After we learn, what do we DO?

After the learning, the challenge is to use, incorporate, combine, make something new, at least make something out of your own hands and heart, something personal, perfectly suited to you and your needs, using your own powers of adding, subtracting and incorporating; in short: creating.

Not just making. 

The quote above is by from Woven Thoughts by a weaver called Sara Lamb. I sat down with my morning coffee to read the first blog in my feed today and really paid little attention to the header (sorry Sara, it was early). It struck me as I read how important these words are for our approach to daily spiritual practice and larger acts of witchcraft or power. Study does really not add things to our lives- just to our heads.  The challenge of combining what we now do with what we might do is what brings our acts into the realm of personal and "perfectly suited to our needs".

Hat4. Sara Lamb 

Also, the pictures were gorgeous!

I was surprised then near the end of her post to realize that this post is about the making of woven artworks, NOT acts of spiritual enrichment!

These thoughts on learning new things and always striving to understand them but incorporate experience, once, twice... over and over into your practice and make each act of creation your own; each act of trying again a celebration of the last act really moved me.

They have stayed with me all morning, so I am sharing them with you as a weaver of spirit as well as cloth.

Sara Lamb is the author of the book Woven Treasures: One-of-a-Kind Bags with Folk Weaving Techniques by Interweave Press, and a DVD called Spinning Silk, also by Interweave Press. Her work is beautiful and her words are very inspiring.

The historical record

Japanese shibori fabric.  Precise tied resist.

Recently, I had the chance to reply to a friend who thought that it was vain to label her beautiful woven work with her name. I couldn't disagree more!

Kuba cloth called Kasai velvet, literally woven
 CASH in Zaire.

I am very interested in the history of textiles in several parts in Asia, Africa, the northern Americas and of course I often study how Europe influenced all of these cultures and their textile practices.

As a hobbiest, I am what is properly called a "living historian" but more popularly: a colonial re-enactor. We strive to get things as close to correct for the period as possible so that merely by looking visitors to our encampments and demonstrations can learn.

As a living historian, I (and others in my club) try to spend short periods actually living under colonial conditions as closely as we can represent them for the public. I do time studies on spinning, linen processing and  weaving and try to extrapolate how valuable a piece of cloth was to a farm household... you get the idea.

Tape weaving with linen thread on a reproduction 18th Century tape loom.

I am delighted to hear that your Aunt labeled her weaving with her own name- and Aunt Marvel was certainly the right name for her!! I'm glad you are doing the same. Because so much of the work of women was not taxed or marked in account books, the value of their contributions to the economies of the past (and today) are lost (read the diary of Martha Ballard in A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to get an idea of how important weaving was to a town's economy and how it was only peripherally recorded in the account books as raw materials ordered).

When you get your next set of labels made, may I suggest that you add your maiden name if Peterson is not it? Quilt makers have adopted this notion and it makes tracing an artist's contributions so much easier then we have two family names to search!

You are not vain, you are contributing to the historical record!!

Yarny love

I keep going to look at the beautiful three dimensional crochet Valentine here at Cornflower Blue.  Rachel does amazing things with yarn, every one of her ideas inspires me to use materials I have seen in new ways.

The beautiful heart looks like it is made of sea urchins or barnacles or some other amazing sea life to me.  It has been chosen to be on the cover of the Valentine special edition of a Madison Wisconsin newspaper.  Do go visit Rachel and see more of what she can do!

This post has been linked to the Valentine's Blog Party 2013.  Go see what else is heart shaped and hot for February!

New Pagan Art Journal

I am so delighted to participate in the 52 Weeks of Pagan Art Journaling Project that I decided I didn't want to just start cramming my entries into my regular daily journal.  So, in typical overachiever style I made a journal just for the project.

I cut 15 pages to size for the outside of each signature so the spine would be uniform looking.  I pressed each fold crisp with the bone folder visible on the top of the stack.  The distracting pile of sketchpads was there to supply paper and later to provide pressing weight on top of the bull dog clips. 

I stitched signatures made of all different kinds of paper together, just to begin with some variety already built in to my new journal.  I've been kicking this idea around for a while but I admit I usually make books in a big hurry for a gift or specific need.  For this book I had time to go slowly and play with papers, and I did.

