Another snowy story

This time I'm stitching in the Arctic, thinking about the melting Greenland Ice Sheet.  It's shades of cream and white- what ever odd balls of wool I can get a hold of: every one a different texture and weight. Mostly I think of what I am making as ridges of stragusi (wind hardened snow) but sometimes they seem more like ice floes floating on the warming water.

I want to make a big afghan to cover my new big bed, in my Polar themed bedroom.  I started out thinking of granny squares, but not so colourful since the room is entirely blue and white, but monochromatic granny squares seem much less charming.  After too many hours of trial and error, I finally came up with this project of irregular strips because I had enough white/cream wool to start it off. I will probably hook them together with shades of blue to represent the melt.

To tell the truth I needed a portable, modular project which could keep my hands busy while I listened.  I have trouble not fidgeting, and keeping my attention engaged in meetings or classrooms but if I'm doing something simple, like crochet, I can stay present, retain information and think clearly.  It actually works even better for me than taking copious notes.

Now that I'm finished March's intensive two week training, I'm still grateful to have a project that is easy and portable since most of my projects at the moment tie me to my studio and require intense concentration. I've got Jury Service coming up in April, and this crochet will be my way of surviving the tedium of the selection process. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure no judge would allow me to stitch while actually hearing a case, even though it would make me a better juror.

Handmade wedding

Bethwyn and Steven just married 

When my dear friend and 'Frugal with the Bruegel' collaborator, Bethwyn, got married last weekend to her sweetheart Steven, it was a completely unpretentious affair. Not small, not plain, but a charming expression of her creativity and that of her many creative friends.  Some of my own contributions surprised me- many of the things I've made and given to Bethwyn since we became friends featured in the wedding, giving me a little frisson of pleasure every time I noticed another one.

Handmade paper garland

My wedding gift to the couple was a book I made a few years ago for the poem I wrote called Do the Dishes.I loaned my bunting which hung alongside the bunting shared by at least two other friends. The many metres of handmade bunting (each maker's character making the different strands distinctive)  first decorated the trees shading the ceremony, then appeared again at the hall for the reception.

Handmade lace garter

My two main (intentional) contributions to the wedding were worn by Bethwyn.  I spent many months crocheting the lace for a garter, then stitched it onto a vintage velvet ribbon. The lace pattern is one I invented called Denniston Lace after a white frothy plant I admired on my visit to Denniston Plateau last year. Making lace is really hard on my eyes and this garter may sadly be the last lace I make. I love to do it, I love the idea of it, but I'm not willing to sacrifice such an essential sense for it!

Bethwyn trying on the garter on the morning of the wedding, with freshly henna'd hands

As it comes off the hook, the lace is naturally scrunched up on itself and doesn't look much until it is starched and blocked.  I worked though a few iterations to get the starch right for wearing against skin.

Blocking Denniston Lace

My go-to home made starch recipe is designed to stiffen hand made lace for exhibition   The garter would have been as scratchy as bark to wear and I wanted the barefoot bride to feel completely comfortable in it.  It spent most of the wedding day hidden beneath her long dress, but every chance I got I made her lift her skirts to show me again!

Show me that garter again please

She also wore a garland in her hair, made by us together in our altered book collaboration.  I suggested using cut up books when she said she wasn't going to wear a veil and didn't want fresh flowers either.  Bethwyn kept saying she couldn't visualise how my proposal would turn out, but she trusted me enough to spend about 5 hours two weeks before the wedding working with me to make it.   She was so relieved when it turned out well. I wasn't completely sure how it would work but I also trusted my skills and imagination to try something new.

Planning the layout of the cutouts

Together we cut out images of leaves, flowers, birds and insects from two copies of An Edwardian Lady's Country Diary and attached them to florist wire to make a wreath.  A few coats of sealant made a very resiliant headpiece which complimented Bethwyn's cream and brown gown perfectly.

Half finished garland

I was just one of many friends and family  members with whom Bethwyn shared the pleasure of making the wedding.  So many weddings seem to be bland displays for which a couple starts their life together deeply in debt.  This one was a celebration of community and creativity as well as Bethwyn and Steven's love and committment to eachother.

