at lilith’s

Yesterday Mel and I had the pleasure of taking a dyeing workshop with Lilith of Old Maiden Aunt Yarns. Lilith’s studio is in West Kilbride, also known as Craft Town Scotland, because of its fantastic local initiative to house and support talented craftspeople in the town’s once-empty shops. Lilith’s studio is one of several great crafty locales in West Kilbride that we discovered yesterday (of which more later).

(if you peer in the window above the cyclist’s handlebars, you will see Mel doing something crafty in a pair of latex gloves)

Lilith’s studio is an incredibly inspirational space. Everywhere you look you see her beautiful yarn

. . . and beautiful things to make with her yarn.

I was very excited. Lilith encouraged us to experiment with the dyes.

Several techniques were attempted, and some mess was made (by me). We then got down to business hand-painting and immersion dyeing a number of mini-skeins. We tested many different colour combinations and yarns composed of a wide range of fibres (merino, alpaca, cashmere, bamboo, silk). While I conservatively stuck to one method, trying (and, it has to be said, largely failing) to get a feel for what different colours might do when mixed together, Mel tried many different techniques and also impressively dyed up some roving (which seemed quite a scary process). We then settled on our yarn / colour combination, and dyed up our finished product. This was thrilling: it felt so irrevocable! Lilith is just fantastic — encouraging, engaging — and I would really recommend her workshop as a great introduction to different practices and processes of dyeing.

I returned to Edinburgh high on dyeing, and very happy indeed with my lovely bag full of damp yarn. The mini-skeins dried out quickly, and I spent much of yesterday evening petting and gazing at them in foolish admiration. Want to see?

Lilith suggested that we come up with names for the colourways we’d invented. I was quite interested in this process, since I completely share Heather’s view of certain yarn-companies’ choice of colourway-names. I am repelled by anything saccharine or prissy, and some of that Jane-Austen associated nonsense almost makes me angry. So I enlisted Tom’s help, and we spent an amusing hour or two naming the colourways of my tester skeins. Tom’s best contributions were “squid”, “council trousers” and “David Icke’s shell suit.” For those of you unfamiliar with his idiosyncratic frame of colour reference (that’s most of you, then) council trousers are bright orange, and you can experience the terrifying wonder of Icke’s shell suit here.

Moving swiftly on, here are my maxi-skeins — three-hundred grams of merino-alpaca 4 ply — which I left overnight to dry. They are a kettle dyed, semi-solid, never to be repeated shade of blue, and I absolutely love them! I have something in mind to do with them, but their colourway is as yet un-named. Do you think I should ask Tom?

While I feel I learned a lot yesterday, and am actually rather pleased with my (completely unpredictable) end results, I know I would need an awful lot more practice to cut any mustard at the colour business that Lilith is so good at. I must also admit that I think dyeing could never be my metier — it seemed to bear some similarities to brewing (or indeed cooking), and I fear my constitutional messiness would act as an impediment to success . . . But I had a wonderful time at Lilith’s and look! I dyed yarn!

You can find out about Lillith’s workshops here, and both she and her yarns will be at UK Ravelry day next saturday! Go and see her!

Jura fell race

I’ll complete the Jura series by telling you a little about one reason we were there. For much of our time on the island, as the photograph above suggests, the weather was just fantastic. Tom was pleased about this, since he had to run up and down this hill:

. . .and six others in the Jura Fell Race. For hill runners, this is a legend among races: sixteen miles, seven summits, a true test of navigational skill and physical stamina. The race’s key peaks are the paps of Jura — three huge quartzite cones that are visible from the mainland and which dominate the island’s distinctive landscape. I have only walked up the paps, and they really are fabulous mountains, but from my pootling, boot-shod perspective I would say they form a challenging landscape at the best of times: bog, and rock, with little inbetween. Their tops are crazy boulder-strewn moonscapes and what might look from a distance like a fine scree turns out at close quarters to resemble the gigantic rubble from a demolition site.

