"Da lacht die weisse Waesche"

Appropriateness

"Dabei vertreten wir den Standpunkt, dass in Strickarbeit nur solche Gegenstaende ausgefuehrt werden sollen, die sich am besten fuer die Technik eignen und nicht den Schoenheitssinn verletzen, z.B, waere es geschmacklos, Bettdecken oder Kissenbezuege zu stricken, die in Naeharbeit schneller, schoener und zweckmaessiger herzustellen sind."

["We take the standpoint that only those items should be done in knitting which are most suitable for the technique and which don't offend the sense of beauty, for example it would be bad taste to knit bed covers or pillow cases; these are faster, more beautifully and more appropriately executed in sewing."]

Donner, Mizi & Schnebel, Carl (eds) (1996), Handarbeiten wie zu Grossmutters Zeiten, facsimile print of the original edition of “Ich kann handarbeiten”: Illustriertes Hausbuch für die Techniken der weiblichen Handarbeit, Ullstein Verlag Berlin 1913, Weltbild Verlag Augsburg 1996, p.74

Threads unite Women

In 2006 I came across a small notice in a textile magazine calling for participants in a project by the German-Afghan Initiative (DAI) entitled "Threads unite Women." Squares embroidered by women in rural Afghanistan are bought by women in Western Europe to incorporate into their own textile work. In 2007, 220 works were selected for a travelling exhibition which has since toured France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Austria (http://solveighgoett.blogspot.com) - alas no host has yet been found for a show in the UK.

Inspired by the exhibition and the rich variety of the embroidered squares and the works they have become part of, more and more women in Europe are getting involved, among them my cousin Gisela and her friends.

For further information and to buy squares, contact Pascale Goldenberg: goldenberg-freiburg@t-online.de

Protection

Mysterious bundles

Rummaging through my sewing box I despair at the tangles of threads in the bottom. Cutting out one of the entangled bundles, I am suddenly struck by its beauty - rather than seeing only chaos and mess I perceive, unexpectedly, mysterious connections of a different order.

I am reminded of an image I recently found on a website of mysterious balls and bundles of coloured twine woven by young men all over Morrocco, their purpose shrouded in secrecy, but possibly to do with practical magic and the dispelling of evil spirits.
(http://www.haimbresheet.com/category/people)

Having seen the image, I begin to understand the magic potential of my own bundles of thread.

String and rubber band

"String is my foible. my pockets are full of little hanks of it, picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come. I am seriously annoyed if any one cuts the string of a parcel instead of patiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. How people can bring themselves to use india-rubber rings, which are a sort of deification of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot imagine. To me an india-rubber ring is a precious treasure. I have one which is not new - one that I picked off the floor nearly six years ago. I have really tried to use it, but my heart failed me, and I could not commit the extravagance."

Mrs Gaskell, Cranford, London & Glasgow, Collins' Clear-Type Press, n.d., p. 85 & 86

Green sheets

"I remember climbing onto my parents' green sheet covered bed when I was just a toddler on a sunny day, the sun beaming through the large windows onto the bed. I clambered up between them and watched tizwaz while being doted on by both of them. This is my last memory of my parents ever being in a state of unison before they split up."

BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/

Shake well to restore bulk and air thoroughly

"What are you afraid of, dear child? Stay with me; if you will do all the work in the house properly, you shall be the better for it. Only you must take care to make my bed well, and shake it thoroughly till the feathers fly - for then there is snow on the earth. I am Mother Holle.

As the old woman spoke so kindly to her, the girl took courage and agreed to enter her service. She attended to everything to the satisfaction of her mistress, and always shook her bed so vigorously that the feathers flew about like snow flakes. So she had a pleasant life with her; never an angry word; and boiled or roast meat every day."

