Settling in at Ock Pop Tok

 Already, on the first day, before sleeping at all after an overnight journey from Doha, I was surrounded by textile stimuli. I'm staying at the villa of Ock Pop Tok's Living Crafts Centre, for the time being, which means I'm in the thick of the beauty and creation.

Weavers are constantly at work all day, turning silk threads into supplementary weft pieces of extreme skill. There are discontinuous (photo below) and continuous supplementary weft works in progress, as well as weavings that incorporate mut-mee weft ikat. I've watched long enough to finally make sense of the vertical heddle storage system (photo above) that keeps the patterns for the supplementary weft handy. I had seen this before but had never quite understood how it worked.

This is the largest complicated piece in progress. Gyang's hands are a blur as she whips the weft threads through the shed, working her way across nearly a meter of warp width. I also met a backstrap weaver who taught me how to improve my fringe twisting by using a thigh roll (the ancient way of thigh spinning yarn, by the way.) I'm very bad at it, so I've been trying to practice.

The location cannot be beat - that's the Mekong River flowing by.
Oh, and I've already bought yarn:

That was all yesterday, the very day I flew in. Which is an incredible experience, in itself. If you ever fly into Luang Prabang, you want your camera handy before the plane even lands.
No wonder my head was spinning so much I could hardly sleep, in spite of the desperate need to catch up on a missed night.

Today I have observed, filmed, and slightly helped with winding a huge cotton warp, and learned how to tie a knot from the woman who was warping (Yes, a knot. Even for the most basic things, there's nothing like an experienced mentor to demonstrate an efficient way. And when it comes to knots in warps, I want to learn from the most experienced people possible.)
I've also done some cotton spinning on a charka - !! If I knew they had charkas sitting around, I would have brought all my cotton. But that can also be found, I'm sure.
Shared my backstrap weaving projects with Gyang, of the super complex weaving above, who has seen such weaving because she went to an event in Santa Fe and got to meet weavers from South America.

So far I've learned at least one new thing and made at least one new friend a day. My mind may never settle, but that may be a good thing.

Here's where I am: Ock Pop Tok

Yarn happenings

Here's what's going on with me.

Several different things, as usual. I haven't stopped spinning, I've just had less opportunity to share photos and stories. This is yarn for the third ring of a wonderful, international handspun swap I've been doing. Two different people spun and knit the first two rings, and I add my own third - meanwhile, I spun and knit two other rings that went to two other people, in Cardiff and Washington State.

The two rings I received are from Virginia and Colorado, and they're beautiful and very soft. I started to knit the third ring yesterday while out and about, but forgot to bring the first two with me - doh! The third ring has to be linked into those two when you join to knit in the round - it's a Russian Wedding Ring Cowl (Ravelry link). 

In other news, I'm getting ready to go to Laos for 6 weeks (!!!!) for my conservation degree placement. I will be working with the Ock Pop Tok organization on their collection of traditional woven textiles.  Hoping to finish weaving the handspun cotton below, and take it with me, to break the ice with the Lao women. Also hoping the local weavers don't laugh too hard when they compare my skills to their own.

 In case I don't find all the right sticks immediately, I'm taking my 'loom' with me. It looks like this:

 As long as I can get ahold of, or make, some yarn, I'll be ready to weave. I'm not planning to take my little rigid heddle - they make such things over there, and I will be on the hunt in the market, and/or weaving without one, which is my normal method.

From the department of Learning Something New, I've been attempting to spin like a Portuguese woman. Or like a Greek, Sardinian, French, Spanish, Medieval European.... I've noticed that a huge percentage of images, historical and contemporary, show women spinning with distaff and vertical spindle held by the tip, without necessarily dropping or letting go. It's counterintuitive for someone who learned on a top-whorl drop spindle with a hook, but I'm trying to get the hang of it. I started with a prepared top, and then changed to hand-picked locks, shown below. Everything on that spindle has been spun in this way, for what it's worth. It is not high-quality yarn, I can tell you that. But it's maybe, maybe getting better.

- spindle made by the same woman who spun the cotton yarn warp I'm weaving, and made the rigid heddle - my buddy Janet who is brilliant but doesn't sell them so don't ask ;)

Recently I had an impulse spin, after hearing about various kinds of suffering among people who are dear to me. Spun up some healing, in the form of supersoft fibers that felt loving and warm as I spun.

And one more fun thing: YarnWench wildcard bling batt, spun on an antique Iranian spindle = whee!

