Yarn Gallery

With the addition of the above work of handspun art, Karen Barnaby's I Am Not the Shy Little Alien You Thought You Married, my collection of the handspun work of others has become worthy of its own gallery space.  Insufficient as my photography resources and skills are, I'm attempting to give these pieces such a space here.  To fully appreciate Karen's yarn, you'd have to witness its original context and Karen's own photos (Ravelry link.) This one was not giving it up for me during the photo session, so I only have the one shot. I must say, however, that this yarn makes a fabulous necklace, which I wore to the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibit at the DeYoung Museum. 

The next piece is a grouped set of three skeins spun by Janet Scanlon. I can't seem to think of them separately at this point. A portion of this is called Medley for A-Muse, and includes handwoven and crocheted additions. It was spun on spindles.

Next is Naomi Ryono's Wonky Daffodils, which I purchased from her Etsy shop, Knotty Handspuns. Naomi's yarns have many different personalities. This one is particularly festive and cheery.

Laura Mayotte's wonderful skein from the "Spin your scraps" challenge remains an art object in itself, although I was sure I wanted to knit it right away when I acquired it in trade. It looks so good hanging on my wall, with its ever-changing palette of twists and wraps.  Maybe it should be woven....

The prized possession below is the work of Michelle Snowdon, aka Wooldancer. It is a double chain-ply of the softest, most luxurious fibers: polworth and alpaca and so on, with sparks of fabric and firestar and beautiful beads.  This one is also quite wearable as it is, making a lush, cosy necklace.

Velma!! This yarn is the first acquisition of the exhibited collection, the lovely and talented Melon Baller skein, which makes me smile every time I see it. The vintage fabrics and intricately scribbled thread add delicacy to this wonderfully fat yarn. Found this gem at Colorbomb Creations.

I received a stunning yarn in the Fairy Tale Spin Swap, from Katja Riley (Made by Pixies.) The story it tells is entrancing, full of gold and glimmer.

And the latest acquisitions, in addition to the alien yarn up top, are two of the most sculptural yarns I've ever seen. Janet spun this on a supported phang-shaped spindle, and it lives alongside my plants, as another grown thing. 

And finally, Karen Barnaby's world-renowned Stone Pile (Ravelry link.) Again, her photo is the ultimate presentation, but here you see how it has taken on a greenish cast in the intervening time. It's a mystery, why it's green, but the yarn is no less marvelous.

This is not an exhaustive list, mind you, just a curated selection.

I am getting very close to being able to decorate my whole house with yarn.

Spaces

Traveling, spending many weeks back in the home country, visiting family and friends, is always an odd experience. We're displaced, but we're home. I get to reunite with people I've missed so much, but am uprooted from my normal routines and environment.  Everything I was doing in Doha is suspended, and I'm immersed in the spaces and lives of others.
This time, the rewards were great, as my travels interlaced two of my favorite fiber people. Below are images from their places, Karen in B.C. and Janet in Oregon.

Can't beat this fiber storage system!

Janet's spindle in Karen's house, providing a very welcome spinning interval.

(You can tell that's not Janet's place because only one spindle is visible, unlike this scene):

And the spaces in between, getting from one place to another, were equally inspiring.

How fortunate am I, that beautiful friends and beautiful landscape are in such close proximity?

Idyll

What could be better than a day when I get to do this

and this

in this landscape?

Better pictures of the ride route from Donner Lake to Donner Pass coming soon.

Meanwhile, more peace and quiet.

Book Review: Bowling Avenue

I could not be busting with pride more if I wrote this myself.

Ann Shayne of Mason Dixon Knitting fame has written a novel!  And published it all by herself!  It's available through various media here.  Go get it, it's totally worth it.  

