Alongside my tanka writing I have become interested in textile art and I’ve decided to use this blog to also capture my progress with this very different form of creativity. At some point this year I even hope to combine the two to create haiga, a Japanese form which combines a poem with visual art. I have already started to experiment with hand sewing text to see how writing the poem in stitch might work. But before I get ahead of myself, let me just tell you a little bit about why I am evolving into textile art and show you what I consider to be my first ‘formal’ completed project.
My textile crafting background is yarn. I started knitting when I was about 10. And I learnt to crochet and spin in my 40s (I’m now in my early 50s). Sewing, on the other hand, has always been something I have considered myself rubbish at but really wanted to be able to do. However hard I tried with hand sewing, I couldn’t do neat work, and I was scared of electric sewing machines. I hated needlework classes at school! But in the last couple of years I have started to view things differently. I have done some basic work on my inherited sewing machine (though we still have lots of arguments). Joining the Upcycled Cloth Collective has helped me appreciate my wonky hand stitches and my less than neat electrically sewed hems. And discovering and doing a form of stitch meditations a while back means I no longer strive for perfection. Then attending the London Knitting and Stitching shows in recent years, pre- and post-lockdowns, I got to see textile art exhibitions in person and I slowly fell in love with the work I was seeing. At October’s show I was so inspired I ended up buying two beautiful books, one by Cas Holmes and one by Alice Fox, and I’ve well and truly fallen down the textile art rabbit hole.
I’ll talk more about my initial thoughts on what my textile art voice might be another time, but for now I want to tell you about my first rag ball. It’s all thanks to Deena Beverley posting about them on her Instagram here. Having never heard of them before, I did as Deena suggested in response to my question about what they have traditionally been used for, and went off, learnt more and watched Lisbeth Werts video and read about the ‘Unidentified Meaningful Object’ project. Here I discovered that I am still in time to submit a rag ball to an exhibition to be held in Chatham in January, so perhaps I will be part of my very first textile art exhibit! Anyway, either way I enjoyed making the rag ball very much and can see more in my future as part of a meditative and restful process. Below I show pictures of the layers, based on Lisbeth’s approach.
I used a snail shell that mysteriously found itself attached to a ceiling beam but when we looked inside there was no snail to be seen! Snails have been showing up for me a lot inside the house in recent months. I suspect a message to slow down in what was a too busy time. I’ve just started collecting old teabags to play with so I decided to pop the shell in one. On the front I wrote ‘Expansion’ – as snails expand out when they move – and on the back ‘& Return’, a reminder that movement also requires retreat and rest and as I go forwards creatively I need also to go slowly. I then wrote an unpolished tanka especially for this project on some old scrap painted paper and after doing the scrunching and smoothing suggested by Lisbeth (a Japanese technique which felt like synchronicity with my tanka writing), wrapped that around. Then the piece of what should have been red thread but I had to make do with dark pink yarn, and several layers of old pieces of clothing from orange to pinks to browns. I wanted the top layer to reflect the snail shell in colour but have the inner layers be the colours of action, passion and creativity. Another reminder of the tension between expansion and return. A purple ribbon which had bells attached to it felt like the perfect finish, purple often being related to mystery, magic and creativity. And I used several strands of a mix of brown, purple, red and pink threads to secure the layers. My first Undentified Meaningful Object!
And Then There Were Stories 