hello, Cornelia!

I was waiting impatiently to see the selection of cards I ordered from Cornelia O'Donovan, a favorite artist, from the UK.  At last, the package was here, by Royal Mail.  It felt hefty, in the good way a box of stationery feels.

I was so pleased to see what she'd sent  me.

Her designs are modern, graphic, images that offer small surprises at every turn. I love her drawing. They are a perfect card for many occasions when a card is desired.
Looking for a Valentine?

Doing what I love to do

 

I put linen on the old barn loom again, and wove this piece with Finnish paper yarn. Linen and paper go together. Their fibers transpire, they breathe, they change. This is slow weaving. Paper yarn threaded on a tapestry needle makes rya knots for the flowers. The lattice squares, or windows, are bound with 9 separate pirns, each passed back and forth.

Off the loom, I brushed 320 petals with water and opened each by hand, petal by petal. I checked the clock, and this blooming process took 5 hours.  But, while I'm working, I tend to forget the time.There is something about doing this that empties my brain of pesky thoughts. I forget myself a little, in an air garden of linen and crisp paper, the thunk of the beater, and the pure pleasure of making something.

Paper and Linen

This is a longer, many-flowered piece.  I made it on the barn loom.   It took so long to finish that I thought it must be at least 8 ft long as I unwrapped it from the loom's front beam.  The flowers that were wound into the apron were pressed flat as if they'd been in a flower press.  I spritzed them with water spray, and they perked right up. 

As for its extraordinary length,  it's a mere 5 feet long, and just 13 inches wide, a narrow textile.  I call it a banner, or a ribbon. The birch twig hanger was selected, trimmed and smoothed.  The woven linen tabs at the top look really nice with the twig.  Yes, details like this please me very much.

Between the loom and the south window is the best light to take photographs.  I'll post it on my Etsy shop, and then find a place to hang it here in the workshop.  I collect my push pins,  step ladder,  monofilament,  climb up and down,  adjust the light,  and don't drop the camera!

Maira Kalman illustrated  the classic Wm. Strunk, Jr. and  E.B. White,  Elements of Style, which I keep near.

sophisticate

I'm a storekeeper here, so I wrap up presents. I do love to wrap gifts.   The wrapping should entice, and excite curiosity. It should be quick, and made out of something of little value, the gift inside is the prize.   Here is a slim, sophisticate (a person with much worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture) poppy doll, wearing a chopsticks wrapper shift.  Her heels are made of Japanese washi paper tape, her arms Finnish string.  Her face is pasted on from an Asian market die cut paper in my shoe box of stuff.

She has a  breezy attitude, like the recipient of the gift.

Long Thread, Lazy Girl

Lazy, all my life.  Even my name, Susan.  Lazy Susan.  I used to protest, but I know it fits me.  Lazy is my nature.  The adage long thread, lazy girl chastises the girl that puts too long a thread in her needle, so she won't have to rethread so often.  I  habitually try to get away with doing less.

And yet, I manage to work productively,  even happily.  Cursing when my long thread knots, and I have to rethread anyway.  Weaving and needling paper rya knots today,  dipping the Finnish paper yarn in water, watching the morning sun light filtered through the paper petals I'm weaving.  Lazily.

Still weaving

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

Dogwood

New blooms on a more structured trellis, another transparency of linen and paper.  This one is going to Berlin!  Some sections were woven by passing 5 individual linen filled pirns back and forth by hand, no shuttle.  Now, the rya paper knots are reduced, for the simpler flower.  The knots are flat on the back of the weave, and look like stitches.  Ends are tied and twisted, held down by my sad iron,  then stitched back to make loops to slide over a birch twig hanger. An even dozen, like eggs, like roses, like 12 hours.

Thunder shower

It was suddenly raining this afternoon, with thunder.  A spring shower!  Here are my May flowers, off  loom now.  And, the stacks of damp bee boxes that keep luring my eye.

Waiting for the Blizzard

I said I was going to call this post, Blue Balls.  Well, they are.  I've been making them and dipping them in my dye jar, in a double boiler, watching the dye move into the wool, where it dangles from a string, at just the right depth, from a chopstick.   I hold the dye bath at the simmer until the right shade  appears.  It's a good job for someone like me who generally likes to spend a lot of time just standing-there-a-lookin' (from my old favorite folk song about that fine man, Old Dan Tucker).

So far, the blizzard hasn't amounted to much, but it's sure to fall tonight. Meanwhile I'll show you this new store activity:  a paper snowflake cutting station. We have recycled butter paper, and scisssors.  Anyone who comes in can take a pair and start snipping.  So far  some young girls cut flakes, a grandmother, a woman I don't know who was proud of her flake,  and a man who hadn't made a snowflake in years and years.  Elizabeth, my good friend, came in and we cut snowflakes together while we caught up on the news of our lives, occasionally pausing for the reveal of each newer, better, more pointed snowflake.  I call it fun!  Let the clippings fall to the floor.  They look like more snow.   Snow on snow on snow.

