Katherine Emtage at Concrete Wardrobe

On Saturday evening, Mel and I popped in to the opening of the Spring collection at Concrete Wardrobe. I can’t believe I’ve not mentioned Concrete Wardrobe here before. It is certainly the best place in Edinburgh, and probably the best place in Scotland, to discover all kinds of original things both beautiful and useful from a wide range of superb designer-makers who are all either Scottish born or Scottish trained. Concrete Wardrobe is owned and managed by the very talented James Donald and Fiona McIntosh, and one of the (many) great things that they do is to support and promote the work of young designer-makers, like Katherine Emtage, who is currently their Maker of the Month. Here is Katherine celebrating her opening.

Katherine works with Scottish tweed (Harris, Borders, Mull) to create fabulous — and very contemporary — bags and accessories. One of the first things you sense about her work is that she has a genuine feel for her chosen fabric, and the intriguing possibilities of colour and texture it affords. The way she folds, gathers and quilts the surfaces of her bags not only make them uniquely sculptural, but really showcases the subtle depths of colour so characteristic of handwoven Scottish tweed. Here the waves, pods, and shadows created by the quilting make an apparently solid teal fabric flicker into life with the blues, pinks and yellows of its original individual threads.

While this quilted tote quietly demanded to be felt, some of Katherine’s other designs are much more flamboyantly tactile, like this next handbag, with its uber-feminine excess:

Katherine’s designs really make tweed tasty. Indeed, the sensory metaphors suggested by her careful and thoughtful manipulation of fabric were confirmed by the manner of their display in Concrete Wardrobe: her tweed accessories were set out on cake stands like tempting, edible treats . . .

delicious!

I love Katherine’s designs: some of her bags are modest and subtle, some are bold and exuberant, but all are playfully original. I had never associated roses and apples with tweed before, but now I do.

Get down to Concrete Wardrobe and see for yourself!

stamping

Since I made these butterfly thingies a while ago, I have become interested in the whole process of printing, and creating block designs for printing. I treated myself to a couple of nice practical books on the subject: Lena Corwin’s Printing by Hand and Lotta Jandsotter’s Lotta Prints. I really enjoyed both: Corwin and Jandsotter have quite different design aesthetics, but both these books are real treats for the eyes. I would say, though, that Corwin’s book probably had the edge for me, in terms of straightforward, in-depth instructions; a super range of projects; and the real care that has clearly gone into putting her book together. Whereas Lotta Prints tends, at some points, to edge toward being just a visual celebration of the author’s style, theres much more substance to Corwin’s writing — and a real generosity of approach as well. It is very clear, very practical, and veryuseable book: ideal for a beginner like me. Produced under Melanie Falick’s imprint, it of course looks very nice too. I found myself foolishly drawn to this jolly chest of drawers.

Lena Corwin, “Dressed up Dresser,” Printing by Hand (2008).

I’ve since had a bit of a go at designing and cutting a lino block, and I don’t mind admitting that my first attempts have been bloody awful. I definitely need practice. But in the meantime, I’ve really been enjoying printing with blocks that other people have designed. . .

. . . these being my current favourites. Everything about these stamps is satisfying: I love the shapes of the blocks in their hand-finished box; I love the pared-down feel of the designs. I find there is a very evocative pleasure in just getting the blocks out of the box, looking at them, rearranging them, and closing the lid again. It is a childlike pleasure, and one can feel the same sort of thing messing around in one’s button box, but here you get to make marks with these things too! Fun! Anyway, I’ve recently been using the Yellow Owl blocks, together with a block of some cranes I got here to stamp up some seasonal cards.

