Fabric Weaving

 Devora gave a Lunch and Shmooze demonstration of fabric and/or paper weaving yesterday.

And it got the creative juices flowing.

She demonstrated a weaving she was doing, using a practice piece from another workshop as the warp (vertical lines).  I got to thinking about some duppioni silk pieces I had snow dyed several years ago.  I never did anything with them because the colours weren't as vibrant as I had anticipated.

I pulled out the snow-dyed pieces, backed them with iron on lightweight interfacing (the ironing didn't totally adhere...), cut them into 1/2" strips and wove away.

This is the finished product:

I will add, when my cellphone recharges, photos of similar whole pieces before cutting up.

Now what to do with it?

Fabric Flowers

Full disclosure:  I did not invent this method of fabric flowers.  I saw it on youtube.

I may demonstrate live at our upcoming Lunch and Shmooze but my hands shake, sometimes to the point of distraction so I will do a photo description and if my hands cooperate, a live one.

First things first:  fabric.

I have done this with silk (leftover from silk ties without interfacing), polyester blends, and cotton.  I have not tried denim or heavier weight fabrics.

I work with freezer paper, making my template(s) using a paper or styrofoam cup.

I cut a piece of freezer paper big enough to make 5 top rim circles and one bottom circle piece. Since freezer paper can be used multiple times, if you have pieces left over from other projects, you can cut the templates from them.  The templates don't have to be in a row or a square.

Iron the freezer paper, shiny side down onto the back of the fabric.

Cut out around the fabric with the template, leaving the freezer paper adhered until you're ready to sew.  Set the smaller circle aside.

Remove the freezer paper, one piece at a time (don't throw out the freezer paper - it can be reused up to ten times before it loses its "stick").  Fold the circle in half, front side of the fabric to the front.  Then fold again.  You should have a quarter circle (the "quarter").  Put a pin in it so it doesn't reopen.  Repeat four more times.  

Don't worry if the unfinished edges don't exactly meet - they will not be visible at the end.

Thread a needle with a thread long enough to sew a running stitch through the rounded edge of the quarters connecting the quarters.  The running stitch should be an 1/8" to a 1/4" from the edge, being sure to go through all four layers., all the way around. 

Pull the two ends of the thread to gather the squares as tight as possible and tie the ends together.

Take your remaining circle, with freezer paper removed, and sew a running stitch all the way around.  Put your button on the wrong side of the fabric, pull the thread to gather around the button and tie the thread ends.  Sew the button circle on top of the flower.

Or you could just omit the final circle and attach the button as is directly to the flower.

 The finished flower

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Fuller disclosure - my hands were shaking so much that I couldn't gather the stitches properly, but you get the idea, I hope.  I may have to rethink the intended project...

 

In Memory

On October 7, 2023, my life changed, as did many others.  I was enveloped in immense grief over the personal loss of my friend, Havik, murdered by Hamas.  I was enveloped in immense grief over the loss of lives of those I didn't know and will never now know.  I felt the need to put my grief into textile.

As is my practice to use recycled materials, I found a piece of black corduroy, black lining and sandwiched a quilt block, 17" wide by 25" long.  I machine-quilted random diagonal lines using red embroidery thread in the bobbin and sewing on the back so the red embroidery lines would appear on the front.  I embellished the red embroidery thread lines by wrapping additional red thread around them and leaving unfinished tails.

I had "cut offs" from the Torah Tie Project.  The colourful cut offs  I am using for scarf dyeing but I had set aside the blacks and greys.  I now found a use for them.  I fused them onto the quilt top.  The cut offs were fairly narrow strips, most wider on one end that the other, their edges raw, much the way I feel.

I looked for text and found it in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes).  Kohelet is read, depending on the tradition, on Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.  The verses I chose are simple, and hold a certain degree of hope.  I originally attempted printing onto grey organza but the text was not legible enough.  In the end I printed it on pongee silk.  I had ribbon to make a border to sew it down on the cutoffs.  It somewhat resembles the death notices printed and posted in Israel with a black border. 

