The imperfection of words

" - My young master in London is dead! said Obadiah. -
- A green satin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea which Obadiah's exclamation brought into Susannah's head. - Well might Locke write a chapter upon the imperfection of words. -
Then, quoth Susannah, we must all go into mourning.-
But note a second time: the word mourning, notwithstanding Susannah made use of it herself - failed also of doing its office; it excited not one single idea, tinged either with grey or with black, - all was green.- The green satin night-gown hung there still.
-O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried Susannah.- My mother's whole wardrobe followed.- What a procession! her red damask, -her orange tawney, - her white and yellow lute-strings, - her brown taffeta, - her bone-laced caps, her bed-gowns, and comfortable underpetticoats.- Not a rag was left behind.- 'No, - she will never look up again,' said Susannah."

Laurence Sterne (1759), the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Penguin Books, Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England 1967, p, 354, 355

Pins & sheep

"Pin-making is similar to needle-making and almost as expensive; at the end of the fifteenth century, when in England a sheep sold for twenty pence, pins pointed individually on a pinner's bone, cost four pence per hundred."

Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: the material culture of needlework and sewing, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 2006, p.16

memory, loss, mortality, love

"A hoard of children's milk teeth are wrapped in a white silk handkerchief and secreted away in a white envelope. The image is titled Anatomy of Time I. Vered Lahav conjures moments of visual poetry out of the most deceptively simple if elements. The overall colour scheme is white on white. The meticulously rehearsed and staged photographs tend towards the emotionally evocative; the assembled sculptures are objects of sentimental resonance. There are cherished embroideries, covert lovers' messages, traceries of the long departed. [...] The surface appearance might be slight, is certainly subtle and delicate, yet the themes go deep: the nature of memory, loss, mortality, love."

Vered Lahav
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, to 23 January 2010

The Guardian, 17.10.2009, The Guide, p.39, RC

Cutting holes

"For many years, children occupy space in the household, whether they have a room to themselves or whether they share with siblings. When they’re little, their rooms provide a place for them to cut holes in their sheets in secret, as well as a place to be sent for time-outs when parents discover they’ve been secretly cutting holes in their sheets."

Robin DeRieux
Whose Room Is It, Anyway?
UC Davis Magazine on-line Volume 25 · Number 3 · Spring 2008
http://ucdavismagazine.ucdavis.edu/issues/sp08/parents.html

knitting patterns

"Old knitting patterns are easy to see as ephemeral, disposable items, artefacts of everyday life that we can see in our memory on our mothers’ laps, but that we don’t readily picture in an archive. They are produced for a very specific purpose, and are not designed to become historians’ or biographical researchers’ sources. However, cultural historians and historians of everyday life can learn from them, and can use them as windows on to their time of production. Using sport-related knitting patterns from Winchester School of Art’s Knitting Reference Library as a case study, this paper will look at what historians and biographical researchers can get from this type of evidence: both empirical evidence about disposable income, materials, technology, and household economics, and more subjective, cultural evidence about class, identity, and gender."

Sweaters and Swimsuits:knitting patterns as historical sources
Dr Martin Polley, University of Southampton
Friday 11th December 2009: Building 32, room 2097, 2.o0 p.m.

see also:
http://www.fulltable.com/VTS/f/fashion/menuk.htm

Injuries

"The First World War was a war dominated by high explosives and heavy artillery. Battlefield casualties included an unprecedented number with horrific facial injuries - injuries so severe the men were commonly unrecognizable to loved ones and friends. Often unable to see, hear, speak eat or drink, they struggled to re-assimilate back into civilian life. This secondary tragedy - the living unable to 'live' - catalyzed Surgeon Sir Harold Gillies to transform the fledgling discipline of plastic surgery based on his unrivalled observation of the profoundly wounded and his ability to push the parameters of the profession beyond all known techniques.

Since 2004, Artist and Project Façade Leader Paddy Hartley has researched, responded to and interpreted the personal and surgical stories of some of the servicemen who underwent this pioneering surgical reconstruction under Sir Harold Gillies."

Visit the project gallery at
http://www.projectfacade.com/index.php?/galleries/

Mourning

"In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century, fabrics appropriate for mourning garments, were black or similarly dark in color as well as non-reflective. People in mourning were expected to wear dull and non-figured fabrics, avoiding shiny silks and reflective jewelry [...]

Before the nineteenth century most elements of mourning garb were made at home, but black pins for mourning had to be directly purchased from local merchants. [...] A widow who retired into mourning would be expected to send someone else, a servant or slave, perhaps, to make the necessary purchase rather than be seen in public herself."

Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: the material culture of needlework and sewing, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, p.26

Peace

Red and White

"According to legend, the Austrian flag was invented during the Third Crusade by the Babenberg duke Leopold V. After a particularly gory battle outside the city of Acre, the duke found his tunic completely drenched in blood. When he removed his belt, the cloth underneath was still white. So taken was he by this colour combination that he adopted it as his banner."

Hari Kunzru, Nowhere to hide, Saturday Guardian 31.10.09, Review, p.16

"I'm not going under"

"My husband left me at the beginning of this year and a had a bit of time in sackcloth and ashes and weeping, you know, in his old T-shirts and my old pyjamas, and then, without even thinking about it, I put on this red cashmere cardigan, and it was really piratical red, and at that moment I thought, to use a cliché - but there is a truth in every cliché - I will survive, and the red was like a sort of red flag: I'm not going under."

Justine Picardie, in The Emotional Attachment: How do we feel about the clothes we wear? Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 29.10.2009

Contagious Thinking

In an experiment conducted by psychologists Nemeroff and Rozin, people were asked how they would feel about wearing a particular jumper that had never been worn and in addition been recently laundered.

"Not surprisingly, people said they had no problem wearing the sweater. The experimenters then asked them to imagine that the sweater had been worn by someone who had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion [but] been laundered a few days ago, and that the person with AIDS had worn it for only thirty minutes, but suddenly people didn't really want to wear the sweater. Even though they knew there was no health or hygiene issue, the superstitious theory of contagion kicked in and they could not bring themselves to wear it. Rozin and his colleagues varied the imaginary sweater owners, and discovered that the idea of the sweater having once belonged to someone who personified evil, such as a mass murderer or a fanatical leader, elicited the strongest reaction from people. In fact, Rozin's results revealed that people would rather wear a sweater that had been dropped in dog faeces and not washed (raising genuine health concerns) than a laundered sweater that had once belonged to a mass murderer."

Richard Wiseman, Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives, Pan Books, London 2008, p. 105, 106

for more detail on contagious thought, see
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Contagious+thoughts:
+under+a+'magical+law,'+good+and+evil+prove+as...-a011315474

MENS SUITS

"Suits, shirts, ties, and gloves ... hundreds of them, painstakingly recreated on a diminutive scale in a dizzying array of colours and styles. [...]

Resembling places we may have been and things we may have seen or worn, their reductive size imbues the ensemble with a strange and arresting presence. [...]

Once new and desirable, now not so new and not so desirable, the clothes might be stand-ins for identity. They embody a desire to reveal and conceal, to conform or to be different, to be marked out as an individual or disappear into a crowd. [...]

MENS SUITS imparts no specific story, but allows for multiple possibilities. At one and the same time extravagant and introvert, the sculpture - like the material from which it is made - guards its secrets."

from exhibition leaflet:
Charles Ledray, MENS SUITS

for more detail see
http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2009/mens_suits

Knitted webs

"This knitted web gives the viewer an opportunity to reflect on his/her position within the woodland area, the wood itself, and the surrounding landscape. It is a device for seeing.[...] Panoramas of distant views, perspectives of middle ground and foreground start to overlap highlighting an effect of 'parallax' created by the specific positioning of the piece.
[...] The knitted web thus becomes a map, a tool for orientation, containing specific information on its surrounding environment. The web is also a trap, its open lacy structure catching, filtering and refracting light, colours and sounds. Ultimately, the web will capture the essence of the place and become a spatial imprint of it."

Shane Waltener, Over here
Jupiter Artland
http://jupiterartland.org/the_works/the_artists/shane_waltener/

Mementoes

Today my daughter left home to go to university. Her independent spirit will enjoy new freedoms.

Picking up bits left behind from the floor of her room and taking the overflowing bin down to empty, I choose some fragments to mark the day.

Nations

"Nations is an installation of 192 treadle sewing machines, hand-painted flags of country members of the United Nations, and multiples of thread [...].

The treadle sewing machines are connected by a web of cottons threading throughout the installation from spool to bobbin winder, from wheel to the eye of a needle. [...] Each spool holds a reel of coloured cotton, and under the foot of each machine a national flag is held as if being worked on. The ordered lines of machinery draw a scene of a busy working sweatshop.