Spinning from the cloud

 ...has never seemed so literal before.  How lovely and inviting is this cloud, made of locks dyed by Laura Mayotte of the prolific indigo vat.

Life requires me to spin right now, which means life is good.

Recipe for sanity

Stay in a house open to the outdoors

Ride a train through a green country

Be surrounded by an unknown language

And if you're really serious about it, throw in a 

ten-day vipassana course.

This recipe worked for me, and I liked Sri Lanka 

even better this second time around.

Outdoors

This is the time of year when we can relish living in Doha. Balmy days, clear blue skies.
And I'm finally back to this again - maybe coincidence, or maybe the chance to work outdoors?

Here's my view while weaving:

And here's what I looked like (with thanks to anonymous Filipino guy who took the photo):

A better version of the view, since it's crooked in the first photo. Here's the Doha skyline these days.

And just for fun, a comparison with 2008:

Linen. Old.

Ancient Egyptian linen. I got to look at some, up close.

Having recently read Barber's description of linen splicing in Prehistoric Textiles, I knew that the places that looked plied were most likely spliced, and these spots were visible here and there in the woven cloth. There's one going across in the photo below, just below the center of the image. If it works to click on these photos and see them bigger, you may be able to find more splices in other images.

I found a blue striped border, which recurred in several fragments. As you can see, the weave is warp-dominant - probably because the weaving was done on ground looms (as per Barber.)

Similar designs were displayed in the British Museum:

I found some fringe, and a seam, both of which may be part of the "additional tunics" mentioned in the conservation article from 1979.

That's the view of the seam that was on the inside, as the fabric lay in storage. On the other side, there is some lint along the fold, which I found very interesting - what would the lint be made of? It looks fluffy, like wool. And how old would the lint be? Ancient Egyptian lint? Or storage lint?

And here's an absolutely perfect selvedge, top of the photo below. It's not folded or anything - it's that straight.

The bulk of the perfect-selvedge cloth looked like this, with some uneven spaces between warps.

I could not decide if this was a result of deterioration or distortion from long years crumpled in storage, or if it appeared this way when it was originally woven. (The dark spot up top is a hole.) Anyway, I let the unevenness encourage me, since my current backstrap weaving has a lot of variation in the space between warps.

There was a wide range of density-to-lightness in the fabrics, with the linen threads also thicker in some cloth and finer in others. Here are two quite different piece, the upper one much lighter and finer.

Did I wish I could open each of these out and see the full size and shape and speculate more about their purpose? Of course I did! However, I was asked to disrupt them as little as possible, and truly any amount of unfolding risked further disintegration, so this was not the time to sort them all thoroughly. I was hoping that someday someone will, though.

Here is a knot. Just because it's there.

And finally, the Gurob sleeves (listed with other things on this helpful website), which I looked at (in a case, with the aid of a museum-provided flashlight/torch) after having examined the other linens. I was happy to see that I could make out the spliced sections on this fabric, which is much more finely and densely woven, and well-preserved. Beautiful seams, too.

These child-sized sleeves were made separately, to be attached to a sleeveless tunic as needed. This was apparently the custom, since Egypt is usually hot and most clothes were made sleeveless. I'm thinking the sleeves are densely woven because they are a warm layer for the cold season.

My appreciation for ancient linen production grew immensely that day.

Questions and comments welcome - don't be shy.

Puttering, or a post to prove I'm alive

It feels so nice to putter again. I’ve just had a good hour or so of puttering about the apartment. When school is on, I don’t have time, and as soon as the winter break began, I got completely ill with a bad cold. Then I left town for two weeks, so had not had a good putter in ages.

After being away, it’s like a little ritual of attention, re-establishing the familiar order of things, adjusting the arrangement of the space in small ways (or bigger ways when, as now, my husband has been dealing with electrical problems and a daily parade of workmen in my absence.)

It’s very gratifying to get a bunch of normal, necessary things done, like wiping down the kitchen, putting away dishes, starting laundry, unpacking, making a grocery list. Nothing the least bit remarkable, but in the week before I left I was too sick to do any of it, which made me a little crazy, and so just being able to productively putter is so nice.

And the sooner I’ve done the right amount of puttering, the sooner I can dive back into spinning and weaving, which projects are calling out to me enticingly.

Then I can also talk about all the things I saw in London, like 5000-year-old linen,

and a spontaneous demonstration of North Ronaldsay fleece de-hairing in the British Museum atrium, courtesy of Sarah Wroot.