Another snowy story

This time I'm stitching in the Arctic, thinking about the melting Greenland Ice Sheet.  It's shades of cream and white- what ever odd balls of wool I can get a hold of: every one a different texture and weight. Mostly I think of what I am making as ridges of stragusi (wind hardened snow) but sometimes they seem more like ice floes floating on the warming water.

I want to make a big afghan to cover my new big bed, in my Polar themed bedroom.  I started out thinking of granny squares, but not so colourful since the room is entirely blue and white, but monochromatic granny squares seem much less charming.  After too many hours of trial and error, I finally came up with this project of irregular strips because I had enough white/cream wool to start it off. I will probably hook them together with shades of blue to represent the melt.

To tell the truth I needed a portable, modular project which could keep my hands busy while I listened.  I have trouble not fidgeting, and keeping my attention engaged in meetings or classrooms but if I'm doing something simple, like crochet, I can stay present, retain information and think clearly.  It actually works even better for me than taking copious notes.

Now that I'm finished March's intensive two week training, I'm still grateful to have a project that is easy and portable since most of my projects at the moment tie me to my studio and require intense concentration. I've got Jury Service coming up in April, and this crochet will be my way of surviving the tedium of the selection process. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure no judge would allow me to stitch while actually hearing a case, even though it would make me a better juror.

From the top down

Felting the contour edges in bush-green tones.

I've picked up a project again that I started last year and then put aside for other more pressing things.  In the interim I've lost my passionate commitment to the original concept, but the piece is big enough for me to take it quite a bit further before I have to decide exactly what it 'means'.

Felting  needles in action

The 50 metre contour lines are those of Mt Te Aroha, as are the mottled tone greens of the New Zealand bush.  The way I make a mountain (or any landscape) from blankets is to work from the top down, finishing each contour before adding the next one below.

Over-stitching with mixed strands of DMC cotton.

There's a lot of colour mixing to do before I felt and stitch the blankets together.  I blend five shades of dyed wool into combinations of two or three to get the subtlety of many different plants sitting in light and shadow.  The thread is even more work- I separate six stranded DMC cotton into pairs and single strands and them mix six colours into various combinations to stitch as three strands.  After all that finicky preparation I eventually apply the wool and threads more or less at random.

Looking out across the mountain top

Planned Pouf

I have planned this pouf for at least three years.   I found the pattern online so long ago that I've lost the link and it no longer comes up in a search, replaced by other, more recently posted, pouf patterns.

Since I moved back to New Zealand I've been saving every snip of thread and scrap of blanket and other materials for the stuffing.  Filling the cavity this afternoon was a trip through nearly four years of stitching projects.  I packed all the scraps in so tight that the overflowing bale in which I'd been collecting scraps is now almost empty.



I spend ages looking for the right cover fabric and eventually found a couple of metres of this sturdy cotton print in an op shop for just a few dollars. Then there was a long wait to find a home big enough to use the pouf, as I didn't want to make it just to put in storage (as happened to so many projects created in my last place).  Finally, after moving to my new spacious home  a few weeks ago, I needed some dedicated time for sewing something so long anticipated.

Finally today was the day it all came together.

I'm not completely sure why I sustained such a long engagement with this pouf.  As a person with almost no furniture of my own, a pouf is affordable (mine was about five bucks) and versatile (it can be a seat/footstool/coffee table/yoga bolster).  I do love to look at poufs in shops, especially those Indian import shops where each cushion is a luscious patchwork of colourful silks.  But more than I coveted the owning of those beautiful imported poufs I wanted the gratification of making it myself. Indeed, so gratifying is this pouf, both in the making and the sitting, that I think I'll start planning another one.

Introducing Shine, my flatmate's dog and my regular daytime companion

Memorial

My Memorial to the 29 miners who died in the Pike River Coal Mine is finished after one hundred-plus hours  of stitching over several months. It was quite a sad piece to be working on and I'm glad its done now.  

I feel for the families whose sadness has no end, who are still waiting and wishing for the bodies of their men to be recovered.

I entered Memorial for an art award but it wasn't selected, so now its packed away waiting for me to figure out another way to share it out into the world.  Because it is an installation that takes up a lot of floorspace I guess its not easy to slip into a gallery programme.  