The garland in action

Planned Pouf

I have planned this pouf for at least three years.   I found the pattern online so long ago that I've lost the link and it no longer comes up in a search, replaced by other, more recently posted, pouf patterns.

Since I moved back to New Zealand I've been saving every snip of thread and scrap of blanket and other materials for the stuffing.  Filling the cavity this afternoon was a trip through nearly four years of stitching projects.  I packed all the scraps in so tight that the overflowing bale in which I'd been collecting scraps is now almost empty.



I spend ages looking for the right cover fabric and eventually found a couple of metres of this sturdy cotton print in an op shop for just a few dollars. Then there was a long wait to find a home big enough to use the pouf, as I didn't want to make it just to put in storage (as happened to so many projects created in my last place).  Finally, after moving to my new spacious home  a few weeks ago, I needed some dedicated time for sewing something so long anticipated.

Finally today was the day it all came together.

I'm not completely sure why I sustained such a long engagement with this pouf.  As a person with almost no furniture of my own, a pouf is affordable (mine was about five bucks) and versatile (it can be a seat/footstool/coffee table/yoga bolster).  I do love to look at poufs in shops, especially those Indian import shops where each cushion is a luscious patchwork of colourful silks.  But more than I coveted the owning of those beautiful imported poufs I wanted the gratification of making it myself. Indeed, so gratifying is this pouf, both in the making and the sitting, that I think I'll start planning another one.

Introducing Shine, my flatmate's dog and my regular daytime companion

Denniston Sampler

In the spirit of the crocheted coral reef I made a few years ago, I'm working on a vocabulary of stitches to represent the mosses, lichens and ferns of Denniston Plateuau. The fragile and unique ecosystem, which seems likely to be lost to opencast coal mining soon, is too delicate for yarn. Instead, I'm working with embroidery floss and stitches, and fine crocheted lace. 

I've been playing around with the stitches on a felt rock that I made for the purpose, a deliberately misshapen slab imitating Denniston's flakey sandstone.  Most of my mosses are pretty straight foward knots, French and Bullion as they are perfect for imitating this kind of low velvety moss.

I also played around with a long looped stitch, cut like a shag pile rug for a spikey moss like the one in the centre of this little clump.

This is the little clump that Robin looked at while we were on Denniston in June, and she said, can you make me this? And I said yes but it turned out a bit sparser than the real thing. Partly as I was impatient to finish it for Robin's birthday (and then I missed it anyway) and partly because I've been distracted by the house and garden that I'm moving to in two weeks.



Also, my crocheted lace green ferns looked ridiculous on the felt rock so I'm using them for something else.  And I couldn't resist adding my own favourite bit of Denniston flora, this low white fluffy thing that I am not sure whether its a fern or a moss or a lichen. If you know, please tell me, I hate my ignorance.

Mysterious Denniston species 

My version of the Denniston white fluffy thing looks like this. It's crocheted lace in a stitch I invented (of course someone probably already invented it, but I was following my intuition rather than a pattern so I can't acknowledge anyone else's version).

Denniston lace on the rock

I made short lengths of the crocheted lace, then starched and pinned it to dry stiff, then ruffled it as I was stitching it to the felt rock base to get the clumpy effect of the original. I do think its a pretty lace stretched out and I might find some other use for this easy and attractive pattern which allows it to be seen better.  Perhaps a gift for a soon-to-be-bride that I know.

Denniston lace: starched and stretched.

How to make a flokati-style rug

Sewing  a Woolrest into a flokati-style rug

 I'm moving to a house in a few weeks. That's right, a real house with rooms with doors, a garden, an oven, a laundry, a bathtub and a separate studio.  I won't know myself after 2 1/2 years living and working in one room, making do without an oven or washing machine, turning my bed into a sofa every single morning, playing Rubics Cube with my possessions every time I want to find or make something.

I have such a crush on the idea of my new home that I think about it all the time. Since I found out about it in early June my imaginative, creative energy has been increasingly absorbed with planning the practicalities and pleasures of setting up my life and work in a much larger space. I've tried to be constructive with the imaginative power of the long lag between knowing and moving with various anticipatory projects such as my 'flokati-style' rug.