Yes, I know the shot is a bit blurry, and the festive lights in the background are cheesy, but I care not — I rather enjoy getting in a seasonal sort of mood. I’ve been sitting by the newly-decorated tree and stamping away at my cards, in between shovelling in several mince pies and some festive booze. Fill up that glass, Tom! Keep that stamping hand steady! Ho ho ho!

retrovintage

Needled reviews:
Lise-Lotte Lystrup, Vintage Knitwear for Modern Knitters (Thames & Hudson, 2008)
Kari Cornell and Jean Lampe, Retro Knits: Cool Vintage Patterns for Men, Women and Children from the 1900s through the 1970s (Voyageur Press, 2008)

Most knitters will have noticed the recent ubiquity of all things “vintage” in the world of wool. There are numerous groups devoted to the subject on Ravelry, a lively trade in so-called “vintage” patterns, and a recent flurry of books. Jane Waller has just launched a reworked and rebranded edition of her popular 1972 title A Stitch in Time (not yet seen here) and two other books also appeared in 2008: Vintage Knitwear for Modern Knitters and Retro Knits: Cool Vintage Patterns for Men, Women and Children from the 1900s through the 1970s.

These books got me thinking about the way that terms like “vintage” and “retro” are applied to knitting. Being something of a stickler for historical specificity, I tend to approach such terms with caution, as they have always seemed to me to be rather misleading and lazy catch-all categories for “stuff from the past.” But a quick trawl through relevant websites and Ravelry forums revealed something quite interesting about the current usage of such terms. While “vintage” seems to be most often applied to garments from knitting’s “golden age” in the 1930s and 40s, “retro” is most commonly used in reference to anything vaguely kooky from the 60s or 70s, such as this popcorn-adorned hoodie, which any space cowgirl would surely be proud to wear.

(Fleisher, 1965; Cornell and Lampe, 2008)

These knitterly usages of “vintage” and “retro” are interesting, because they are broadly historically accurate—in terms of the two words’ etymology at least. According to the OED, “vintage”, in the sense of “classic” design, came into common usage during the 1930s, whereas the use of “retro” as an adjective first gained widespread cultural currency in the late 60s and early 1970s. But while there’s this incidental confluence between the origins of the words and the garment styles they suggest to many knitters, other usages of “vintage” and “retro” are a bit more, um, woolly — for example, when applied to particular styles, techniques, or methods of pattern writing in the world of knitwear design and marketing.

As regards pattern-writing, “vintage” seems a sort of shorthand for “inaccurate” or “error ridden” — as such, its a term that could perhaps be equally descriptive of the editorial practices of current issues of Vogue Knitting as much as any 1950s design. I’ve also seen “vintage” weirdly applied to techniques such as steeks, or knitting in the round: practices whose history extends back several centuries, and which have been used by knitters more or less consistently ever since. For some designers, “vintage” style seems to have exclusive reference to Victorian lace, while for others, its a term that’s solidly linked to colourwork or applied embroidery. Sarah Dallas’s version of “vintage” is certainly not Kaffe Fassett’s; nor, I imagine, would this “vintage” knitting classic have much to say to Melanie Falick.

(is this vintage? retro? or just plain astounding?)

The problem is, that “vintage” most often seems to be a shorthand for a designer’s particular style preferences, or (more troublingly) for what they deem “good taste” (whatever that is). And for those who market knitwear design to us, “vintage” is just one of those easy adjectival devices like “classic”, “timeless” or “heritage” that can be wheeled out in the service of selling more stuff. While “retro” seems to be most often used in (broad) reference to post-war design, “vintage” remains a real rag-bag of befuddled meaning. Do either of these books do anything at all to dispel the confusion? I’m not sure that they do.

The blurb of Lystrup’s book refers to vintage style both as historically situated (in the 30s, 40s, and 50s) and as entirely “timeless” — a little bewildering. The longer and much more careful introduction to Cornell’s and Lampe’s book also includes many miscellaneous usages of “vintage,” but does at least make clear what they mean by that term. Cornell and Lampe take a straightforward approach to all things “vintage” by arranging their patterns historically, producing a narrative of knitting fashion that is both engaging and accurate. Retro Knits is also handsomely illustrated with patterns and advertisements from every decade from the 1910s through the 1970s, and each of Lampe and Cornell’s selections of designs is prefaced by short, lively discussions of each era’s knitting styles. Lystrup’s patterns are reproduced without much context — fashionable, socio-economic, or otherwise — and the book as a book seemed to me to rather suffer from it’s lack of framework. Another shortcoming of Lystrup’s book is its styling. Now, this isn’t a matter of personal taste — its just that clothes look much better on real people than they do on dressmaker’s dummies. The styling of Lystrup’s book does little to make the patterns appealing to the reader/ knitter, and it is a real shame that the photography of her beautifully knitted garments does not show them at their best.

