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Exotica. 

When the Midlands Textile Forum decided on this title for an exhibition to be staged at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham, (on from now until 30th September), I had to smile!  I could just imagine certain men of my acquaintance brightening up with the titivating thought of what they might see!!  But they would be disappointed.

Not in terms of the quality of work on show, but in the subject matter. 

Exotica refers to the plants that can be found at the Botanical Gardens which, although not large (15 acres), is perfectly formed!  Just like the exhibition.  22 works are shown by 17 artists in a long thin gallery with good lighting and plenty of space around the exhibits. 

Themes are good for exhibitions.  One study day at the Gardens led to different interpretations from each artist, and the range of textile techniques used, the different approaches, the different subject matter taken from the Gardens worked well together.

Themes are also good for individual artists developing their work.  I used to be a total scatterbrain, tempted by a myriad of techniques, a wealth of subject matter and influenced by everything.  (Some would say that I still am but I suspect they don’t know what I was like before!!!) 

For me, finding weaving was a turning point in my life.  From living the life of a musician, I found myself pulled to weaving.  It stimulated my brain cells, helped me to look at life with the eyes of a visual artist, and challenged me in many different ways.  Then, in 2006, I got the book Above The Earth.  Casually flicking through this lovely coffee table book, I was taken over by a total certainty that I had now found my genre in weaving - a total expression through weaving of what I am about.  I still have that feeling today, and am aware that this will probably be with me all my life.  Satellite and aerial images of the unpopulated areas of the world, away from the obvious visual physical damage that humans have perpetrated on this lovely planet, inspire me with thoughts of how to affect people’s perception of their world through weaving. 

The limitations of having a theme can be a positive thing - a jumping off point for delving deeper.  Limits are good for stimulating creative thought and lateral thinking.  As a child, how often can boredom develop into imaginative ideas for play, for making something out of materials close at hand.  I know for me as a child that I developed some crazy ideas that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, but I always had fun finding out. 

Now I have found my theme for weaving, my world is opening up in ways unimaginable to me before. 

Do you have something that inspires you in a similar way?  Do you want one?  Sometimes just thinking about it can help address that overwhelming feeling that can come from too much choice.  Perhaps this week might be a good time to ponder what you want to be your special theme…..

Ok, I admit it….  I’m showing off!!  But blame it on the music, as they say (who are ‘they’ and why do we take notice of them anyway…?) 

Seriously though (awww!), you really can blame it on the music!  As a music student one of the pieces I played as a teenager - round about grade 2 standard - was entitled Soliloquy.  The first time I saw it I though, ‘OK, better check that one out before my teacher asks….’ and I dived for the dictionary. 

Boiled down to a simple one-word explanation, a soliloquy is a day-dream!  But doesn’t it sound so much more impressive when you are having a hard time with someone who is challenging your attention span when you can say with dignity “I was soliloquising!”.  I used it to great effect at school - but could only get away with it once for each teacher!!  My English teacher was so impressed, she set me an extra homework task to pontificate for 3 pages on a soliloquy!! (Damn - that one backfired!!) 

Anyway, this week I was listening somewhat abstractedly to Classic FM - a lovely radio station in the UK which plays classical music in bite-sized chunks - and this particular piece of music came on and took me back to my not-so-happy school days.  Remembering this particular essay that I had to write, I also recalled that I used it to explore the word and say it out loud a few times, rolling it around my mouth.  (Does anyone else do that?)  That essay got me thinking about day-dreams in a way I never had before, and I realised just how important day-dreams are in the big scheme of our lives.

If we don’t take time to day-dream, to be taken unexpectedly along a different thought path, to relax our minds so that they flit from topic to topic, to allow our minds to go totally blank and to stare with unfocussed eyes, to give our minds a breathing space in our chaotically busy lives, how can we recharge the batteries? 

Of course, there are times and places to day-dream.  I wouldn’t recommend it whilst driving the car on a particularly busy road, or anytime whilst driving the car, actually - although sometimes you find that you’ve driven a large stretch without remembering anything about it! 

But time to just stare without focus, to sit without doing or watching anything, to lie down without the intention of going to sleep, to lean on a gate or a wall and just gaze without definite thought, is so important to our well-being that it should really be taught in school! 

Even if it’s only for 5 minutes - just fit in time to day-dream today and you’ll find yourself refreshed and more relaxed.  Here in the UK we have a bank holiday tomorrow.  Why not just take some time to allow yourself to detach from the pressing day-to-day minutia of life and soliloquise for a few moments? 