Threads and remnants of cloth strewn over the floor form barriers to entry to the machines. As a viewer we are called to attend to our own relationship to mechanised labour serving global markets and to our own participation in the fabrication of national identity."

http://www.iniva.org/exhibitions_projects/2009/nations/introduction

NS Harsha: Nations
18.9. - 21.11.2009
INIVA
Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA

"Expanded the army, Recruited thousands, Knitted their socks"

"At the onset of the First World War, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith appointed Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Kitchener, at the time Viceroy of Egypt and the Sudan, was the first military officer to hold this post. Predicting a long war that would require a huge army, Kitchener embarked on an unprecedented recruitment campaign, symbolised by the distinctive poster that made his face famous. [...]
Kitchener also associated himself with a Red Cross plan to exhort British, American and Canadian women to knit various 'comforts' for the men in the trenches, including mittens, scarves and socks. He is said to have contributed his own sock design, which included a square-ish 'grawfted' toe. The toe featured a seamless grafting stitch that made socks more comfortable for troops to wear, and which became known as the ‘Kitchener stitch'."

The National Portrait Gallery, London
http://www.npg.org.uk/visit/take-another-look/lord-kitchener.php

"Bras get you good press"

"It is no surprise that the invention by a distinguished female scientist of a bra that converts into a gas mask has proved an enduringly popular story on the BBC's website.

When I worked for another newspaper, its online success turned out to be reliant on a report by a fashion writer about having a bra fitting.

So how wise of the designers at the Paris fashion show to have kicked off with some adaptable bras, thus getting the kind of coverage usually reserved for Chanel.

If I were trying to drum up interest, say, in the slightly-hard-going Tory fringe meeting yesterday on decentralisation and social action, (Caroline Spelman and Sayeeda Warsi) I know what I would do."

Sarah Sands, Bras get you good press, Evening Standard, London, 6.10.2009

A boom in the recession?

"Knitting has cast off its traditional image thanks to a series of famous backers.
New figures show a boom in popularity for the pastime that was once associated with elderly ladies but is now the hobby of Sarah Jessica Parker, Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Sandra Bullock.
Arts and crafts chain HobbyCraft said celebrity endorsement helped push wool sales up 28 per cent in the past year. Chief executive Chris Crombie said people of all ages were adopting a make-your-own attitude during the recession.
John Lewis is also selling six per cent more needles and designer wools than last year.
Gail Downey [...] said the boom meant people were joining knitting circles and swapping wool, patterns and ideas.
One of these grous is run by her design house Weardowney at a Starbucks in Oxford Street. It also hosts classes in her shop in [...] Marylebone, near Tony Blair's house. "Knitting has definitely become more glamorous," she said.
Kimberly Stewart, daughter of rock star Rod, [...] joins Miss Downey and her partner Amy Wear at their shop's classes. She said: "I like to knit so I have knitting parties."

Ellen Widdup & Sri Carmichael, Girls who purl: wool sales soar after celebrities make knitting fashionable, Evening Standard, London, 6.10.2009, p.23

Growing old

The continuous flow of life "is, if you like, the unrolling of a spool, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming little by little to the end of his spool; and living consists in growing old. But it is just as much a continual winding, like that of thread into a larger ball, for our past follows us, becoming larger and larger with the present it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory."

Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, A Citadel Book, Carol Publishing Group, New York 1992, p.164

Euroqual Workshop: Archives and Life History Research, 21 - 23 September 2009, Madrid

A meeting of researchers from many countries with shared interests in and different takes on archives and life stories. Not at first sight a conference that had much to do with textiles, but of course, like all such gatherings, a networking event and like all human enterprise embedded in textiles and stories.

We shared experiences, research narratives and stories around dining tables always laid with white linen, and in the lecture theatre facing a row of solemn flags behind the speakers' table - a reminder to me of the privilege of having been invited, a certain formality maybe lending gravitas to the event that dissolved as the days went on and disappeared altogether once we retired after yet another splendid meal to the Duque de Alba bench with its own aristocratic tale outside La Residencia for la penultima. So many honored guests had stayed and talked at this beautiful place before us: Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Albert Einstein, Paul Valéry, Marie Curie, Igor Stravinsky, Walter Gropius, Henri Bergson, Le Corbusier and Alexander Calder. Calder's wife Louisa, by the way, like him worked with bright colours but in threads, and wrote a book on crochet.

In the mornings which came always too early, after an invigorating shower the faint scent of vinegar lingering in the white bathroom towels mingled with the fresh fragance of the Agua Colonia to clear my mind for another stimulating and challenging day ahead. We make our own sensory memories of time and place.

