Huichol Yarn Painting
When I started writing this, it occurred to me that a lot of people are painting yarn these days. But this post is about a painting -made- with yarn. The artist spreads a layer of beeswax onto a board and presses the yarn into the beeswax. The best-known yarn paintings are by the Huichol Indians of southern Mexico. The internet has lots of information about Huichol yarn paintings; you just need to search on those terms.
I love all fibery, textilish things, and Charles and I both love decorative art, like pretty plates, blown glass, embroidery, mosaic, and all that. So when I saw a set of yarn paintings at a shop in Austin, I knew I would be back. They were beautiful and beautifully made. I didn’t think the opportunity to buy such fine work would come along again anytime soon.
This yarn painting is by Maestro Cantadero Chaman Hiuveme (could also be Niuveme), or Master Singer Shaman Hiuveme. He or someone wrote in Spanish on the back, explaining the symbolism in the painting.
Es el sol, la sangre del venado y el fuego por eso lo vemos todo rojo. El ojo de dios y las mariposas mos anuncia la lluvia. Os Huicholes le Resamos y oferenos el ojo dios paca que llueva y la motierra no este caliente y asi poder sembros.
Por eso habmos fiesta ofendas y tejuino, bela para los dioses. Nos escuchen el canto de suplica
Echo por El Maestro Cantador Chaman Hiuveme
Here’s one interpretation of the words:
It is the sun, the blood of the deer, and the fire, for they all go red. The eye of god and the butterflies announce the rain. The Huichols repay and offer the god’s eye [the diamond shape at the center top] for the rain and so the land will not be too hot, and so give power to our planting.
And for this we have a party of offerings and [?unreadable?] beauty for the gods. They hear the song of our request.
Made by the Master Singer Shaman Hiuveme
Caught Up in Cables
“Cables, Bobbles, and Braids” is one of my workshops at the Wool Festival at Taos (and, I hope, at some other venues in 2007). The workshop samples are coming along nicely. I’m really proud of this sample, because it shows how cable stitches are related.
Use your hand or a piece of paper to cover the top part of the sample. You will see two simple cables going up the swatch. They twist in different directions. Okay, now move your hand or the paper to cover the left side of the sample. You should see one cable going merrily up the length of the swatch.
Now look at the whole swatch. Do you see how the two simple cables join up to become a different kind of cable? Barbara Walker calls it the “Horseshoe Cable” or “Double Cable,” but it’s really two regular cables, side-by-side, twisting in opposite directions.
In my workshops, I try to show people how to see relationships among stitch patterns in knitting. It amounts to seeing, with your brain fully engaged. Just like any subject, when you develop a deeper understanding, you are able to appreciate it in a new and satisfying way. Yes, you can enjoy knitting even more than you already do!
We have six hours in the Taos class, so we’re going beyond the basics. To begin, we’ll knit cable, bobble, and braid samples. Then we will design a cable sweater together. Finally, we’re going to design our own cable pattern stitch, either as a class or individually.
Does this intrigue you? Well, you still have a few days to sign up for workshops at Taos, without a late fee.
A Trip to Austin
Charles had to pay a visit to the Geology Library at UTexas, so he said, “Want to go to Austin for a day?” I considered for about a zeroth of a second, and said, “Yes!” My plan? To spend some time communing with the fibers that be at Hill Country Weavers, 1701 S. Congress Avenue, Austin, TX.
I spent a blissful hour and a half looking at yarn and books, and then looking at the yarn all over again. An employee saw me looking at Rachael Matthews’ Knitorama. We both agreed that it is a very silly book, and we both love it! The “Yarn Foreword,” an introduction by Amy Plant brought on nostalgia. She advocates knitting with a lovely cup of Yorkshire tea at your side. I did that many times when we lived in England. Yorkshire tea is delicious.
Hill Country Weavers is in a converted house. Every nook and cranny is filled with yarn. I was glad to see Habu Textiles well-represented. Their yarns are imported from Japan. I knitted a shawl/poncho with their linen paper yarn. It is interesting stuff.
Beautiful yarns from small producers, like Judy & Co. and the Great Adirodack Yarn Co., are featured at Hill Country Weavers. Alongside them are the old standards: Cascade 220 in its many colors, crisp Euroflax Linen and ethereal KidLin, Brown Sheep Yarns, and Tahki Cotton Classic, which is one of my favorite yarns ever, because of the color choice.
