This blog lives

[photo by Liz H-K] HOORAY!
This shot was taken on/at a reef party in Nanaimo Harbour.
The reef is only visible at extreme low tides,usually in July.

It has been one year since my last blog post. The year long pause was due to a variety of factors starting with a switch to a tablet which only encourages browsing and not writing, or as some one described it, consuming not creating. Then life happened. Long story not designed for public blogs, but here I am with a new computer one year later and with more time. So the blog lives on!

Fibrations

St Anne's Academy, Victoria BC

I never got around to posting about Fibrations held in late August at St. Anne's Academy in Victoria this summer.So, before the 2013 year ends, I thought I better get this post up. Better late than never.
Fibrations was a celebration of fibre, all kinds of fibre and all kinds of ways of using it. Organized by Knotty by Nature --if you are visiting Victoria you MUST stop in at Knotty by Nature. It's a fibre store with attitude, positive attitude, like a fuzzy yarn that grabs you, whirls you around like a spinning wheel would and knits up an event called Fibrations, totally run by fibre aficionados.

The Victoria Handweavers and Spinners Guild had a few demos with members showing basketry, weaving and lace making skills.

Scutching flax

There was a booth by the Victoria Embroiders Guild. Who knew that such a guild existed? And that they stitched up such wonderful things. One booth that stuck out  proud as can be, was the fly tying booth. He used all sorts of interesting fibres to make his fly ties. And the fact that he was one of the few male fibre enthusiasts didn't phase him in the least.

A highlight of the day was the Linen Project. This is a group of flax enthusiasts who have a long term flax to linen project going. They plant and tend the flax, rett it, process it and then produce fabrics. They had demos going all day showing people how to hackle, srutch and process the dried flax stems.

Interestingly, in the 1800's it was Sister Marie Angele, a nun from St. Anne's Academy who taught Cowichan girls at St Anne's school near Cowichan Bay how to knit. This was the start of what grew into the Cowichan sweater industry. It seemed fitting that Fibrations was held there.

Solstice - The days are getting longer

Google's logo, Dec 21, 2013.

Dec 21. Winter Solstice. I am trying to mark the solstice with a return to the blog. The solstice marks the lengthening of the days AND it also marks the first day of my semi-retirement. Well, not the first day since I am on holidays but when I return to work on Jan 2, 2014, I will be only working half-time. This is part of my plan of a phased in retirement. This means I will have more time for fibre and more time for blogging. At least, that's the plan....

Uggg. What's wrong with this picture...nothing...except

I am not really a weaver, but I have to do something with the ever growing spinning stash I am building up. Besides, the major project for Master Spinners Level 5 is to make something in either linen or cotton that takes 50 hours. First, I chose linen. It is a pleasure to spin. Cotton, well, it's okay, but heck, it is cheap enough to buy already spun. Flax on the other hand, shines, has an earthy smell, and satisfies.
I have now spent, hmmm, well over 30 hours spinning flax. I have spun dew retted, water retted, tow, line and bleached flax. I have spun it Z and spun it S. I have a stack of flax now spun into lovely linen yarns.
With all that linen I decided to weave 3 tea towels. Why do one? With all the work it takes to warp a loom, you really have to make more than one thing at a time. So I spent, hmm, another 8 hours putting on a dummy warp. Why spend tall those hours on just 3 finished products, I figured I would save oodles of time by using a dummy warp and then leaving it on after my 3 tea towels and then I can just add a new warp and skip the having to put the yarns through the heddles and slaying the reed each time. Besides it would save 18 inches of wasted yarns.
So I just spent , oh, umm, about another 4 hours sleying the reed when, almost finished I realized I had the wrong reed on! I am aiming for 20 ends per inch and I stupidly used a 5 dent reed, and ended up with 10 ends per inch not 20. It was going so well. You would have thought I would have figured out there was something wrong hours ago. But no, it was only when I thought, hmm, this tea towel sure is wide. So like my knitting adventures, it is three steps forward and two back.

A Coast Salish Blanket hidden in Alaska

While wandering the exhibits, my husband heard what he thought was an announcement about a Salish blanket and rushed over to me. I hadn't heard it so we headed to the front desk to inquire. It turned out a staff member had radioed another asking if they had seen the Salish blanket and that is what he heard. It seemed my earlier email had started a hunt for a lost Salish blanket. Apparently neither museum could find it! I said I was the one who had stared the panic. They were most helpful and apologetic for misplacing the blanket and they kindly showed me all the pictures they had on file. When we finished, somewhat disappointed but appeased by the photos and conversations, we followed the suggestion of the woman at the front desk and headed across the parking lot, into the State building up to the 8th floor where I logged into the internet. Surprisingly (and most fortuitously) an email from the curator 'Come back, we found the blanket!' So back we went and had a wonderful time looking closely at Judge Wickersham's blanket.

