all hallows

Strange things are afoot in Edinburgh.
Pumpkin faces have been appearing in hot beverages . . .

. . . and someone transformed Hannah into a sinister knitting elephant!

happy halloween!

Cold Harbour Mill

One of the highlights of my fun weekend with Felix was a trip to Cold Harbour Mill. I am writing at greater length about what a fantastic place it is to visit in a feature I am producing for Rowan (look out for it in 2009, folks!). But there is one point about just why Cold Harbour is so great that I wanted to make here. While researching and editing this book several years ago, I became very interested in the policies and practices of transforming British history into publicly-accessible ‘heritage’. Cold Harbour is a sterling example of just how well this can be done without fuss, without pretension, and in a way, it seems to me, that rather admirably swims against the tide.

(Steaming-Up at Cold Harbour)

This transformation of history into heritage is particularly interesting where industrial processes, or particular commodities are concerned. Taking whisky as an example (and in complete contrast to what’s going on at Cold Harbour), here in Edinburgh we boast the five-star visitor attraction known as the Scotch Whisky Experience. Let me start by saying that I have experienced the “experience” twice, that I really learned a lot, and that I also had a great time on both occasions. But the rather bizarre assumption of the ‘experience’ is that people somehow want the same kind of thing out of history as they do out of the rides at Blackpool pleasure beach. . . .

(history. heritage. rollercoaster.)

Whisky is obviously a highly sensory thing, but does it have to involve one’s whole body? Clearly so, for at the Scotch Whisky Experience, you have to physically get into a barrel (mysteriously equipped with wheels and multi-lingual audio) before travelling back in time. This booze-fuelled ghost train then trundles through several Scottish centuries, complete with kilt-clad waxwork highlanders, the sound of pipes, and migraine-inducing malty aromas, until the historic journey of whisky concludes in a mock-up pub. A holographic ghost then appears behind the bar to reveal to you the secrets of the spirit-safe, and the intricacies of blending a branded malt. Finally, you are deposited in a well-stocked commercial outlet where you can buy a reasonable range of whiskies, a dizzying assortment of gifts with a tartan theme, or an obligatory box of flavoured fudge.

(Wha Hae)

The whisky experience usefully fills a hole: tourists come to Edinburgh, they are naturally interested in our national drink, and there are unfortunately no distilleries conveniently situated on the Royal Mile for them to visit. And while most distilleries offer tours, they are usually a little more concerned with brand identity than national history. So many of what I regard as the shortcomings of the ‘experience’ concern the simple fact that it occurs in a space that has absolutely nothing to do with the production of whisky. But I am also frankly bewildered by the assumption that for the public to engage with history in any meaningful way at all, they have to berloody smell it. And it’s not even the ‘real’ smell, but the smell at one remove: not the earthy scent of the maltings but a careful chemical imitation; not the dung heap of history, but the fantasy of that dung heap.

But at Cold Harbour they are keeping it real. There is no need for imaginary gimmicks: this is a working mill that has been right here in this Devon valley since 1799. It’s history is written through the fabric of it’s buildings, through the landscape in which it sits, and through the textiles it still produces. You can really see the nineteenth-century shifts in industrial power from water through steam to electricity. You can get to grips with just what it was about the worsted process that lent British woolen products such international renown. You don’t need to clamber into a woolsack, travel back in time, or smell any fake sheep shit. You don’t need the heritage fantasy because what there is here is exciting enough: a wonderfully preserved location, carefully restored machinery, engaged and knowlegable staff, thoughtful and accurate self-presentation, and everywhere a commitment to education, to public history, and to the future of the mill. I’m someone whose job it is to think about the way the past is represented, and I was deeply impressed by everything I saw. And the fact that great businesses like John Arbon’s are now thriving at Cold Harbour is evidence of it’s straightforward and successful combination of old and new.

So go to Cold Harbour. I guarantee you will think differently about the history of British woolen textiles after being there. And yes, you can buy their worsted-processed yarn. And yes, it is really fabulous stuff.

(70% alpaca, 30%bfl)

oomska

I’ve just returned from an amazing trip to Sussex and Devon with the fabulous Felix. Seriously, how much good stuff can you pack into just one weekend? There was the drinking of the ales . . .

. . .the discovery of a unique landscape shaped by beasts and textiles. . .

. . . much general hilarity. . .

. . . serious research . . .

and wonderful walks.

We had of course brought boots stout enough to withstand the autumnal oomska.

More of our trip and schemes anon. . .

as you were

It feels as if things are returning to ‘normal’. The physios are very pleased with Tom’s progress. He must now punish the healed-up hand with constant exercise to regain maximum mobility, and is also allowed to do everyday things again. Today we both went for a run in the hills. Time to fire up my trusty walshes and throw myself off a summit into a howling gale — hurrah! I have also (happily) been relieved from cooking duty. This means I now have the pleasure of devouring things like this again:

Tom’s pear and ginger cake. Insanely good and one of my favourite things to eat ever. This version had the added bonus of fresh eggs from Sarah’s hens (thanks, Sarah). Recipe from Jane Grigson’s fruit book.

