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Bobic 1997 - 2014
He was an abused dog and we found each other in an animal shelter.It was love on first sight. Hubby called him the Grumpy Punk Dog. He didn't take shit from no one. Except me.
We had loads of fun, good walks, went on countless bike tours, we had interesting times and he was a great companion and friend. He will be dearly missed.
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When I went the roses started to bud and I feared I would miss them. But thanks to a not so nice cold spell it all got delayed till I came back.
Prepare for some rose power ;o)
I'm in fnishing mode. I left several UFOs behind which are now being finished. One of the is my new market tote
Since we all arrived on different days, most of us met in the lobby of a hotel in Tokyo. Which was more or less on the other side of town. Underestimating the Japanese inability to speak English and overestimating my own sense of direction, I wandered around more or less in circles on my search for Tokyo Station. It was easier the day before when I arrived and just took the most direct route to the hostel. 45 minutes later (I did even then see interesting parts of Tokyo‘s banking quarter which were not supposed to be on my direct route) I arrived there and that was it. But the next day I felt adventurous and thought I could just walk to Shinjuku Station next to which we were supposed to meet. And it would have been possible only I lost my way so many times on the way to Tokyo Station that what took me 45 minutes the day before took me more than 1.5 hours the next day. And yes, I have Google maps and I had a physical map as well. Google maps shows only Kanji (the Chinese-Japanese characters) and doesn‘t seem to be quite sure about directions either when it comes to navigation and my physical map only showed Romanji (our letter system). Yes, Tokyo has his main streets labeled with both writing systems. But I got lost in the maze of small backstreets with no Romanji street signs. A very, very nice policeman (with less than basic English) put me back on my track and then I just took a taxi (whose driver didn’t speak English either) to Shinjuku Station and arrived just in time after an odyssey of almost 3 hours.
Like with so many big cities it seems almost unbelievable how rural it can become only a few kilometers outside the wider city boundaries. And Fujino is rural.
Wonderfully so with those lush green steep hills, bamboo forests, tea terraces and the scattered farm houses. Walking up the steep hill to Bryan’s house you are greeted by two large indigo vats in ceramic pots that are standing right and left to his main entrance. We would use these vats every day over the course of the next 10 days.
The first thing Bryan did was to get us introduced into the chemistry of the indigo vats, how to judge the vat’s health, feed it with what it might need and how to use it.
Since not all of us had experience in dyeing with indigo out first exercise was over dyeing several skeins of cotton yarn. Indigo has the wonderful property of making everything look much nicer. Even weird beige colours and ghastly turquoises. Bryan owns an old industrial knitting machine with which he produces long tubes of knitted fabric. And those over dyed yarns were meant for this knitting machine. At the end of the workshop each of us got her piece of knitted fabric. It might just be enough to a sleeveless t-shirt, I’m still pondering. (Which will take me a while like always.)
With the over dyeing of the skeins, Bryan established a kind of base line for his students. From where he could move on. With out next task we moved to the large and wide field of shibori. I had some experience with basic shibori stitching in the past. During Glennis’ workshops I folded those mandalas and stitched the dragon fly. More or less successful.
At Bryan’s I was introduced to the high ART of Shibori. The many variations, the time and effort one can invest in one piece and the nice little tricks in dyeing it. I didn’t put that much time into Shibori though because of all the many other textile techniques I was offered.
Especially Katazome. Katazome is the Japanese craft of stencelling a resist on fabric. Something I really wanted to learn now for quite a while. We have a similar technique in Germany called Blaudruck. But unlike Katazome this is done by printing the resist with wood block prints onto the fabric before dyeing it with indigo (in our case it was mostly done with woad and naturally we wouldn’t use rice paste but some wheat flour paste but that’s just local flavour). Because of the wood blocks local patterns usually are much smaller and live mostly from the repeat.
Katagami are larger and the patterns can be much more elaborate depending on the provenance. Kaki Shibugami, the special stencil paper is made from paper glued together by fermented unripe persimmon juice high in tannin content and then smoked over a wood fire for several days. It is almost impossible to get outside of Japan (and if only to exhorbitant prices) and since unripe not sweet kaki are not available at my place (or anywhere near) I will have to find another method to produce something similar useful.
Right now I’m thinking of walnut or oak tannin or simply boiled lineseed oil as it is used as base coat in paintings. If all fails I will have to resort to plastic stencil paper. Not my favourite but better than buying the original stuff from Japan (or someplace else). Again, something I have to ponder about. After shibori we got out our homework. He had send us some shibugami to cut our own stencils at home.