Despite the sombre subject and its political implications I think Memorial is beautiful to look at, with so many cones repeating, varied by subtle shades of grey and constructed with deliberately irregular stitching.

Denniston Sampler

In the spirit of the crocheted coral reef I made a few years ago, I'm working on a vocabulary of stitches to represent the mosses, lichens and ferns of Denniston Plateuau. The fragile and unique ecosystem, which seems likely to be lost to opencast coal mining soon, is too delicate for yarn. Instead, I'm working with embroidery floss and stitches, and fine crocheted lace. 

I've been playing around with the stitches on a felt rock that I made for the purpose, a deliberately misshapen slab imitating Denniston's flakey sandstone.  Most of my mosses are pretty straight foward knots, French and Bullion as they are perfect for imitating this kind of low velvety moss.

I also played around with a long looped stitch, cut like a shag pile rug for a spikey moss like the one in the centre of this little clump.

This is the little clump that Robin looked at while we were on Denniston in June, and she said, can you make me this? And I said yes but it turned out a bit sparser than the real thing. Partly as I was impatient to finish it for Robin's birthday (and then I missed it anyway) and partly because I've been distracted by the house and garden that I'm moving to in two weeks.



Also, my crocheted lace green ferns looked ridiculous on the felt rock so I'm using them for something else.  And I couldn't resist adding my own favourite bit of Denniston flora, this low white fluffy thing that I am not sure whether its a fern or a moss or a lichen. If you know, please tell me, I hate my ignorance.

Mysterious Denniston species 

My version of the Denniston white fluffy thing looks like this. It's crocheted lace in a stitch I invented (of course someone probably already invented it, but I was following my intuition rather than a pattern so I can't acknowledge anyone else's version).

Denniston lace on the rock

I made short lengths of the crocheted lace, then starched and pinned it to dry stiff, then ruffled it as I was stitching it to the felt rock base to get the clumpy effect of the original. I do think its a pretty lace stretched out and I might find some other use for this easy and attractive pattern which allows it to be seen better.  Perhaps a gift for a soon-to-be-bride that I know.

Denniston lace: starched and stretched.

How to make a flokati-style rug

Sewing  a Woolrest into a flokati-style rug

 I'm moving to a house in a few weeks. That's right, a real house with rooms with doors, a garden, an oven, a laundry, a bathtub and a separate studio.  I won't know myself after 2 1/2 years living and working in one room, making do without an oven or washing machine, turning my bed into a sofa every single morning, playing Rubics Cube with my possessions every time I want to find or make something.

I have such a crush on the idea of my new home that I think about it all the time. Since I found out about it in early June my imaginative, creative energy has been increasingly absorbed with planning the practicalities and pleasures of setting up my life and work in a much larger space. I've tried to be constructive with the imaginative power of the long lag between knowing and moving with various anticipatory projects such as my 'flokati-style' rug.

I want a warm soft rug in the living room on the polished wooden floor and looked into all sorts of options for making rugs, since buying a nice one is out of my reach.  I was considering various kinds of rag rugs to make with my stash of blanket scraps when I came upon an old Woolrest mattress cover in an op shop for $7.  And suddenly I saw a shaggy sheepy rug as the cosy centre piece of my new lounge.

Woolrest before washing

The single woolrest was a bit tired and grubby when I got it, so the first job was to wash it by gently stomping warm soapy water through it in a bathtub and then rinsing thoroughly with more gentle stomping. I drenched a few big towels squeezing the water out.  After being thoroughly air dried, it came up creamy, fluffy and inviting.   I love the fact my rug is New Zealand wool because I really didn't want an acrylic rug.

I trimmed off the elastic (in good condition so saved for future projects) and label.  Then I backed the woolrest with a heavy coarse woven wool blanket that I'd been given but which was too stained to use for art.  I cut the blanket about 5cm bigger around than the woolrest, which was lucky as during the sewing they magically ended up the same size with very little trimming required!

Woolrests are made of wool staples hooked through a loose wool weave so I could sew between the rows relatively easily.  It was slow going though because I had to make sure the long staples didn't get caught up in the machine foot, or sewn flat.  The weight and bulk of the rug meant I couldn't reach the middle of the rug with my sewing machine so I sewed three rows parallel to each edge starting as near the centre as I could get (about 30cm).I sewed two straight stitched lines inset from the edge and finally zigzagged around the perimeter (overlocking would have been even better).    I kept checking to make sure the blanket was flat and smooth, occasionally unpicking where puckers or bubbles crept in. I need the rug to sit flat and not be tripping hazard!

