Textile Windfall
There are advantages to being known as textile lovers. Eva, Ella, and I reaped the benefits yesterday. My Aunt Mary used to sew a lot, but she can’t see to sew anymore. She gave us a bag of fabric, appliques, felt pieces, and trims. Eva loved a paisley print, which is destined to become a skirt for her. Aunt Mary knows we appreciate it, and will use it. Thank you notes are on the way!
Sometimes friends of friends of friends of friends find us, too. Former students of my Mom’s teacher friend offered her a box of trims and fabric from their mother’s estate. The lady sewed, but the children didn’t. Their teacher said, “I can’t use it, but I know someone who will.” The box has been making its way to us for several months, and it is finally here.
We felt like treasure hunters as we pulled out borders and trims, one after the other. I love all the crochet, but the rick rack and crochet trim is my favorite. I’ve seen the combination of crochet with rick rack and other trims in reprints of old crochet books, so it’s been around for a while.
Several of the trims look like they’ve been removed from some other piece, and saved for another use.
We are grateful to those who take the time to pass these wonderful things to someone who will love them.
The sewing lady had wonderful taste in trims–our minds are spinning with possibilities!
Crochet, Crochet, Crochet
It’s crochet city up here around Washington DC. Ladies are wearing fine thread crochet tops. Some are worn over solid color tops. Some are lined. Our group ate supper in malls the last two nights, and we saw those cute crochet tops in lots of shop windows.
Crochet is all over accessories, too. Claire’s Accessories, the best girl store I know, had thread crochet-covered headbands and journal covers. Individual crochet flowers crop up as decoration on all kinds of stuff. Handbags are either crocheted or have lots of crochet in the construction or trim. And we saw lots of crochet shawls and ponchos.
Then there was the skirt in pinapple-pattern crochet, lined with white. Eva thought it looked great. “I made one like that, years ago,” I said. How many years ago? About 25. It was originally lined in white, but now in green, which is Eva’s favorite color. I promised to find it for her. Check back, because I’ll post a photo of it.
Guess I can also haul out the pretty pineapple-crochet shawl I made about the same time as the skirt, and I’ll be on the cutting edge of fashion.
We have a couple of hours at the Smithsonian Museums tomorrow, and we’ve tentatively agreed to see the First Ladies’ Inaugural Ball Gowns. Can’t wait!
March 20, 2006: Here are the pics of the crochet skirt. Couldn’t resist including our wisteria in one of the shots. My memory was pretty good about when I made the skirt. It was in a show called “Tying the Knot,” a show of wedding clothes and accessories at Hill Country Weavers, Austin, Texas, in 1982.
Knittingham Puppy Farm
We’re back from Washington DC, where we were kept so busy by our elderly tour guide, that I was too exhausted to knit. There wasn’t time! My red poncho was admired by the group. One of the ladies is from The Netherlands, where she used to knit all the time. “But the sweaters are so cheap here, there’s no need to knit!” she said.
We watched a couple of educational videos on the bus, and during those, I managed to knit the armhole edging on Eva’s yellow vest. It’s almost done. Then I need to finish up my samples for the next issue of INKnitters.
Here’s a little trivia for you: Scooby Doo, the famously cowardly and hungry dog detective, was born at Knittingham Puppy Farm. The farm is owned by Mrs. Knittingham. Is it possible that her ancestors were knitters? Did she come from a place famous for knitters? We can always hope.
Sore Feet in Washington DC
We’re in Washington DC as part of a school trip. It’s great. After a very short tour of the Capitol Building today, we had lunch at the Library of Congress and then went to its Visitor’s Center. It is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Every surface is covered with decoration, including gold leaf, decorative painting, and, oh yes, mosaic! The mosaic floors and ceilings are breath-taking. Hope I can find something out about it–could be made by Italian mosaicist. Pictures in a week or so.
It may have been beautiful, but Eva was mad. “I want to see the books. When can we see the books? You don’t go to the Library of Congress to see the architecture, you go to see books,” she ranted. So the dream will have to be postponed.
Did I say pictures in a week or so? Why is that? Because we have been forced to fall back on film for this trip. Can you fathom it? I foolishly put down our digital camera to pay for something at one of the Smithsonian museums. I guess I forgot to pick it up. When we went back to look for it, the clerk said, “Was it on this corner?” Yes, it was. “I think a gentleman picked it up,” she said. Another clerk standing nearby said, “He must not have been a gentleman.”