Seriously, being a fan of the blog for years, I had been anticipating Ann's non-blog writing for a long time. I read Mason Dixon Knitting for the writing quality and the witty humor, the knitting and beauty, and the lurking-but-always-present depth of feeling of these two women. They are a force of good in the world, and I'm so glad to know them (I do know them, I've met them in person for real.) So it would have been easy for me to support Ann's book and read it and adore it simply because it's hers, and I could have probably overlooked a number of little flaws for her sake, even though I'm typically a major writing snob.

But there was nothing to overlook, nothing to forgive for the sake of friendship, because it's a great novel! It's a delightful read, through and through, and I felt perfectly justified in my confident anticipation of an excellent piece of writing from Ann.  I was laughing and stomping the floor with glee by page 24, in celebration of her writing style. This was the first time I've read a novel written by someone whose voice is already familiar, and it was such a pleasure to hear this voice come alive in novel format. And it works. The whole thing works so well, I got caught up in the characters and often forgot that I was reading Ann's novel. She's there and she's not there, which is surely an indication of good writing.

If you'll indulge me, I'd like to include an excerpt that epitomizes the flow of thoughts, images and language. It's from early on in the book, when Delia is trying to cope with the idea of selling her sister Ginna's house and has gone for a walk.

The merciful thing about Ginna's neighborhood is that the houses are spaced so far apart that nobody needs to talk to each other, at all. Splendid isolation. It's as if the guy who laid out these plots, one fat acre after another, calculated exactly how far the human eye can discern the features of a face, and that was the distance from the center of one lot to the next. I have no idea who lives next door. It's not neighborhood, really. It feels like that desert in Arizona where they mothball old jetliners.

Ahead, a stacked stone wall has collapsed. Stones are scattered all over the ground, sorted by size. I see a figure moving behind the wall, down low. It's that guy with the alarm code who came up the driveway the other day. Ichabod Crane.

He stand, like a giraffe, with a pair of small stones in each hand. "Hello," he says blandly. He seems to be wearing the same clothes he wore the other day, which would be creepy except that I seem to be wearing the same clothes, too.

There's an approachable thoughtfulness in this self-deprecating Delia, and her awkward way provides the comic relief for the heaviness of the situations she's going through. A quite incredible load of family Stuff gets unpacked in this story, and the tinge of absurdity, in characters and descriptions, saves us from despair. This mixture of dead serious and slapstick funny is a trademark of the author's, and it blends so seamlessly that you don't realize until afterward how important that relationship is.

I'm reminded of a classmate of mine who survived breast cancer, and as a drama professor with experience in clowning, decided to write a comedy about it. It was a one-woman show, and she used her comic abilities to communicate things that people may not have been able to listen to otherwise. She also talked about how the clowning, the silliness, was an essential tool in helping her get through it all.  This seems to be one of the themes in Bowling Avenue, or maybe I should say a modus operandi.

Another prevailing theme is how little we might know about our families, and how much people may have to hide. Layers and layers emerge slowly, driving the pace of the novel in a kind of slow, psychological suspense. Nothing's happening very fast: this is Nashville, after all.

The only criticism I could think of people leveling at this book is that there's not a single mean character to be found.  If you must have a villain, you may be disappointed, but if it doesn't bother you to see people revealed to be basically decent, welcome to Bowling Avenue.

So, as I was saying, go get yourself some summer reading!

Heddles, henna, etc

So I had my hands painted with henna last week, because I was going to a Qatari wedding, and that's what people do. And the best photo I have of both hands turned out to be this one taken while I was making heddles. This is a few days after the henna application - it got darker over the first several days.

It was difficult for me to sit around and not do anything with my hands for over 2 hours the first day.

 I did in fact try to doe some spinning on the wheel, and little bits of blackened, dried henna kept flaking off into my fiber. Some women get the entire surface of their hands and arms done, including palms and fingertips, but I would surely go crazy if I couldn't use even my fingertips for a few hours.

 When it all flaked off, it was red-orange, making quite a contrast to the quilt I was working on - although the leaf shapes are similar.

Trying to photograph my henna'ed hands doing fibery things became a brief obsession, but without much to show for it, until the hub snapped the one at the top.

