reprise

heddles

all that new year furor weaving and tidying left me with a swollen ring finger on my right hand. downtime today.
i'm posting the last of the photos i took at the ethnography museum in ripoll.
besides wool, the town also had a thriving jute industry.  jute was grown, spinned and manufactured into coarse cloth and sacks.

old barn loom.

 reeds and spinning wheel

neki desu

お正月 oshogatsu

changing the tradition, this new year has found me at the looms, so i can participate in meg's a day in the life of looms. this makes me think it is going to be a good year.

i am weaving a scarf in wool with a stripe of very fine crepe wool aka overtwisted  wool.

here's the contraption i had to devise for the overtwisted yarn because i don't have a second beam in my table loom and i also wanted to control those threads varying the tension. i had read somewhere that arai junichi wove with crepe wools in very loose tensions, so ambition blinded me-again- and decided to give it a shot.

the sample: plain weave, this crepe again , crepe wool and merino wool. the plain weave resulted in a too stiff fabric after the slight fulling. i liked what the crepe did so i went along with it.

here's the scarf being woven as window screening-quoting sandra rude. it presents some inconveniences as the crepe stripe is looser, but being so very open it weaves fast. good! because this baby is long.

remainder of the crepe warp being coaxed into behavior for a double weave sample on loom nº 2. note the second warp on the right of the image. both are remnant chains, but given the difficulty of the crepe wool i am contemplating changing and warping front to back.i have to sleep on that.

and last, but not least:
it's not a loom although it can create weaves
( we weavers know better) and it's yarns too.
practicing short rows on the k. machine.

cally booker can you hear all that sampling going on?






happy new year to ya'll and let's get go gogo!




neki desu
 

good tidings to you

may your lights shine bright during  the holidays and  through the rest of the year.
ill be back after the new year.





neki desu
 

baby caps, christening gowns, dollie robes and a sampler

   

exquisite handwork: linen christening robes  and caps with bobbin lace and hand embroidery.

                   

dollie clothes for baby dollies and lady dolls made of paper with the luxury of real lace.

a sampler, one of many. of course all these neither the robes nor the doll's clothes came from a shepherd's family, but from the town's bourgeoisie.

neki desu

 

sheperds'crafts

beautifully carved bell holders perhaps for baby lambs or goats made from poplar wood.







cups and a salt or sugar box.
wish they could make those cups again.

                                                                                         

  those spoons! they remind me so much of the 

ones made by the  sami people. luckily there's still a craftsman who makes a simpler version that sells at the museum's gift shop.

neki desu
 

....the rest is explained by science, philosophy and psychology

ethnographic museum, ripoll

this cap is typical of catalan  peasantry and many hold it as a symbol of catalan identity.
so it was a surprise to see a map indicating areas where the cap was also donned.

napoli, sargedna  and corsica were logical: 

the reason might have been within

the kingdom of two sicilies which is still

nominally linked to the spanish bourbon 

monarchy. but i was  very curious about marseille and nice.

catalan as a language is an off shoot of provençal and there's much more french provençal to their culture than they are ready to acknowledge. following this thread i suddenly  made a connection with the textile museum in lyon and the display of clothes pertaining to french revolutionaries. there were britches, flags, women's clothes. and the cap.

fast forward to a weekend of searches and  putting pieces together until it all gelled .and there it was,
why of course! the fédérés marching  into paris  to aid the revolutionaries wearing the cap and singing a a song called la marseillaise .

the story of the cap is long and interesting and during the years its symbolism has been adapted to different circumstances-think salvador dali for example,but what it still holds is the notion of freedom.
i wonder if some high handed art curator will insist on dismissing textiles as women's stuff.



neki desu

 

history explains almost everything....

we took a very pleasant trip to the village of ripoll, about 2 hours by train from barcelona.

it is a small town close to the pyrenees, full of history and  albeit being inland, it has a  very interesting cuisine. in the old days their wealth came primarily from sheep-herding so there was a thriving wool industry. paralell to it there was also an important jute industry.

 during the week i will be posting photos of the delightful ethnographic museum full of  tools of the trade and assorted textiles.

for now some photos of the romanesque  monastery.

neki desu