I want a warm soft rug in the living room on the polished wooden floor and looked into all sorts of options for making rugs, since buying a nice one is out of my reach.  I was considering various kinds of rag rugs to make with my stash of blanket scraps when I came upon an old Woolrest mattress cover in an op shop for $7.  And suddenly I saw a shaggy sheepy rug as the cosy centre piece of my new lounge.

Woolrest before washing

The single woolrest was a bit tired and grubby when I got it, so the first job was to wash it by gently stomping warm soapy water through it in a bathtub and then rinsing thoroughly with more gentle stomping. I drenched a few big towels squeezing the water out.  After being thoroughly air dried, it came up creamy, fluffy and inviting.   I love the fact my rug is New Zealand wool because I really didn't want an acrylic rug.

I trimmed off the elastic (in good condition so saved for future projects) and label.  Then I backed the woolrest with a heavy coarse woven wool blanket that I'd been given but which was too stained to use for art.  I cut the blanket about 5cm bigger around than the woolrest, which was lucky as during the sewing they magically ended up the same size with very little trimming required!

Woolrests are made of wool staples hooked through a loose wool weave so I could sew between the rows relatively easily.  It was slow going though because I had to make sure the long staples didn't get caught up in the machine foot, or sewn flat.  The weight and bulk of the rug meant I couldn't reach the middle of the rug with my sewing machine so I sewed three rows parallel to each edge starting as near the centre as I could get (about 30cm).I sewed two straight stitched lines inset from the edge and finally zigzagged around the perimeter (overlocking would have been even better).    I kept checking to make sure the blanket was flat and smooth, occasionally unpicking where puckers or bubbles crept in. I need the rug to sit flat and not be tripping hazard!

Stitching between the rows of wool staples

The final step was hand stitching wide strips of old yoga mat onto the back around the edges so it won't slip around on the polished wood. I put out a call on Freecycle if anyone had an old yoga mat, and was given a worn, stained mat that was almost ideal (a white mat would have been more perfect but lavender is good enough).  The yoga mat was molded with rows of tiny holes so I sewed through the holes, catching the blanket but not the woolrest.  I used an upholstery needle for a big running stitch and it wasn't as difficult or slow as I expected.

The whole project, including washing the rug and the yoga mat took about 9 hours (compared to 60+ for a rag rug). The cost was $8 including thread (real flokati rugs cost hundreds).  It will be a no-shoes and no-food rug because flokatis don't vacuum well and I don't want to have to beat it clean too often. It looks beautiful spread out in my tiny current home where I like to dig my bare toes into the pile and imagine lounging on it, in front of the wood burner of my future home.  22 sleeps to moving day!

My newly completed snuggly, cosy, soft and warm 'flotaki-style' rug.

 PS This is my first attempt at blogging a tutorial-style post. I am learning lots from generous tutorials on other people's blogs (at the moment mostly gardening, machine-sewing and DIY decorating). I want to contribute back to the amazing pool of shared knowledge. Since I couldn't find any tutorials already online on this topic this is my gift back to the internet craft/DIY community. Please let me know what you think, especially if you try making yourself a rug like this.

In the Window Gallery

Today is the start of my latest exhibition, Extraction on in the Window Gallery of Objectspace in Ponsonby Auckland.  The Window Gallery can be seen 24/7- peer through the glass at night or step inside during the day for a closer look.  

Seep I & II, Spill I  &  II and Slick I  &  II

Its a small gallery (though much bigger than the Sanderson window I just pulled Dispersant out of).  In it I'm showing six small framed embroideries about oil spills and two larger three dimensional works about mining. Laura Howard has written a lovely essay to accompany the show.

Opencast Australia, reworked for the wall

I've long aspired to show my work at Objectspace and so this is (yet another) dream come true. (So many of my dreams come true, its lucky I'm good at generating new dreams so I don't run out).  The extraordinarily sweet Laura did a beautiful job of curating and installing, with some help from me.  It was a bit of joke though because she has a broken foot and I was (am) still recovering from a debilitating illness. We were like two half-people trying to help each other put the work up and accommodate each other's limitations.

