Tag Archives: textiles

Buttons, Craft, Creative Process, Knitting, Sewing, Yarn

Spring wardrobe, part 3

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The saga continues!

While my summer sewing plans are perhaps overambitious, I have a conference coming up in May that I’d like to have a couple of outfits ready for. It’s being held in a warmer climate than the one I inhabit, so I’m not quite sure what conditions to expect, but I should be able to cover my bases with a couple of sundress-and-shrug ensembles.

Planned Outfit One is a Hazel in a rose-colored linen. Current challenges include moving the bust darts and increasing the back width. (I am a very beginner sewist, so this is requiring an embarrassing amount of effort.) I’m planning to top it off with Aynia in both the recommended yarn and the recommended colorway (!), which is the very light silvery blue pictured below left:

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Planned Outfit Two is a Crepe in an indigo batik print, to be trimmed with gold bias tape and covered by the Wispy Cardi in the gold Malabrigo above right. This colorway was the closest match I could find for the very specific shade of yellow I imagined. I’ll save this knit for last, since I should be able to wear the Aynia with both dresses. (It will also be nice to knit on the plane.)

In other news, I’m scrambling to finish my Flemish(ish) garb for upcoming SCA events, and a weaving project for a very patient friend. The latter project has been a tangly mess in the corner for a depressingly long time. I finished my other commisison, however, and here’s a glimpse:

A woven bag
More details on my Weavolution page.

I also finished my post-holiday present-to-myself project. It sat on the needles a bit longer than  intended, but I’m quite pleased with the outcome. It’s a Cowboy Cowl modified to include the cable from the Hayden Shawlette. I had only a vague plan for finishing off the cable until I actually knit it, but this seemed to work:

Of course, my favorite part is on the back.

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Dorset buttons!

And one day, when all these projects are under control, I’ll be able to tidy up.

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Right?

Historical, Knitting, Out & About, Spinning, Tools and Equipment, Weaving

Voyages in Lace

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You know that the Almighty Fluff has taken over your life when, on a vacation, the first thing you do is scope out the local yarn shop.

Naturally, when I went to Quebec City for a few days, one of my first stops was this store. I treated myself to some delicious (and affordable!) alpaca, which also happened to match the tea set in my hotel room. I think this justifies the purchase.

This is not the yarn shop. I just liked the view.

I also spent lots of time touring the touristy historical district, and found all sorts of handwoven goods to admire: napkins, placemats, and so on, but also some interesting-looking objects that I assumed were scarves. But after seeing them at a number of shops and booths, I started to wonder: they were everywhere, and each one had a different maker’s tag. Clearly, this was some sort of cultural… thing… that I wasn’t getting. (You know what else I didn’t get? Photos. In retrospect, I wish I had, but I found one on ever-useful Wikipedia.)

Ceinture-fléchée-ftl

A bit of Google research has answered some questions as well as increased my curiosity. Apparently, what I saw were examples of the ceinture fléchée, a piece of folk costume with some historical significance. (Other useful keywords turned out to include Métis sash, Assomption sash, arrow sash, and voyageur sash.) Traditionally finger-woven (!), these seem to be commonly produced now on hand looms. Interestingly enough, one of the people (or the person?) responsible for re-popularizing the sashes in the early twentieth century seems to have been none other than the Edmond Massicote of my previous post. (In more recent years, this appears to be a responsibility of the terrifying Bonhomme Carnaval.)

Anyhow, I’m planning to do much more reading about these, so you can expect to hear more from me in future posts!

For the moment, back to the vacation. I found some other interesting craft-related goodies that I didn’t photograph: a spinning wheel faintly visible from the window of a closed antique shop, for one, that induced a number of hopeful visits until we finally managed to find the store open. It was a cute little Canadian wheel: unmarked, screw tension, all wood, looking to date from the early nineteenth century. Fun to visit, although I didn’t wind up taking it home with me. (This is not to say that part of my mind didn’t consider it. It would have fit on the train!)

