Spin-off magazine – something from seaview

Or stitching a doodle … I’m not really sure …But I do know that I started this piece in the most playful of manner, with just some pieces of fabric machined together – perhaps originally I was thinking of making a GiveWrap? And then I took a turn off (veered to the right as it were), and starting adding pictures and scraps, and embroidering, stitching them …
Some were strong images cut out from fabric … And others were just pieces I found in my scraps, exactly as they were…Scraps from all sorts of places. Those strong green flowers came from my dear friend Mandy’s cast-off dress. And the vibrant yellow silk lines were an unintended gift from my cousin Polly – beautiful scraps of sari silk used to wrap up a GiveWrap …Happy stitching through the winter months, playing idly with fabrics and keeping the cats company as they bird-watched. My favourite times …My stitchery grew. I had started to add faces …I am fascinated by stitched faces. One of my favourite feeds on Instagram is Spiritcloth who with such skilled dyeing and stitching produces pieces like this …So small green faces crept into my work too. I never quite knew how they would appear. They always started quite similarly – just a couple of scraps of green fabric, pinned together …I was nervous about stitching them, but I needn’t have been. They took on a life of their own. Some were catty …Some were sleeping …Another had a fawn-like appearance, I thought – especially when it became clear they wanted beards …So they all got beards – some wispy …Some luxurious, as with the Roi Soleil …The cat has a fine beard too, complementing its whiskers!And a few beardy wisps too for the sleepy one – perhaps to complement those wisps of hair …My piece was now growing, and I was no longer thinking of it as an idle doodle. It demanded to be seen as a whole – with backing (a lovely cotton Ikea duvet from a local charity shop) …And, once I started to see it as a whole, I had to think of balance. It needed some more of those strong yellows – and it needed poetry …
There usually comes a point when I am stitching when words come into my mind that I might stitch into the work in hand. Some of my embroideries have been stitched around text as in my Love Letter to Europe …With others, the words sort of drift in as I stitch away. So it was with my Chinese Vase embroidery. For a long time it was just fabric pieces and embroidery … Then – as I stitched – some of Eliot’s words from the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) came to mind: “as a Chinese jar Still moves perpetually in its stillness.”It was T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) that came to my mind again as I stitched those little green faces …
A little fiddling around with size and placement: “Go said the bird … for the leaves were full of children … hidden excitedly, containing laughter … quick said the bird … find them, find them …”And then some stitching …At first I was disappointed that it’s so hard to make out Eliot’s words and I wondered about re-stitching them. But I decided that the almost-hidden words was in keeping with the sense of looking: Quick, said the bird, find them, find them …
My stitchery was drawing to an end. Time now to add the backing, and quilt it with some comfortable sashiko stitching …The cats approved …As the border stitching drew to an end, I thought – well, perhaps I’ll just add a little extra stitching here … and there … and there. I realised that I’ve grown accustomed to having this stitchery around to pick up for a little stitching here or there. The time had come to finish it.

By happy coincidence I was introduced at this time to the old Navajo belief that the spirit of the weaver literally enters the cloth they are weaving. In an article on the Spirit of the Cloth in the Spring 2018 edition of Spin Off magazine, Rebecca Marsh describes how the Navajo weave a spirit line from inside the border to the edge of the of the weaving to allow the weaver’s spirit to leave the cloth.

I needed a spirit line!

My spirit line – my escape from this stitchery – was to add my initials and the date.
Finished!

We came back from the Cornish wedding last year with spinning treasure – 3 large bags of creamy white alpaca. My just-married step-daughter, Ellie, had negotiated the sale with a work colleague (and got me a very good deal too). The car was laden, but we managed to squeeze the bags in somewhere – far too good to leave behind.

I’ve never – in all of my thirty years of spinning – spun alpaca properly before, so I wasn’t sure how to tackle it. First I needed to lay out my treasure (and this is only the first bag) …Of course, Poe had to inspect it first …Now to consult the experts …Writers in these Spin-off magazines wrote of the difficulty of spinning alpaca – how slippery it is, how heavy and lifeless your yarn will be. Yes – I have to admit that I don’t terribly like spinning alpaca – everything, everywhere was covered with fluff – far worse than when grooming the cat. Alpaca was in my mouth, my nose … ugh! And yes, it did break constantly as I tried to spin quite a fine yarn – just slipped through my fingers.

Hmm …. there were all sorts of other suggestions in these Spin-off magazines. One article strongly recommended that you ply your alpaca with another yarn, so I found an old batt in my spinning stash which I think is synthetic yarn of some sort – can you see the sparkle on it? – and got a nice little hank of mixed fibre yarn.However, others wrote that you can produce “straight” alpaca. So that is what I did too. This yarn I produced is very soft and fluffy and has just a bit of lustre. I rather liked the result, – so much so that I got carried away and started knitting without remembering to photograph my pure alpaca hank.

I’d decided to knit Emily Wessel’s Tin Can Knit’s Loch hat with the alpaca. The Tin Can Knit’s ladies have come up with these lovely lacy patterns which – after initial lacking-confidence struggles – I am now enjoying knitting more and more.Easy peasy – in no time at all, it was finished. The alpaca knit up like a dream. It’s softly fluffy as opposed to lustrous, but you can still clearly see the wonderful pattern. Thing is – I don’t really see myself wearing an off-white hat – just not a colour I feel comfortable with. So could I dye it? I’ve always been given to understand that you could dye fleece and dye yarn, but not a finished product because it would felt. However, perhaps if I dyed it in a microwave oven, which would be a very quick process, with minimum disturbance, I would get away with it …? Time to consult the dyeing books …Frances and Tony Tompson only cover microwave dyeing very briefly in their excellent book, Synthetic Dyeing, but by very good fortune a friend had attended a workshop they ran and was able to give me the course notes which expanded the information on microwave dyeing considerably. At the end of them they say:” Finally, the wool will remain soft and springy with no chance of matting.” Sounds promising. Gail Callahan also gave excellent clear information on microwave dyeing.

In the end, I came to a rough mix of their times and their temperatures. I mixed up the colour from Easifix’s AllinOne Acid Milling Dyes: Emerald Green, Golden Yellow, Ultra Blue and a little Black to act as a saddener. Into the microwave my pot went. Oh, it does look so very promising!And what an excellent result! When wet, of course, it was much darker and I was afraid that the dark colour obscured the pattern definition. But dry, it was just perfect, and honestly not matted at all.Curiously, it has a little darker crown. I didn’t change yarn, so I can only think that I must have spun a different part of the fleece here which didn’t show up when it was all creamy-white. I rather like it.And luckily, the weather is still cold enough to go off for a brisk seaside walk well wrapped up and sporting my new alpaca beanie!(The camera and light are playing colour tricks – the outside photo is closest to the actual colour.)