I then fused and stitched now the Hebrew letters, Nizkor, because the horror and the massacre itself is not something we can forget and something we should remember.

I had tried sewing a black binding but it seems too finished for my piece.  In the end, I just zigzagged the edges with a satin stitch in black.

I think this piece is finished.  Although I have not finished grieving, for all the victims on both sides of the border, it is time as Maya pointed out to attempt a return to "normal", so as not to give Hamas any victory.

And the absurd is that we are all hoping for an end to the war, but no side will be victorious.

Mazal Finds Us

I was visiting Carmit when she lived in Preston, UK.  While she worked during the day, I wandered around Preston which has a museum/art gallery.

There I saw Nick Kennedy's "Dice Drawings".  (If you google Nick Kennedy Dice Drawings, you can see a lot of different works). His premise is to decide on the medium, rules of engagement, and let dice dictate placement and use of media.  Long story long, his medium is paper and pencil.  He made an "x" in the middle of the page, rolled a die trying to hit the "X", and where the di landed, he used a manual counter  to record in blue pencil the number appearing on the counter.  If he hit the same number twice in a row, he switched to a red pencil.  After many rolls of the die, and switching pencil colour, he reached the number on the counter which he had set as his goal.  The result: Dice Drawings.  

 It looks like a swarm of bees but a closer look reveals the marks are the numbers appearing on the counter.

When I got home, I kept thinking about how I could use the premise - i.e. leaving the placement of stitches up to chance.  After contacting Nick and obtaining his permission to steal borrow his idea, I thought hmmm, how can I do this in textiles?

My rules of engagement were:

1,    to use fabric on hand.

2.    to give the piece Judaic content.

3.    to break the rules if necessary, me being the arbiter of necessity...

For fabric on hand, I had leftover dupionni silk from other projects in many colours.

For Judaic content, I thought "chai".  If I make the piece an 18" square, that's chai.  If I made the piece from 36 dupionni squares, chai again.  And if I use 3 dice, yet again chai.

How to choose the fabric colours and placement?  I didn't have 36 different colours but I did have over 18.  So I made a grid of 6 blocks across and 6 blocks down and identified each A1-6, B1-6, etc.

	1	2	3	4	5	6
A
B
C
D
E
F

If I used 18 fabrics, I could use each colour twice, the first in A-B-C 1-6, the second in D-E-F 1-6.  I hope you're getting the visual.  Just imagine each cell is 3" square (because I haven't figured out yet how to make the table yet.

OK.  So now how do I decide on placement?  By casting lots, obviously.  A Jewish tradition going back to the Torah. See Leviticus 16:8.  So I put fabrics squares for A-C in a bag, and slips of paper numbered A-1, A-2, etc. into a separate bag.  I pulled a square from the fabrics bag and a slip of paper from the papers bag and voila.  The colour and its placement on the grid.  The process was repeated for D-F.  So if I pulled out, for example, a blue fabric square and a paper slip marked A-3, the blue square would go into A-3 on the grid.  And so on until the entire grid was filled.

But could I leave it alone?  No.  I broke the rules by deciding that I could roll the die once for each half of the grid.  The number on the face of the die would dictate how many squares I could move around and reposition, up to a maximum of 6.  My luck, it fell on 1 on each roll.

So that takes care of the placement of fabrics.  I sewed them into rows and then joined the rows together in numerical order.  However, I wanted to bead the squares.  New Rules!

 I was going to bead 18 chai squares.  To determine which squares to bead, I rolled two dice, I one marked A - F, and the other with the regular 1 - 6 dots. 

 Then to determine how many beads to bead at each location, I rolled 3 regular dice (maximum of 18 beads per square). 

(Sorry, haven't figured out how to rotate photo yet...) But you get the idea, I hope.  I had two rolls for placement which were duplicates so I had to roll again.


I got to choose the type of bead and how to bead on each square. 

The almost finished pieces was not quite 18" - it needed borders.  So I left the final decision of whether to do a border of one colour the entire perimeter or one colour on each side up to the member of the Pomegranate Guild.   They chose one colour for the entire border.

And this is the finished piece, not the best photography but a future challenge.