Now the usual household division of labour is reinstated, theres also a bit more time for completing old projects. . .

. . .and exploring the potential of some new ones:

Mostly, though, I’m just so thankful that Tom is able to use his hand again — with not much mobility and still less feeling, but he can use it. The transformation from bloodied stump-thing to working appendage has really been remarkable and has filled me with a stupid sense of wonder at what the human body (and some very good surgeons) can do. I did sort of want to show you before and after shots, but was told that this was far too gruesome. Anyway, thanks once again for all your good wishes and encouraging words. Those of you who emailed us with positive things to say about healed injuries and physiotherapy were (of course) absolutely right. Thanks! x

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous . . .

. . . beasties*

Courtesy of the design genius that is Ysolda, may I present Mousie: a beastie you can knit up in a couple of hours. Such a deft pattern! Such a neat, wee mouse! I liked the first one so much I had to make another. Jesus, as you can see, is not so sure.

Coming soon in Ysolda’s forthcoming collection of knitted treats.

*apologies to Rabbie Burns.

seasonal colour

all photos taken on my way to the shops yesterday.

instructional

Thanks very much, everyone, for all your printing tips and suggestions! I’ve ordered the books Kirsty recommended, as a sort of modern supplement to my Dryad Handicrafts Leaflets, which I immersed myself in again last night. Any of you who have encountered the Dryad leaflets will know that there is a particular joy in reading them, which comes from the way their authors combine a seriousness of approach with a genuine pleasure in their craft. The prose is also just wonderful. Last night I particularly enjoyed the account of potato printing in leaflet no. 57 which begins: “Select a crisp and closely grained potato . . .” and concludes: “the slight irregularities which come from the softer nature of the potato are by no means unpleasant.” But my favourite read was leaflet no.146, “Wood Engraving,” written by the aptly-named Douglas P Bliss. Here is a man who quite simply adores wood engraving, and wants the beginner-engraver to adore it too. He waxes lyrical about the history and practice of engraving, and the “quite remarkable pleasure of working with well-ground tools and a fine box-wood block.” He is also keen to assure the reader of his craft’s ease and portability: “You can put all your tackle into a small box, clear off to the country, if you so desire, and get on with your engraving snugly there. This writer has engraved blocks in the public room of a hotel in the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides.” How can you argue with a man who takes his craft down the pub? Seriously, I HEART Douglas P. Bliss.

Another great thing about the Dryad leaflets, as Jeanette pointed out yesterday, is their suggestions for simple pattern repeats for the novice block cutter and printer. Their designs are all bold lines and primary colours and are very pleasing indeed. Heres another one

and . . .

oops, how did that ram get in there?

more printing experiments next weekend, I hope.

indigo

I have really enjoyed seeing the wonderful printed fabrics Jesse exchanged and received in her swatch swap (flickr group here), and I really wanted to participate. But I’ve never printed fabric before, let alone cut out a lino block (eek), so I thought I’d approach things from a rather basic level first, using a rubber stamp. I bought some fabric paint and plain, medium weight calico, and had a go yesterday with a stamp I acquired in a set of stationery.

It took me a while to discover the right proportion of paint to block, and a little longer to think through the block spacing, but soon I was printing away very happily. I found the look and colour of the final printed fabric very pleasing: I like blue on white generally, but indigo on calico is a winning combination. It recalls, for me, the very particular look of American nineteenth-century household linens. When I see an indigo printed fabric, in fact, I tend to think of Deborah Norris Logan (notable for many things, including her design of a wonderful indigo print that I had the pleasure of seeing here)

After drying and fixing the print overnight, I made a few kitchen things with the fabric this morning: above, a place mat; below, a tea towel.

I made a few napkins too.
Much as I like these indigo butterflies (and I do) I really want to try cutting and printing my own design. There are good instructions for this sort of thing in my trusty collection of Dryad Handicraft Leaflets, but, as I am such a novice, I wondered if you had any suggestions for me (particularly as regards materials). Should I just start with a homely potato and work my way up from there?

Wool 100%

Needled reviews:
Mai Tomangi, Wool, 100% (2006)

Really, what’s not to like? In a Japanese cross between Bagpuss and the Wombles, two elderly sisters, armed with pokey sticks and shopping trolleys, collect furniture, toys, and other discarded items from surburban rubbish bins. Their house totters and teeters under the weight of their gathered spoils, and their bodies beat time to the tick of a thousand pilfered clocks. This world of lost memories and found objects is invaded by the destructive, succubus-like presence of a girl they call “Knit-Again.” The name is an apt one, for she is wearing a tatty, badly knitted, chunky red sweater that looks like it might have been designed by Twinkle. But her work is incomplete: the girl labours away at the sweater frantically until her blood-red wool runs out. Only then does she notice what a terrible job she’s made of the knitting: “Damn!” she wails, brandishing her needles, “I have to knit it all over again.”