As I said, the weather had been gorgeous, but by the morning of the race it certainly was not. The mountains were swathed in dense cloud, and a thin rain was falling to complement the nice, chill wind. These were evil conditions in which to scale and descend several rocky mountains at speed! Visibility is very important in this race because of the particular navigational challenges of the terrain. For example, to the north of Beinn Shiantaidh is a sheer precipice which, when cloud is low, is very difficult to spot.

The crowd of locals, runners and supporters assembled here number more than twice the existing population of the island. Very few people live on Jura.

Tom ran while I waited (and knitted). The weather seemed at times to want to clear, but then it became even more grim. I hope you don’t think I’m romanticising my own position (I wasn’t running, or owt), but conditions were so bad that I felt the same kind of concern as if my feller had been out at sea in a storm.

A few hours later, I took a walk up to the three arch bridge to watch the runners coming down off the hills.

The terrible conditions meant that times were very slow. But, after a while, gaunt and muddy figures began to appear out of the mist. Tom was one of them. Hurrah!

The sense of achievement and (for me) relief was immense. And from my non-participant, outsiders perspective, I would say this is a truly great race in all senses: the intensity of the challenge it presents, the camaraderie and atmosphere, the local support ( which is tremendous), and, more than anything, the brooding majesty of Jura’s landscape. From the runner’s point of view, I can report that the conditions made a genuinely difficult race deeply unpleasant at times, but not so unpleasant as to contemplate not doing it again. I think we might be back next year.

the gardens at ardfin

Would you like to come for a short walk on Jura?

Leave your money in the honesty box by the tree, and follow the path to Jura House garden. With its mix of Scottish wild flowers and victorian woodland planting, the surrounding landscape looks like a fairy glade.

Then you open a door in the garden wall, and enter another world entirely

Because of the gulf stream, Jura has a very mild climate, but, as one might expect from a Hebridean island, it is buffeted by wind. Sitting on a sunny south-west slope, and protected behind high walls, the garden flourishes on Jura.

Laid out in the early nineteenth-century, the garden was originally designed to provide produce and flowers for the estate. The feel of the Victorian kitchen remains here, but the planting is now managed with a looseness and informality that I really liked. The feel of the space is intimate, comfortable, and not at all pristine.

each pathway opens up another delicious combination of colour and texture.

and there are plenty of places to rest and enjoy the fragrances and shifting sounds of the garden. The air is alive with magnolia, wild garlic, and many buzzing things.

Walls, of course, mean private property: they are there to keep the outside out. At Ardfin, this is forcibly brought to mind in the story of one notorious nineteenth-century estate owner, who cleared the nearby crofting community of Brosdale because it spoiled her prospect view. Today, however, the walls of Jura House are permeable, and its garden is very much a public space. One of the most impressive things about it is how it fits into the surrounding landscape: through careful estate management, the garden’s inside and its outside work in harmony. Beyond the garden walls, you can continue your walk along a spectacular cliffside to Poll a’ Cheo, (the misty pool) and its stone-age burial site.

To the south-east you see the mull of Kintyre, and the hills of Arran beyond:

And lovely Islay lies across the sound to the west:

Wild orchids thrive on the hillside, and, by the water’s edge, the shilasdair is coming into bloom:

A walk with a perfect mix of the cultivated and the wild.

mead magic

Last summer, when we were walking on Jura, we buried some home-brewed mead above the gulf of corryvreckan. Yesterday we retraced our steps, and returned to find it.

I heart Jura.

Seven miles and a very enjoyable walk later, we climbed up a cliffside on the remote and empty north-west of the island and wondered if we would be able to find our bottle. Last August, we had dug a hole near the heather line, covered up the mead, and placed a large stone to mark the spot. Since then, the heather appeared to have receded, and other visitors had added other stones to ours.

