Category: Reflections

During weeks 6 and 7, I was able to attend a two part weaving course at the Nifty Knitter in Issaquah. It was a very introductory level course, but I found the teaching style/community to be much less welcoming than what I had experienced at Arbutus.

I successfully wove my very first scarf and was super pleased with the outcome and the level of ease that is associated with simple weaving, however I was not thrilled with the approach that the teacher took in instruction us beginning weavers. For the past seven weeks, my work has led me to the conclusion that in fashion and textiles, visual perfection and symmetry will always be overrated. I believe its one of the main reasons we have so much waste with textiles being produced on an industrial scale, and also the reason that small craftspeople cannot compete with machine-rendered textiles. While I was at the weaving class, the teacher kept emphasizing perfection, symmetry, cleanness of lines, and other aspects that actually had nothing to do with the structural integrity of the garment and instead, in my opinion, wasted time and material. She kept stressing how difficult weaving is and how much work it takes you to be perfect, but the whole time I could not stop myself from being incredibly skeptical about her comments.

Overall, I felt like the craft world in this particular community was one reserved for rich old ladies who needed something to fill their time and pour their excessive disposable income into (I was the youngest in the room by 30 years), it was not meant to be a useful task. This is unfortunately what I think a lot of the craft world in the United States is saturated with. It is not made to be a practical, attainable skill – if it were, there would be no lucrative market for it at all.

Why do the lines need to be perfectly lined up? Why can’t there be little snags or fluffs here and there? Sure, a machine wouldn’t do it that way, but if a machine can do it better, why are we even doing it at all? I think the answer to that last question goes back to what I have been finding to be the most prominent theme in the conclusions I have been making: human interaction with fiber and fabric creates a narrative that industrialized machinery is sorely lacking.

Overall, it took me about 13 hours of weaving to finish my scarf. In order to make the minimal living wage from that amount of work (let’s say $11/hr), I would need to charge about $150 for it. To be honest, with the scarf that I made from the boring, textureless, perfect yarn that I was given alongside instructions to be as precise as possible, I would not in a million years pay $150 for that scarf. I do believe, however, that there is a way to create something that is totally unique and quite priceless when you allow your work to have personality in every step of its life cycle. From the methods employed to spin, weave, finish, dye – each and every stop allows for an opportunity to create something completely and entirely its own story.

On Monday evening I attended my first class on wool spinning at Arbutus Folk School. To start the class, we went over the basics of protein fibers and discussed the various different methods of processing and prepping the fibers for spinning. This being my first time actually interacting with wool and a drop spindle, I was actually incredibly surprised by how much knowledge I had retained from the reading I have been doing on the subject over the past couple of weeks.

I did, however, learn quite a few new concepts that I will list here:

• When spinning, there are two different kinds of spinning techniques: the “Z Twist” and the “S Twist” (Basically clockwise and counter clockwise)
• When plying, you must spin in the opposite direction that the wool was spun in
• When buying “roving” (cleaned and carded wool) you should look for fiber that has a staple of at least 3 inches, anything less than that probably is not worth your money
• Good fleece makes a “ping” noise when you hold it up to your ear and tug
• Just like humans, wool producing animals exhibit health issues in their fleece, so an animal that has undergone a hard winter, pregnancy, stress, etc will have sections that break when tugged

We then went through the life cycle of wool and what steps need to be taken in order to create spun wool most efficiently. This is exhibited in the diagram Emily showed us from the book “Textile Tools of Colonial Homes”

Finally, we got to spinning our first wool. We began by “pre-drafting” the roving we were given. We did this by gently pulling the roving apart in order to create a thinner, longer piece. This is done in order to make the spinning process go a bit quicker and smoothing.

After that, the act of spinning itself was actually surprisingly intuitive. It was comprised of using the drop spindle as sort of weight that lead the twist and pinching of the roving at certain points in order to control the width of the wool. I’m really pleased with my first attempt at spinning:

At the end of class, we were given some roving to practice with and the homework assignment to spin 4 nights out of the week and to spin all of the materials we were sent home with. Next week we’ll learn how to ply our yarn so that we can have a finished product.

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.

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.

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(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)