I got to thinking about ways to sew with hand woven fabric and decided to use some Christmas money buying a lovely book on weaving clothes and a philosophy incorporating Zen and the attitude of going with what happens and creating. So I have ordered the book Self Discovery Through Free Weaving By Misao Jo & Kenzo Jo. It is only sold through distributors for Saori looms, so is fairly expensive; I’ve been waiting since last year to order it.

I like the casual look to the clothes but I also wanted some more jacket patterns to try with the yardage I weave. I went back to Kwik Sew as I really like their patterns. They are only sold online so I had to place a special order, but I’m considering this part of my Christmas present too. They should drape and go together nicely with woven material.

I am weaving with some knitting yarn I bought last Christmas, which is a blend of cotton and modal (a beech wood fibre.) I wanted to try out a checked warp and play with it as an exploration of colour blending in weaving. I am calling the project Quasimodal Towels, a play on words invented by the spouse. The 110-inch warp will make two or three kitchen towels, or kitchen towels and a fabric for sewing later as a handbag. If I do that I will use my tablet weaving cards to weave a strap for the purse too.

Autumn and the cooler weather has made me interested in both knitting and weaving again. My hand and arm pain has diminished enough that I can do a bit of knitting on small things, so it has been fun. I read a book I’ve had on my bookshelf for months on the history of weaving called Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, which I found to be quite a page-turner and full of theories and examination of historical documents and Indo-European languages.

I also ordered a book in from the library called No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting by Anne L. Macdonald that gave me such feelings of joy, because my Mom used to be a terrific knitter and anything related to knitting reminds me of her. I finished this quickly, ready for the next book. I find with inter-library loans that they all seem to come in at once, leaving me scrambling to finish them in time and assimilate the information.

The newest book I received yesterday on inter-library loan is called The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Ulrich won a Pulitzer Prize years ago for another of her books, and she really packs this one with information and interesting pictures. I have only begun but it feels good to have a history book related to my own creative passions.

On page 59 he has a beautiful thought:

But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.

I recognized the character Miss Lasqueti as having the name of one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. It brings some mystery and self-reliance to the character just to know that. I am always chuffed when I get the joke.

This bit from Ondaatje reminded me so much of a thought from Kenneth Clark that I am quoting them both.

That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric.

And way back in 2003 I was struck by this similar bit in Civilisation, Episode 7: Kenneth Clark is discussing the Baroque and exploitation by the chosen few, relatives of the popes, clothed in nepotism and housed in palaces of greed. He ends by saying this as the camera pans out and shows him walking down an enormous arched corridor that is thick with ornamentation and carving, and a sense of huge, whistling coldness and emptiness that goes on and on.

I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit, has ever been conceived or written in an enormous room.

It’s a haunting statement, not a question.

I have never read Marcel Proust, but Michael Ondaatje uses a remark by Proust in a letter to René Blum from 1911 that struck me as one of those solid, human truths:

We think we no longer love our dead, but . . . suddenly we catch sight again of an old glove and burst into tears.

René Blum helped Proust get the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past published and they were friends. I like this snippet from a review by the California Literary Review of a book about Blum called René Blum and the Ballets Russes: In Search of a Lost Life.

Cul­tural his­tory, like polit­ical his­tory, may place its impres­arios and empire-builders at the centre stage. But it is the quiet her­oes like René Blum, work­ing to pre­serve the clas­sics and to encour­age a rising gen­er­a­tion of artists, who often make a more last­ing contribution.

Yes, the quiet heroes in small rooms, writing, creating. . .

This passage from The Cat’s Table parallels something I discovered myself when discussing Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the Tarot of the Saints, so I shall quote Ondaatje’s paragraph and then my own thoughts from that study.

At the Cat’s Table they were discussing Italian art. Miss Lasqueti, who had lived in Italy for a few years, was speaking. “The thing with Madonnas is, they have that look on their faces—because they know He is going to die when young . . . in spite of all the hovering angels surrounding the child with the little spurt of bloodlike flame coming from their heads. Somewhere in the Madonna’s given wisdom, she can see the finished map, the end of His life. No matter that the local girl the artist is using cannot attempt that knowledgeable look. Perhaps even the artist cannot portray it. So it is only we, the spectators, who can read that face as someone who knows the future. For what will become of her son is provided by history. The recognition of that woe comes from the viewer.”

Here is my take on it, written in 2005, a response to someone on a forum who complained that Robert Place had depicted Mary on The Moon in the Tarot of the Saints.