The site now resembled a small burial cairn — which I suppose is exactly what it was. Underneath the stones was a bare patch of ground, and what seemed to be solid peat. Tom began to dig. Was the mead still there?

Of course it was!

It is hard to convey just how excited we were to see this bottle again. It had spent three seasons in the ground of Carraig Mhór, above the swirling, whirling, myth-infused waters of Corryvreckan. Our mead had lain there, quietly wintering with with Cailleach Bheur above the whirlpool in which Orwell had almost drowned. As a friend of ours said after a few in the bar of the Jura hotel on Saturday night, “that bottle is bigger than both of you.”

It tasted damn fine, anyway.

I can also confirm that the returning foot miles seemed to pass by rather quickly in a sort of warm, meady fug. Which was good, since we were walking into a headwind. Slainte!

hello from Jura

Through the miracle of wifi I am writing this from the beautiful Hebridean island of Jura. Tom’s off running a fell race (seven summits! Sheesh!) and I am having tea and scones in the lovely Antlers cafe, and getting some knitting in. Tomorrow we intend to go for a nice long walk to uncover some mead we buried here in a secret location last year. Hope that whatever you are doing you are enjoying your weekend too!

Mrs Sew and Sew interview

Since my sister bought me this book a while ago, I have taken all my darning advice from Mrs Sew and Sew — the fictional character invented by the British Board of Trade to promote practices of mending and making do. When considering war-time rations, we perhaps first think of food and fuel, but clothes and textiles rationing was introduced in 1941 and continued until 1949. The clothing allowance, which enabled each person to acquire what was thought of as the equivalent of one full outfit, began at sixty-six coupons per year, and was later cut as low as twenty. Children’s clothes carried a lower coupon value (to allow for fast-growing kids), and rations covered fabric and notions as well as finished garments. All garments were carefully itemised and valued. For example:
“Bolero, short jacket, short cape. If woollen or leather and with sleeves of not less than elbow length — 5 coupons. If not woollen or leather and with no sleeves or with sleeves of less than elbow length — 2 coupons” (Clothing Coupon Quiz (British Board of Trade, 1941)

(emergency clothing coupons like these were issued in special circumstances — such as when property had been destroyed by bombing).

At a time when a couple of yards of elastic might cost you a valuable coupon, the care and repair of clothes became paramount, and to encourage such thrifty practices, the Board of Trade and Ministry of Information invented the persona of Mrs Sew and Sew. In a series of pithy pamphlets (which you can still read today) Mrs Sew and Sew issued clear and constructive advice on all textile-related matters, from dressmaking with parachute nylon to recycling a worn rug into a pair of warm slippers. I love Mrs Sew and Sew’s pamphlets and often make use of them: her instructions on how to darn a sock really are the best and clearest I’ve read anywhere.

(Make do and Mend, 1943)

I was intrigued to discover that, with the support of the lovely people at the Imperial War Museum, Mrs Sew and Sew was, through the wonder of Twitter, once again dispensing her words of thrifty wisdom to the nation. In her witty missives, the home-front has been speaking to the twenty-first century in a variety of very interesting ways. I recommend signing up to follow her tweets and those of the IWM right away! While much has been made by other crafty commentators of how the 1940s dictum of “make do and mend” speaks to that discourse of thrift that has such a particular national currency right now, I would like to stress that Mrs Sew and Sew and her tweets are entirely free from political bias (by which I mean that she has in no way associated herself with the new-tory language of thrift or (God forbid) that of the Conservative Party’s celebrity housing advisor). In 1943, fuel rationing would not allow for a gigantic 4 x 4 in which to carry home your skip-pilfered furniture; nor would a jolly team of builders be available to renovate your derelict Devon home. And while I can’t speak for her, I’m pretty sure that Mrs Sew and Sew would not recommend doing the decorating in your best Cath Kidston frock. Do bear that in mind, Kirstie.