Stitching between the rows of wool staples

The final step was hand stitching wide strips of old yoga mat onto the back around the edges so it won't slip around on the polished wood. I put out a call on Freecycle if anyone had an old yoga mat, and was given a worn, stained mat that was almost ideal (a white mat would have been more perfect but lavender is good enough).  The yoga mat was molded with rows of tiny holes so I sewed through the holes, catching the blanket but not the woolrest.  I used an upholstery needle for a big running stitch and it wasn't as difficult or slow as I expected.

The whole project, including washing the rug and the yoga mat took about 9 hours (compared to 60+ for a rag rug). The cost was $8 including thread (real flokati rugs cost hundreds).  It will be a no-shoes and no-food rug because flokatis don't vacuum well and I don't want to have to beat it clean too often. It looks beautiful spread out in my tiny current home where I like to dig my bare toes into the pile and imagine lounging on it, in front of the wood burner of my future home.  22 sleeps to moving day!

My newly completed snuggly, cosy, soft and warm 'flotaki-style' rug.

 PS This is my first attempt at blogging a tutorial-style post. I am learning lots from generous tutorials on other people's blogs (at the moment mostly gardening, machine-sewing and DIY decorating). I want to contribute back to the amazing pool of shared knowledge. Since I couldn't find any tutorials already online on this topic this is my gift back to the internet craft/DIY community. Please let me know what you think, especially if you try making yourself a rug like this.

Dazzling

A surprise in my letterbox yesterday: a beautiful little book published by Sanderson Gallery, looking back over its first 10 years.  The biggest, and most delightful surprise of the book, is that my Dispersant installation was the photo they chose to illustrate the section on their Outeredge Project.  The text describes Dispersant as "completely dazzling" which is very nice.

I will be showing work again at Sanderson Gallery this month in their 150x150x150 group show (opening on 7 August). The works are all 150cm2, all priced at $150. A great opportunity to purchase affordable contemporary art.  I used the show as an opportunity to experiment with stitching straight onto stretched canvas.



I blogged earlier about my Yellowcake Uranium piece, for which I couched curls of yellow yarn. I've actually made two of these and sent the second one to Sanderson as it is on the same kind of stretcher as the Asbestos, and I wanted them to be matching.  If you can't get to Sanderson's exhibition or miss out (I hear work sells quick at these shows) I might let you have the other Yellowcake which I actually think is prettier (its the one featured in this blog post)

I also made a piece of Blue Asbestos.  The Asbestos also uses the couching technique but this time with bundles white cotton crochet thread. Yes, I know its not blue, but I used as my model a photo of a kind of asbestos called fibrous tremolite which is in the amphibole blue category of asbestos.

Lace practice

This is one of the very first exercises I tried from Clark's Needle Lace, a nontraditional net (even before the snail). It was useful to attach it to paper and have that firm surface to work on while I was learning the basics. It was also useful to work with quite a coarse crochet cotton, and fun to play with colour a little. I'm pleased enough to have it pasted into my journal.  But I don't really like the look of that loose net stitch, which is a shame because it really is the easiest.

Right now I'm focused on expanding my repertoire of stitches for my next exercise in detatched lace.  I learn each new stitch attached to aida cloth, because the set up for making detatched lace is so time consuming and challenging. Once I'm confident enough to add them to the detatched project, that's where I'll do the hours of practice that it will take for me to develop enough skill to produce the quality I want for my work.  


It turns out the snail was a really good symbol to choose for learning to make lace.

Learning lace

My first complete detatched lace motif,  8cm wide (about 3 inches).
The net fillings are a sampler of different kinds of stitches.

I've been thinking about making lace for years: wanting to, wishing and yet always putting it off. I needed the incentive of a particular project to help me overcome feeling intimidated.  I can't tell you yet about the project but I'll tell you about the learning.

Crochet lace, which I thought was hard to learn...
 and then I started on needle lace and realised that crochet lace is a piece of cake

After gaining some competence with crochet lace I realised it wasn't suitable for the project I have in mind. What next?  Bobbin or pillow lace requires a serious committment to a lot of expensive kit (bobbins, bobbin winder, pillows and pins). It seemed easier (ha!) to start out with needle lace. Needle lace has a history at least as long and illustrious as bobbin lace but only requires a fine tapestry needle to get started.