And anyone who interrupts you will be so impressed with the word, that they will leave you alone again!!

Firstly, may I apologise for putting this in the wrong place last week.  I created a new page instead of a new post, so you can find it if you search for shibori, but otherwise it wasn’t in the normal blog page!  You can imagine my perplexity when I wanted to check something, and couldn’t find it!!  So I’ve published again so it appears in the right place! 

Shibori for texture is something that I really discovered at Kay Faulkner’s shibori class in the UK in December 2008.  I had read the Woven Shibori book by Catharine Ellis that has a chapter on supplementary warps written by Kay that uses shibori in the warp, and her workshop was the perfect opportunity to try it out.

Weaving for shibori entails 2 warps, or 2 wefts, or both.  In warp shibori, your main warp is woven plain weave in something like a cotton yarn which has plenty of body but not too thick.  I use 3/18 or 2/12 usually.  The shibori supplementary threads in the warp are placed in a ratio of your choice.  We used 6 plain weave ends to 1 shibori end  For a short sample warp, you don’t need to beam them separately, but for a long length, it is advisable to use two warp beams, or a separate dowel that you can weigh to separate the two warps.    For your shibori warp, it is best to use something a bit thicker than normal and very strong.  Mercerised crochet cotton is good, and Kay uses fishing line.  You don’t want it to break when you are pulling the fabric up on the shibori warps, and you need to knot it securely so that the puckers are held in place when you are finishing the fabric (or dyeing it - after all, shibori is mostly known for its dye resist capabilities!).

The plain weave can be threaded onto 2 shafts if you have an 8 shaft loom, or over 4 shafts if you have spare shafts.  This helps to ease the burden of lifting on just 2 shafts, and can be kinder to the warp threads. 

Keeping the threading order going, thread the shibori warp ends in a point order on your remaining shafts. 

To create the lumps n bumps, you do a point lifting too, creating diamond shapes with your supplementary shibori warp threads, like this…..

You can vary the size of the diamonds, if you like. 

The simpest stuff works the best, as with so many things. 

Here are the visual results after the shibori ends were used as pulling up threads, and the fabric bunched up and then knotted.  I used a polyester weft, and then the fabric was steamed (it got a little scorched on the steamer!!) so the polyester held its shape after the shibori ends were removed.  NB Allow the fabric to dry fully before trying to pull out the shibori warp threads.  If you don’t, it’s really hard work!!  (How do I know????!) 

  Front side      Reverse side

I also used alternate shibori warp ends and create square blocks or blocks on odd shibori ends versus even shibori ends.  Try it and see what the results are.

I have a thing for water, waves, ripples, that kind of thing, and it was oh so simple to create waves and ripples with this technique.  Here are the waves I did in the workshop, and they were created by weaving only half of the diamond shape and then repeating the same element again and again, with different amounts of plain weave for each block. 

  Front side   Reverse side

That was the start of my explorations in shibori.  I’ve done loads more since and had a lot of fun.  You’ll be able to see some of my results in a few weeks time, but until then, I’ve some more texture techniques I’d like to share with you.

Next week is a waffle weave that is really delicate…. 

Until then, have a lot of fun weaving!!

I was watching an ants’ nest that had been disturbed in my garden during our most recent renovation activity.  The ants were scurrying around seemingly at random, running here and there without apparent purpose, until I realised that there was indeed a very methodical method in their running.  To me, the ants are identical, but I guess to ants, humans are identical.  I couldn’t recognise individuals but I could recognise patterns of movement that emerged as I took the time to watch what happened.

There were obvious patterns and tasks that were allocated to specific individuals.  You’ve probably read about the information that bees pass on to each other about locations of food sources through their dances.  Well, information of some sort was being passed around the ants with resultant changes to their behaviour when an obstacle was put in their way. 

That got me to thinking about how that relates to human behaviour.  We like to think we are all individual with our own choices, and independent behavour patterns, but we are also swarm animals.  Whenever we are together in big groups, you can see that behaviour emerging.  Just watch behaviour patterns at airports when there are flight delays or cancellations.  Watch the crowd at a sports match.  On occasion, and for the sheer fun of it, I’ve stood in a busy area and looked up a the top of a building, or the sky, and waited to see how many people look up too.  It’s quite funny!  Once one person looks up, another will do so and on and on until most people glance up just to see what everyone else is looking at.

The same kind of reaction can be generated by businesses looking to sell things.  If you can get people to think that everyone else is buying the product, then the swarm behaviour kicks in.  Just think of the January sales!! 