I used a few watercolor monochrome pages I painted and stored to use when I needed some texture and color but not a specific picture.  Last year I bought a book of card stock with general monochrome print backgrounds from a bin of discount scrapbook paper and have hardly found a use for it so that got cut up too.  Along with ivory colored sketch paper, these made the bulk of the 10" x 14" sheets which folded to 10" x 7" pages.  After that, I added some envelopes, partial sheets of plain watercolor paper and a few pages of odd sized brown craft papers.  There are 15 signatures of 3 pages each, one or two have 4 pages.  That should be plenty for 52 entries even with a few duds I cut out and remake!

I folded the signatures together and added a smaller page or envelope to most of them.

After folding the signatures and adding the odd sized pages I pressed them well again with a bone folder.  Then I taped the three linen tapes for the spine to my work surface and stacked them in the order I wanted them to appear in the book.


I made a card with marks where the holes should go near the ends and beside the tapes.

You can see the card with the hole markings here, and the punched holes beside it.
I added arrows to make the marks more visible for the picture.

Then I took each signature off the pile and punched holes in the fold through all the page layers.  I used a magazine opened to the middle to make a place to lay the fold and punch into it.

Row of holes ready to stitch and linen tapes attached to
 the surface below the work.  Beeswax and linen thread on top ready to go.

 I stacked them back up in order and then moved the whole pile to the side.

My assistant was no help whatsoever.
 As soon as she realized that my awl had an antler handle
she forgot all about hole punching until she was caught.

After all of the holes are punched and you have the pages in the order you like them you stitch along the length of each signature and tie it to the one below.


As you stitch around the cloth tape at the spine you form a flexible back edge that will open well for writing or drawing.








Leaving the tail on the outside you bring the needle through the first hole to the inside, then in and out along the row of holes.


Tie the starting tail to the thread as it exits the hole on that end the next row.  After that, loop a stitch around the row below on the outside each time you reach the end of a row.  The pictures below show the linked end stitches one above the other.

Sew the waxed thread through the pre-punched holes in each fold.  

Pull the thread to the outside and be sure to go around the outside of each tape.  Keep everything nice and snug.

In, out around each tape. 

 It takes time to keep layering and sewing the folded signatures on one at a time, but it makes for such a neat stack.

I used tapes on the spine instead of a heavy doubled thread because I want to leave the spine exposed as a pretty design element of the journal.

Here you can see the stitches going around the tape for each new folded signature added.  You can also see the stack of linked stitches on the end holes. Each end hole stitch is attached by looping it through the stitch below it. 

I used bulldog clips to further press the whole stack
 for a few hours and tugged the tape snug .  

To hold the tapes down on the outsides of the text block I have just made, I used PVA glue to add a piece of thin linen fabric to each side.  This is actually a folded strip of handkerchief linen, because I want a neater folded edge to show near the exposed spine.

 The spine with the glued linen strips was shielded with parchment paper to keep it from sticking to everything and pressed between the boards with the bulldog clips again.


Here is the whole stitched book.  You can see how many of the pages are full size but there are heavy watercolor paper strips and all kinds of other things in there.  I hope that running into the different papers is a good challenge to inspire me to try different techniques and approaches all year.

Sometimes staring at another blank page just sends me into a creative straight-jacket!

This looks pretty inspiring to me now.

The spine is really flexible and pretty.  You can see the tapes glued down under the strips of fabric front and back.

Covers are glued to folded endpapers inside the front and back page.

The covers I have were reclaimed from another journal with really cheap, absorbent and yucky recycled paper.  Everything I did on that paper just smeared and wrinkled and made me feel helpless.  I was so glad when I realized the problem was mostly the pulpy paper!!

These covers are 10"x 7" with holes from a spiral binding.  I haven't decided yet what to do about the holes.  They could have beads stitched into them or ribbons laced through them, but that will make it hard to shelve this journal later.  I don't have to decide about the cover today.  Eventually it will be covered with a brown striped silk book cover paper I have.

You can find great instructions step by step for making bound and stitched books at T. J. Bookarts.

If you are doing the 52 Weeks of Pagan Art Journaling this year, please leave your link for me to go see it!

New Old Loom: warping with no cross

Sectional warp beam, all wrapped up and my seat of the pants thread ordering method. I put tape sticky side up on
 the back beam and on a lease stick, combed the heck out of each section of the already warped beam
and stuck it down as close to in order as I could. then I climbed around inside the front of the loom
and pushed each little thread through a heddle in a straight draw, that is 1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4.

I received the back beam of the New Old Loom wrapped with beautiful linen warp. Unfortunately, it had been cut from the last project and wrapped for storage onto the big beam without separating the threads into two groups of every-other thread. That is called the cross, and it keeps the warp threads from tangling as you pass each thread from the back beam through its heddle and reed slot and set it up to be woven and wrap onto the front beam.