So about three weeks ago I started teaching myself to make needle lace and now I have finally completed my first little piece of Venetian Point-style lace. I've been following this excellent tutorial online and practicing stitches from Needle Lace-Techniques and Inspiration by Jill Nordfors Clark and  Therese De Dillmont's famous The Complete Encyclopedia of Needlework.  


It is, without doubt, one of the most difficult things I've ever learned, certainly the most difficult textile technique in my wide repetoire.  I've been joking to friends that it's like learning brain surgery, (but thankfully no one can be killed by my poor technique).

Proof of how terrible my first lace really is.  My eyesight (and most people's) isn't good enough to notice most of these messy details even on close inspection, but macro photographs reveals every imperfection. 

Early on a single stitch would take me several minutes, and then be so bad that I unpicked it anyway. Every few stitches I had to stop, get up, and move around to release the tension in my body and mind before returning to the task. But then after some dozen or so hours over of sweating and swearing I imperceptibly crossed a line. Now I wasn't struggling over every individual stitch, but  instead was frustrated by trying to make them into a pattern. And then another dozen or so hours later, some of the patterns started to look better than a stoned spiderweb.

And eventually my little lace snail was finished in all its misshapen glory. My needle lace is lumpy, uneven and a little grubby, as you would expect for a first attempt.  I'm so proud, and yet so ready to start the next little piece so I can work on getting my tension consistent, changing threads smoothly (and keeping the work clean).  I can't wait to take these basic skills and develop a wider vocabulary of stitches and techniques.  And one day my cordonettes will flow and my nets will float.   
  

I'm a bit embarrassed to share these photos which reveal my beginners's clumsiness but I intend to eventually get good enough to make a  beautiful brain out of lace. 

Yummy Yellowcake

Yellowcake

I sort through bags of yarn passed on by a family friend clearing out her craft stash.

Ugly yellow acrylic sits on top of my reject pile while I'm telling my mother about the book I'm reading, Uranium: war, energy and the rock that shaped the world by Tom Zoellner.

I've been thinking about how I could make nuclear power or a radiation leak for a long time, at least since the Japanese tsunami.  That's where my thinking about clouds started before veering off into Dispersant.

Yellowcake, I say to mum, such an innocuous word. Yellowcake is the standard form for safely transporting uranium over long distances from mine to enrichment plant to be converted to fuel pellets for nuclear power plants.   The yellow yarn glows at the edge of my vision.

I sneak the yellow yarn into the bag of wool I'm taking home with me.  The yellow is too bland in its brash brightness. I dye hanks of it in tea, taking some out in minutes, leaving others in overnight so that now I have five subtle shades looking more interesting all together.

I've been thinking about stitching mines straight into plinths and blank stretched canvases.   I can try it out with my ugly yellow wool on the little square canvases in my cupboard.  I start sketching scrabbly and powdery piles and films and cakes of dust.

Couching

How will I stitch my yellowcake? I need a whole new technique.  I get another book off the shelf, The Art of Embroidery by Francoise Tellier-Loumagne seeking inspiration and find it in couching.

I have never couched before, but I don't read the directions, I just look at the photo for a while and then I do it. Which is usually how I figure out new stitches. Why is it so easy for me to learn textile craft techniques and so difficult to learn other useful things like science or accounting or colour theory?

A scattering of uranium

Making Many

A new project in memory of the 29 miners who died inside Pike River Coal Mine two years ago and whose bodies still lie buried in the dangerously gassy tunnels, to the great distress their families.

I'm making 29 of these mounds, small versions of Spoil which was also about coal mining. I've completed six so far. I can make one in a day which makes a nice change from my other long slow projects.  

My thoughts as I stitch these pieces are less about environmental impacts and more about the social costs of mining, one of the most dangerous industries in the world.  An estimated 5000 miners die in Chinese coal mines every year.  Over history, New Zealand has had several mining disasters which have reverberated widely through our small population.  The lies that communities are told about the wealth that mining will bring to locals must be cold comfort to families grieving for their men or caring for loved ones disabled by the job.  The imperative for mining companies to return increasing profits for shareholders is too often at the expense of safety.