My hotel also happened to have some especially endearing hosts in the breakfast room:

I wanted to share.

Now that I’m home, I’m itching to get back to the loom, but there’s just one more needly project in the works. In keeping with my goal to Enjoy Knitting, Dammit, trying out a knit-along seemed like the thing to do. Also, it’s a puzzle: you don’t find out what the shawl looks like until you finish it. I always liked a mystery.

There’s only one decision to be made:

Which do you like better?

Craft, Language, Weaving

Talking Craft: Shuttle

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A good shuttle, while not absolutely required to make cloth, is one of the most important tools for efficient weaving.

From top to bottom: two stick shuttles, a boat shuttle, a rag shuttle, an end-feed mill shuttle, a baby boat shuttle, and a ski shuttle. The small walnut shuttle in the upper left is a belt shuttle, which is a type of small stick shuttle with a sharp tapered edge for beating in the weft of narrow bands.

The operating principle is the same for the simplest stick shuttles and the heaviest industrial flying shuttles: the shuttle carries weft (or woof, or filling) thread back and forth through an arrangement of warp threads.

Original graphic: http://cnx.org/content/m26166/latest/

When you consider the back-and-forth motion of a shuttle on a conventional loom, it’s easy to see how the word came to be applied to any sort of relayed transportation device.

From Old English scytel (“dart, arrow”), from Proto-Germanic *skutilaz (compare Old Norse skutill (“harpoon”)), from *skut- (“project”) (see shoot). Name for loom weaving instrument, recorded from 1338, is from a sense of being “shot” across the threads. The back-and-forth imagery inspired the extension to “passenger trains” in 1895, aircraft in 1942, and spacecraft in 1969, as well as older terms such as shuttlecock. (Source: Wiktionary)

More obsolete than a stick shuttle?

So the next time you hop on a shuttle bus, wherever you’re going, you can really think of yourself as part of the… fabric… of modern society.

Or something.

Craft, Language, Weaving

Talking Craft: Textile

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There’s not much craft progress to report today, but I have some more linguistic trivia for you.

Handwoven scraps and samples.

As you almost certainly know, for most of the industrialized world, handspinning and weaving are specialty crafts and hobbies more than a central part of daily life. But textile production has been a driving force behind human innovation and industrialization for millennia, and that left a mark on our language. Common words like “textile”, “cloth”, and “fabric” come from old, old roots, and have relatives that may surprise you.

For instance, the word “textile” has cousins that we use all the time whether or not we work (or play) with fabric. It can be traced directly to the Latin word texere “to weave”, which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *teks–. This root was inherited by the Indo-European languages, where it took on various forms and meanings. Among its older and more obscure descendants, we have Old High German dahs “badger” and Sanskrit taksan “carpenter”. Others that might be more familiar include modern English “text”, “technical”, and “architect”. For my French-speaking readers, this is also the origin of tisser “to weave”.

(In case you’re still curious, the word “cloth” came to English through the Germanic branch from another Indo-European root, *gleit-, which had a meaning along the lines of “to cling to”. Like “textile”, “fabric” came through Latin, but from Indo-European *dʰabʰ “to fashion, to fit”.)

Okay, I got sucked into the Wiktionary web. The word under discussion is supposed to be “textile”, if you’re confused. Anyhow, a few members of its family tree jumped out at me:

  • Latin texere: weave; plait; construct with elaborate care
  • Greek techn: art, craft, practical skill

I like thinking that our crafting terms are related to words with these cheerful connotations. Of course, so are the words “tissue” and “technophobe”, but let’s take what we can get.

Now, it’s back to the workbench. Spring is on its way, and I’ve got two of my favorite things on my mind: trees and miniatures. A tiny treehouse may be in the works. Where’d I put the superglue?

(Sources for this post: Merriam-Webster.com, wiktionary.org, myetymology.com, wordsmith.org. Fact-checking is never discouraged.)