nemo ignorat

the fog

The last days I was cranked, wound up and felt itchy in my own body, all at the same time. While my brain is meandering about fish shapes and how to realise them in 3D and fabric, I tried to keep my hands occupied with some quilting on the large blanket, felt dissatisfied with it, packed it away began sorting my fabrics came across some quilt tops I started so many years ago, I can't even remember when, and tried to work on them for a while. But you know how it is, the disquiet and restlessness is still there. And it didn't help that DH had to work the weekend and came down with the flu sunday evening. Some people are not the best patients.

Yesterday was worst. I was cranky, moody, didn't want to talk (which is not easy with two other people in the house who love to talk the whole time) and began blaming alternately DH, my Mum and myself for it. (The only highlight the whole day was DebG's beautiful smile, I still smile when I think of her picture.) I stitched a bit here and there, spun some yarn for mending holes in some sweaters, sewed on some buttons and finally succumbed to stupor while at the same time not being able to sleep. And I had terrible dreams. Which made waking up this morning not better.

But I have two dogs who don't have any sympathy for cranky, tired humans who would just love to get back to bed. So I went on my usual early walk in the woods. It was foggy. The kind of fog that hangs between the feet and drips from the trees. It is wet and your breathing opens up because of the humidity. You don't see anything and every sound is so much louder. I was a bit later than usual. It was still dark but the birds were already active with the occasional owl hooting in between. Enveloped in the external fog, my internal fog seemed to clear up. I had one light moment after the other and in the same flow the external fog got gradually lighter, my mind became serene and my heart calmed down.

Over the next month, I have several commitments, tasks and obligations. Which all weighed me down.

- There is Glennis' indigo workshop beginning next week, for which I really have to clear my workspace and set up a fermentation vat. (something which has priority, the fermentation vat needs some days to get going in this cold)

- I have to sew some more fish (that is always the problems with commisions, you have a fixed date and you need a certain number, but it can't be helped, no way out of it, especially since I don't want out).

- I'm still carrying around a commision for a woven blanket for a friend. (more on it further down)

- I want to stitch more more more on a new project.(very important but I can do it in my own time, no need to rush, it doesn't go anywhere)

- I need some more clothes, spring closes in and I need to get going with my sewing. (I'm not going naked, just not in the clothes I want to wear. That's all.)

- And then there is this thing, I really dread: a spin retreat at the end of the month.

  I am really bad with people. In the sense of shy bad. Too many people and I don't feel secure. And whenever I don't feel secure, I come across as arrogant which doesn't really help to loosen things up a bit. But on the other hand, I want to go, even if I dread it. Among all the unfamiliar people there are some old friends I don't see very often. And I want to be able to spend some time with them. And - even if it costs me a lot of courage - it is important for me to get out. To meet other people. So I will go. But it already weighs on my soul.

But at least I feel calmer, now that I found the source of my disquiet. And I even solved a design problem on my walk. The woven blanket.

It was a trade with a friend. She is a wizard on the knitting machine and DH needed a new sweater. Like most men, he seems to live on a perpetual heater, so that he prefers his sweaters a bit thinner. Which means knitting with sock yarn. In anthracite. Plain coloured. Without any pattern to break up the monotony of a plain anthracite large sweater in sock yarn. My friend said, this borders on a reason to divorce. I wouldn't go that far but I agreed that knitting machines have their advantages. So she knitted this boring plain coloured anthracite large sweater in sock yarn on her knitting machine and in return I offered to use up some of her stashed yarn in a woven blanket. When I got the yarns, I could see why they ended up in her stash and stayed there for years. The colours, the material, the yarn itself - simply yikes.

So I tried a wide warp with vertical stripes. Nope.

A small warp with horizontal stripes. Definitely not.

And I even began knitting a long vertical colour repeat. Booooring and, um, no.

But this morning - eureka - I finally realised: I can use every fabric as I like. Woven ugly yarns are, in the end, just fabric. I am not limited to traditional vertical or horizontal stripes woven on wide or small warps. I can weave long stripes on the backstrap loom and then cloth weave them on a woollen back. Or sew them together for a larger fabric. I am free in using it as I think fit. In my mind, I can already see that even these ugly yarns can make something good this way.

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So, apologies for the long entry. I think I needed to write it down to get it out of my system in a way. And to keep it as a reminder that the fog will dissolve, even if it sometimes means going out into the tangible fog first.