Its a sad somber project but also very peaceful to work on. It fits on my lap and there are no tricky design problems to solve. Just the soothing steady push of needles into wool and through blanket.   I turn to this work for relief from the challenges of my other more technically demanding projects and gradually the collection grows.

Just a little challenging

Me and Just a Little Spill (to give you a sense of scale)

Last week, in a mad rush to finish the stitching on my big black oil spill, I spent ANZAC Day sitting on my bed embroidering for 12 solid hours.  As I stitched I watched the entire fourth series of Mad Men on DVD on my laptop.  I enjoyed Mad Men very much. I finished Just a Little Spill which was very good. And I fried my laptop which was very bad.

The mad rush to finish Just a Little Spill was due to tomorrow's deadline to submit an online entry for it to the National Contemporary Art Awards.  An online entry requires one to have a computer and right now I don't have one.  Thanks to my mother letting me use her Macbook I have been able to submit the entry in time but its been extremely stressful to prepare.

Thankfully I'd already organized with photographer Craig Brown for him to photograph Just a Little Spill in his big studio. I found Craig online and chose him because he is the only local photographer who specializes in photographs of things (like cars) rather than people. He was an excellent choice, not only because he had the space and all the gear to manage my enormous black on black on grey, very difficult to photograph, work, but because he is very patient and experienced.  I'm so pleased with the pictures he took for me. Since I didn't have access to my own photos or Photoshop it was a great relief to have such a good full image that a detail view wasn't really necessary.

I've ordered a new desktop computer which will be more impervious to my studio's constant cloud of blanket dust (the original source of the overheating problem that after a year finally fried the laptop beyond repair).  My computer guy thinks he'll be able to retrieve about 95% of my data from the laptop, which will hopefully fill the two month gap since my last backup (let this be a cautionary tale that makes you do a back up right now!).  With luck, I'll be back online at home within the next few days.

Lovely for me

A strand of Dispersant, casting night shadows on the studio wall

In preparation for installing Dispersant in the Outeredge Project window in just a couple of weeks I am attaching my 400 crocheted, dyed and starched globules to fishing lines. I keep coming up short whenever I run out of the strips of old sheet and duvet cover that I use to carefully wrap each strand so they don't tangle in their boxes (five big boxes full so far).  So sometimes a strand of globules is left hanging in my studio for a day or two.  At night my bedside lamp is well positioned to cast lovely shadows through the globs. It is incredibly beautiful and I'm afraid I am the only person who will ever see them looking like this.

I feel sorry for (most) people who only get to see my finished art works in galleries because there are so very many moments of loveliness in the making and you will never know them as I do. I try and share as many work in progress (wip) photos here as I can, and often I continue to use wip photos after the piece is complete, because they remain my favourite images. But if I stopped and took a picture every time I noticed the transient loveliness under my hands I fear I would be even slower than the outrageously slow artist that I am anyway.  So most of my delight unfolds hour after hour in exclusive solitude.

Much of the loveliness can't be captured in photos, and I'm sorry, not matter how I try, my words are inadequate. How can I share with you the feeling of pulling floss through plump felted layers of blanket? The shushing of cotton and wool fibres stroking past each other until I sense just the right tension has been reached, the stitch is complete and the smooth point of the needle probes into the dense softness to begin the next stitch.  Over and over and over again, in a rhythm governed by the ever shortening length of thread, which begins as long as my arm can stretch from my lap and ends as short as the needle.  The trance is broken, I stitch the knot, snip the ends, pull another three strands of DMC off the card and thread the needle.

That's the pause when I am most likely to look beyond the row I am stitching to see the whole of what I've made so far.  Sometimes, especially in the long middle of a big project it's not lovely at all.  There's an awkward adolescence in which the charms of beginning are exhausted and the satisfaction of maturity seems a long way off. But I love the first stages of all my pieces as fiercely as a mother loves her newborn baby.  And coming to the end, seeing my vision made manifest the pieces look as intensely gorgeous to me as they ever will. More than the finished piece will, because once its finished I am stuck with all the little flaws and disappointments I have settled for.  No more potential, and to me, potential where the real beauty lies.

400 Globules

One strand

This morning I finished crocheting the 400th globule for the Dispersant installation.  I think I started the first globule back in September when I was still thinking of them as spheres

Looking up

  for clouds.  It's been a long journey and its not quite finished yet.