Swarms also have impacts greater than the efforts of the individuals involved.  If you can’t solve a problem on your own, and you ask a group of people for help, other people’s different approaches to the problem can help all of you solve the problem.  That’s called collective intelligence and nature uses it frequently.  So do the armed forces and rescue services. 

I love that we just have to look at what is happening in nature to see what happens in human experience.  We like to think that we are superior beings but we march to the same tune as everything else!!  We can express ourselves perhaps in more diverse ways, but really we are all related to everything else and that is a fact we should never forget.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve indulged in some creative downtime!  After the hectic scheduling of Complex Weavers and Convergence, Agnes and I headed off for a road trip (aka Thelma and Louise - without the dramatic ending!!).  Agnes was in charge of itinerary, and we headed out to Arizona, aiming for Page, via the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.  We took two days to get there, so we could take in unscheduled photo-call stops along the way.  Once at Page, after a day to get our bearings, drive around and see what was available, stopping in for quite a while at the lovely little Powell Museum in Page, each day we scheduled somewhere to visit in the morning, and then chilled out for the remainder of the day.  It worked well with the weather (thunder storms most days in the late afternoon and evening), and gave us some downtime to process everything we saw and experienced.  We both journal to help that filtering process, and we both took loads of photos, sometimes of the same shot, sometimes completely different things. 

Over the 10 days we had, we visited the Grand Canyon twice - the north rim was amazing both in sunlight and in cloud and rain - Bryce Canyon (which was simply amazing!), Antelope Canyon, took a ride down Glen Canyon, and came back to New Mexico via Monument Valley.  I haven’t got round to sorting out my photos yet as I’m teaching non-stop until September, but as and when I do, I’ll post a few with my Sunday blog. 

People had told me previously that these places are not appreciated until they are experienced, and I can wholeheartedly endorse that view.  The feeling you get when you are standing near the edge of any big canyon, especially when it is shrouded in mist and rain and you can’t see the edge (!), and suddenly the mist rolls back, the rain lifts and a peak is illuminated by a shaft of sunlight and glows a rich red is breathtaking.  This is when you appreciate the wonders of nature firsthand, and realise your place in the big scheme of things and acknowledge deep in your soul how small you are and yet how integral a part of the whole shebang.  It is a salutary experience and worth remembering when back in the hum-drum of everyday routine.  What food for the brain and visual stimulation for the eyes. 

Agnes and I had a ball!  We are both still friends <G> and found we have more than weaving in common.  We think in a similar way, so we appreciated the wonders of everything we saw, in both nature and in the people we met along the way.  We now have brains full of inspirational images and ideas that will, at some point, find their way into our different forms of weaving.  We’re now waiting with baited breath to find out where the next Convergence and Complex Weavers Seminars will be - so we can plan our next road trip in the US!!

For those participants in my Deeper Beneath the Surface seminar at Convergence who wanted a copy of the 8 shaft pdf on pique and matelasse, you should already have received it by email.  However, as I know that some US isp’s block UK addresses, you may not have received your copy.  Comcast.net is one of those that regularly blocks UK static addresses.  If this is the case for you, then please email me (I can receive emails from US addresses no problems!) on stacey@theloomroom.co.uk and I will send it via a web-based server. 

Thanks so much for signing up for my class, and I hope it has interested you in creating dimensional texture in double cloth.

As you might know, I subscribe to a great magazine on philosophy for people who aren’t necessarily philosophers but who like to ponder on some of life’s more interesting questions!!  This quarter’s edition of The Philosopers’ Magazine has a number of interesting articles including one on the intelligence of dolphins and contemplating that we should perhaps consider them as ‘nonhuman persons’. 

However, that is not what I am writing about today.  The central theme of this volume is should philosophy be taught to children in primary and secondary school?  Research which has been done in the UK over the last 20 years on teaching philosophy to primary school children has found that children ‘who have been through sustained Philosophy with Children improve in almost every other academic area.  Philosophers are traditionally asked awkward questions and to come up with alternative answers, and it really breeds independent thinking.  If we want a generation of people who will begin to tackle and solve the problems we have, we need people who think for themselves and who think differently.’  So says the author, Brooke Lewis, a journalist who is now working in Cambodia. 