The Illustrated Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm
edited by R. Klanten & H. Hellige, Die Gestalten Verlag Berlin 2003, p. 68

Beds

"In Plato's scheme, beds are ranked into three types, with differing degrees of reality. To begin with, there are the familiar beds in which we spend a third of our lives and some of the moments that define us as human: we dream, make love, are born and die in the kinds of beds that belong to the world of everyday experience. Plato postulated another world, which contains what he designated 'ideas', from which the things of everyday experience derive their forms. In Plato's philosophy, the idea of the Bed is eternal and inalterable: Every bed in the world of daily experience must embody the same basic form, however beds may differ in detail. There are finally the beds that appear in works of art - in vase paintings, for example, picturing persons doing the kinds of things people do in bed. Now bed builders must grasp the idea of the Bed and make their products conform to it. They possess practical knowledge of how beds have to be built, in order to support the bodies of those who use them. But artists who want to paint pictures of beds merely know how beds appear. They don't really know anything about beds beyond how they look.Plato argued that pictures are of the same order as dreams, shadows, reflections, and illusions: not as real as the beds in bedrooms, far less real than the Idea of Bed in the realm of Ideas.
[...]
In 1964, [...] I began to feel that the history of art had evolved to a point that Plato's distinction between the beds of art and the beds of life was no longer compelling."

Danto, Arthur C (2005), Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life, Columbia University Press, New York, Preface, pp. xviii/xix

One rope, many perspectives

"Jeam Dubuffet (1988) also uses the notion of a braided relationship to describe cultural responses to art. In his writings he is critical of the cultural elite and antagonistic toward art critics. He thinks art criticism is like a strand of unraveling rope where meaning and the work are intertwined or disconnected so the same image can mean different things depending on the perspective of the viewer (or which part of the rope you are holding). Although Dubuffet sees this practice as a liablility, it is also possible to see it as a context-dependent account that opens up the possibility of considering many perspectives."

Sullivan, Graeme (2005), Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi, p.104

Transfers

"Rub through a pounce composed of powdered cuttlefish for a white line on a dark material and a mixture of charcoal and cuttlefish which should be graded in colouring to the colour of the material used. A lighter pounce is used for more fragile material. When the pounce is prepared it can be kept in a small jar. It is applied with a small round pad made of a strip of interlining about 4 inches deep. This is tightly wound round and is stitched down the side. The flat end is dipped into the pounce, and before applying to the tracing it should be gently shaken against the side of the jar.

When all the design is transferred in this way take off the weights and carefully lift off the tracing, which will still have a certain amount of pounce left on it. Replace this in the jar. Gently blow any superfluous pounce from the material. The impression thus obtained must be traced over with a paint line. On materials with a rough or fluffy surface oil paint, thinned with turpentine, must be used. For a straight-weave linen water colour can be used, but if there is much work to be done in the hand oil colour is more permanent.

Use a fine sable brush, working with the tip only and keeping the brush in an upright position. For oil paint use black or white, and for watercolour new blue, because it washed out more easily than any other."

Weldon's Encyclopedia of Needlework, The Waverly Book Co. LTD, Farringdon Street, London E.C.4, ND, p.6/7

Monogram

"Embroidered initials are more often used than any other form of fancy stitchery, as their purpose is useful as well as decorative. Daintily worked on lingerie they make it attractively personal, or simply and practically worked in cross stitch or satin stitch they make a neat method of identification."

Weldon's Encyclopedia of Needlework, The Waverly Book Co. LTD, Farringdon Street, London E.C.4, ND, p.127

"Western European household linens for the trousseau are marked with red cross stitch, usually by a monogram, and are frequently also numbered. As laundry was a social activity at river bank or village washhouse such marking served in addition a practical purpose, in the same way that bread baked in a communal oven was stamped with distinctive symbols to identify its owner. The marking of linen was the motivation for the myriad red alphabet samplers of the school girls of Europe."

Paine, Sheila (1990), Embroidered Textiles: Traditional Patterns from five continents, Thames and Hudson London, p.151

Knit against poverty

"We're searching for knitters to turn their knitting needles into lethal poverty fighting needles.