Meanwhile, I had made a new handspun warp and was eager to set it up, but this one was still on the loom bar,

and I was using my loom bar extension, which is a second bar attached only by rope loops, so it sways out from the table under tension. Due to its mobility, it's not good to have a second, unused warp on there.  (The one above has since been finished and made into a bag, and I could write a tome about this piece, but perhaps not right now. Yes, I cut the fabric at a slight angle to accommodate the widening of the woven strip!)

So, inspired by Emi in Laverne's recent report from her classes in the US, I tested the length of my handspun warp and found it perfect for this setup.

 I don't think I could weave a whole piece this way like Emi, but for the short time it took me to make heddles, this worked well.

Now that I have finished the black and white complementary warp piece, I have both this one and the one in the top photo on my loom bar, Bedouin and Andean side by side.

The piece on the left will have a shajarah motif in the center, using warp substitution, and the handspun has a mayo q'enko pattern in pebble weave. The pebble weave is going faster at the moment, since it's only 8 ends of pickup, while the shajarah is 35. But the nice cotton warp is so much easier to manage while changing sheds that it has its own appeal. I have a young budding weaver visiting my home tomorrow, and these will also make good instructive pieces to demonstrate the different kinds of warp patterning.

And the henna is almost all faded off now.

Going up

Ah, Petra is becoming a fading memory already. But I have the photos to remind me and prove I was really there. These rocks are just so incredibly cool. And the sky was cooperating, too. Up we go, toward the High Place of Sacrifice.

And up, and up and up. You have to keep on going, beyond where it looks like reasonable people might stop, to reach the actual spot.

Trees!  I noticed that the dry places of Jordan have these cedar-type trees, which are familiar to me from other dry places like Ladakh, India. They seem to be able to grow with very little soil and moisture, and I suspect some of them are very old.

Here we are. I lay down on the slab where my backpack is, thinking that was the place of actual sacrifice. But the actual spot is where I'm standing to take the photo. There's a kind of drain, for the blood. 

Click to enlarge (that works, right?) and you can see buildings on the ground behind me. That's the area leading to the Monastery, which is the other place we climbed up to. We spent 9 hours hiking through Petra, since we only had this one day.  Up, down, across, and up again. It was great. 

Looking down on the tombs. 

Wandering around on this level, we saw smoke rising from a small fire behind a rock outcrop, and found a Bedouin family having tea. They invited us to sit and drink tea with them, and we were more than ready for a nice cup of sweet black tea. It tasted especially good, cooked in a teapot directly over the coals.  Sitting there in their perfectly sheltered nook (it was windy and cold otherwise,) we felt completely relaxed and peaceful, and got a real taste of how people have lived in this place for centuries. I was again reminded of Ladakh, India, where things would be very nearly the same, except for the landscape.

At the end of a full day in Petra, this remained my favorite moment.

Entering Petra

Let's walk in, shall we?  The siq, or canyon which is not technically a canyon because it was caused by a split in the rock, winds along for quite a ways, and it's breathtaking the whole time. It's impossible to do the place justice in photos, especially with a little point & shoot. But I'll show what I've got anyway.

Starting at 6:30am, we had the place nearly to ourselves, with only a few other people spaced out far enough to give a sense of solitude.

The rocks still show signs of having fit together once.  On the left above, and both sides below, you can see the carved water channels that run the length of the siq.

Look for the geometric, carved alcoves in the photo below, tiny in the face of the rock. There were so many of these, all with subtle stairways or paths leading to them, as if the Nabateans tended them regularly.

Okay here it comes....

No words for that moment, except that the camels are very well placed.

The intricacy and depth of carving, into and against the living rock, is staggering.

 We reached the Treasury before the sun, and as we turned down the next path, we found that the men from the coffee shop opposite the Treasury had come down here to sit in the first warm sunlight, as it lit up some tombs.

Next, we go up.