Summer reading: New Potatoes, Tilleke Schwarz

Our gardens here are in full-on cornucopia season, and here is Tilleke Schwarz' new book, titled appropriately,  New Potatoes, with an abundance of new work in her complex, layered, free embroidery style. Looking back at 18th and 19th c. Dutch embroidery samplers, she borrows here and there from old motifs, and text samplers. In the 70's she became fascinated with these samplers, and even replicated a Friesian sampler from 1730, in counted cross stitch.   Samplers were the work of  young girls, usually worked in silk on linen,  to teach them needlework, cross stitch,  darning,  embroidery, and how to spell and read.Unsatisfied with replicating the beautiful samplers, Tilleke soon decided to stitch her own designs, following her own ideas.

Her contemporary samplers are fast forward narratives. Her subject is the complexity and chaos of  the digital information glut, which streams toward us at internet speed.   Tilleke slowly embroiders, texts and images that catch her attention, plucked from the stream, slowing the hyper speed to a stand still, using the antique and ordinary art form of the stitched sampler. On her cloths, sometimes hand dyed, she layers images from her everyday life, in hoopless, embroidered stitches: her cat, a toilet, her new washing machine,  and people, with internet text fragments, creating an appealing visual diary of personal and world wide interconnection, which is the new normal.

The opposite of rote work, Tilleke's embroideries are free asymmetries, looping couched lines,  tangled line, a little wild, and beautiful. They are exciting and liberating. She also writes about how she creates the embroideries, her process and composition, and  the difficulty of working as a textile artist, a woman, creating art with a needle. Textile art, and women artists particularly, have always struggled for recognition.

Tilleke's work has been recognized, exhibited in European exhibits, and galleries, and published in many books and magazines. ( I first read about her in an article in the beautiful textiles magazine,  Selvedge).

Her first book, Mark Making, a cross stitch and embroidery thriller,  has long been out of print, but her second book, New Potatoes, is every bit as inspiring.  I have been selling it here in my store, and can ship copies, if anyone would like to have one. The books are paper covers, each signed by Tilleke.
Book+ shipping in the US, $30.  Email susan@avalanchelooms.com if you'd like me to send you one.

Down the Rosepath

A rug is a path.  It is a record of many choices (color, texture, mood, balance) made by the weaver as she follows her hunches of which is the best way to go, what next, and next, and next.  Off of the loom, and on the floor, the rug is an actual path.  Wide enough for a person to walk its length, for a moment or two, along the path the weaver made.

Choosing to weave rags is also a path.

(Look at this! Artist, Rikkianne Van Kirk invited me to carry on about my Big Love for rag weaving in her new Redefine article series on Apartment Therapy Re - Nest  www. re-nest.com)

What was I thinking?

No, seriously. What was I thinking about before we left to visit our family out west just 5 days ago? This book and these yarns were on the table. I was thinking about something new. But what?  The show catalog Tradition Transformed, Brown/Grotta, No. 22,  is a favorite of mine. Japanese ideas and  9 contemporary weavers, are represented in a collection originally curated by Sheila Hicks, in 1995, at Brown/Grotta gallery, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in  NewYork,  and to coincide,  Brown/Grotta gallery, 1998.

Chiaki Maki and her sister, Kaori Maki, weavers, are part of this group.  Their work and words are so clear to my mind's eye, and help me to think better about what I try to do, every time I come back to weave in my own studio.  Their elegance alone would be hard to match, but their textiles incite memory, or something less tangible, something not quite remembered.  Can a textile do that?  What a painting or a poem can?  Obviously, it can.  Here are the proofs.

When I was weaving as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I experienced a moment in which I disappeared, and only the weaving remained. The piece that was born of that moment was fascinating, beyond any description. Such a moment is the very heart of my creation.   Chiaki Maki



                                                                

Paint It Black

 

The store is painted dark now.  It smells painty.  The hooks are rehung, and the yellow cabinet by the front door again.  A new set of shelves are still in the works.  I'm starting to put merchandise on display.  I'm so pleased that the space is already easier to work with, and dedicated to textiles from now on.  The new wall color makes me feel very clear about what I want to see here. 

I made the pieced cloth lamp after seeing a beautiful collection of pieced shades made by Dutch artist Maartje Vandennoort  Like piecing a quilt for a room, why not cover  a lamp in soft patterns? 

Chartreuse & Some Bees

High summer, and my eyes can't get enough of what I see.  The bees have a surfeit of flowers, nectar is everywhere.  There is too much of everything good, all at once.  Everything is lush and ripe and overgrown, but the heat makes us sleepy and slow.