Seep I & II in their beautiful frames

If my regular readers think you recognise these works, you are right, nothing is brand new, though its all new to Auckland.  Objectspace is not a dealer gallery, but all the work is for sale, just contact me directly.  See www.meliors.net for more details.

From the floor looking up, Spoil (foreground) and Opencast Auxtralia (background)

Granny Squares

I rarely do any stitching purely for personal purposes. It's so time consuming, and when I'm working on big art projects with deadlines it just doesn't make sense spend hours of stitching time crocheting myself a hat.  But sometimes I do make an exception for my most beloved darlings: especially my daughter, who had a birthday last month.

I've had granny squares on my mind for a while because a) they are quite fashionable so I keep seeing attractive photos of granny squares and b) they are fun and easy to crochet.  I'd love to make a vibrant multi-coloured granny square-something one day, but for Louise's elegant taste I restricted the palette to blue and grey. I knew she wanted a small blanket to keep her lap warm while studying in her cold Melbourne flat, and I hoped I could piece it together with op-shop wool because I was really broke.

I had the blue mohair, and some bits of grey wool already in my stash and I became a determined searcher of op shop wool baskets for a few months.  It was only as I came to sewing up the squares that I completely and utterly ran out of wool and had to go buy a whole skein new.  It was surprisingly difficult to find a warm grey in a light weight even once I broke down and started looking at yarn shops as well as second hand. Apparently no one makes hand knit boys school uniform jerseys anymore.

Just a little challenging

Me and Just a Little Spill (to give you a sense of scale)

Last week, in a mad rush to finish the stitching on my big black oil spill, I spent ANZAC Day sitting on my bed embroidering for 12 solid hours.  As I stitched I watched the entire fourth series of Mad Men on DVD on my laptop.  I enjoyed Mad Men very much. I finished Just a Little Spill which was very good. And I fried my laptop which was very bad.

The mad rush to finish Just a Little Spill was due to tomorrow's deadline to submit an online entry for it to the National Contemporary Art Awards.  An online entry requires one to have a computer and right now I don't have one.  Thanks to my mother letting me use her Macbook I have been able to submit the entry in time but its been extremely stressful to prepare.

Thankfully I'd already organized with photographer Craig Brown for him to photograph Just a Little Spill in his big studio. I found Craig online and chose him because he is the only local photographer who specializes in photographs of things (like cars) rather than people. He was an excellent choice, not only because he had the space and all the gear to manage my enormous black on black on grey, very difficult to photograph, work, but because he is very patient and experienced.  I'm so pleased with the pictures he took for me. Since I didn't have access to my own photos or Photoshop it was a great relief to have such a good full image that a detail view wasn't really necessary.

I've ordered a new desktop computer which will be more impervious to my studio's constant cloud of blanket dust (the original source of the overheating problem that after a year finally fried the laptop beyond repair).  My computer guy thinks he'll be able to retrieve about 95% of my data from the laptop, which will hopefully fill the two month gap since my last backup (let this be a cautionary tale that makes you do a back up right now!).  With luck, I'll be back online at home within the next few days.

Lovely for me

A strand of Dispersant, casting night shadows on the studio wall

In preparation for installing Dispersant in the Outeredge Project window in just a couple of weeks I am attaching my 400 crocheted, dyed and starched globules to fishing lines. I keep coming up short whenever I run out of the strips of old sheet and duvet cover that I use to carefully wrap each strand so they don't tangle in their boxes (five big boxes full so far).  So sometimes a strand of globules is left hanging in my studio for a day or two.  At night my bedside lamp is well positioned to cast lovely shadows through the globs. It is incredibly beautiful and I'm afraid I am the only person who will ever see them looking like this.

I feel sorry for (most) people who only get to see my finished art works in galleries because there are so very many moments of loveliness in the making and you will never know them as I do. I try and share as many work in progress (wip) photos here as I can, and often I continue to use wip photos after the piece is complete, because they remain my favourite images. But if I stopped and took a picture every time I noticed the transient loveliness under my hands I fear I would be even slower than the outrageously slow artist that I am anyway.  So most of my delight unfolds hour after hour in exclusive solitude.