WITH a cross, you can pick up a thread and know that the next thread below it is the very next thread in line. With the warp on the beam and no cross preserved from the previous project, I have the threads in rough groups of forty or so but in each little group, who knows how I can keep the tangles out?

The interwebs know, that's who.

I know I could unwrap or cut the old warp off this beam but
A: there seems to be a lot of it and
B: I know it was warped using a rack of spools so it's probably pretty neatly done and
C: Linen isn't cheap and I love a challenge.

Heddles from the front of the loom. Temporary lease stick with sticky tape and
the combed warp threads right behind the heddles where I can grab each
thread in order and stuff it into the hole in the middle of each heddle.

I've been looking hard in all the good places on the interwebs for smart peoples' advice on how to warp when you lose the cross.  It happens to a lot of people, it seems.  Some people (a surprising number, actually) just can't face it. I am not those people. Most people who have been weaving for a while realize that a certain amount of tangle is possible to deal with if you first thread up the warp in as organized a way as possible and then raise every other thread by lifting the heddles to make a plain weave shed and sliding really long sticks called lease sticks into the 2 plain weave sheds.

Then, you just slide the sticks back, tie them to the frame and go. as the warp advances, comb the tangles behind the lease sticks ad slide them back again as far as they will go.

I scrubbed the first shaft full of little metal heddles in front and put them back on, but I decided to just give the rusty back three sets a try on this free warp.  I'm eager to get going and I've been cleaning loom parts for two weeks thanks to my stubborn work on some rusty parts that couldn't be saved at the beginning. I couldn't wait anymore, but the front ones look great and I'll get to the rest soon. Really.

That is the plan. If the amount of tangle is manageable, I will get to play on the loom with a free linen warp for a long time. If it is simply too seriously tangled for me to be able to keep pushing the snarls back toward the beam, I'll get to weave a foot and then I will HAVE to cut it all from the back and begin with a brand new warp with a properly made cross.

I can only find out by trying. 

B: Book of Shadows

My tool carrier full of drawing supplies can move with me to wherever I am working on my BOS.

I remember how curious I was about contemporary books of shadows. I could get an idea of the ancient, illuminated super fancy ones of the past, but what about today's? Surely everyone is not supposed to have that level of skill and time for this? Will an incantation written on a bar napkin or a legal pad work?

Good news, of course they will. Especially if your working involves a bartender or a lawyer.

But since I wondered, I bet some of you wonder. Today's Pagan Blog Project contribution is a little tour of what goes into making my own BOS.

I only use Red for my Book of Shadows      photo: Treehugger .com

The Book itself
is a red Moleskine hard cover 5" x 8.5" Artists Journal  I have been keeping black hardcover Moleskine journals full of ideas and sketches for years. I love that they have that nifty little elastic band attached to keep them closed and a pocket in the back. They also have that fancy pantsy ribbon to mark your page. I am a sucker for those.

Top, black everyday journal, bottom, BOS

Paper
I addition to the archival paper in the journal I have glued paper from old BOS books into my present BOS. I never kept one as nicely as this before, it was more like just running lab notes.  I don't think I'm going to move things forward anymore, just begin a second red journal when this one fills.  I'm not super fussy about what I attach to this book, index card stock, notebook paper, feathers and pressed flowers as well as copier paper all are in there.

Pens and ink
Writers and Artisits can be really emotional about pens. I have only put on the table the ones I am using frequently on my BOS, but as you can see, I have a whole zinc tool carrier full of glass cups and each of THOSE is full of pens, pencils brushes and other journaling supplies.It sits on my beautiful oval walnut desk (the first desk I ever picked out for myself!) and does its "let's not get too serious here" job.  Fine lines, permanent ink and beautiful lettering are my needs in a pen. I use Pigma Microns and Staedtler fineliners have been my faves ever since I found them a l o n g time ago. I have a Hunt quill and Speedball calligraphy pen for dipping into ink too. Last, I have Noodlers fountian pens- the black one is extra flexible for sketching and the orange one is stiff for writing. I also love Noodlers ink, they make great products and the packaging is full of rambling thoughts of the owner. check out the reasonably priced pens and ink at Goulet Pens.

Beloved watercolor pencils turn my sketches into paintings!

Coloring
Oh! What can you say about coloring? I love it, and I always do it after the drawing part. I have found that even when I use a paintbrush I seem to always draw, so now I stick to sketching my ideas into my BOS, lettering things carefully and then going back in and adding color to the pages on another day.  The Noodler's inks that I use are called "bulletproof" and are made for security on documents. Not only do they not run, they can't (according to the package) be removed by bleach, oven cleaner or any other method check forgers know about.