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Now, I'm off to my dye workshop, clearing up for the upcoming indigo jam session ;o)

wild fish

When I began the Valentine's Day pillow, it was meant as an exercise in 3D cloth weaving. Due to the special cloth I used, it became much more but I still wanted to move on to other shapes. One shape in particular stuck in my mind: a fish.

I love fish. Ever since I was a child, I dream of being able to breathe under water. While other kids dreamt of flying, I dived and swam in my dreams and never needed to surface. I love our holidays at the seaside and if I was able to do as I wished, I would live somewhere at the Atlantic Coast. (Sorry, but not Germany's seaside. I am no great fan of North or Baltic Sea. In my mind they are no real oceans.)

Anyway, after finishing the Valentine's Day pillow, I cut out a fish shape from some old cotton bed sheet, sewed it together, filled it with some viscose/ramie-fibres I had in my stash for ages (I thought about spinning them but viscose feels really icky to spin) and began cloth weaving. Only to realise that cloth weaving and fish shapes don't go together well. Remembering my trip into mosaics (yes, yes, show me a craft I haven't tried yet) and the famous pointillists, I cut out small (about half an inch) rectangles and sewed them onto the fish shape and lo and behold, it worked really well. It takes a hell of a time, it took me about a week to sew on every scale but I love it. From nose to tail the fish is about 45 cm (about 17 inch) long.

I'm now at the stitching phase. Every scale is stitched down by a backstich/running stitch (whichever fits better). I'm still thinking about the eyes. She (yes, it's a female fish) already has eyes but they are not finished yet. But I do like her mouth.

There are more to come. My friend at the cupcake shop was asked to open it during a museum's event in july. (It's called 'Lange Museumsnacht' during which all museums in a town open all night long and you can enter all of them for a fixed rate.) And she asked me to provide her with a window decoration. We are now planning a bestiary of rag beasties or Assumentum Bestullae ;o)

DH called them cross stitch tatoos ;o) The cross stitch fabrics are remnants of my cross stitch phase. Originally I planned a pojagi curtain with all the old cross stitch fabrics. Maybe one day. Until then, she will be a tatooed fish.

The Assumentum Bestullae will be my way of using up the old synthetic dyed fabrics. My Procion MX phase is long gone and I think they are too garish now for clothing. But they look great on the fish I think ;o)

Make Love Not War

Valentine's Day is nothing we usually celebrate. Germany doesn't have its own Valentine's Day tradition. This year will see an exception.

I wanted to experiment with 3D cloth weaving like Jude showed it in her Boro Class. I am fascinated by the process and have some shapes in mind I want to put to test. So for trying out the method, why not make a heart shaped pillow for a friend of mine who certainly will appreciate it. I used some old tablecloth for the basis, stuffed it with some more old fabric scraps and then looked for appropriate fabrics, i.e. some pinks and greens. Pinks and greens are spring colours (and the signature colours of my friend's cupcake shop as well). Although I prefer not to dye with synthetic dyes anymore, I still have a lot of fabrics from my Procion MX days.

One special fabric found its way on the pillow: fragments from an old cotton blanket my father brought back from military hospital when he was wounded in WWII. Which made me think a lot about him while sewing and stitiching.

He was 20 when he was drafted. He didn't really have a choice. Deserting never was an option back then. My father's family lived in a barren rural mountain region for over 500 years. For over 500 years they were farmers, shepherds and butchers. Where should he go? So, he was 21 when they marched towards Russia, and in a way he got lucky. Somewhere on the way, he got caught by a shrapnel and lost his left leg at the thigh and parts of his right calf. For him, the war was over. That he survived the injury and was able to become an almost whole person with wife and three children and a job as landscape gardner for the city council, showed how resilient he mentally and physically was.

When I was born, he was already 46. Due to his disability and his age, he never was one of the active fathers running around with his children. (We went swimming together very often, in the water it didn't matter how many legs he had). But he was a good father nevertheless. And he taught me well. When I asked him as a little child, what happened to his leg, he told me, he lost it in the war.
"What is war, dad?" "War is bad."
It's a simple as that.

He died on his 88th birthday 4 years ago in February.

I think it is fitting to incorporate a blanket from a military hospital from one of the worst wars in human history into a little love present to Valentine's Day.

Make Love Not War

quilting

The cold is exhausting. Luckily we're on the western part of the Siberian coldfront but still, -15°C (that's 5° F for those who aren't metric ;o)) is really cold. Especially at 5 am in the forest. Fortunately, the dogs don't seem to mind. And no, they don't wear vests or anything. I'm the one in the seven layers of woollen underwear and sweaters and whatnot. I praise all ancestors who had the idea to breed sheep.