This display of Alchemy Yarns stopped me in my tracks. The colors were so saturated, so brilliant, that I wanted to dive in! I love that they use the same colorways on different types of yarn (silk straw, mohair, silk, bumpy yarn).
I bought a few things and made notes about many others for future projects. Stella, the shop doggie, checked on me every now and then, to make sure I was getting along alright.
Another book caught my eye: The Museum of Kitschy Stitches, by blogger Stitchy McYarnpants. The author makes sometimes funny, sometimes mean comments upon ridiculous knit and crochet designs of the past. Some of the fashions are truly terrible. The worst part: I can remember when many of those patterns were originally published!
Cosmic Peacock: The Coat
A fellow member of the Incredible Sweater Machine list on Yahoo remembered my Cosmic Peacock coat from 1997. Another fellow member asked for pictures, and I am extremely flattered and honored to oblige! The coat toured with the 1997 Fairfield Fashion Show, which was sponsored by the Fairfield Processing Company (manufacturers of quilt batting, stuffing, and other fine crafting products).
Here’s the story I wrote, to be read during the fashion show. Much of it is meant to acknowledge the sponsors. The heart of the story is in italics.
Which came first—the peacock or the egg? There’s no doubt, says Suzann Thompson, the peacock did.
She used Style pattern 2551, adapting it to a peacock feather motif. She charted the feather design for knitting, with Cochenille Design Studio’s Stitchpainter Gold. Using Harrisville Designs’ Highland Style 100% wool, she knitted the outer coat fabric on an Incredible Sweater Machine from Bond America. She quilted the knitted fabric with Poly-Fil Cotton Classic batting and embellished it with Prismatic Foil from Meryl Ann Butler Studios, buttons from Blumenthal Lansing, ribbon from Offray, and threads from Sulky of America and Coats & Clark. The coat’s binding is Jigsaw ribbon from Offray.
Our cosmic peacock was looking pretty handsome by this time, with his sparkles and buttons and trims. He caught the eye of a discerning cosmic peahen, and it was love at first sight. She laid a couple of Prismatic Foil eggs in the inky darkness of Rosebar’s Iridescent Taffeta, which lines the coat. The eggs are trimmed with Offray ribbon, and appropriately, baby rickrack by Coats & Clark.
The trousers, McCall’s pattern 8576, are also of Rosebar’s Iridescent Taffeta, trimmed with Offray ribbon, and assembled with thread and a zipper by Coats & Clark.
Nowadays the show is sponsored by Bernina Sewing Machine Company. The garments tend to reflect the change of sponsorship. They are much more floaty, and a lot of the designers go wild with machine embroidery. The show opens each year at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas, and travels around the US and sometimes overseas. If you ever have a chance to see it, do. It is wonderful.
Crochet Trim for Wall Hanging
Some red wool that’s been in my stash for at least a dozen years finally gets its chance to shine! It’s the perfect weight for crocheting a trim for my heart wall hanging. Here it is, mostly done. It will go around the outside of the piece.
Two posts back, I said that the wall hanging looks different in the photo than it does in real life. Woolwinder asked, “How does it look different?” First, the piece looks crisper in the photo. In real life, you see the fuzzy yarn and the texture of the stitches and the sewing. The camera flattens everything out. Also the flash seems to brighten the white, which gives the whole thing more contrast.
The other thing is that I had been working on the piece on a smaller level: cutting the patches, piecing them, sewing each patch. So my eye was seeing things up very close. The photo shows the whole piece, and you can’t really even see the separate patches. It’s a perspective shift, which catches me off guard.
Looking Back to Ladybug
Last year around this time, I finished a little wall hanging. I wrote up the story of its inspiration and sent it to a publication which required that the images and words not be published anywhere else. My story was rejected (don’t feel sorry for me—it’s a fact of life for writers). Now it’s time to show it off!
It’s all knitted on the Ultimate Sweater Machine. I stabilized the pieces with fusible interfacing, trimmed and cut pieces to fit, and machine embroidered the daisies. For the ladybug, I cut a ladybug shape from red, then cut a ladybug-shaped hole from the green background, and set the red piece in. All pieces are sewn to a lightweight cotton background. I added rick rack.
