needled

It was abandoned. I kept passing it. This morning it had frost on it. I had to save it.

It is a very nice tam. If it is yours, tell me. I found it on the cycle path near Ferry Road and Agnew Terrace.

If you’ll excuse some trumpet-blowin for a moment, I have a piece in the current issue of Selvedge about the doll-art of Tabitha Moses. I find Tabitha’s work incredibly suggestive for many reasons, especially her thoughtful engagement with stitch as both process and mark. I urge anyone who’s interested to have a look at the catalogue from her superb exhibition at Bolton Museum, The Lost and the Found, in which Alexandra Wolcowicz’s photography goes some way toward capturing the powerful effect of objects like ‘Untitled’ (2006).

Anyway, in the course of researching the piece, I rediscovered Annie’s room. For those of you who do not know, Annie’s room is a talking point of the Edinburgh attraction Mary King’s Close, which has opened up the fascinating world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century streets hidden beneath the Royal Mile. Many tourist attractions in Scotland seem to feature a wee Annie as a matter of course, but this particular Annie is particularly interesting. In 1992, just after the rediscovery of Edinburgh’s hidden city-beneath-the-city, Japanese psychic, Aiko Gibo, visited a tenement in Mary King’s Close and in one room reportedly felt the tugging hands of a girl abandoned there to die in a plague year. Gibo comforted the restless ghost with a tiny tartan doll, leaving her a curiously nationalist playmate.

(The doll originally left in Annie’s room by Aiko Gibo)

Since then, numerous visitors to what quickly became known as Annie’s room have done the same. While the original doll is now dusty and showing signs of age, she has been joined over the years by hundreds of new companions. There are Barbies and beanie-babies and several Raggedy-Anns. Stuffed animals jostle alongside plastic infants; painted wooden soldiers smile up at porcelain princesses.

(miscellaneous gifts in Annie’s Room)

As well as toys, visitors also leave money for Annie (which is charitably donated by Mary King’s Close, and which, in the last year alone raised a staggering ten-thousand pounds for the Edinburgh Sick Kids Hospital). So what are we to make of this shrine, this spontaneous memorial to the ghost of a girl no-one remembers? Are we moved or repelled by Annie’s room?

When, as a tourist myself several years ago, I first visited Annie’s room, I remember that I was most definitely repelled. The shrine seemed completely grotesque to me. Lying in that cold tenement for a decade or more, some of the toys had taken on the appearance of textile objects abandoned at a landfill site. They were ugly things, making an interesting space, an historic site, ugly too. And my immediate reaction to the story behind the shrine was to regard it as a laughable testimony to a ludicrous superstition. I have no truck with ghosts or saints, a world beyond or an after-life, and the impulse that would lead someone to leave a commemorative object for the ghost of a child who probably never existed seemed to me odd and incomprehensible. Why even bother?

But when I recently enountered Annie’s room again, I discovered that my reactions had completely changed. I’m certainly not saying I suddenly believed in Annie’s ghost, or even that I found anything remotely admirable or appealling in the strongly-held belief that a ghost innhabits that room. I still think that’s all superstitious nonsense. I also continued to find the shrine ugly, both as object and as space. But even though I do not really understand the motive for the placing of the objects, there seems to me now to be something particpatory, celebratory, even radical about Annie’s room. It is a spontaneous act of commemoration, a popular and populist and incredibly democratic act of making in which everyone might play a part. Annie’s room is perhaps folk art at its best, a thing in process, an object in a constant state of becoming, being made and re-made anew every time another visitor adds their contribution. The whole ghost business now seemed weirdly incidental. . .

(the shrine)

. . . and what’s interesting when one begins to look closely at the piled-up array of gifts in that dark tenement is their many different associations. Some have been left with evident care (a pricey bébé) others with apparent thoughtlessness (a screen wipe). So many of Annie’s toys seem just misplaced or random: plastic binoculars, a Westlife CD, an enormous grinning bear. Together, though, these things have transformed a space that is supposed to be terribly spooky and lent it a spectacular ordinariness. Annie’s room has a materiality in which there is a pathos that exceeds, or defies, the uncanny. Like the dolls of Tabitha Moses, the toys in Annie’s room are, in the end just part of the everyday world of things.