Anyway, its time for me to stop wittering on, and bring you a treat: yes, its Mrs Sew and Sew herself! I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that Mrs Sew and Sew agreed to this interview, and would like to thank her (and the IWMs Sarah Gardiner, for kindly acting as her intermediary).

In what ways has your life changed since war began? Are any of these changes welcome?
The negative aspects of war are well known. Obviously having family abroad fighting on our behalf is incredibly difficult to cope with, while rationing and bombing has a huge effect on us back home. But in a positive light, the war has helped bring communities together to help one another. There are so many on my street that I didn’t know before the war that I know now. It’s a source of tremendous strength to know that you’re not suffering alone.

Do you think that managing on rations is easier in London than in the rest of mainland Britain?
I imagine it’s roughly the same. Rations are the same throughout the country, but of course in rural areas you have easier access to locally grown produce that might find its way to your plate without entering the ration system. And this is probably offset by the fact that produce from abroad often comes through London docks – and sometimes finds its way onto the black market.

I understand that the German magazine Frauen Warte is incorporating propaganda into its knitting patterns. What are your views on this?
Well, it’s not surprising really. They’re doing everything they can to win the war. I’m surprised we haven’t started doing it too!

Did you hear about the recent abuse of fuel rationing in Barrow in Furness? How can we discourage such things from happening?
I haven’t heard about the problems in Barrow in Furness, but I do think we need to keep reminding people why rationing is so important. We need to do everything we can to support the war effort, and these rations support this.

Will I manage to clothe myself and my family on the new reduced ration of clothing coupons? What are your top tips for coping on coupons?
It’s going to be difficult keeping everyone clothed on the rations. But there are lots of things you can do to make this easier. The most important thing to do is to really look after your current clothes to make them last as long as possible; repair holes as soon as they appear, shake out clothes before putting them on hangers, check stored clothes for moth eggs frequently and so on. And when clothes are really beyond repair, think about how they can be used in other ways…old sheets can be turned into handkerchiefs and thick material can be used to patch elbows and knees on children’s clothes.

Is knitting wool subject to rationing?
I’m afraid so. But have you got any old woollen items that you’re not wearing any more? It’s possible to unravel the wool from old clothes back into a ball – it’ll be thinner than it was before, but it should still be usable.

Should I just throw away my old, worn winter coat?
Oh, definitely not! Don’t forget that we’re all in the same position trying to make ends meet. Other people on the street are patching up their old clothes and it’s not embarrassing at all that you can do the same.

Help! I’ve found moths in my knitting basket. What can I do?
Oh no! Well the one thing moths hate is fresh air. Take the whole basket outside, empty it out and give everything a good shake. You might need to unravel the wool to get rid of all the moth eggs. They’re a real pest, and you should definitely give stored clothes a good shake outside too to get rid of the eggs (they’re often found under the collar).

Which women from the past do you most admire?
Oh, Marie Curie is top of the list without a doubt. An incredibly intelligent woman, and it’s so rare for a woman to succeed in such a male dominated profession. Did you know she was the first female professor at the University of Paris?
I also admire Madge Watt. She was the driving force behind getting the Women’s Institute in the UK, and this organisation has helped look after evacuees during WWII.

And who inspires you today?
It’s so difficult to just list one person. There are so many women pulling together to get us through the war, many of whom are only known on their street, that it would be unfair to name someone who’s famous. My answer is therefore that unsung heroes throughout the country are the source of my inspiration today.

Please tell us the name of your favourite film.
I love Gone With The Wind! It’s such a wonderful, stirring story. And Clark Gable is a real dish!

Thankyou, so much, Mrs Sew and Sew!