In a summer post, I had promised to tell you about a special find in Alaska. It is a relatively unknown Coast Salish blanket once owned by Judge Wickersham. He lived in Washington State, purchased the blanket somewhere there (more on this next year as I follow an interesting lead) and took it with him when he moved to Alaska.  And there it remains, in the Wickersham House Museum...although that isn't where I saw it and that is part of the story of fortuitous luck.
I found out about the blanket from another Salish blanket researcher, Elaine Humphrey, an expert in microscopes. Elain has been investigating the fibre contents of Salish blankets using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) - a fancy microscope for extreme close-ups (see my SEM post). She had been to see the blanket and collect some fibres from it. Most interestingly, there is a small patch of black fibres which when she put under the SEM, turned out to be human hair. There is just a little of this fibre in the blanket. Think about it. Was it the weaver's hair? The spinner's hair? The original owner's hair? Was the blanket dedicated to someone? I would love to know the hidden story behind it.

[Mark Kaarremaa Photo:
Close up detail
showing black hair fibre
next to the blue triangle]

I was already booked on a cruise to Alaska but somehow had the mistaken impression that the Wickersham House Museum was in Fairbanks and that would involve a plane trip from the Alaskan Coast to Fairbanks, not something I could fit in for this trip. I happened to be talking with Elaine the week before the trip when I mentioned this and she exclaimed " Fairbanks! No. The blanket is in Juneau." I practically ran home and phoned one of the state curators who was kind enough to start arranging with the Wickersham House a visit for me.
The day before leaving on the cruise I received an email. It seems the blanket had apparently been moved from the State museum back to the Wickersham House but we hadn't quite connected with the curator there to view it. I hoped that by the time the ship got to Juneau, we had arranged for a viewing.
Internet connectivity is on cruise ships is terrible! It should be inexpensive and a decent speed. It isn't. If you can send emails for free from 30,000 feet above the earth, then surely you can send from sea level??? To make a long story short, we arrived in Juneau and no word from the curator. I assumed that I just hadn't given them enough time. None-the-less, we decided to visit both Museums.

[Photo: Judge Wickersham's
blanket hanging on the wall.]

Cruise ships do not advertise things like local museums. It is a shame. The State Museum in Alaska (see earlier post) is well worth a visit! We entered, paid a minimal fee and the woman at the desk gave us some good hints on where to go next ( cross the road, through the parking lot, into the State Building, take the elevator,get off at the 8th floor for a good view, stop by the library where there is internet service, go out the far door from the 8th floor out to the upper street and then head for Wickersham Museum). We hoped we could remember all that but in the meantime looked around the incredible exhibits. 

Judge Wickersham was bigger than life. Statesman, author, Judge, pioneer, keeper of the peace in the gold rush. He was on the first team of white men to climb Mt McKinley. And wrote 43 diaries in which he recorded life. It is heart wrenching to read his entry about loosing his son. His diaries from 1900 until his death 1939 can be found here.

[Photo: Judge Wickersham]  

The picture at the top is the blanket as of 2013. Note the hole. There is another hole a bit smaller in the lower right just out of the photo. The Judge apparently liked to sit on the blanket on his chair, so the holes line up when folded and also lined up with his tush. Note the picture at the bottom of the blanket on the wall taken before 1940. It is hard to see if this size photo but click the link to see the full image and you will notice it has been folded. The stripe in the middle is really the right edge of the blanket but has been folded in to, I suspect, hide the two holes. Interestingly the blanket also hides the full story of the black hair.

Iron Age Sweater

[Photo: MUSEUM OF CULTURAL HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF OSLO/PHOTO: MARIANNE VEDELER]

An interesting news item. An iron age sweater made somewhere between 230 and 390 A.D, which makes it one of the oldest sweaters known. It was found on a rocky hillside revealed by a melting glacier in Norway. The owner, probably male (apparently, it would fit a slim 5'9" man) probably stopped to enjoy the view, perhaps the sun was shinning and he took the sweater off and put it next to him. Maybe something disturbed him. Whatever happened, he left it there.  The photo of it lying on the rocks shows how hard it was to distinguish between the sweater and the rocks. 

[Photo: Marianne Vedeler] The sweater
was found 6,500 ft up Lendbren glacier.

I imagine he was kicking himself for days after for losing it. Perhaps he tried to retrace his route and never did find it. Or something prevented him from returning. 
Almost 2,000 years later someone stumbles across it. Suppose it was you that found it. How would you feel? Finding something so personal and in such good condition builds a bridge connecting you to him across all those years. I would clutch it and look around for him, thinking perhaps it was only a moment or two since he left it, maybe at most a few weeks if it was wet. But forever after, I would harbour the idea of time travel. Maybe it was me, the finder who scared him off!

The sweater was woven in diamond twill, a common design in those days. The closeup picture seems to show the warp is S-twist (spun z) and the weft is the opposite Z-twist (spun s). It makes me wonder why? Any weavers out there who could shed light on the advantages of S warp and Z weft?

Beattle bombing

[Photo by VW]

This is a first. Marthe and Magnus Schwarz, an imaginative couple from Northern Germany spent 7 months and 40kg of yarn to yarn bomb their VW Beattle. They see this as a sweater outfit which makes one wonder if another outfit is in the works?