Each of the crocheted globules is dyed in tea, then starched in home made wheat starch with a wool stuffing so they hold their sphere-ish shape as they dry. Then the wool stuffing is picked out and finally the globules are tied to fishing lines, ready to hang in the Outeredge Project window next month.Whew!

All together it works out to about 50 minute per globule from start to finish which that adds up to about 333 hours in total of making for this project.  Not quite as long as making My Antarctica, and definitely easier because of the modular aspect of it, but on a similar scale.

I had my first real crack at attaching the globules to their fishing lines this week.  I really like how they look, and can't wait to see them en masse, against the dark blue background.

I'm pleased to have finished the crocheting, especially because at one stage I'd fallen behind my production schedule and was worried I wouldn't get them all made in time. But as usual for me, its a bitter sweet sense of satisfaction because I always enjoy the process of making so much and now that fun part is over.

I'm not sure what I can do next as a portable project to occupy my hands when I'm on the bus, or visiting friends.  Without a little project in my bag I am prone to anxiety and impatience.

Shall I indulge in something purely personal as a break from my gallery oriented projects?  Helen Lehndorf's cute knitted necklace reminded me that I was keen to make a crocheted necklace last year but got caught up in making my globules instead.  

It has to be a very quick project because I am just *this* far away from deciding what my next modular making gallery project will be. Well actually I pretty much know, I just haven't decided yet how urgent it is. So I better hurry out to my storage unit and have a sort through my little stash of wool yarns.

A batch of starch ready to be rubbed into the globules

A visit to the unit

The first action on visiting is always to move the spinning wheel and tapestry frame out into the hallway so I can access what I need. I share the rental on the storage unit with a friend who rarely needs to access his excess household possessions, so his bits are all at the back (top layer of mattresses visible). 

My studio flat is too small to contain me, all my possessions and all my home and studio activities. One of the ways I manage around this is by renting a storage unit about five minutes bike ride away.  Everything that is not in at least weekly use lives in the storage unit. I visit the unit once every week or two. I pick up and drop off what I can fit on my bicycle (or persuade someone with a car to help me, if there is too much bulk for my bike). I spend time there working too: packaging pieces to send to collectors or galleries; photographing work against the big bare walls of the corridor; and sometimes even doing the odd bit of stitching.

Note the green forks on the front of the bike which has lost its some of its glamour since the original forks had to be replaced in a hurry recently.

The list of things to do at the unit this weekend included packaging up a framed work to send to a collector. You can see it squeezed into the saddlebag on the back of my bike above.  I was also going through my fabric stash to choose fabric to sew a dust cover for my new sewing machine.  The vintage curtain fabric below is very funky and fun but also too ugly and weird for me to want to use in something decorative or sartorial. The yellow ground is printed with images of playing cards, smoking paraphernalia, coffee and booze.  I don't share any of those addictions, but making things is my addiction so I finally feel like I've found the right purpose for the cotton.

I learned how to use my new sewing machine on the dust cover project.

The most important task was to get into my Box o' Bergy Bits and prepare some for sending to an exhibition in Auckland next month, at Sanderson Gallery's new Paper/Project space.  The exhibition is called 'Object' (opening 6 March) and I am sending up four of my icebergs, including Big Berg.  When Big Berg was dis-installed from the Imagining Antarctica exhibition last year, someone cut short the fishing line used to suspend it. Since getting the fishing line into the Berg in the first place had been a long morning of tears, bad language and several broken needles, I've been postponing this repair task for months.  Now the time had come, but within the first five seconds, my only big needle broke.  It will have to wait a few more days while I re-equip.  (Lesson learned: provide dis-installation as well as installation instructions).

Iceberg resting on exhibition details

I finally got round to another long procrastinated task, to sew printed cotton labels onto the bases of the smaller bergs.  I've been frustrated with my previous labelling system for a long time until I came up with idea of getting labels printed on cotton that I can sew discreetly onto pieces. At least those pieces that have backsides or bottoms. It makes me cringe have my labels visible which was a problem with my old labelling system, as curators seemed to love to show them off and I would have to go around my exhibition trying to hide the labels, only to find them dragged out into view next time I visited.

What better to have on my label than the URL of my brand new gallery website ?