There is a darker side to being the mother of a saviour to the world, the fear and worry which this highlights. Mothers are often given credit for intuition and “knowing” when their children are in trouble or something’s not right. She knew of Jesus’ inevitable death and the danger to her other children from political and religious factions. Deep, mysterious motherhood and the mental and emotional umbilical cord it carries, is much like the Moon archetype. The ghostly sadness of clouds drifting across the Moon, the deep paths of the soul who bears that knowing sadness all her life, howling into the night.

Judith A. Johnston

It is often the small snippets, the tender shoots among paragraphs, that grab me with an excellent writer. Michael Ondaatje is like that with words, grabbing your attention so that you remember his writing as a lyrical refrain, a drift of a song that you can’t stop playing in your mind.

“Golgotha” is the name of the hill that Jesus was crucified on, which we often call Calvary. Golgotha is an Aramaic word that means “the skull” and is used in the title of this book to signify genocide and murder. I came across this book last year while browsing new stuff online; I often try to keep up with new books even though I no longer work in a library and do collection development.

This episode has gone fairly unnoticed in the West, perhaps because of the time period and people being weary of war, plus the resulting political change and disillusionment from World War I. There is quite a detailed account of it at Wikipedia, and interestingly, there are people who deny this particular holocaust, much like people do the Jewish holocaust of World War II. As a historical event for which the word “genocide” was created, and the second most-studied genocide in human history next to the genocide perpetuated by the Nazis, it seems strange that we rarely hear of it.

I find history fascinating, but this seems very compelling to me, perhaps because it was shrugged off. Today we are so self-righteous about stopping various genocides, it is important to remember that this wasn’t always the case. Ethics come and go in politics and civilization.

Here is a review of the book from a Canadian newspaper

Citizens in the West complain about the emphasis on multiculturalism that our current governments uphold, but the Armenian case history is a perfect example of why that is important, as are the continuing ethnic civil wars around the world. To have knowledge of this case, and the response and denial of it, might give us a glimmer of why this sort of thing continues.

Or not. Homo sapiens, the species that reasons, often has no reason for doing terrible things except that they can.

The pattern is called The Natural.

I recently taught myself how to knit socks. There is never enough time for learning new things I find. I get pain when I knit too much, but lately I have found myself able to do some smaller projects on finer needles without pain, so I feel the world opened up creatively. It gave me a happy feeling to uncover my old needles from 30 years ago. My mother used to knit so it gives me a nice connection to her even though she died many years ago.

I call these my Malachite Socks because they have the colour gradations of malachite, one of my favourite gemstones. I made some mistakes but practice will help with that and I managed to trade some old machine knitting magazines and a book for some sock yarn, so I’m ready to go on another pair.

Here is a shot of the yarn with a string of malachite chips. Absolutely yummy, maybe I should make myself jewellery to match my handmade socks?!

Then I decided to make myself some mittens and a cabled hat for my husband using some other yarn I traded two books for. I of course made the spouse his hat first. I am just coming up to the crown shaping now, and he already tried it on and it fits well and looks very nice. This was made of Patons Decor yarn which is a blend of acrylic with 25% wool.

I like hanging around with creative types in forums as they are so inspiring. Lately I have been interested in what people are doing with knitted patterns from Rebecca Danger. I bought The Big Book of Knitted Monsters by her and am planning a few projects from there.

This is not the sort of thing I usually make since I don’t have children, but I do like to tell a story about characters and pair them up with books and card draws just for fun. To practice some of the techniques for knitting in the round to make monsters I made some Owl Puffs from a free pattern designed by Jenna Krupar.

I call them Percy and Patty, the Parliament Twins since a group of owls is called a parliament of owls. I messed up my Kitchener stitch on the heads. I did the stitch flawlessly before but got mixed up here. Perhaps they have tufts on their heads? Maybe a woodpecker got confused one day and started hammering on Percy’s head? You know how that happens in the wild.

I started weaving these towels on May 1st. Here it is October and I finally got around to hemming them. I was trying for something different and using a thick cotton yarn called Sugar ‘n Cream by Lily. I used their Hot Lime, Hot Pink, and Tangerine colourways. I liked the lime and pink but orange is a colour I detest, so that was my first mistake. My second mistake was using a thick yarn as I don’t like bulky yarns for knitting or weaving. My third mistake was doing two long towels on the warp instead of dividing it up into three. These are a huge thirty-eight inches long, almost the size of bath towels, and they are for the kitchen.

This project languished while I reconciled myself to not having a perfect project, then I got busy and hemmed the towels yesterday so I could get them out of the way and warp up again.