And now he showed us how to make the resist paste (although we ended up using ready to use resist paste everything else would have ended in very complicated logistics with 9 people), how to prepare the stencils and the fabric and how to apply the paste onto the stencil and the fabric. And he brought us to a katazome master whose workshop we could visit and use for some smaller stencil experiments. Especially his fermentation indigo vats were very interesting.
From Katazome we moved on to Kumihimo and Weaving. (Not that we didn't still do all the other things as well. Bryan's workshop is more like a textile bootcamp with little sleep and more craft possibilities than you can imagine. At one point I was so overwhelmed by all the possibilities I just stood a little dazed in the hall doing nothing until my head cleared. At least food and entertainment is really nice.)
Right from the start I was hooked on kumihimo. So much that I ordered my own Marudai (the stand you use for braiding) over the internet at home. Luckily for me I already have the bobbins. A craft shop closed several years ago and sold them for a bargain. And I like them for fixing broken warp threads. The Marudai, made by a local wood turner from local wood, arrived on wednesday and it is so beautiful. And in use already.
Our little bits of weaving (about half a yard each) were done on a very old traditional Japanese loom. She was called – very endearingly – The Beast by all of us outsized gaijin women. And she had tended to bitch around a bit eating warp threads by the dozen if you were not careful. But we succeeded in weaving our piece without any long term damages.
And I was introduced to another bit of weaving. One of us was so nice to show Bryan how to warp and thread his 4 shaft loom. As I understood it the loom was a rather new acquisition and he and her were not quite on good terms yet. Luckily I had the chance to take more than a peek and learn so much for my own 4 shaft darling. Thank you for the opportunity.
And all the while we dyed on, learned to sew little pouches called shifiku, visited the Folkart Museum in Tokyo, learned how to behave in an Onsen (my first time) and learned how much all parts of Japanese culture are interlaced into each other.
Japan was a rather isolated country for more than a millenium. Just imagine a country whose basic garment design didn’t change for 1300 years. (Look at how people clothed themselves in the 6th century Europe and then in the 10th or the 11th, the 12th or during rokkoko, baroque, regency ….?) And now imagine those 1300 years only wearing one kind of clothing. A more or less practical one and one on whose fabric amount taxes were paid. A basic piece of clothing that had only the chance to subtle changes. Much like the whole society. Imagine a country with a continuing line of crafts and craftspeople, without the suppression of the church, without cultural setbacks and lost inventions, lost knowledge and without permanent waves of mass migration from one end of the continent to the other, without constant invading forces that brought their own culture with them and without next to none external influences. And you get a culture which had so much time to get so intricately interlaced that from subtle non-verbal communication to flower arrangements to tea ceremonies from pottery to fabrics everything is connected. This realisation hit me at one point. How close knit the Japanese culture (at least up to WW2) was. How little was left to accident and choice. And how different it was to ours. European culture is basically the antithesis to Japanese culture.
Even in early days celtic rulers (I’m talking about him, 500 BC) in what today is Southern Germany were buried with Greek pottery and amber from the Baltic Sea. Trade later reached as far as China (Silk Road) and all over the world. There were so many different oppressing, suppressing and encouraging influences over the millennia. And how impossible it is to compare both cultures. (And I am talking only about Japanese and the European hotpot, ignoring the fact that there are so many other cultures out there either almost or actually extinct or still existing, ignoring whole continents of culture and societies just for the sake of literary flow.)
I am completely fascinated and feel like I am on the first steps of a new road. Embarking on a journey, one that might lead me nowhere or to a lot of interesting places. Who knows.
When we moved into our flat, there was a strange carpet in the hall. Each time I vaccumed it I got zapped through the vaccum cleaner. Only the vaccum cleaner got charged, it was totally weird and rather unpleasant. I told this to some of my friends and one year they pooled together for my birthday and presented me with a new floor, laminate and all, fitting inclusive. I was so happy I actually cried.
And I am still happy. But since my octogenarian dog (he's 16) doesn't dig as much as he did in the past his claws are longer than they used to be. Not as much that I should put him through the torture of clipping them but long enough to click and clack on this very laminate. And since elderly people don't sleep through the night any longer, he wanders. From living room to "library" (we do have about 2/3 of our 4000+ books in this room but it is only 12 square meters so library might sound a bit grand) and back. With a little tap dance in front of our bedroom to see if I might wake up to relieve him from his boredom. And so it called for a dampener or in other words: a rug.
