and researching this past week, I believe the region that I will be focusing my studies will be the Peruvian Andes. From my reading, I have gathered that the various different cultures situated in that region are diverse and teaming with not only pre-Colombian weaving practices that connect the people of that land with their past, but also is home to a rich culture of ever-evolving and shifting textile arts. I will be continuing my research on how craftsmen of that region are able to make a living off of the market for indigenous crafts in the Western world and how/if they are able to combat the knock-off products sold by fast fashion retailers.

In an attempt to trace the exact origins of Aran sweaters and their evolution into the tourist attraction known as Blarney Woolen Mills, I began to read Ireland’s Traditional Crafts by David Shaw-Smith. While, this particular book did not break down the history of this particular craft, it did mention mechanics behind not only Aran jumpers or “ganseys” but also the extensive work that goes into any hand-knit or woven product. The book also discussed the associations that hand-crafted products had with poverty, as well as their relatively recent transition into symbols of national pride and heritage. I also briefly researched the Irish Homespun Society as it was mentioned that they were largely responsible for encouraging the continuation of Irish products from Irish sheep. I found that what seems to be a large part of the reason hand-spinning and knitting has withstood the ages is the fact that the Irish Homespun Society promoted it as a largely social practice. Instead of relying on spinning and knitting as a source of income and slowing transitioning with the rest of the world into more profitable means of textile production, the craftspeople of Ireland (particularly of the islands off of counties Clare and Galway) continued to do what they had always done because it was done for the sake of community rather than productivity.