Starring Ayu Kitaura, Kazuko Yoshiyuki and the wonderful Kyôko Kishida (of Woman in the Dunes fame) Mai Tominaga’s debut feature is strange, unsettling, and very, very witty. Combining elements of fairy-tales and dream work, as well as puppetry and animation, Wool 100% is an incredibly powerful meditation on desire, loss and the secret life of things. It is also, of course, a must-see for every knitter.

(No time for food. There’s knitting to be done)

The girl’s red sweater is full of meaning. The rhythms of it’s knitting match those of the female body through menstruation, childbirth and death. Knitting sublimates sexual desire (“If you knit, a baby will come” one sister tells another, looking with hate and longing at a young man outside their window). And, for the two sisters, who are forced to confront the story of their youth as the plot unravels, knitting also literalises the work of memory, showing how much the past is something that we are constantly making and re-making, in a daily effort of stitching and piecing together. The blood-red yarn is menacing, murderous, and also a figure for the discontinuous narrative thread of the film itself. I was strongly reminded of Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, in which guilt, trauma, and narrative memory are similarly suggested in the long red cord by which an unfaithful lover drags his suicidal beloved through eternity.

(Takeshi Kitano, Dolls, 2002)

Dolls figure importantly in Wool 100%, too, as do several other kinds of inanimate objects which might, at any moment, spring to life. The objects the sisters collect are living presences: as they catalogue and care for the things that other people throw away, so these things, in their turn, seem to watch over and care for them. Their cuckoo clock chimes to cheer their morning repast; a futon snores and shudders as it envelops its silent sleeper. At the beginning of the film, a group of children sing a song for the two sisters: a neat, suggestive fable that sounds like something straight out of Blake’s Songs of Experience. A sheep sneezes, and an apple falls from a tree: “it is now the sheep’s apple,” sing the children. But, after the sheep munches the apple, it becomes part apple itself, “it is now the apple’s sheep” the song concludes. The subject ends up being possessed by the object it incorporates, just as the sisters are ultimately owned by their things.

(doll-things)

Much of Wool 100% seems to be about finding the appropriate process to deal with things and the memories they embody: to engage with them, to confront them, and ultimately to discard them (there is much funereal burning in the film: painful and theraputic in turns). And the film definitely suggests that there is something more than a little pathological in the repetitive, relentless activities of both knitting and object-collecting (the knitting will never be finished; the collection will never be complete). “Sleep tight,” says the sweater-wearing succubus to the two sisters, before her final destructive act, “when you awake, you’ll have to knit it all over again.” Hell, we all know that feeling.

Wool 100% is available on DVD (but only as a region 1 DVD, those in the UK take note)
Links:
NY Times Review
official Wool 100% site (Japanese)

captive

(captivated visitors at Edinburgh Zoo)

I am ambivalent about zoos. I imagine I feel the same way as many people: I love looking at animals, but I have an innate dislike of seeing them in captivity. The only zoo I have visited as an adult was the biodome in Montreal, about five years ago. I remember thinking that the idea of re-creating and encountering several different ecosystems was really quite appealing, but I found the reality deeply upsetting — all those poor beasties stuck indoors! I also remember being very angry — at myself, for being so easily drawn in by what was essentially a marketing concept for a rather bad zoo, as well as at the biodome, for having the gall to give their big glass cage an educational, conservationist, and environmental gloss.

Some zoos, though, can legitimately claim that conservation and research are central to their business, and Edinburgh Zoo is one of these. We had visitors this weekend, and I went there with them for the first time. I was impressed by the size and careful design of the site itself, which extends for several acres up the side of Corstorphine Hill. I was also impressed by the seriousness of the zoo’s various conservation and species-protection projects, and by the straightforward way they put this at the heart of their self-presentation. I was disturbed by a few things: carnivores in old-fashioned menagerie-style enclosures, for example, and the spectacle of the captive polar bear was deeply melancholy. But if the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s ambitious reorganisation plans come to fruition, perhaps these outmoded and troubling zoo-elements will soon be gone.

Anyway, I’m only mentioning my (still-existing) zoo-worries because I wanted to show you some pictures. I am not in the least a spiritual person, but I found this rhino a wondrous and near-spiritual sort of presence.

(rhino phiz)

did you know their arses looked like this? The rhino-skin’s different textures, with its armoured plates and folds, is truly amazing.

(rhino arse)

I find the back-ends of beasties strangely fascinating — perhaps it is the way they de-familiarise familiar animals. Or perhaps I just like arses.

(zebra arse)

. . .and you just can’t be sniffy about the famous penguin parade. (This, as the keepers kept reminding us, is entirely voluntary: the gate of the enclosure is opened at a set time each day and, if the penguins fancy it, they shuffle on out for a wee walk. Sometimes they don’t, and there is no ‘parade’).

The proudly parading emperors were impressive:

But this wee gentoo penguin, tramping through the autumn leaves, was my favourite . . .

I think she or he is cannily plotting something. What do you reckon?