I felt bad enough about it, but my daughter had so enjoyed snapping pictures of all the interesting sights, that I felt even worse knowing that she couldn’t do that anymore 0n this trip. Ah well. The thief will undoubtedly suffer karma. My current understanding of karma is that it is all bad, so apparently, “bad karma” is redundant.
But here is something funny to close with: at the National Zoo, a man walked up to the information booth. He said, “Do you have any kangaroos?” The woman at the booth, a National Zoo employee, said, “No, I don’t think so. We have emus. That’s the closest thing we have to kangaroos.”
That is a true story. I heard it with my own ears.
Maglia and Uncinetto
With a German mother who knits and crochets, and her mother, and yes, her mother, I am naturally a great fan of international craft magazines. Some German mags have been available over here for years (Anna, for instance). Mon Tricot, a French knitting mag, offered designs and ideas that were fresh to US eyes in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
My foreign craft magazine habit has been well-known for a long time. My Tante Christa sent me a now-defunct German magazine called Handarbeiten (handworks). I loved that magazine.
Charles brought me a stack of crochet and knitting magazines from Mexico, when he did his graduate field work. Greek craft mags are stunning, with lots of embroidery, cross stitch, and crochet. We couldn’t leave Barcelona without stopping by a book store to check out the needlework and craft books and magazines.
I waited until the last minute to check out craft mags in Italy, but luckily the train station news agent was open for business on Sunday afternoon. These were my favorites. The blue and white, knitted and crocheted sweater on the cover, sold me on le idée di susanna. Love that name. Cross stitch took up most of the pages.
Consigli pratici has knitting (maglia), crochet (uncinetto), embroidery, cross stitch (punto croce), and even beauty tips and recipes.
I don’t make a point of collecting baby patterns, but the clothes in Prestigio collana—Moda Baby were so cute, I had to get the mag. There are a couple of little jackets that I think could be successfully translated to adult sizes.
By matching pictures to words in the basic instructions, you can figure out what words go with which stitches. Combine that with the fantastic charts, and you can pretty much work out how to make the garments. You’d have to be a reasonably accomplished crocheter.
Correction: I said in an earlier post that Filatura di Crosa was the yarn manufactured by the Missoni family, but that is wrong. There was a Missoni yarn up until just recently. The family got out of the yarn business to concentrate on designing. They have an interesting website. It has a very design-y, European feel to it. You can view it in English.
Mosaics of Mine
Here they are! These are the mosaics I made at Luciana Notturni’s Mosaic Art School. This one is a copy of a tiny portion of the grand mosaic at St. Vitale, a Byzantine church in Ravenna. It is mostly glass, with quite a few gold tesserae. Along the edges, the browny-yellow is made with stone interspersed with gold.
We all got a lot of help with our copies. Several square inches of my left edge was mysteriously filled in, on the second morning. I learned best by watching the teachers demonstrate or correct mistakes. A million words might make your brain understand how to do a thing, but it’s much better to see hands at work. In fact, there’s Luciana helping a student in the photo at the top left—a familiar sight in our class, too.
Our small mosaics were of our own design or inspiration, worked directly into cement. I used glass tesserae for this heart, choosing the shades of pink and lavender from the many colors available in the studio. The border around the heart is thin glass pieces alternating with pebbles. Pebbles fill in the background.
I enjoyed our workshop very much. I’m sold on the groutless mosaic technique. Without a doubt, grout has its benefits for certain applications. The ancient technique we learned opens up far more possibilities for me, as I consider what sort of mosaics we want to have in our house.
Another valuable aspect of the week spent in Ravenna, was seeing a well-organized studio in action. As I mentioned before, Luciana’s studio was very much a community and family effort. She provided leadership and expertise for most of the pieces produced in the studio. It was a pleasure to see how the other craftsmen, apprentices, teachers, and speakers worked toward the common goals of producing mosaics and teaching classes.
Dale Chihuly, an American glass artist, works in a studio with many other glass-blowers, some of whom are also artists. I’ve read about his studio and seen an inspiring documentary about him and his cohorts in art. Chihuly’s studio, like Luciana’s, produces a great deal of work, much more than one person could hope to accomplish.