(thanks to Lisa Helsby of Mary King’s Close for the tour and the chat)

This is the kind of mess I really like

I find textile waste really very beautiful and like selvedges so much that I cannot throw them away. One day I shall find a use for them. As favourite messes go, sewing waste comes a close second to this kind of textile-related mess:

This is rucksack and tent and sleeping bag mess. It will stay messy until it has aired, or until I can be arsed to put it away. It is a pleasing indoor mess which signals that a good time has been had outdoors. And indeed a good time was had this weekend, both in the North:

(snowdance by Loch Assynt)

. . . and in the South

(Pentland skyline)

I must be feeling seasonal:

Recently, I have found myself cooing stupidly at a number of toys and softies, in particular this reversable chicken and egg toy from mochimochi, which appears in the current issue of CRAFT magazine. But when I saw Kate’s amazing square chickens I just couldn’t resist (with her permission) attempting one of my own.

Despite its rather wonky appearance, this is a very luxe chicken. The stocking-stitch body is knitted in mirasol baby llama, and the garter stitch contrast in artesano alpaca ‘hummingbird’ in the pheasant colourway. I embroidered on a beak with some crewel wool, and the crest is made from scraps of yellow roving that I felted as per knitty’s instructions for felted beads .

My sister is the creature-making expert in our family, and she designs some fantastic sock monsters and softies. This chicken is the first creature I’ve made and, as usual, one was not enough. . . my chicken soon found itself joined by a couple of wee pals:

I think I’ll stop at three, though. Beyond that, madness lies.

The Mechanical Randomising Competition Winner Selector — in other words, Mr B’s hand, and some names in a hat — has chosen a pincushion winner. Roobeedoo, it is you! I have sent you an email, so you can send me your address, so I can send you a wee pincushion.

For those of you who were asking about the pincushion design: the wrapping is based on traditional Japanese furoshiki - yotsu musubi - the second method you see here:

I bought the original sashiko pincushion as a kit from this company. The interior cushion is made from kimono silk. It is really rather lovely. They do not list the kits on their website, and I have had a bit of trouble contacting them by email in the past but I often spot them at quilt and stitching shows (in the UK). For those of you who are interested in the sashiko stitching, Susan Briscoe is the woman to contact in the UK. Her books are very good indeed, and she also sells some stitching kits directly from her website.

Anyway, the pincushion is a traditional and very simple furoshiki design. I’ll post a how-to-make tutorial in a couple of days, for those who are interested in making their own bobbly objects. I have become mildly obsessed with furoshiki since the pincushion episode — they are so satisfyingly simple — and have been attempting to design a reversible knitting project bag combining a few different wrapping methods. If I manage to come up with a good workable design, I’ll post another tutorial.

Have a lovely weekend!

After reading Felix and Lara’s superb manifesto and posts, I am inspired to celebrate messy tuesdays.

“Neat” in the rooms in which I live, is a rare and fragile thing. There are mountains of mess at the margins of the tidy, just waiting to seep in.

You see here one corner of my work pod. Others may more accurately describe this space as a “cupboard”. Note the mess, above, steadily encroaching on the workspace, below. If you are short, like me, the mess is above eye-level and virtually invisible. And in any case, I am fond of the mess: it is a sort of sculptural testimony to space-saving. It is frankly amazing what you can fit in a space three feet by six feet by eight feet high: computer, printer and associated gadgets; three bookshelves filled with books; my entire stash of fabric and wool; half of my packed away wardrobe (I have to rotate clothes between winter and summer); numerous old handbags and pairs of worn out shoes; boxes of photographs; old letters and greetings cards; a frightening assortment of wooden animals; several eighteenth-century prints; a small rug; a clarinet; me sat at my desk, and a commemorative bottle from 1876 in the shape of George Washington.

I love mess. Mess is archeology.

(who knows what crappy detritus hides beneath the keys, or how long it has been there)

Mess is pleasure, and the memory of pleasure:

(last night’s drinks)

And it is the stuff of potential:

(this mess may soon be made into something else).

Mess is good because it is stuff in the process of becoming. It might well become more mess, or it might turn into something else entirely. I am put in mind of Bill Brown’s account of Toy Story, in a great article he published ten years ago. Brown gives a superb reading of the mutant toys under Sid’s bed –”a one-eyed baby’s head on an erector-set spider, a pair of Barbie legs attached to a miniature fishing pole” — as things of tremendous transformative power. For him, these essentially messy objects are suggestive of a “wish to transfigure things-as-they-are.” To me, tidyness is an acceptance of things as they are. Mess, on the other hand, is the wish for transformation.

I made monkeys! Just like everyone else. . .

But how I love em!

Monkey love!

Monkey dance!

