26 Dec 2010

new toys!

2

Well, new books. Books are Serious so really shouldn’t be denoted toys no matter how many you have, right? I have just had the pleasure of adding these to my LibraryThing collection:

That’s volume 2 of Peggy Osterkamp’s New Guide to Weaving and Marg Coe’s new book Fit 2 Be Tied. I’m especially excited about the latter as I was disappointed that I couldn’t go to the Complex Weavers workshop which she taught at Handweaver’s Studio in early December (unlike Stacey who has blogged about it here). However, given my limited mobility in the context of All That Snow, it really wasn’t a good idea — I am still struggling just to get to the end of the road without falling over! Anyway, I have dived straight in to both books at once so no doubt there will be related posts to come.

In the meantime, what’s on the loom? In addition to the plain colours of silk which I used for the Serious Scarves, I bought a couple of variegated skeins: one in blue/violet and one in red/pink. I have matched the blue/violet one with some merino yarn from Chameleon Colorworks in a colour scheme called Midnight (yes, I admit it, another Convergence purchase). My plan is just to see whether I can make a soft crinkly scarf by shrinking stripes of merino between bands of huck lace in the silk.

My little sample piece looked like this.

There are two different shades of silk in the weft and two different options in the merino stripes. At the bottom I have woven huck in the merino as well as in the silk; at the top the merino is in plain weave.

I thought I should be gentle with the silk so I washed it by hand and had a go at fulling the stripes using a combination of bubble wrap and elbow grease. Hah. I ran out of elbow grease long before any shrinkage could be observed. There is nothing like impatience for increasing the presumed resilience of yarns. Silk, delicate? I threw it in the dryer with a towel. And lo:

As you can see, the plain weave areas didn’t shrink much at all, which was rather what I had suspected. However, in the huck areas, where there is more room for manoeuvre, the merino has shrunk just enough to give the silk a lively bubbliness. So I have proceeded accordingly and it is looking like this.

I made a complete muddle of winding the warp bouts and had to rearrange them on the loom to get a degree of symmetry in the colours, but I like the way it is working out.

For a seasonal finish, let me leave you with one of my favourite family photos from yesterday: Three Wise Men, making the most of those festive nibbles. On the far right, with the coffee, is my own Stuart, taking a well-earned day off from loom support.

“new toys!” was posted by Cally on 26 Dec 2010 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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20 Dec 2010

belt, braces, glue and staples

1

Second Bee (see First Bee here): when I did go from being a belt and braces person to being a belt, braces and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink person? I started wondering about this last Wednesday afternoon.

I had packed up my wares to take to Petite Noel and I was assembling a kit of Useful Things: pair of scissors, safety pins, you know the sort of thing. But as I was walking out of the studio my eye fell on a roll of masking tape — might need that, thinks I, and into the bag it goes. But thinking of situations requiring masking tape leads one to wonder whether masking tape is really sufficient… Might I not need some blu-tack as well? Into the bag. The bag already contains spare sticky velcro squares, the aforementioned safety pins, regular pins and some string. What other fixing agents should I take? Staples, glue, magnets?

As I was shovelling all these things into various corners and pockets of my bag, I started to ponder on my behaviour. I do like a backup plan, but this was getting ridiculous. If I’m giving a presentation I take a USB stick with my file on it. I might have two copies in different file formats, perhaps, but I don’t take several different portable hard drives Just In Case. Then I remembered the presentations of our work which we used to give at Bradford.

Each time we returned to the college with our precious three months’ worth of woven work we had to display it in the studio for a group critique. The samples would usually be mounted on boards and the boards had to be fixed to the wall. However, there were quite a lot of us and therefore more boards — than the studio walls could comfortably accommodate. Easels and other miscellaneous items had to be brought into play. Getting the work displayed was as creative and challenging an exercise as producing it in the first place!

So if you had taken along pins to mount your work on the wall, but then found you didn’t have any wall, what could you do? I reckon this was the beginning of my fixings addiction. I had to have to hand every possible means of attaching my work to something else, because I couldn’t know in advance what the something else was going to be — but nonetheless I wanted very strongly to be in control of how my work looked. The most fun I had was when we were allowed for the first time to display our samples in some other fashion. I opted to go for something completely freestanding and liberate myself from the wall problem altogether. Since my ramblings are pretty dull without photos, I thought I had better rummage around and see if I could find any of the project in question… these aren’t very good ones, but they do show my strange contraption built around a bookcase frame (click to biggify).

The idea was to reflect the building I was using as inspiration: the DCA, a contemporary art gallery which was developed out of an industrial building. By the way, you can see great views of the building on the architect’s website.

Of course, I could just have been more relaxed about the whole thing, but I have to say that “relaxed” was definitely not a feeling which Bradford engendered in me! And I am a bit of a control freak about presentation anyway. Going back even further, I’d say it all comes down to the quirk of having neat handwriting when I was a child. I don’t know why my handwriting happened to be neat; I started writing very early, so I guess I just had a lot of practice. But whatever the reason, I certainly did have nice-looking handwriting — much nicer than it is now — and it turned out to be a terrible curse. In those far-off days projects were not formatted on computers but painstakingly written out by hand and mounted on sugar paper before they were pinned onto the classroom walls. (Actually, I know they still do that in junior school, which is something of a relief.) Anyway, in any group effort, guess who always got nominated to “do the writing”?

