Playing with textiles

It's been a retatively quiet week in our small hamlet.  The students are getting excited for the Christmas season and are losing focus, but that is to be expected.  We had four continous days of lake effect snow but, to the chargrin of the students, school was never cancelled. I think we ended up with well over a foot of snow, although much of it is currently getting washed away by the rain. 

On Friday evening, we went out for a celebratory dinner with a friend who just got tenured at one of the colleges in the area.  He's an art history professor and we began to talk about what constitutes art.  We were talking about textiles and folk art, which was particuarly timely as my three bags of wool (no joke!) were sent back to me cleaned and carded, awaiting spinnning and knitting (more on this later). A thesis student of our friend got asked the question (during her defense on samplers) about whether samplers were really pieces of art.  She was able to defend that they are, and thus one would think that quilts and other textiles would also fall into that category.  Extending that, we could say that hand-crafted furniture is as well.  Then we got thinking to what is actually displayed at art musuems such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA etc. and really, are those coats of armor art?  Are the arrowheads art?  The coins?  The mummies?  We can expand it futher... Is cooking art? It is called the culinary arts after all.  But wait, cooking is a science, isn't it?  I mean, there is a procedure and the whole idea behind cooking are the chemical reactions that occur when various ingredients are combined under various conditions.  We simply agreed that western academia is way too specialized and doesn't appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of the real world.

For the rest of the weekend I was working on the art (or science) of wool.  I don't have a working spinning wheel nor any experience spinning, but I do have a drop spindle, and I've been experiementing with techniques to get the best quality yarn.  So far, I haven't had a huge amount of success.   The resulting yarn is certainly knittable, but it's chunky and varies in thickness, so at this point probably only good for making scarves and hats. This winter, I am looking forward to working with some spinners in the area as well as fixing my own spinning wheel.   

In direct opposition with my primitive yarn making, my darling husband and I took a trip to Thistle Hill Weavers on Saturday as they were having an Open House.  The mill is located in the middle of nowhere but we were pleasantly surprised to find the place packed with other like-minded folk.  The mill specializes in 17th, 18th, and 19th century reproductions of fabric and carpet.  We had no clue what to expect, but left with a much greater appreciation of the process that goes into making fabric.  The looms are automated, but setting them up to make the fabric literally takes days, between creating the warp, getting the warp beam set up (and individually knotting hundreds of threads) and creating the chain (in some cases, a punch card of sorts) that will "read" and "translate" the pattern to the loom (nonautomated looms require multiple foot pedals to translate the pattern, a process which can look eerily similar to playing the organ). The finished products are beautiful, obviously made with care, and will last forever.  The website has some movie clips showing parts of the process.

From Thistle Hill Weavers

The mill produces fabric for historical fims, including my favorite non-Austen mini-series John Adams. They also provided fabric for Titanic, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, There Will Be Blood, Narnia, and many others.  As noted in previous posts, I am a huge fan of the early 19th century, and I had fleeting visions of redecorating our home with these gorgeous textiles.  Yes, they are functional (my darling husband was certainly eyeing the wool blankets while I was looking at stair runners) but they are truly pieces of art as well.