A while ago I inherited some cones of carpet wool (some local sheep, I suppose they grey is Pommersches Landschaf) which I wanted to use for weaving at first. But I need my sleep, short as it is, and so I decided for the much faster method of knitting in garter stitch. (It still takes me too long to warp the countermarch)
So far it works. He can still roam the flat freely only without waking me at unholy hours.
Ramses, our younger one, may wander as well, I don't know. His nails are so short from digging for mice that they don't touch the floor.
Jude's White project in the What If group CHALLENGEs me. White is so far away from my comfort zone as it only can be.
The challenge is to STEP OUT of my comfort zone, which is a bit painful and a bit exciting. A bit like a birth of a new idea. I'm HATCHing an idea egg. GERMINATing a little white idea plant. EMERGING.
I'm not sure how it will go on with it. I think that's the general idea. And I am still a little bit uncomfortable. For the time being, it will be called EMERGENCE.
Due to bad planing on my side, the next month will be seeing me with my teaching hat on. In the Online Guild, I am teaching supported spindle spinning and on my own site, I'm teaching an online workshop in natural dyeing (German only). The first of three this year.
I am also thinking of offering some naturally dyed fabrics in my etsy shop.
Outside there still is winter. Even if we get a whiff of spring from time to time, the crocus are peaking out and the birds are marking territories like mad, it still is in the minus centigrades with a freezing wind from the Siberian east. It definitely does not feel like the last day of March, Eastern or April. Still more like February.
I've seen 12 great white egrets yesterday. They were perching on top of some precariously high trees in front of a snow white (it snowed again) sky. No use getting out the camera. White on White.
After a short bout of spring last week
But I did at least one little thing.
One thing I wanted to do for a long time. I'm beginning to sew curtains from my dyed strips. I wonder how they will stand up to the sun. I'll see. As soon as the sun decides to come out again ;O)
There they are, the early signs. I know it still will be a while but the roses are curiously experimenting with the first warmer days already. Always a good sign.
I already mentioned the new sweater which is now finished. The light was ugly (a dull gray), the true colours are leaning more to the brown than gray. The yarn is Blue Faced Leicester Humbug (which means a mix of different natural colours) with silk, spun about 3 years ago. The pattern is one of those generic top down raglans with 7/8 arms. Nothing fancy. It wears well, which is the most important thing. And this time, I even remembered to add a true round neck by adding some short rows to the back. This I learned from another top down raglan I knit about a year ago. Same style with the same turtleneck and it puckers a lot in front because I didn't add the short rows.
Its name comes from the actual necessity I had for a new sweater. My old one are beginning to fray around the edges. They are still well and warm for every day, outdoors and the woods but I wouldn't want to wear them anywhere else.
Like DebG I'm thinking about what a basic wardrobe should contain and how the single items should be made. Since I'm not really good at planning or sticking to a plan, I like top down patterns. I can try it on any time and I actually see how far the yarn will go and if I might add some other yarn for the bottom. Which usually looks better than adding some at the top.
I have no actual length but the yarn worked well in needle size 2.5 (which is about US 1 or UK 13) and I have to admit, I got a taste for it. Right now, I'm swatching for a tank top in size 2 (US 0 or UK 14). Up to now, my prefered needle size was around 3 or 3.5. 2.5 was reserved for socks. But I like the different drape of the thinner yarn very much.There is lots of potential.
Strasbourg didn't only give me a trip down memory lane but I also came back with a nasty flu. After two weeks I finally recovered and am able to show you Ramses' new collar.
Only as comparison, Bobic (the dark one on the left side of the picture) is now 15 years old and he lives with us now for over 13 years and he still has his first harness and only the second collar because the first one broke. It is not normal for a dog to loose his stuff the whole time. Just as an aside.
The weaving is not perfect but it is nice enough for Ramses (who knows how long he will keep it anyway) and well enough for my second tablet woven band. And I enjoyed it. Might want to weave more. Small weavings are really nice. Not so unweildy like large looms.
And just for the fun of it a picture from our autumn forest:
One of the few places in my flat where I can lay out a cloth to have a look and experiment is in the living room cum office where the desks are. To try out some combinations, I layed out stardust (in between dark and light) and just turned my back to get the camera. When I turned around again, I saw this:
Albeit very decorative it was not what I had in mind.
This was more informative for my purpose (though not as cute, I admit):
Between books, fabrics, cloth and dogs, we seem to have developed a kind of organic living style. Our senior dog uses the book piles in front of the sofa to make the ascend easier for his old bones and Ramses, more a whole zoo in the body of a dog (I still think, he is a cat in camouflage), well, he tests every fabric and every fibre that is laying around for comfort. That's just the way it is - and it's a good way.