So I have carried the weight of expectation all these years, and I think it is beginning to weigh rather too heavily. After all, improvisation can be a fun and creative challenge. I think next time I will try and leave one item behind. And the next time another. Until I feel able to leave the kitchen sink at home.

“belt, braces, glue and staples” was posted by Cally on 20 Dec 2010 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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17 Dec 2010

lovely stuff

2

Now that I’ve let that First Bee out of my bonnet it is a lot quieter in there and I can concentrate on telling you about some of the lovely things which people round here are making – people whose wares I was able to enjoy at Petite Noel. For a complete list of participants, the best place to go would probably be the event page on Facebook — though if you are not on FB that might be a challenge. Anyway, here are a few highlights.

I did some Christmas shopping at Tights for Sore Eyes. Nikki and Danni use the print studio at DCA to jazz up tights in a host of glorious ways: even the packaging is hand printed.

Something I would like for Christmas myself would be one of Hilary Grant’s Rocky Mountain cushions. Except that one wouldn’t really do, you’d need a whole range.

Stuart would almost certainly prefer one of Nikki’s cushions, because they look like Tunnock’s tea cakes. Strictly speaking, he is a caramel wafer man, but that would require more of a bolster-type design. (Apologies to readers outside Scotland: these confections are a national obsession.)

A suitable motto for the studio would be the “Less Talk More Make” print by illustrator Jen Collins of hellojenuine. A more general purpose motto would be her alternative “When in doubt, bake a cake” but — unsurprisingly — that seems to be out of stock.

And finally… another Jen, aka RandomlyGenerated, paints little peg people. But these are not just any little peg people, they are the entire set of doctors from Dr Who. There are Dr Who sidekicks as well, of whom my favourite has to be River Song — just look at that hair. Peg dolls have moved on a bit since I made my nativity set in junior school.

“lovely stuff” was posted by Cally on 17 Dec 2010 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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16 Dec 2010

questions of identity

5

I’ve had a host of bloggy bees buzzing in my bonnet for the last wee while, but no time to stop and set them free as I have been too busy hemming mug rugs. Now, thanks in large part to Petite Noel, the mug rugs have almost all departed for their new homes, so I can sit down and write a post or two. (Not that I wasn’t sitting down to do the hemming, you understand.)

First Bee, then, is the title of this post: questions of identity.

Buzz part 1

When I first started my blog I didn’t know what to call it. My main concern was that I didn’t want to come up with a name that would sound brilliant when I first thought of it and then cringeworthy forever after. As my most overused phrase is “well, it seemed like a good idea at the time”, this was not a negligible risk. So I settled for the plainest URL I could think of: my own name. I suppose there’s a chance I might eventually start cringeing at the sound of my name, but in that case I’ll have far more serious problems to worry about than blogging. As a bonus, I was able to give my blog any title that I wanted — independent of its address — and that worked just fine.

Buzz part 2

When it came to trying out an etsy shop, however, I decided it was time to get a bit braver. I didn’t want my etsy shop to be designated “callybooker” because I wanted to distinguish between myself,  “the weaver”, and the products I make, “that which I weave”. The name I came up with — and haven’t started cringeing at yet — is Bonny Claith, which is simply Scots for “pretty cloth”. A bit of googling reassured me over two possible concerns: nobody else seemed to be using it, and it didn’t appear to be moonlighting as a euphemism for anything embarassing. I haven’t actually used it much except on my etsy shop — and to be honest I haven’t used my etsy shop much either!

Buzz part 3

More recently I had to decide what domain name to register for my website and that made me pause for a while — before I decided to get both names: callybooker.co.uk and bonnyclaith.co.uk. At the moment everything is built in the callybooker space, while the bonnyclaith name simply points to it. However, the intention is to maintain and develop that distinction between the weaver and the woven. If you want to know what I am up to, if you want to ask me anything, then you need Cally Booker. If you are primarily interested in buying something which I have woven, then you need Bonny Claith. In the first case, I suspect that you are also likely to be a weaver, while in the second case you are probably not a weaver — another reason for aiming to develop two distinct spaces.

Most recent buzzing

I can see potential for getting muddled; I can also see potential for developing each space on its own and in relationship to the other, and that is quite exciting. My first moment of muddle came when I set about ordering new business cards with the new web address on. Which new address should they carry? Well, it depends on the purpose of the cards. My business cards get an airing here and there, but mainly they come into their own when my work is on display somewhere, so it made sense to use the bonnyclaith address associated with the work. This led me to thinking a bit further about the cards’ function. If they accompany the work then perhaps they could be tailored to go with specific pieces of work?

Many of you have used moo cards, as I have, to feature lots of different photographs in a single set. I decided to try and manage this aspect of the moo production process to get a mix of business cards: some would be straightforward business cards with my contact details on one side and a photograph of my work on the other, while some would take it a step further and be purposely designed as swing tags. These would have the same contact details side, but the other side would be half photo/half “product details” — fibre composition, care instructions and so on. Planning them in this way reinforced their identity as bonnyclaith cards, which is what I now have.

Ooh, look. There’s one right there.

Next bit of buzz

The architecture of my site is evolving in my mind, but it seems to me that it is likely to be a place which has several different front doors. At some stage I would like to host my own online shop, for example, but there are all sorts of other possibilities percolating as well. In the meantime I am playing around with some of the formatting — you may occasionally notice changes (sometimes swiftly followed by changes-back-again) — and getting used to the powers suddenly bestowed upon me as webmaster.

Another bee coming up shortly.

“questions of identity” was posted by Cally on 16 Dec 2010 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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