I’ve been concerned for several years about the dumbing down in school of original thinking by students.  Because of the constraints of the National Curriculum in the UK, many of my teaching friends find themselves handcuffed not only in the content of what they teach but even how they are to teach it.  I am, perhaps naively, encouraged by the new coalition government’s view of giving schools back to teachers and reducing the bureaucratic restrictions of the National Curriculum and maybe philosophy can help our youngsters to think for themselves once more instead of the seemingly primary goal of regurgitating set facts and figures at exam time! 

The Philosophy for Children programme sounds heavy, but it isn’t.  Imaginatively taught, children are encouraged to think about morals, ethics, choices, through the medium of books, TV, films, songs, and practical life situations.  There’s an example of this in the article - discussing clones prompted by a new movie. 

It is this kind of in-depth, curious, thinking that I find myself searching for in myself and in others.  Quite often when I go out socially, I am dismayed at the level of surface conversation - inane chatter that skims across the surface of everything.  I know I am one of those people who gets too deep too quickly, and that this is uncomfortable for many people to handle, so I more often than not keep very quiet unless I’m with people I know or people who are happy to get meaty in a discussion.  But when you do find like-minded people and a wide-ranging, give-and-take discussion involving lots of different ways of thinking and sounding each other out, the joy is just wonderful! 

I’m not a person who does confrontation, but I am a person who loves to think about other people’s opinions.  These sorts of discussions lead to more open minds and personal mental growth.  My son and I still have great discussions about all sorts of things and it’s interesting to see how differently his mind works from mine. 

There’s also a young lad of 12 who visits his granny across the road from me.  We were looking up at a passing plane and the stars and got into a discussion about space the other night at a barbecue, and he was both very knowledgeable and very curious, sucking up all the information I could drag from the depths of my mind.  We had a brilliant chat about infinity and his granny said that that’s what he would do all the time if he could, but no-one has the time to talk with him in that way.  If our children learn to access deeper levels of thinking in this way, we could find ourselves in a more considerate, thoughtful era, and I’m all for the parents and schools that will help in this task!!

Last week we looked at warp repp - setting the warp yarns so close together that the weft cannot be seen - and I talked about warp and weft emphasis, mentioning that not only can warp repp be effective for rugs, but so can the other extreme, where the warp is spaced so widely apart that it is totally covered by the weft when the weft is beaten against the fell.

The most obvious examples of weft-dominance are flat-woven rugs such as kelims, and woven tapestry.  If you are using fairly fine weft yarns then the warp is not as widely spaced as if you are using thick wool yarns, as the resulting fabric has to be firm and the weft needs to cover the warp totally but not loosely. 

Back in the 1990s, I did a little exploration of weft-faced rug weaving as part of the Bradford Diploma in Handloom Weaving - a distance learning course which focussed on using only 4 shafts.  It was a great discipline and, although we were all self-taught (the course was like a Certificate of Achievement where you do your own study and the course gives you the framework for that study), the rules were very tight and forced you to be creative within constraints.  This is always a good thing for inventiveness, at least for me! 

Here is a kelim style of flat-weave rug weaving : 

And this next sample shows that you can mix flat-weave with knotted pile to create surface texture :

Ok, so what if you don’t want to weave rugs? 

Well, you can incorporate different setts into the same piece of fabric, simply by sleying one area closer together than another.  Sleying is the term given for spacing the threads through the reed which beats up the weft into place.  The reed separates the warp yarns, spreading them into the width and closeness that you want.  So you can have areas where there are no warp threads - spaced - and other areas where there are a number of warp threads grouped together - crammed.  With this next sample, I have a balanced fabric (so I can see both warp and weft equally) in most of the sample, but in the pink and brown stripe areas, I didn’t want the delicate colour of the pink to be diluted by the cream silk, so I sleyed them closer together so that the fine weft yarn could not be seen.  I also did the same for the chocolate brown stripe so that it would contrast effectively with the pink. 

You can also see from the detail that I used a textured yarn in the warp - a silk boucle - which gives a lovely textural contrast to the flat silk.  Just be careful when using a highly textured yarn like this in the warp that it will go through your heddles and reed easily, otherwise you will find it snags in the weaving. 

Instead of cramming your warp threads together to create areas of warp-faced weaving in a balanced weave piece, you can also do the exact opposite, and space them out to create areas of transparency.  That’s exactly what I’ve done with this final sample this week.  I was inspired by the Antarctic and wanted to weave a whale, but I’m not a tapestry weaver.  How was I going to do that?  I could only use 4 shafts, but there was no written restriction on what else I could do……

This transparency incorporates tapestry techniques, an inlay technique and spaced warp to depict the whale’s fluke in the Antarctic. 