I took my hyperbolic crochet work into the lecture hall to think through my hands as I listened. There were other textile encounters in words and images - in Cristina Sanchez's paper on public mourning, for example. I was very moved by an image Francisco Fernandiz showed: of two brightly coloured picnic chairs next to the excavation site of one of many mass graves holding the remains of those killed by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. The chairs with their cheerful patterns, so ordinary and bright, carrying the heavy weight of the past in the people sitting in them and telling their memories of terrible events that happened long ago, but are neither forgotten nor forgiven.

http://www.residencia.csic.es/pres/frame_hist.htm

Calder, Louisa & Konior, Mary (1979), Louisa Calder’s Creative Crochet, Penguin Books Hammondsworth/England, New York/USA

for photographs of Madrid, colours & textures, go to
http://solveighgoett.blogspot.com/

Mourning: black ribbons, white gloves

"Black ribbons and white palms are two common elements in all the shrines and demonstrations. The white palms stand for fighting terrorism with peace. It has become a national symbol in Spain in the fight against terrorism. A group of law students at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid first adopted the gesture of painting the palms of their hands white or wearing white gloves to signify the hands of people who want peace as opposed to the bloody hands of terrorists."

Sánchez-Carretero, Cristina (2006), Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections after the March 11th Attacks in Madrid, in Santino, Jack (ed), Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p.341

Jorge Semprun

"An individual patch in the impalpable material of that shroud. A dust mote in the ashy cloud of that agony. A still flickering light from the extinguished star of our dead years."

Jorge Semprun, The long voyage,Grove Press New York, 1964, p.120

My thanks to Rosa-Auria Munte Romos from the University Ramon Llull in Barcelona, for reminding me of the poetic power of Jorge Semprun's writing.

"¿Pero puede uno asumir una experiencia cualquiera sin llegar a dominar más o menos su lenguaje? ¿O sea, la historia, las historias, los relatos, las memorias, los testimonios: la vida? ¿El texto, la misma textura, el tejido de la vida?"

SEMPRÚN, Jorge. Aquel domingo. Barcelona: Tusquets, 2004, p.71, quoted in MUNTÉ, Rosa-Àuria (2009) Cuando realidad histórica y ficción literaria convergen: la autoficción de Jorge Semprún sobre Holocausto, conference paper, Madrid 2009

["But can one take on any experience without more or less mastering its language? In other words histories, stories, tales, memories, testimonies: life? The text, the very texture, the fabric of life?"]

Who produces silk?

"Nuestra apuesta trata de contrarrestar una tendencia a hacer desaparecer el trabajo y los trabajadores, a la vez que las estrategias empresariales, de las escenas productivas. Es la tendencia al deslumbramiento ante el cadre bâti, ante los artilugios o artefactos, o ante los fragmentos incomprendidos de los mismos, sin que, en muchas ocasiones sean esos investigadores capaces de reconstruir el proceso productivo, y menos aún la red en la que se inserta un centro de trabajo. Como aquéllos a los que identificó Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán: maravillados ante un tejido sin saber si la seda la produce un árbol o un gusano. Piezas, fragmentos, edificios o restos y vestigios desenraizados en suma."

Juan José Castillo (2006), La Soledad del Trabajador Globalizado: Memoria, Presente y Futuro, Los Libros de la Catarata, Madrid, Spain, p.16

["Our task is to counteract the trend of making work and workers disappear from the scenes of production, together with entrepreneurial strategies. It is the tendency to become dazzled in front of the cadre bâti, of equipment or devices, or their little understood fragments, and researchers often unable to reconstruct the process of production and, even less, the network in which the workplace is embedded. Like those people identified by Mrs. Emilia Pardo Bazán: marvelling at a fabric without knowing if silk is produced by a tree or by a worm. To sum up, pieces, fragments, buildings or remains and traces uprooted."]

A breakthrough in pants

"Here's the news in briefs - left-handed men need no longer worry about getting their knickers in a twist.
Underpants specially made for southpaws are going on sale, to help them spend less time unnecessarily fiddling down below. The design of the left-handed trunks could save men a crucial three - yes, three seconds when stopping to spend a penny.
Alas, it will cost a little more than that to get your hands on the pants - between £16 and £22. But retailers believe they will appeal to the 3 million British men thought to be left-handed. The traditional Y-front opening in pants favours right-handed men, leaving lefties to reach further down and and across at the aproriate time. [...]
Rob Faucherand, head of men's accessories at Debenham's, insisted: 'In our view this is a vital step for left-handed men. Switching the opening from vertical to horizontal may sound like a small step but it's the breakthrough that many men have been waiting for.'"

Aidan Radnge, Undies specially for lefties - pantastic!
Metro, London 24 Sptember 2009, p.25