Laying Season

Linen transparency, spaced warp, with mixed fiber rya knots, 14" X 28"

I'm back at my barn loom, working on a similar piece to the first All My Eggs in One Basket, made in 2007. After all, it's spring, and definitely laying season. Weaving this transparency I used many different yarns, silk ribbon, unwoven plastic tarp, Finnish paper yarn, Japanese paper and silk yarn, wool, and linen, in the rya sections. Each section contains over 100 knots, with multiple strands bundled in each knot. Linen transparency weaving is a traditional Finnish weave, as is rya. The predominant yarn, after linen, is Finnish paper yarn I first bought on a trip to Finland in 2004, with my mother, Irene Johnson, also a weaver, who lives in Ely, Minnesota.

At the time I saw many contemporary weavers in Sweden and Finland using it, and I was already familiar with Hanna Korvela's brushy paper yarn designs using paper in rya knots.

On our trip, my mother and I visited a restored block of workers' residences in Tampere, Finland, which provided housing for workers at the Finlayson cotton mill in Tampere.
The houses were open to tour, and we saw an apartment similar to where my mother's mother,
Impi Sofia had lived with her sisters, while she worked at the mill.

These were civil war years in Finland, and my grandmother was known to have tried to throw bread to her starving brother, held captive in what our family describes as a large, empty molasses vat. Other brothers in her family had been shot and killed, including a 14 year old brother acting as a messenger. The story is vague, but her own life was in danger for trying to help her brother. For her safety, her sisters and family friends gathered money for her ticket to the United States. She left Finland suddenly. We were able to speak to her youngest sister, who was still alive, and remembered the terribly sad day when they were packing her trunk to leave. My grandmother never saw her sisters or Finland again. She was 17 years old.

All My Eggs in One Basket celebrates and commemorates her escape, and the result that my mother was born, and, so, I was born. These are strands that connect me to her life, and her experience. When my grandmother left Finland to come to the US, she put all of her eggs in one basket. It may be that she had few good choices, but I think it was an act of great courage.

All My Eggs is about taking the risk and sticking your neck out, not holding back for fear of losing. To choose to work as an artist calls for putting your skills, and insubstantial ideas out and claiming them, in public. No one shows up to say you're not allowed to do this.

The "eggs" in my baskets are partly made of the Finnish paper yarn produced there in Tampere.
By unwinding some of the tightly twisted paper yarn, these eggs "bloom". To me they are blooms and eggs, imagination and creative potential.

Though conventional wisdom discourages the idea of risking all, I take the opposite view.
To create anything new and of value to the future often requires that you put everything you've got into the basket, and maybe a little more than that.

April Come She Will

The little linen warp is on the old loom, and the first window weave with native Big Bluestem is off. Now I'm back to Finnish paper yarn and rya knots for another in the All My Eggs in One Basket weave-series. Actually, all my "eggs" seem to be in more than one basket now, since it's a series. Still, the idea persists. I have to be careful doing this since it brings on my sensitive elbow.

More than 100 knots of mixed paper and silk ribbon and yarn fibers are tied into each of the largest intersections in this spaced linen weave. This time I have started to unwind some of the tightly twisted paper yarn to be more petal like, and "bloomed." I want this to look like the first days of the crabapple blossoms. Some of the tree closed up, and some of it open. We're still a little way from crabapple blossoms.

For now, it's a short walk down to the spring where the nicest pussy willows are blooming.

Paper Work

The main thing looming large here has been taxes. Procrastination weighs heavily on this task. I am suddenly struck by an inspiration to sew a new felt doll, or fill the bird feeder, or anything at all, but take out the paper work. Happily, this is picture of a stack of my now completed tax work!

Yet, even in the midst of it, I found the opportunity to avoid it a little more, by printing some new white paper bakery bags with my print Gocco. Paper work I like. Now, back to the linen threading, in progress...

Lucky Day

From the fortune cookie: today is a Lucky Day for those who remain cheerful and optimistic.
In bed. I should have stayed in bed. I misplaced my glasses for half the day (behind a curtain on a window sill). I missed a deadline by 5 min. I sent a batch of moldy, dented cranberries to my mother-in-law for a Thanksgiving present! If I'd been wearing my good glasses it would not have happened.

I did finish weaving a nice birch bark log pillow in the evening, and found these papers I'd marbled years ago, that survived last year's fire in our old shop building, in an old (flammable) suitcase. They were only a little smoke damaged. They remind me of some smoked mulberry stencil paper I once bought from Aiko's paper store in Chicago. Sadly, Aiko's has closed now. I remember how my marbling experiment disappointed me. How difficult it was to control the oils and the patterns, when I wanted to create classic Persian feather shapes.

What surprises me is, seeing them again, I now like them. They have intriguing colors, and contours, like maps of the surface of Mars.