To me, a studio with several craftsmen and students is the best way to realize an artistic vision, and also to pass on a lifetime (or more!) of expertise to the upcoming generation. I guess weekend retreats and conventions are one way to do this, but a year with a master artist/craftsman would be a whole lot better. I want a studio like that someday. Give me about seven years.
Some Recent Mosaics in Ravenna
Gold tesserae have a thin layer of 24-carat gold sandwiched between one thick and one thin layer of glass. Ancient mosaicists used gold to symbolize the light of God and to actually reflect light from those lofty mosaics down to the church-goer at floor level.
Apparently, tourists love lots of gold in their mosaics. But our teacher, Luciana, told us several times that precious materials don’t necessarily make precious mosaics. Good design, good technique, and judicious adherence to the rules of mosaic, add up to a fine mosaic.
Mosaic-making rules include using light, medium, and dark colors; following the line of a design; and outlining design elements with background color before filling in the background. But once you know the rules, you can break them. “If it’s choice,” said Luciana, “it’s not mistake.”
You can make the same general observations about knitting and crocheting. Expensive, fancy yarn doesn’t guarantee a good product. Understanding the commonly accepted rules of design, color use, and garment construction, gives you a firm footing from which to break those rules.
Sorry, the soapbox is a constant temptation to me. Back to mosaic.
This breath-takingly fabulous fountain gives the impression of gold from afar. There are a lot of gold tesserae in the mosaic, but Luciana pointed out that orange, yellow, and brown tesserae, plus iridescent ceramic tiles contribute to the golden appearance of the fountain, without the cost of gold.
Now let’s move in closer. The stylized double-helix shape is covered with multicolored motifs and patterns. It looks interesting from afar, and even more interesting up close. Here’s a really close shot of one of the patterns.
The Peace Park in Ravenna features mosaics by artists from across the world. I loved this one. It is a large crescent-shaped piece that is rich in texture, line, and contrast. In these details, you can see that it is made of stones, bricks, pipes, and stone paving tiles. “You can have a good mosaic with poor [humble] materials,” said Luciana.
Look at the white, gray and dark areas of this next one. Those are made with dark-colored cement and white tesserae. The artist crowded the white bits together for white areas. She spaced them out or turned them up on their corners for gray areas, and she left the cement unadorned for dark areas. I love that. You can achieve a similar effect in knitting by combining knit and purl stitches in certain ways.
Finally, here are some mosaics about town that you probably won’t see these in any art books. This is a strip that replaced a line of bricks in the pavement. Luciana and her students wanted to replace the bricks up the length of the street, but the city of Ravenna couldn’t or wouldn’t stump up the funding.
This pretty strip surrounds the window at the mosaic gallery of Scianna on Via di Roma.
These are in the park in front of the city museum of Ravenna.
Tomorrow, I’ll post the mosaics I made at Luciana’s Mosaic Art School”. Finally!
Some Old Mosaics in Ravenna
Ravenna’s Byzantine and Roman mosaics are famous and beautiful and mostly very difficult to photograph, because they are so high or so large. You can find good pictures of Ravenna’s ancient mosaics and their fascinating history online and in books. Better yet, go there and see for yourself.
When most people couldn’t read, the mosaics at the St. Apollinaire Nuovo church told a story of religion and leadership during the reign of Emperor Theodorico. When the Emperor Justinian conquered the city, he destroyed the mosaic likenesses of Theodorico and turned the mosaics of Theodorico’s court into pictures of saints. Justinian preserved only the mosaics that agreed with his orthodox Christian beliefs. This happened around 1,500 years ago, which goes to show that political spin and manipulation of the media have been around for a long, long time.
The photo shows some of the converted saints at the left, and the three wise men bearing gifts in the middle above the arches. I tried to show the stunning scale of the building and the mosaics, by including the tourists in the photo.
In the 1990s, a development company started construction on a block of flats in the city of Ravenna. The flats had already been sold, and the new owners were probably happy that a parking garage was going to built under the building.
The parking garage excavation stopped when workers struck a very dense layer, which turned out to be seven layers of mosaic floors, dating from Roman times, built one on top of the other! Ten years went by as archaeologists and mosaic restorers excavated the site, ingeniously preserving the layers of floors. The water table is very high in Ravenna, so the site had to be pumped continuously, which caused subsidence problems for the surrounding buildings.