It nearly put me off weaving. While I understand the need for artists to stretch out of their comfort zone and use different colours and techniques, the bloody ORANGE was never going to fly for me, I don’t know what possessed me.

While getting charged up about weaving again, I decided to spend some of my Christmas money this year buying a second heddle kit and two extra reeds for my Ashford 16-inch rigid heddle loom as well as two pick-up sticks. Up to now I have used a plastic ruler as a pick-up stick but it isn’t ideal. The kit is two blocks of wood that fit on the loom to allow you to place and rest an extra heddle and thus weave a finer fabric or double weave fabric with two heddles to double the sett.

The shop that ordered my loom for me usually doesn’t open on the weekends but they are doing so in November and part of December this year, so I shall be able to pick my loom parts up and talk to them about finer cotton yarns and buy some fibre to work with. I have decided that I love weaving towels and want to experiment with finer setts and different materials and patterns .

As long as I don’t buy orange I should be successful.

I saw a photo where the quilter had cut the ends off randomly pieced borders and I could feel my interest picking up. I often do random writing exercises and pull disparate things together quickly to give my creativity a chance to blossom without adhering to rules and preconceived patterns, so this sort of thing appealed to me.

I’ve been reading articles by quilter Gwen Marston since I started quilting in 1984 and she has a recent book called Liberated Quiltmaking II that I have ordered.

Then I needed something to add for free shipping so I also ordered Fresh Quilting: Fearless Color, Design, and Inspiration by Malka Dubrawsky:

Yeah, we don’t want no stinking fear in this house.

And that’s the end of my birthday money but the books will keep on giving to my mind and creativity.

Update: I loved the sewing machine cover so much that I am currently piecing it. It goes together really fast, so a nice project for summer holidays.

I am keen to read this as not only is it Canadian history but it is rare to find books on women photographers. I also put in another inter-library loan request for A History of Women Photographers by Naomi Rosenblum, so I hope they can get that for me as easily as they got The Magic Box.

Since buying the Portable Fortitude Playing Cards with author Eduardo Galeano on one of the court cards, I have been trying to save up to buy used editions of his Memory of Fire trilogy and I had just enough to buy Genesis, Faces & Masks, and Century of the Wind last week right after our postal strike ended. It will probably take about a month for them to get here but at least I will finally be able to read them which is very exciting. My editions will not be a matching set but that’s okay.

While looking up some mythological references last week, I realized that my book collection was lacking information on Celtic Mythology so I managed to hunt up a used copy of an older edition of James MacKillop’s excellent Dictionary of Celtic Mythology to go with An Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology by Bob Curran. It is hard to find Celtic information that hasn’t been overtaken with New Age credo. I am hoping these two books together will provide some substance as online sources for Celtic mythology are a bit haphazard.

And I also faithfully wait for James Wells’s Circle Ways Tarot, which is going to be a fantastic round deck in black and white—two of my favourite things. I have already chosen the book I am going to use with this one: From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. I like to pick what I call “random passages” of non-fiction or poetry to study with individual cards.

I was waiting for Ciro Marchetti’s new 52-card Oracle of Visions and was disappointed that his special edition with a brief full-colour booklet, and a CD-ROM containing several extraneous digital doodads, is being sold for $55 USD plus $15 shipping, which comes to a whopping total of $70 USD.

Joanna Powell Colbert is marketing her limited edition of the Gaian Tarot for $247 USD plus shipping for the deck, a signed book, a handmade bag, a signature bag of herbs, and a polymer clay amulet with an image of a card. Fortunately Llewellyn will be publishing a mass market edition of the Gaian, but this is rare with self-publishing.

While heartening to see that artists are able to self-publish good decks that conventional publishers may not want to publish, I find this trend toward limited editions frustrating.

I make my own extremely beautiful tarot bags and jewellery with high-quality supplies, that are imbued with hours of creativity and imagination that is not a copy of other artists’ work.

I just want the deck.

A signed book is nice, but I am not into celebrity. Save the high quality full-colour images for the card deck, not the book. I am not interested in your personal philosophy, credo, an itemized list of the correct approach to tarot invented by the expert-of-the-month, and dubious tarot history. What inspired you to create? Why those colours? Tell me about that in a booklet included with the cards and box.

I just want the deck.

I do not want wallpaper or screensavers or a CD-ROM or other tschakas, digital or otherwise.

I just want the deck.

Don’t take it personally, because it is not personal.