I love using watercolor pencils by Prismacolor and also Derwent pencils. It's like a paint with water picture, you just draw, wet your brush with plain water and brush over the parts you want to smooth or blend. Magical! Sometimes I will use my regular journal to make notes about something that I will later do up nicely in my BOS. Sometimes I just dive right in. It's not supposed to be perfect, it's supposed to be personal.

Next week: more Book of Shadows...
Catagories and how I keep track,
other inclusions and ways to attach them.
hinge, hanger, tuck, pocket, glue

New Old Loom: its own little circle

To clean rust in these very tiny gaps (15 gaps per inch) I began with steel wool, then tried wire brushing after WD 40.

I am travelling around the edge of a new circle. Eventually, I will travel the smaller and smaller paths as I spiral toward the center of it.  I call this circle New Old Loom.

Weaving is a much used and often overused metaphor for working on your life, but like so many things, weaving comes with its own WHOLE LIFE. I was gifted a wonderful old floor loom (read about it here: Asking + Action = Attraction . So, I get to weave. Grow. Create and contemplate while doing it.  I have a New Old Loom and along with it I have been gifted hours and hours of assembly and rust removal. Contemplative time.

Next, I tried other grades of steel wool and tiny strips of fine sandpaper. I can make the outside shiny but the inside remains rough. I tested the "cleaned" spaces with the little piece of 40/2 linen, and it frays. As a last resort, Naval Jelly will turn the rust into a neutral coating that I can scrub off.  I taped the wrapped-thread rails to keep the Naval Jelly off them and followed the instructions. I include all of this because when I searched the web for hints on cleaning rusted reeds I found very little. Mostly, advice that it can't be done well enough and the reed must be replaced.  Plus, I find pictures reassuring, maybe the next reed cleaner will enjoy finding these.

I am trying to make the rust work as enjoyable as possible by lighting candles or incense, visualizing the wonderful woven goods that will roll from my beams after I have my darling's parts smooth, even having a lovely cup of tea handy. This last is kind of tricky because I am wearing a dust mask while I use all the steel wool and stuff. I could probably design a tasty tea delivery system to work with the mask if I weren't so committed to staying focused on this rust until it is gone. No distraction. No project hopping.

Project hopping will take me out of this circle and make me start another circle. I want to stay put.

Those would be some legendary parties, though.

This is where the biggest obstacle to weaving lies. While I rub and polish and sand and Never Ever swear at all I have my mind on a leash so it doesn't wander completely off and go shopping for the materials to build a yacht. Or a fence around our raised beds. Or teach the dachshund to balance on my big exercise ball. Wouldn't that be awesome? She could do it at parties and our parties would become legendary! Woah- pull back... It's kind of a bungee leash, so I am always having to pull my wandering mind back from somewhere where another project looks much better than this one.

The project my mind is on is seldom a project already underway. Those projects are not interesting and my skibbly little mind has explored them as much as needed because they were the mind-wandering destinations for previous hobby activities. Hobbies can eat your house, and vice versa, but I don't want to live without either one (I have friends who would happily live without a house if they could bed down in a Hobby Lobby or Michael's at night).

So, radio. I am not a big background sound person, but keeping the radio on might keep me from dreaming up a more compelling project than rust removal. Let's face it, after 4 hours of smoothing little delicate rusted reed fins and heddles replacing all the wax rings under the toilets is more compelling.

If I am going off on a non-weaving mental stroll and the radio doesn't work I want to at least redirect my head to wander over and think through some of those half done... mostly done projects I have that fall more firmly into the category of Home Repair and Improvement than Hobby. I often confuse them because I enjoy working on the house so much. Its just as satisfying as creating, just less portable. I hope this works, because my ability to picture how good it's going to look when the last piece of molding goes into place is blinding me a little to how many little "finish-ups" there are here. Stay tuned, Divine Reader. I pledge to report honestly on whether or not I am working on new or old projects.

Back to the rust part of the weaving circle.

After two rounds of Naval Jelly, the reed is covered with a film of black ex-rust and grey phosphorus coating. I can scrub this off the outside with steel wool and brass brushes (see the stripes where I tried each one), but between the fins the metal remains pitted and rough. It seems like the advice was right- if I want a reed this fine I need to buy a new smooth one.  Drat! 5 hours of subborn effort decides it. I will send for a stainless 10 dent reed