Much of the loveliness can't be captured in photos, and I'm sorry, not matter how I try, my words are inadequate. How can I share with you the feeling of pulling floss through plump felted layers of blanket? The shushing of cotton and wool fibres stroking past each other until I sense just the right tension has been reached, the stitch is complete and the smooth point of the needle probes into the dense softness to begin the next stitch.  Over and over and over again, in a rhythm governed by the ever shortening length of thread, which begins as long as my arm can stretch from my lap and ends as short as the needle.  The trance is broken, I stitch the knot, snip the ends, pull another three strands of DMC off the card and thread the needle.

That's the pause when I am most likely to look beyond the row I am stitching to see the whole of what I've made so far.  Sometimes, especially in the long middle of a big project it's not lovely at all.  There's an awkward adolescence in which the charms of beginning are exhausted and the satisfaction of maturity seems a long way off. But I love the first stages of all my pieces as fiercely as a mother loves her newborn baby.  And coming to the end, seeing my vision made manifest the pieces look as intensely gorgeous to me as they ever will. More than the finished piece will, because once its finished I am stuck with all the little flaws and disappointments I have settled for.  No more potential, and to me, potential where the real beauty lies.

Serendipitous snotty globules

Snotty globules of oil-spill dispersant, hand-crocheted  cotton with wool 

After starching up the first batch of tea-dyed crochet dispersant, I realise I really have to stop describing them as spheres.  They are lumpy, misshapen, blobby globules with little in common with actual sphere shapes. But to me they are beautiful, especially en masse. Each one is unique with its own wabi sabi character.  They are like tiny crayfish pots or loosely woven baskets and obviously handmade. I'm very pleased with my globules of dispersant.

Starched globules stuffed with wool while they dry

I've also been surprised by my globules. How I get them from flat to round is with a homemade starch mix, not dissimilar to the wheat paste glue I use to make books.  To hold their shape while they dry I stuff them with short-staple wool from an old pillow.  It turns out that when I go to pick out the wool from the dried-stiff globules its almost impossible to remove all the wool, and strands of fluff line the insides like ectoplasm.  

Last snotty bits of wool that can't be removed from inside the globules

Or snot, which is just the effect I want, because the dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Corexit, once mixed with oil and floating in the water is colloquially called snot.  Back when I thought I was making spheres, I feared they would look too sweet and bubbly to adequately represent the horrors of dispersant's impact on ecosystems and human health. My globules are still pretty bubbly, especially from a distance, but this unexpected snotty quality, combined with the lumpy shapes is very pleasing.

I'm nearly half way through crocheting my 400 globules, and though the tea dying is quick and easy, the starching, stuffing and unpicking is very laborious. I pick as much of the wool filling out of each globule as I can, using a pair of long, medical tweezers. Its a good thing I'm so pleased with how they are turning out because I'm going to be spending a lot of time picking at snotty globules over the next few months.

Birdspoke

Red Billed Gull

While in Auckland for Art in the Dark last weekend, I stayed with Rachelle Wood who is the artist behind Birdspoke.   She lives in a rambling old villa set on a huge section planted to attract the birds that inspire her work. It is an oasis of birdsong and beauty near the middle of a big city.

Vintage lace 'window treatment'

Rachelle is doing some lovely renovations and her home displays her quirky, vintage and sweet tastes  perfectly. Her style might be called 'shabby chic' and I like it very much.   My mattress was in centre of the living room floor and when I opened my eyes there was almost a sense of vertigo under the extraordinary ceiling rose (complete with bursting pomegranates) set inside a large dome.  Like any proper home, its heart was in the large kitchen/dining/sitting area which opens out onto a deck with views of fireworks at night and trees in the daytime.

One third of the fabric stash

But my favourite room is her studio which is small, perfectly organised and crammed full of potential for creativity.Her huge stash of fabrics is neatly arranged by colour, her tools stored in baskets from Samoa, and her vintage lace in old suitcases.  I arrived feeling very annoyed to have left my crochet workbag* on the bus, but Rachelle quickly sorted me out with a hook and some ecru cotton from her stash so I could keep making throughout the weekend.