Joy of Joy’s Fabrics in Stephenville, Texas, helped me choose a black and white gingham for backing and binding the piece. Then I quilted the whole thing, bound it, and sewed on buttons.
I teach a workshop called “Small Quilt from Your Old Sweaters,” which covers the techniques I used on the ladybug wall hanging. You don’t even have to know how to knit.
All Pieced and Maybe Ready for Quilting
Here’s the heart wall hanging with its background in progress. The three thrift store sweaters worked well together. I just cut random pieces and pin them in place. Sometimes I have to cut a certain shape, like around the curves of the heart, or between two pieces already in place. Mostly I try to have the knitting going in different directions, and similar pieces spaced apart from each other.
This piece is so beautifully small, that it took me only three late nights to piece the whole thing! And here it is. You would be surprised to see it in real life. It looks so different than it does in the photo. Is it the scale that makes the difference?
It is probably ready for quilting. Luckily I need to buy some fabric for the back, so I have a few days to decide. After quilting and binding, I’ll add trim and buttons and try to make some sense out of this chaos.
Crochet and Solar Clothes Dryer
Some people say this weather is dry and hot and sunny. I say it’s dry, hot, sunny, and perfect laundry drying weather! With all the free solar energy shining down on us, I can’t stand the thought of running the dryer, which uses propane and adds more heat to what we already have.
So we have a clothes line. It’s a little short, so I sometimes hang clothes from other clothes. Today’s laundry included crochet heart placemats, which my friend Vickie made as a wedding present for us over 19 years ago. We use them almost every day and they still look great.
In the 1980s, Vickie made heavy crocheted rugs from strips of fabric. She tore the strips from lengths of cotton fabric, and she had to remove the selvedges. Our heart placemats are made from those selvedges.
I haven’t seen Vickie in years, and I don’t know where she is. I hope she might read this someday and know how much we have enjoyed her gift of crochet.
Meanwhile, as long as this weather lasts (which will be a long time here in Texas), I will enjoy hanging out the laundry. It reminds me of simpler and slower times, though the drying time is anything but slow. Sheets usually dry in about seven minutes. Someday, I’m going to make myself a solar oven.
August Project Spectrum Project
After the long-long lasting snowflake project, I wanted to do something quick in the wall hanging department. It must be small. No new knitting allowed. It must use up lots and lots of buttons. If possible, it must be something I could enter into a quilt show.
I cut a piece of cotton fabric, two feet square. What a shock! It looked so small after that 40 x 40 inch snowflake. Here is the knitting I found in my recycle stash: three different black and white sweaters (perfect for August’s Project Spectrum) and part of a red sweater. You can probably see the fusible interfacing already on the knitting.
Hearts are one of my favorite motifs, so the red is for a heart and the background will be black and white. This is the first night’s progress: I pieced the heart and sewed it to the foundation fabric.
Heart Buttons and Trim
We had a buttons session with the heart wall hanging. My girls tested various black and white button combinations on the piece. It’s fascinating to me how buttons and beads can change the character of a design. I like to use them as part of the design, to accentuate borders or patterns.
I also like to hide buttons in patterns or against a same-color background. This adds a subtle visual interest that most people seem to like a lot. When they find a hidden button, it’s like finding a treasure.
You may be able to make out the crochet trim I made for a border around the outside of the quilt. It will look good, once it is sewn down. Well, the next step was to crochet a red trim to go around the heart. I crocheted a short length of spiky trim, so I could see how it would look.
It didn’t look good.
I tried a plain trim. It didn’t look good.
Clearly, the plan in my head wasn’t going to work in real life.
This sounds frustrating, but this is my favorite part of doing wall hangings. I love the challenge of blending or accentuating borders and patterns within a piece. I love to see how my mental picture compares to the real-life picture.
I spent a pleasant evening trying different trims around the heart. This pleated trim won. It softens the transition from the brilliant red to the black and white. It is sheer, so you can see the patterns behind it, which helps the transition. Now the inside of the trim was pretty stark against the red heart, so I sewed red baby rickrack on top of the edge of the pleated trim. Again, it blurs the border between the white trim and red heart.