(“Evening Jacket in a Feather Pattern,” 1933; Lystrup, 2008)

Reasonable photography of a re-designed 1930s garment like this really is crucial: so much of knitting is based on trust, and knitters simply do not trust patterns written before the 1970s to give reliable results. Cornell and Lampe make the work of trusting the designer even more tricky, as their book includes no photographs at all of their re-sized and re-worked patterns. And, in reference to Cornell and Lampe’s book I will strike a personal note: I was really disappointed in the way their patterns had been re-sized. A couple of garments which they describe as updating to be ‘more in line with contemporary body sizes’ start at a 38 inch bust. Now, to those of us of diminutive height and meagre chest, this is more than a little frustrating. I had a similar problem with this book of Jane Waller’s (good historical research; bad sizing; terrible photography) in which every neatly tailored item of 1940s knitwear had been transformed into an outsized garment designed to fit a woman of amazonian proportions.

Lampe and Cornell’s Retro Knits is probably worth having a look at if you enjoy pattern styling and advertisements, as well as for the useful potted history it provides of twentieth-century American knitting fashions. But would I knit anything from this book? Probably not. I wasn’t that inspired by any of Lystrup’s patterns either, and other than her careful sourcing of contemporary British yarns, and the good size range of her patterns, I unfortunately can’t find much else to recommend about this book.

But my pernickety irritation at all things described as “vintage,” and my frustration that “modern vintage” never actually seems to be built for me, has probably been compounded by the love I have recently discovered for actual “vintage” design. Thanks to Ysolda, a whole world of wonder that issued in the 1930s and 40s from the Odham’s Press has recently opened up, and I have been really enjoying the encyclopedias and “practical guides” of the loopy, dictatorial, committed knitter that was James Norbury as well as the less loopy, but no less committed Margaret Murray and Jane Koster. Their books are generous, inclusive and engaging. They are full of knitterly wisdom, interesting stitch patterns, helpful design prototypes and tips that still strike a contemporary note, as well as original garments that the knitter with a bit of experience might well adapt to their own requirements just as easily as anything in Lystrup’s, or Lampe and Cornell’s, books. Odham’s publications are being sold for peanuts on ABE and other second hand booksellers sites. Now they are books I can heartily recommend.

(lovely Odham’s endpapers)

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)

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)

unheppy

I am often struck by the liveliness and diversity of the world of contemporary domestic crafts. In very particular ways, the intermewebnet really has informally transformed the domestic into the public sphere. From their kitchens and computers, women and men all over the world are exchanging knowledge about an enormous range of practical issues and debates, sharing their messes and mistakes as much as their proud creations. These people are asking questions about consumer and gender politics, about the history of design, about process and about material practice. They are making things for beauty and for use: benches, pies, hats, yarn, toys, books, tools. Some people are examining the idea of domesticity and transforming it into art, while many others are finding it the basis of successful businesses.

With all this infinite variety, how is that the two least interesting faces of contemporary domesticity have suddenly become its public representatives? The two faces I refer to are the domestics-in-drag who need no introduction here, and those less pernicious, but no less prevalent ‘ironic’ crafters who read anarchy in every crocheted granny-square. In an article by Viv Groskop in last week’s Guardian, the conservative and ironic faces of the ‘new domesticity’ are held up as twin envoys of what is regarded by many (non-crafting) feminists as a terribly regressive trend. Apparently, both Jane Brocket and the Great Cake Escape are indicative of a ‘return’ to the pre-feminist 1950s, that simple time of embroidered table linen and hourglass silhouettes, when the clock struck four, and everything stopped for tea. According to Groskop, the activities of both conservative and ironic crafters reinforce rather than question traditional domestic ideologies, prompting the rather pointless query: “can domesticity ever be subversive?”