What I learned: a new for me word "aleatoricism" which is defined as the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially art or media, from Latin "alea", the rolling of dice.

Still contemplating a series of 6 X 3, 2 X9... or perhaps I could use fabric instead of paper and make a mark with a pen and then cover it with an embroider stitch.  Or use silk and permanent markers and rubbing alcohol, or...

 

 

 And a little about the use of dice in ancient history:

Astragalomancy, also known as cubomancy^[1] or astragyromancy, is a form of divination that uses dice specially marked with letters or numbers.

Historically, as with dice games, the "dice" were usually knucklebones or other small bones of quadrupeds. Marked astragali (talus bones) of sheep and goats are common at Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeological sites, particularly at funeral and religious locations.^[2] For example, marked astragali have been found near the altar of Aphrodite Ourania in Athens, Greece, suggesting astragalomancy was performed near the altar after about 500 BC.^[3]

The practice of contacting divine truth via random castings of dice or bones stretches back before recorded history. The Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed bone "dice" (hakata) used by the Shona people of southern Africa.^[4] They have been in use for thousands of years, and remain extant.^{[citation needed]}

Astragalomancy is often considered to be a branch of cleromancy.^[5] As a form of sortition, numbers are scrawled into the dice; the numbers are associated with letters, thus bearing on the questions of the diviner. The diviner then casts the dice, resulting in a random sequence of numbers.^[6] The diviner interprets this sequence according to certain rules – usually rules related to a religion (e.g. Tibetan Buddhism and the Mo system of cubomancy).

Another branch of cleromancy sometimes compared to astragalomancy is pessomancy (also known as psephomancy) – a type of divination which uses colored or marked pebbles rather than numbered dice. These pebbles are either thrown out of a bag after shuffling or drawn from the bag at random. The interpretation of the colors or symbols relate to issues such as health, communications, success, and travel.

 

 

MY continued love (hate) affair with silk neckties

A week or so ago, on one of our weekly POM Zoom meetings, I showed this scarf which I had dyed from necktie bits and pieces leftover from the Torah Tie Project, currently known as Of Biblical Proportions.

Any references to that project can be seen at thetorahtieproject.blogspot.com.

I volunteered to show the process.  Here goes:

I was left with a bin of tie bits.

I spent three days ironing and sorting them.  And this is what I got:

 

 

I used this 11.25" wide by 60" long 5 mm pongee silk scarf which I bought at G & S Dyes.

 

 

I cut a piece of cotton fabric (i.e. old sheet) slightly larger than the scarf and laid it out on a flat surface.

I then laid the silk scarf on top of the cotton piece.  The chopstick marks the half-way mark of the scarf length.

I decided to use odds and ends bits instead of strips this time.I then laid the random sized pieces of silk tie bits on the silk scarf, up to the half-way mark.

Folded the second half of the scarf back over the first half, removing the chopstick...

Folded the second half of the cotton piece over top of the scarf.

Rolled the cotton-scarf combo from the narrow open end into a roll.  Roll from the open end otherwise the rolling motion will push the pieces out from the scarf.  Ask me how I know...

 Tie the roll with string, thread or bits of ties so that the roll is tied at both ends and once or twice in the middle.

I decided to use odds and ends bits instead of strips this time.ade

I decided to also experiment to see if the dyes from the ties would dye cotton.

Same procedure as for the silk scarf roll.

Bring a pot of water to a boil.  This has to be a dedicated pot, not to be used for cooking foods.

Add either 3 teaspoons or 3 tablespoons of vinegar as a mordant.  I just glugged glugged some vinegar into the pot...

Rolls ready for immersion.

Rock for stone soup or for holding the rolls under water...

Simmer for 20 minutes.

Place old towel on flat surface.  Protect surface under the towel, if necessary.  The cotton, scarf and tie bits may still be hot.  Carefully remove the tie bits.  Et voila! 

Et voila!  Hang the scarf to dry and when dry, heat set with iron on silk setting.

This dyeing method is apparently not as successful on cotton.  The colours were not as vibrant and some pieces didn't show dye at all.  Can't win em all.