An underground museum took the place of the parking garage, and that’s where these photos are from.
I’ll get back to knitting and crocheting pretty soon. These mosaics are just too good to keep to myself!
A Texan Knits and Crochets in Italy
The Winter Olympic flame has flared and faded, and with it my Olympic dream has come and gone (until next time, anyway). I knew that my trip to Italy and the mosaic workshop would cut seriously into my knitting time. How could I know that my classmates would be so genial? How could I predict that we would spend each evening relaxing over delicious Italian food and talking, talking, talking?
In a serious bid to catch up on the knitting for my Olympic project, I knitted on the train to Venice and back. On my last day in Italy, I knitted on the train back to Bologna, looking up every once in a while to admire the neatly pruned orchards and vineyards, all ready for spring.
I spent all afternoon in my hotel in Bologna knitting and watching, or rather listening, to BBC World on the TV. Some comments by the newscasters made me fear that the Olympic flame was already out! But no, I flipped to an Italian station a little after 8 p.m. and found the closing ceremonies.
I skipped supper and feverishly knitted the last few sections of my poncho. I was grafting the seam, when the Olympic committee president said, “Arrivederci, Torino!” Luckily, he went on to repeat his speech in English and French. And of course there were a few more speeches, and I kept my head down, working away.
Because the TV announcers spoke Italian, I didn’t know the exact moment the flame went out. Piecing together the events from a newspaper account, I realized that I was probably still grafting when the deadline passed.
However, I am a winner even without the fabulous gold knitting Olympics medal. I started the project, and it is finished: a poncho, straight across the front, going down to a point in the back. I used less than 3.5 oz of Habu’s shoshenshi linen paper with viscose, knitted on size 8 needles. To make the neck narrower than the hem, I used short row shaping.
I started crocheting Ella’s international poncho at the Bologna Airport. I put it down to admire miles and miles of rugged Alps: snow-covered crags tinged with the faintest yellow by early morning sunlight, and casting long blue shadows.
I picked up the poncho again at London’s Gatwick Airport, and crocheted between meals and movies, over the northern Atlantic, and across snowy and icy north-eastern Canada. By the time we reached DFW, the poncho was all crocheted. We added fringe and a tie at home.
Aren’t our daffodils pretty? They are a very welcome sight after our cold, dry, brown winter. Here’s another reminder that spring is on its way: a bluebonnet seedling! The bluebonnets are sprouting very late this year, because of the dry weather.
More to come about Ravenna, its mosaics, and my finished mosaics.
Scenes from a Mosaic Studio
Luciana Notturni is the master mosaicist and founder of the Mosaic Art School that I’ve been writing about these last couple of weeks. She teaches workshops like the one I took, about three times a month. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts and the School” of Mosaic Restoration in Ravenna. She and her studio staff restore ancient mosaics, as well as reproducing portraits (like the two pictured here) and motifs from ancient mosaics to sell to tourists. Many pieces are for sale in a shop that Luciana keeps near the center of town.
Luciana and the other craftsmen, students, and apprentices of the studio, work on commissions such as interpretations of paintings. A painter joined with Luciana’s studio in proposing this large piece for an art-in-public-places competition. Their proposal won the contract. For reference, a copy of the painting attached at the right edge of the mosaic’s frame.
Here are some of my classmates working at a long table in the studio.
My spot was at the far end, and to my right was this wall of shelves containing bags and boxes of colored glass. What a temptation for a gal who loves color. And to add to the color extravaganza, here are color sample cards of vitreous glass and marble.
To my left, was this collection of hardies. A hardie is a blade sunk into a heavy piece of wood. To cut stone or glass, you hold the piece on the blade and tap it with a hammer. One can cut glass and stone to tiny dimensions, like 1mm pieces, using the hammer and hardie. However, our teacher Annalise told us that it’s much harder to cut larger pieces correctly.
Mosaic college students must spend a specified number of hours working on mosaics. I liked these tulips that a student completed while we were at the studio.
It took all five days to begin to absorb the sights of the studio. This lady and the small landscape hung on the walls. The round reproduction of an ancient Roman piece, the two-way head, was propped behind a door.