Now, I’m not going to have a go at the Great Cake Escape. At least these women are energetically camp and entirely self-aware. Unlike many so-called anarchic crafters, their irony seems less cynical marketing than witty interrogation—a stage toward something that might turn out to be more interesting. And (perhaps unwittingly) the juxtaposition of ironic with conservative crafters in Groskop’s article does reveal something more intriguing about them both than either are in isolation. Brocket is quoted saying that “anything which is very personal and behind closed doors and pleasurable to women is subversive these days.” Here, she neatly captures what was always really at the core of the middle-class English domesticity she celebrates and perpetuates: that is, the dark heart of eccentricity and taboo beating beneath David Lean’s “heppy” exterior. What I am getting at here is just how close net curtains are to fetish-wear, and anyone who has seen Patrick Keiller’s superb exposition of petit-bourgeois Englishness in Robinson in Space will know exactly what I mean.

Brief Encounter. Heppily unheppy.

But despite her incidental disclosure of the obvious proximity of pinny-porn to bourgeois deviance, there are several problems with Groskop’s article. The main one is that she hasn’t done enough research. She just trots out banal generalities about how baking and sewing are stereotypically ‘feminine’ without actually looking at who participates in those activities, examining how they can be empowering, transformative, critical and creative things, or looking at how sewers or bakers of either sex who share and circulate their knowledge can thereby find new means of social and political engagement. Groskop’s notion of domesticity is incredibly, ludicrously limited: for her, it just equates to cupcakes and repression. But if she had just looked underneath the frilly pinafore—ironic, conservative or otherwise—she would have found a whole world of witty, critical, talented, and engaged domestic crafters just getting on with their thing without congratulating themselves on how bloody ‘heppy’ they are the whole time. As one smart baking friend of mine put it “the creativity is in the recipe and the labour, not in the fact that you scatter dolly mixtures on top”*. While Groskop concerns herself with those dolly mixtures, the rest of us will carry on engaging with that labour, and that creativity.

*thanks, Clare B.

process

Needled reviews: The F-Word. Tuesdays, 9pm, Channel 4
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Allen Lane, 2008)

Don’t get me wrong, I do not like The F-Word, but it is worth watching it occasionally for a few cheap laughs. You know the bit I mean: when Gordon tells you how to make his pea and lettuce soup in just one minute, all in words of just one syllable. Riotous! We are somehow meant to see Gordon’s failure to use any adjectives at all as the signature of his virility, “full of balls, energy, and really great food,” as the Channel-4 tag-line puts it. (Full of balls? Sure is. . .) And the gender stereotypes peddled in Gordon’s brisk how-tos are just as strange and crass as those associated with Nigella. Man does not describe. Oh no. Describing words redundant, and unmanly. Man only know how to use imperative. Imperative style of cooking instructions works best with short, firm words. More difficult with two syllables. Very hard to make the word “mushrooms” sound manly. “Mushrooms” does not sound like manly decree. Man quickly mutters “mushrooms” then gets on with real business of shouting Real Man Words. “WHISK! TOSS! STIR!” etc. If Nigella’s mellifluous, adjectival style is supposed to be read in direct relation to her cleavage, then the F-Word’s use of the imperative might be seen as the culinary equivalent of a wanking circle, with wee Gordon in the centre, braying out commands (Shaft! Girth! Beat! Etc)

Gordon.

But I bring the F-word to your attention because of a particular moment in Tuesday’s show. The redoubtable Janet Street Porter appeared on set, fresh from her carefully stage-managed experience of rearing and slaughtering two veal calves. The viewer had already been treated to the money-shot of the poor beasts’ deaths, and what we clearly needed now was Janet to preach at us about our lamentable food-buying habits. We must never buy cheap meat again. No we mustn’t. Instead, we should feast only on luxury meat products humanely reared by media luminaries. While dispensing her new-found farming wisdom, Janet was dressed in a formless top, machine-knit in a vibrant shade of puce. It was a truly hideous garment (sorry, Janet).