Staff in our Leeds office have just started a new campaign to create a giant baby blanket, with each square knitted representing a mother who did not survive pregnancy or childbirth to be able to care for her baby, because she couldn't access the medical care she needed.

We're aiming to get 250,000 squares by September, which is the number of mothers who could have been saved in that time if decent healthcare had been available.

We need knitters to make 9 inch squares for the giant blanket, which will be handed into the Government as a sort of 'patchwork against poverty petition', to demand a world where everyone has access to free basic healthcare".


More details at:
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/campaigners/2008/03/
wanted_knitting_activists_to_d_1.html?ito=2440&itc=0

Rugs on the street

When asked "What would you do first if you were president?" Andy Warhol replied,
"I would put rugs on the street and distribute money."

Source http://www.heidi-helmhold.com

Butterfly and Blanket

"Coming back from an opera (madame butterfly) in which I played a baby in the taxi. I remember the blanket covering me and the streets illuminated by sodium orange street lights".

Source:
BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/

Eastbourne Festival

Almost 40 years after the first Brighton Festival took place and years after almost every town and village in the area has been celebrating an arts festival, this year fpinally Eastbourne has got its first art festival. It was supposed to coincide with the oening of the new Cultural Centre, but the building work is far behind schedule.

Last weekend I went around a few Open Houses. At Susanne Smith's studio I bought this little knitted purse - from Eastbourne with love.

Happy Easter

"I was sitting in my cot aged about 2 eating an easter egg. I can remember getting chocolate on the covers and being slightly concerned that I had made a mess."

Source:
BBC Radio 4 Memory Experience
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/

naphtalene

"Colorless, crystalline, solid aromatic hydrocarbon with a pungent odor [...] Naphthalene is obtained from coal tar, a byproduct of the coking of coal. It is used in mothballs and gives them their characteristic odor. From it are prepared derivatives that are used in the preparation of dyes and as insecticides and organic solvents."

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia 2007, Columbia University Press www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/

"A toxic carcinogenic hydrocarbon derived from coal tar or petroleum and used as a solvent."

The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2007, 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company

History Unravelling

"Pick any strand and snip, and history becomes unravelled. This is how Tony begins one of her more convoluted lectures, the one on the dynamics of spontaneous massacres. The metaphor is of weaving or else of knitting, and of sewing scissors. She likes using it: she likes the faint shock on the faces of her listeners. It's the mix of domestic image and mass bloodshed that does it to them…"

Atwood, Margaret (1993), The Robber Bride, Virago, London, p.3

Writing and Knitting

Knitting is often seen as something easy that anybody could do if they wanted to, not much of a special skill.

"The subtext," Montse Stanley argues, "is that knitting has no substance. If any dimwit can learn all there is to it in a few hours, the creative potential of knitting must be next to nil." But, she says, while it is indeed relatively easy to learn the basics, to master the art of knitting is a different matter.
"A certain parallel can be drawn between knitting and writing, in which we value literary achievement as distinct from daily usage. Although the initial mechanics of both writing and knitting are easily grasped, what matters is the use to which we put them and, in particular, whether or not there is an artistic intention. Writing covers a very wide spectrum, from epic novels, poetry and love letters to invoices, laundry lists and telephone directories. The range of knitting categories is nearly as wide and equally varied."


Montse Stanley, Jumpers that drive you quite insane: Colour, Structure and Form in Knitted Objects, in Schoeser, Mary & Boydell, Christine (eds) (2002), Disentangling Textiles: Techniques for the Study of Designed Objects, Middlesex University Press, p.24

Curtain lectures

Curtain lectures
private admonitions given by a wife to her husband

The phrase, though of earlier origin, is immortalized in the celebrated 'Mrs Candle's Curtain Lectures' by Douglas Jerrold, published in the columns of Punch, 1845

Curtains = bed curtains, the lectures being delivered at night.

'Beside what endless brawls by wives are bred,
The curtain lecture makes a mournful bed.'
Dryden


Source: James Main Dixon, English Idioms, Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, London & Edinburgh 1944, p.62