Links and further reading:
Imperial War Museum
Mass Observation Archive
Helen Reynolds, ’Your Clothes are Materials of War: The British Government Promotion of Home Sewing during the Second World War’, in The Culture of Sewing; Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Berg, Oxford, 1999), pp. 327-339.
C. Buckley, ‘On the margins: theorizing the history and significance of making and designing clothes at home’, Journal of Design History, volume 11, no 2 (1998), pp. 157-172

outlook

Those of you who can remember Tom’s accident last year may be interested to hear our good news. After six months of hard work, his hand has healed incredibly well, and last week, the physios and surgeons finally signed him off — no more operations needed! While the circulation is terrible, and there is very little feeling (Tom says it feels like he’s wearing a glove made of bacon) the hand’s mobility has improved dramatically and compared to the bloodied stump it was six months ago, its transformation is truly amazing. Thanks to Livingston’s fine surgeons and physios, and Tom’s determination with his exercises, the outlook is very good!

Meanwhile, you may be interested to see what’s on the knitting horizon. . .

The lovely weather badges are made by Mark Pawson (thanks, Mark). The knitted something is made by me. . .

unpicking

When thinking about process, there is nothing more instructive than unpicking someone else’s stitches.

I found a beautiful hand-embroidered cloth on ebay. I have plans for it. The plans involve deconstructing and transforming it into something else. I began by undoing the slip stitches of its heavy, worn cord edging.

Then I started to unpick the tiny stitches which attach the embroidered front to the cloth’s very fine silk back. The silk is faded but luminous, alive with copper and green.

The secrets written in the cloth began to reveal themselves. Neatly folded hems. Pale green silk thread that moved through the cloth like clockwork. An outer layer of heavy cotton satteen. An inner layer of lining satteen, fresh and bright because unseen for decades. Embroidery worked through both layers. Each thread end carefully woven and hidden. The back of the work faultless in its steady execution.

. . .and just as mesmerising as the front.

It was then that my fascination with the little mysteries of this cloth changed into a something else. I felt a sense of privilege and respect — in unpicking the stitches I was re-living the work of their making, admiring the skill of a talented needlewoman. But my act was also one of trespass: me and my snipping embroidery scissors were destroying a once-whole thing. And as I, blithe, curious, surgeon-like, began to examine the cloth’s insides, I uncovered the truth of its age: the satteen was of a certain kind, and a little older than I’d imagined. I was an historical vandal, cutting through the threads of time.

In cutting someone else’s threads, as in wearing someone else’s clothes, there is the frisson of encounter. We don’t know and will never know the person who made or wore the thing, but they are speaking to us nonethless, in the movement of their hand through the stitches, or in the the shape of their body left in the garment. There is something deeply uncanny in the silence of cloth and clothes: the trace of an unknown and never-to-be-known physical presence. (One does not buy second hand shoes, because one shies away from the ghost of the foot inside.) As I unpicked the stitches, then, a simple encounter between me and the cloth changed into a more complex one between me and its maker. Because I was un-making a made thing my act seemed an intimate one, but it was an empty intimacy, an intimacy with no content. The embroidered cloth was both speaking and not speaking: of a someone living in those stitches and of the silence of the grave.

Wallace Stevens’ brilliant poem, The Emperor of Ice Cream, (1922) has much to say about the dumb intimacy of embroidery — and of death. Stevens describes the covering of a woman’s corpse with a cloth she embroidered when alive.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam
(lines 9 – 15)

Here the corpse is, like the cloth she embroidered, an everyday material object. She reminds us of death’s easy finality. Yet she also suggests the mute compassion of the world of things. We feel the weight of her hands on the lost knobs of the well-worn dresser; her fingers quick movement through the stitches of the cloth that decorates her dead countenance. She does not speak, all we can know is her corpse and her cloth. And it is in the relationship between these two material objects that the essence of the poem (perhaps another object in itself) lies. Gaudy embroidered fantails will never cover death, but each small act of making is an end in itself, capturing the (perhaps pointless) vitality of the human. Now get back in the kitchen (says Stevens) and enjoy your ice-cream.