The wonderful Sue made me a superb pair of blue Monkeys last summer, which have served as my staple walking sock ever since. It was time to make myself a new pair before I walked hers into the ground. I don’t make socks very often, but they really were a delight to knit. These are made from old maiden aunt sock yarn, in the cherry colourway. I knit them on one 2.5mm circ. I am also sporting my favourite shoes, for maximum monkey fun.

I was recently very impressed with my sister’s sashiko stitching. I had to try it. A few weeks ago I bought sashiko materials for a wee pincushion, and tried stitching a simple design with the intention of impressing her back:

Now, I enjoyed the stitching, but the thing I found most pleasing was the resulting pincushion-object. It was so neat! so wee! such a simple and satisfying design! And it fastened with *bobbles*, for crissakes.

bobbles!

how canny a thing is that?

Then a worrying haze descended. I was so enamoured of the prototype, I had to make another. This was clearly an appealing object that might be rendered in different ways, without sashiko stitching, using different fabrics . . .

. . . or several different fabrics . . .

Mr B returned home from a long run to find me frenetically turning out pincushions. “Look at them!” I shrieked, “they have bobbles!” “That’s right,” he nodded, backing nervously towards the door, “whatever you say. . .”

I have now managed to stop forming bobbles and Mr B has not packed me off to the puzzle factory. I do, however, have more pincushions than I know what to do with. I have given several away as gifts, but there are a few of the beggars left as testimony to my craft insanity. To save me from myself, just leave a comment on my blog between now and March 20th. I’ll select the ‘winner’ at random, and post you a pincushion.

Here are some photos of my weekend in windy Lytham-St-Annes.

I have been making a start thinking about Belle’s quilts. She lived near Blackpool, and the first quilt will be a jolly sea-side-y affair, made up entirely of her stripey tops and T-shirts — of which she had over thirty. In the summer she was always in stripes. I’ve been looking at different methods of piecing and quilting striped fabrics:

. . .and getting lots of inspiration from the way that Jude makes — and writes — about the texture of memory.

Then yesterday I read Vladimir Arkhipov’s Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts, and it completely blew me away.

Arkhipov is an artist, who, for the past decade and a half, has travelled all over Russia collecting and exhibiting ordinary and marvellous hand-made objects. The objects, and the human stories behind their making, are documented in this super book. The bigger picture here is Perestroika and Russia’s economic and political crises from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s — a period when not not only items of luxuriant or complex manufacture were difficult to get hold of, but when everyday commodities became both scarce and pricey. All of the objects in this book are useful, and the vast majority are born out of necessity — but scarcity and privation are only part of the story here. Arkhipov, and the individual makers whose work he brings to light, show how conditions of necessity produce a particular material grammar; a poetry of ingenuity out of the aesthetics of use.

Here is a poetry of mending quite different from those eighteenth-century darning samplers I wrote about a few weeks ago:

Lubov Arkhipova, Socks, Kolomna (1995)

Arkhipov describes his archive of hand-made objects as “socially responsible art . . . in which people are [authors] of their own histories, histories that have unique illustrations — the self-production of everyday things.” His collection shows individuals as creators not just of things, but of meanings, as each maker accounts for their object in their own words. These short texts and multiple voices often produce intriguing dialogues between the makers and their objects through the narratives, memories, and desires with which they are invested. For example Aleski Solomkin’s contribution to the collection is a doormat made of beer-bottle tops that his neighbour and drinking partner kept flicking over the fence into his garden. Forced to clear up the debris of several evenings’ drinking, Solomkin felt “it would have been a shame to just chuck them all away,” and created an object that, beyond its immediate function, is also a quiet celebration of booze, friendship, and neighbourly-ness.

Many makers also speak persuasively about the pleasure of everyday materials and the creative process. For example, this beautifully made leather cap is formed out of an old Soviet punch bag and a worn out pair of leather boots:

Aleksandr Yakimovich, Cap, Moscow (1993)

Aleksandr Yakimovich talks about how the leather of the punchbag softened up over fifteen years of hard use, and of the “great pleasure” he derived from “making something out of something else” and subsequently wearing it. “Its one of my masterpieces” he says of the cap.

In terms of my own thinking about piecing cloth and memory together, the object I was most drawn to was this quilt made by Galina Svistakova for her son, out of the clothes of his brother, his father and his grandmother.

Galina Svistakova, Quilt, Ryazan (c.1990)

Of this wonderful cloth Svistakova’s son says “I think that things possess the aura of their owners, of a person who may very well no longer be with us, that things all carry information and inform us, and harmonise with other people’s things. I believe they live their own independent lives and that we need to. . . harmonise with them and be sensitive to them, in order for them to work in our favour.” This is the sort of functional poetry I can only aspire towards.