Well, I hope that’s given you a few ideas to play around with incorporating different setts in your projects.  If you decide to have a go, do let me know how you get on.

Next week, I’m going to look at a simple weave - honeycomb - and how you can change simple grids into curves and cells.

Enjoy your weaving!

© Stacey Harvey-Brown 2010

Conversations about intelligence seem to have popped up all over the place this week….

How many different sorts of intelligence are there?  So far this week, here are what’s come up in conversation….

There’s the obvious academic intelligence which seems to be all about remembering lots of facts and figures to be regurgitated at required times such as exams (which are thankfully coming to an end now). 

There’s IQ.

There’s common sense, and practical intelligence - things learnt by watching and absorbing practical things over the years.

There’s what I call ‘native’ intelligence - the kind of intelligence that puts separate bits of information together to make up a complete picture. 

There’s lateral thinking - which is separate from native intelligence but closely related - where seemingly random and unrelated things can be the trigger to solving another problem entirely.

There’s emotional intelligence - where people are aware of how others are feeling and respond accordingly.

There’s social intelligence - knowing how to interact with people in many different situations whether one-on-one or in groups. 

I also rate curiosity as a form of intelligence.  If you are curious about life, how things/nature/science works, if you are curious about how people think, if you want to keep learning about many different topics, extending your life experience through reading, listening to others, experiencing different situations, then to me, that is an intellectual form of intelligence. 

Why this discussion on intelligence?  My son, who has just turned 21, decided he wants to go into the army.  He took various tests, including one that measured ‘intelligence’.  From what he described, this test was designed to search out speedy reactions to many different situations - comprehension, lateral thinking, native intelligence, and others.  What it was not designed to do was measure academic intelligence - lucky for him because he is not that way inclined!  However, in other forms of intelligence he rates pretty highly.  In fact, so much so that he scored high marks and has been selected for a number of possible jobs that require his brains rather than his brawn.  A huge relief for his mother!!! 

The whole process led to a number of discussions with several people about intelligence and I find it fascinating!  What other forms of intelligence have I not included in my summary?  We place so much store by academic intelligence, and yet, once we are out of the education system, that is virtually the least used intelligence.  It is a rare school that teaches students about the other forms of intelligence that will be so useful to them in the outside world.  Why is that?  And what is the benefit of such a skewed approach to intelligence? 

My son, on exam results alone, although no dunce, is not a high flyer.  Yet put him in a situation that calls for a cool head and an ability to weigh things up quickly and accurately and he is a star!  And with a razor-sharp wit!  The army will give him the opportunity to develop those skills that he possesses, learn new ones and keep him interested and engaged.  Although as a mum it’s been a shock to the system, I know that he will have a purpose and be part of something much bigger than he is.  His intelligence is finally being given the recognition it deserves.

I read this little gem in a blog this week.  It was a throw-away comment on a business blog, but one that struck a chord with me.  The translation all depends on whether you start the sentence with an indefinite article or a definite one.  (I’ll bet that just took you back to long English grammar lessons at school!!!) In other words, if you write “a present is a gift” then you are talking about something usually physical that someone gives you.  And yes, obviously, someone giving you something is a gift.

However, the version I have been mulling over is the other one -the present is a gift.  That’s a whole other ball o’ wax!  All we have is right now.  What we’ve done in the past makes us into what we are right now.  The future is unknown but what we do right now is what makes our future selves.  So what we have right now is priceless!  We have the chance to change our lives - to rewrite our course through life - just because we have right now - the present moment. 

This is so mind-blowing.  I’ve thought about it before, as I’m sure you have as well.  It’s one of those student navel-gazing topics on similar lines to ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what’s existence’?  I’m sure you remember those heady days when you first got to grapple with life’s big questions.  I still have those days on a regular basis - usually from spotting something wonderful in nature. 

And during tough personal times, when we spend a lot of time looking in at the minutea of our day-to-day lives, and our relationships and our purpose in life, and reflecting on what might have been and what still could be, realising that the present is our chance to do something different, to change the results we’ve been getting, to alter the path of our trajectory in life can be a tremendous gift. 

I’m not talking glibly here.  I mean this.  I’m living it right now.  And one thing I learned this morning, whilst watching a buzzard seemingly hanging immobile in the sky, is that the present is for living, for embracing, for enjoying, for understanding.  Today I have really had a sense of the present as a gift.  I hope I always have the grace to value that gift and to embrace it with gratitude, joy and passion.