Having unpicked my thoughts I will get on with the uncanny work of unpicking.

seeing the light in a station bar*

(Newcastle Central)

Tom and I were talking about station bars the other day and discovered that as teenagers, living many miles apart in Stretford and Rochdale, we both liked to hang around the one at Manchester Victoria. This had, before it fell victim to nailed-down chairs and the homogenising effects of Travellers Fayre (shudder), a marvellous, atmospheric and (to our teenage selves) immensely exotic interior: all stucco, coloured glass, and plush upholstery. (I’ve not been there for quite some time, so have no idea of its more recent fate). Anyway, our conversation turned on how station bars form a particular genre of British pub: how they are purportedly spaces of transition, of waiting, and therefore never a destination in themselves. But then we changed our minds and decided, that precisely because of their liminal status (being the place you go to before you get to where you were going; neither one place or another) station bars really are distinct destinations: in-between spaces, half-way places, purgatories of refreshment.

(Halfway hoose)

It then occurred to me that, largely because of my own transitional existence between two cities, I am a regular in two great examples of the genre: The Centurion in Newcastle Central and The Halfway House, just a stone’s throw from Edinburgh Waverley. Both serve a good range of ales (always a bonus); both are superlative station bars, and they both celebrate their particular in-between-ness in very different ways. The Centurion does so in a manner entirely in keeping with its surroundings in the grand Victorian sweep of John Dobson’s Newcastle Central station.

(The bar at The Centurion)

The bar pumps, which happily dispense a swift half of Rivet Catcher or Old Kiln Ale to me after a long day’s teaching, nestle behind glorious late nineteenth-century columns decorated in this stately and very excessive manner. Some of the tiles are exuberantly suggestive of fin-de-siecle train travel along the East Coast mainline: of steam, sunrise, and the view crossing the Tweed near Berwick:

The Centurion sits in what was, in the 1890s, the station’s first-class lounge. But, by the 1960s, it was frequented not by well-heeled passengers but disgruntled prisoners, after it was transformed into holding cells for the British Transport Police. British Rail then apparently did their best to destroy the tiles with a bucketload of paint, before the interior was finally restored to its former glory in 2000. Now The Centurion’s fabulous interior and fine ales can once again be enjoyed by travellers through the station, as well as all the good folk of the toon, (including a well-known group of knitters).

(Dear man who also likes The Centurion’s interior: thankyou for being in my picture)

The Centurion’s real showpiece has to be this mural which displays for North-bound travellers their promised destination: all dappled braes and rocky shores, green and gold and . . . rhododendrons. After looking at it many times, I think the landscape must be meant to suggest a view across Loch Lomond from the East shore (which of course became a popular tourist destination in the 1800s, largely because of train travel). It’s such a luridly late-Victorian highland fantasy, and I absolutely love it.

The interior of The Halfway House (HWH) also celebrates trains and transition, but in a rather different way.

While The Centurion is the epitome of opulence, with its high ceilings, elaborate decor, and luxurious surroundings, the Halfway House is all about being snug. This is the smallest and cosiest pub in Edinburgh. Within seconds of your train arriving, you can step out of Waverley Station, walk a few steps up Fleshmarket Close, and be in the welcoming interior of the HWH, enjoying a very reasonably priced lunch of hot stovies or cullen skink, and (oh joy of joys) a well-kept pint of Bitter and Twisted.

(HWH bar)

The pub is stuffed with railway paraphernalia, chief among which are posters and postcards celebrating the destinations one might reach on the old LNER.

Though the HWH is meant to be a stop-off point, a waiting room, a resting place between places, I am most fond of it because for me it is my final destination (and not purgatorial at all). I frequently meet Tom in there for a pint at the end of the working week, and I look forward to that pint immensely. Cheers.

Where are your favourite station bars?

*apologies to Nick Drake

debris

They are demolishing — sorry — developing part of the university. This is what I saw through the wreckage this morning.