Bird embroideries and sewing machines

I've not met anyone besides Rachelle and me who crochets with this old-fashioned cotton that is so fine and fiddly. Rachelle shares my passion for slow making and hand stitching. She spends hours crafting each individual piece by hand to sell at craft fairs and on Etsy, Felt and Toggle.

A Huia plushie.  Huia because extinct over a century ago because their tail feathers were so fashionable.

She also finds time to make pretty things for herself and her home. I love this work in progress (below), to stitch together old lace doilies into a window hanging.  I can't wait to go back and visit again, to see the light shining through the lace.



*Complete with six precious completed spheres, two balls of cotton, crochet hook and second best scissors.   If you find my little blue and green bag, please give it back!

Eyjafjallajökull and Puyehue-Cordon Caulle

Imagining Antarctica is up in ArtsPost for one more week, so if you haven't seen it yet there's still time. Since installing it three weeks ago I have been having a rest from blankets, and besides catching up on paperwork and housework what have I been up to?

I had the flu for a week and didn't do anything. But before I got sick I finished restoring, at long last, my Adana printing press. Yesterday I inked up for the first time and printed 75 new business cards for myself. It was fun to remember how easy printing can be, especially on a little, user-friendly press like the Adana.


As a reaction against my single-minded focus on blanket stitching land- and ice-scapes with heavy wool blankets for most of the past two years, I have been crocheting light as air little mesh spheres. I've had an urge to make clouds for ages: the aurora borealis of Antarctic winters, the radiation leaking out of Fukiyama, the volcanic ash clouds that have grounded planes around the world recently.

In my first experiment I used up a small hank of thick creamy wool which gave three small gorgeous cloud like globules. New wool is beyond my means at the moment (the exhibitions have left me with some debt) so I've been checking out the haberdashery bins in op shops hoping to find a big stash of a suitable yarn for one of my cloud making ideas. The first thing to show up was a couple of new balls of fine crochet cotton in variegated greys.

Crocheting cotton hadn't been my intention (too fine, too slow) but the grey shouted the volcanic ash of Iceland and Chile. I've been making mesh balls, sort of 360degree doilies in various sizes. To make them spherical I'm experimenting with various home made starch recipes and methodologies. When the crochet is soaked with starch I stuff it with green wool roving to hold its shape while it dries

The next step will be to stitch all my little spheres together to make a small cloud of particulate matter suspended in midair.

Last glimpse of the backside

I'm experimenting with lighting to try and get the colours to photograph. Here the greens are about right, but the blue and red are way off.

My island piece has a name now: No Mine is an Island. I was describing the work to someone* at a party this weekend and they made the pun first, and it seems the Right Title on so many levels. I do tend to assume all puns are bad puns, but surely if there are any good puns this must be one of them.

I have all but finished embroidering the two main components, island and ocean, and next will sew them together before mounting. On this last day before all the workings disappear I thought I'd share with you some evidence of my 200-plus hours of handstitching and felting so far.

I am unreasonably fond of the 'wrong side' of my embroideries. I think in my childhood I was impressed upon with the importance of the back of the work being neat and tidy, and I'm a little proud of my relatively ordered reverse.

The underside of the ocean. This is what the back of blanket stitch looks like.

The centre of No Mine is an Island is the deep crater of the open cast mine which extends below sea level by some 7cm. It may not be obvious to a casual observer but the depth of this negative space seems quite radical to me. In the same way I am eager to share the underside of my crafting, I am also eager to understand and share what is usually unseen: the dirty secrets of extractive industries, what is below the surfaces of earth and sea, and the unintended consequences of what we buy and consume.

My island mine is an imagined and generic representation of extractive industries. The raw red gouge of the mine and its tailings were inspired first by my dream/poem and then by images of iron ore tailings. Arguably not the most toxic tailings produced in mining activities, but irresistible because it looks like the earth is bleeding from a fatal wound.

The underside of my island, with the bottom of the crater appearing as a tower from this angle. In the foreground you can see a little of the felting as it reaches round the edge to the bottom of the plain cream blanket.

*I was a little drunk at the time and can't remember who the punster was, but I'm happy to give credit where its due if reminded!