Due to the cold, I wasn't as productive as I wanted to be. A lot of my ironing is still lumping around in baskets but I descided it was time to work on my quilt again.

Two years ago, I've sewn DH a quilt. As it happened, I was unable to walk around much with a rather bad knee and 6 weeks to wait for the appointment at the specialist. (BTW by the time I had the appointment, the knee was better and we could start aftertreatment at once - and it most probably saved me from a knee surgery. Lucky me.) So I took the opportunity and made the quilt. When I asked DH about specifications, he just said: large and green. Well, that's what it is:

The larger pieces are hand dyed (synthetic dyes) bourette silk and the smaller ones small linen pieces I bought in bulk from a flax cooperative in Northern Germany some years ago. They sell (sold?) the leftovers from their tailoring in bulk. The quilt was sewn during those 6 weeks, while I was cooling my knee and watching the whole 7 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Therefore I called it Forest Quilt or an Hommage to Gene Roddenberry.

The quilt stitiching was done with two different green linen threads, it has no batting/wadding but a flanell backing and really is warm enough. And it is about 2x2m (which is a bit more than 2x2 yrd). 

Why am I telling this. Well, first of all, I really like the quilt and wanted to show it to you. And secondly, last year when I went off to ISEND, I took a lot of hand dyed (natural dyes) patches with me to have something to do while sitting around. And the top was finished in december:

The patches are mostly vintage cotton and linen and some are bourette silk. The undyed fabric is from a bolt of vintage linen. Rather dense but wonderful fabric. Like the Forest Quilt, this one is about 2x2m as well, no batting/wadding and a flanell back. This time, I quilt with some silk threads and a hemp thread, some naturally dyed. And although I told myself after the Forest Quilt, I would never ever quilt such a large cloth again in one go, right now it is quite cozy underneath it.

Stitching on my quilt and watching and listening to Jude's magic diaries (I'm still behind schedule) made me think what I am doing.

I like complicated, colourful pieces. But my patchwork blankets are mostly functional and for warmth. Maybe my approach will change when I begin piecing a larger cloth together from all those experimental pieces, we'll see. I always was really bad at following patterns and trodden down paths.  Back then, I tried to follow patterns and tried to make things like the manual said they should be made. And I failed colossally. Always. So I began seeing patterns and rulebooks a bit like the pirate code, more an inspiration and as a guideline, which worked much better. And now I am on my way to really let go and go with the flow, so to say. I know, I wrote this before, but I still feel like I am standing on a cliff top ready to jump, not yet jumping. More like hopping up and down on the spot, opening my arms, ready to fly and shouting FREEDOM ;o)

Right now, some words are buzzing around in my head: neo-tribal, post-apocalyptic and most of all STELLIFEROUS.Weird combination but they all fill me with a warm fuzzy feeling and I think there is potential in them.

The cold has one big advantage: the night sky is crytal clear and indigo blue, with a bright yellow moon and lots and lots of stars.

another experiment

I am in an experimenting mood right now. I really have the urge to try new things, so I go with the flow and work on several new beginnings. The day before yesterday, I was mostly working on some vest pattern. I try to sew as many of my clothes as possible. So far I stopped only at Jeans (though I have a really nice organic cotton canvas ready for some new trousers already lying around) and underwear. Just the thought of the amount of underwear I would have to sew is a bit daunting. But we'll see.

One piece of cloth I regularily wear is vests. In summer only with a top underneath, during winter with shirts or even sweaters, vests are my staple clothes. And I really like my sewing to be functional. Just wearing accessories for the pure decorative effect is not my thing. To cut a long story short, when I looked at the elefant cloth, I thought, why not make it into a vest. So I worked out a paper pattern for a vest and realized, it wouldn't work on the elefant cloth. Which didn't stop me I just tried something different. Woven cloth directly into the vest pattern.

I wouldn't say it's perfect yet. It's not even what I imagined, it is still too geometrical, to organized for my taste but it's a start. I think, there is potential. But did I mention too organized? I will have to work out a way to let go.

I will be signing off until monday. I finally need to do some house work (my ironing basket already multiplied and Mum needs some attention) and I need to do some real stitching now. Not only the beginning of experiments but stitching and seeing where the cloth wants to go.

And I added something to the About section. Bits and pieces about me. In case you wonder who is writing. Somehow I don't find a way to open a comment section there as well. Still getting used to typepad's CMS.

See you all on monday

still wandering

Ulrike