A piece of writing that I read nearly everyday, from Eva Zeisel, the exquisite designer:

"To me, beauty depends on one single person, on the person who looks at something and feels joy in looking at it because it pleases him without second thoughts, irrespective of whether is is useful, whether it is art, or whether it is in good taste.  It is the love affair of the eyes with the things they focus on.  As its enjoyment is immediate and spontaneous, it is quite impossible to put into words how to make beauty."   (italics, mine)

Still weaving

I know there are other things I could, even should, be doing.  But I'm a dogwood flower machine now.

Goodbye, Yellow Bird

The vibrant stack of fabrics were my purchases yesterday from Yellow Bird Art in Lansing, Iowa.  Yes, we crossed the Mississippi River successfully once more, on the steep and narrow, scary bridge.  Yellow Bird, sadly, is closing on May 15.  There are still so many beautiful fabrics to choose from, and at a very deep discount. It is never a better time to lay in a fresh supply of fabrics. Many of the fabrics to choose from are not easily available elsewhere.  This is a singular collection of fabric.  Yellow Bird has consistently carried the most interesting and highest quality of fabrics for sewing &  quilting, and I am very sad to see it close. Best wishes for a relaxing summer, Yellow Bird!  You created a wonderful place.

A new stack of my store postcards just arrived.  Waiting to see them is close to the excitement I used to feel waiting for our school pictures to come.  Miraculously, post cards take just a few days.

It shows my stack of weathered bee boxes, whose  chalky colors, dove tails, and rows of rusty nails inspired my spring/summer  linen, cotton, and silk Rosepath scarfs.

Heavy Duty Glass

This box of Russian ornaments is one of my favorite things to find when I start to burden the branches of my Tree again. I find the box colors, the designs, the Russian font in a gooey, minty green, completely agreeable. This is my brand of eye candy.

The ornaments themselves are glass, but not delicate, and almost scary. I have squirrels and rabbits, sly foxes, and blue dogs. Also Monkeys! The creature above looks like a mushroom, or an elfin Santa. It takes a sturdy branch to support this glass menagerie!

wax and wool

Though masses of Asian lady beetles (false lady bugs) have come flying in to plague us, it is still a great pleasure to print a new batch of wax bags for the store, and labels for rugs and scarves. I have been weaving my winter rugs with the new blanket wool, in the hushed palette of blue gray, mushroom, gray, cocoa brown and olive. Also a few of the short scarves with the simple yarn warp. The yards of spool knitted cord I made last winter have come in to use now as keepers to tuck the scarf into so it stays snug around your neck. Each scarf is lined with cotton velveteen, this one is a dotted gray. This scarf reminds me of the West Fork (the river that runs through Avalanche). It is a trout stream, so this is a trout scarf.

October, 5pm

We had our first, hard frost last night, and today the milkweed pod burst open. I don't know if these events are related. The breeze then began its work of emptying out the little fluffy parachutes. Milkweed is my new favorite color. My winter wool rugs are following the rich, subtle color I see in them. Which is not to say I'm immune to the brilliance I see elsewhere.

The milk weed pods are still pale green outside, but I found these from last year on my shelf.
Cotton wood, poplar, and maple leaves have been falling into the creek behind the store, and there is a pyramidal rock at the edge that I never saw before today. When I scoop pitchers of water for the flower pots on the porch, I smell mint. The path is a mint path. My weaving can't
begin to compare to the least thing I see on the path outside my back door. But, I did finish a new wool rug. It's a good rug, and feels good on bare feet.

Harvest

Tonight Dan brought home a box of sweet pears from a roadside tree. Yesterday and today the loggers have been cutting trees, skidding them up the hillroad, and laying them out in the field on top. I wound warp spools with 12/6 cotton for the new rugs.

Looks like rain

Bring in the clothes and pick the tomatoes because it looks like rain. In a few months the snow and wind may be blowing, and I'll be chipping ice off the step.

other texture, other design

Sometime yesterday, a female rosebreasted grosbeak flew into my glass kitchen window, and fell to the ground, dead. Sad to see, but so beautiful. Just after this picture was taken, someone on the porch was seen with feathers about the mouth and whiskers, and the dead bird had mysteriously disappeared.

button, button

I've been looking through my button box this morning. My collection of small buttons used to fit in a tea cup. Here are glass buttons, vintage plastic, Mississippi mother-of-pearl, and 2-hole
bone underwear buttons (my personal favorites). Looking through my mother's button box was a favorite activity of mine when I was a child. These buttons survived the shop fire, and are still my treasure.

organdy detail

Summer scarves with new labels printed on organdy.