Loading a self-published product with extraneous gewgaws is not of real value, The real value comes from the creation and use of it. Offer a deck-only option which includes a realistic price, unencumbered by a set of irrelevant stuff I do not want.

Get real.

I am currently doing up two final redwork blocks for the red sampler quilt I have been working on for 14 years. I can feel it coming to completion, I just have to fit disparate sizes of blocks together with strips and then it will be done.

This is a nice vase I found in an online free colouring book source. It is working up beautifully in a ten inch block.

The final redwork block has been traced out on fabric. I got permission from one of my favourite artists to use a section of her artwork, much modified for stitching purposes, in this block, so I will unveil that at a later date. I was happy she gave me permission; artists are so generous if you only write and tell them what you hope to do, and then ask.

I laid the completed blocks out to get an idea on how many blocks I still needed to do and was surprised that I don’t need any more. This will finish up around 65 x 80 inches and the quilt is to go with a red Adirondack chair that my brother refurbished for me. The chair was my Mom’s and she sat in it when she was pregnant with me 55 years ago.

The Honey Bee block on the right in the middle section was hand sewn and traded to me by a pen pal of mine from California whom I’ve recently been back in touch with. She’s a wonderful quilter and just talking to her got me fired up again about finishing this quilt.

While talking to her about a name change on her part, I got browsing tartans and made some beads for a necklace using the Wallace tartan as impetus. I used the botanical prints I made for another necklace in black and white, and changed the background to red, and then I generated some great looking patterns in Gliftex to complement the whole thing. I LOVE that program, it comes up with the most gorgeous patterns. The two black patterns and the two red patterns in the lower tier are Gliftex designs. After painting and varnishing the beads, 20 hours later they are done.

And then we come to the fun part: I needed a pendant for these beads and could not find anything suitable in my budget range of $8 and under. So I was browsing around the Internet and saw some stunning examples of a wirework pendant so I took the plunge and made a prototype. I didn’t have a wire that was dark enough to get the contrast I wanted, but I got a nice necklace out of it and used some older beads I’d made several years ago that picked up the colours of the beads in the tree. I also made matching earrings, and the gemstone chips are tree agate and malachite, which look well as tree leaves I think.

I’ve ordered some black and burgundy wire in a fine 26 gauge to make more of these. The gauge I had on hand for this one was 28 gauge and it worked but is a smidge too fine for good definition and the gnarly look I want on the trunk of the tree. So, more plans ahead for these!

And lastly, I made 10 earrings for my neighbour as a thank you gift and that got me fired up again about making jewellery. I have lots of supplies and don’t want to waste them even though I don’t have things up for sale at the minute. I love the variety in these. I took a box of things over to her house and we sat on her back porch creating designs so she would get exactly what she wanted. It was a lot of fun, another spontaneous project that just fell together for some happy creativity.

I already had Lynda Barry’s book What It Is, and when I saw her in this card deck it convinced me there was something deeper to this deck. After receiving the cards I purchased Barry’s latest book Picture This which is similar but talks about art and creativity rather than creative writing.

After seeing Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan author, in this deck, I received a used copy of the book Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Galeano, and several people he discusses in that book are depicted in the Portable Fortitude deck. As well, he covers Hildegard of Bingen, one of my favourite people in history, and the Roman healer and philosopher Galen who had some interesting things to say about wellness.

From page 64-65 of Mirrors Eduardo discusses Galen’s advice to patients who were ill by nature to change their habits. Health and illness are ways of life and your habits can often decide that. I found that a revelation. I might type that out and put it up on one of my walls.

Another interesting fact that came to light on page 243 of this book is that Heinrich Göering, the father of the infamous Nazi Hermann Göering, operated a concentration camp in Namibia in 1904 where two men did medical experiments on black captives. These two men were responsible for training Joseph Mengele, so the precedent for concentration camps was far deeper in German culture than one might realize; it didn’t just pop up in the mid-thirties.

Hypatia is discussed on page 74 and also pops up in the Portable Fortitude cards as does Walt Whitman (page 230.) There are too many details and asides to note here and the book really needs to be read from front to back so that you get the connections as he’s written them, but it is worth a read. I’m going to try and find affordable copies of the three books in his Memory of Fire trilogy. I have The Book of Embraces on order from my library so am keen to get that too.

Considering how frivolous people sometimes view collecting card decks, I wanted to point out how interesting another person’s world view through art and literature can be, and how that can positively affect your life. Card decks are always worth a look-see, and this one has fuel for the eye with beautiful artwork plus fuel for the mind.

You never know what the impetus will be for new discovery and excitement in life.