“I suppose you knit that yourself?” said Gordon, inferring that Janet’s experience of slaughtering “her boys” had turned her all rustic, or something.
“No I fooking didn’t, Gordon,” retorted Janet, “this is a designer item.”

puce

Now, I know that I’m more sensitive than your average jane to anti-knitting slurs, but this was about so much more than knitting. Janet enthused about how raising the calves, and watching the process of their lives and deaths, had completely transformed her perception of meat. She now knew what was involved with what she put on her plate. And everyone should think about how the meat they eat is raised and killed. Apart from the patronising attitude, and the unavoidable questions Janet did not address about cost, class, and the ethics of raising a niche luxury product like veal, this is sort of fair enough. Yes, Janet. We should all think about process, and production. But, the problem is, that she hadn’t really engaged with process at all. She had merely played a game to camera: a game with a neatly plotted narrative arc, with contrived hooks and encounters, with a particular rhetorical language (that of reluctant maternity—quite bizarre) and with moments of typically ‘direct’ and ‘irreverant’ Street-Porter-like entertainment. “’Oh no, it’s pooing again’, moans Janet,” to quote The F-Word website. Janet had engaged about as much with the slow processes and difficult realities of farming as she had with the making of her sweater, and her quick retort about the obvious superiority of ‘designer’ to ‘hand-made’ spoke volumes.

So is it just me, or does so much of this currently popular moralising about process (particularly as it concerns food) have an incredibly hollow ring? It is just far too easy for Gordon, Janet and their like to preach to the middle classes about the importance of the means of producing edible luxuries, before nipping out to snap up, promote, or sell other commodities with little thought about the process of their making—or the livelihoods of their makers, for that matter.

But one place where such discussions of process are neither hollow or easy is in Richard Sennett’s excellent new book, The Craftsman. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should. In a series of radical, lyrical essays, this venerable sociologist makes the case for a reassessment of the idea of work itself. The making of things for use or beauty are never, he argues, a matter of individual brilliance, the romantic imagination, or isolated talent. Rather, for him, excellence lies somewhere between the eye and hand, in material practices and processes, and the slow engagement with them over time. Sennett’s notion of craft is something equally applicable to the design of a mobile-phone or a line of linux code, as much as a Stradivari violin , or a particular recipe for Poulet a la d’Albufera. For him, all these ‘crafts’ involve the same struggle with tools and processes, the same issues of encountering and solving problems, of developing and refining skill and focus, of learning how repetition itself can be creative, and of coming to know the singular pleasure of doing something well for its own sake. It is a book of tremendous breadth and sweep but which is also rich in details. In fact, for me, Sennett’s singularity, both as a writer and a public intellectual, is found in such details: in the bumper that really bothers him in the parking garage of a post-modern building; in his discussion of the symbolic values of bricks; in his thoughtful self-awareness of being an outsider as he watches a group of healthcare professionals transfixed by the image of a troublesome large intestine. And any man who can begin a sentence with the words “consider, for instance, an irregular tomato” and from that opening build an argument about the how an idea of virtue inheres in thing-ness, is OK by me.

Epinglier (pin making) Diderot, Encyclopedie (1762)

Lurking around the back of Sennett’s thesis is a familiar argument about the de-humanising effects of the modern and post-modern division of labour. He is quite explicit about his fondness for the all-encompassing curiosity of the mid-eighteenth century, or the undifferentiated artisanal labour of the medieval workshop. Not for him Adam Smith’s efficiently produced pins. This practical resistance to the division of labour—and the division of knowledge too, perhaps—is something he clearly applies to his own intellectual craft-work. He writes about the way children treat the spaces and equipment of playgrounds just as articulately as he does about Martin Heidegger.

Sennett’s thoughts about process have multiple and resonant contexts for me. For example, his remarks about being-in-the-thing came to my mind very strongly, when I read Mandy’s account of the pleasure of the rhythm of knitting her swallowtail shawl:

“We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labour, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it’s nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organised as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metapmorhose, improve, but the emptional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled crafsman has extended rhythm to the hand and eye.” (p. 175)

. . .and his section on mess chimes very strongly with Felix’s and Kirsty’s Messy Tuesdays posts:

“To arrive at that goal [that of being fit-for-purpose] the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.” (p.161)

And what Sennett has to say about the importance of modesty, and the awareness of one’s own inadequacies, while engaging with material processes is very moot too. Perhaps this is something for Janet and Gordon to bear in mind.

*You can hear Richard Sennett talking with Laurie Taylor and Grayson Perry about craftsmanship, and process in this episode of Thinking Allowed.

from twelve t-shirts

You may be wondering what has happened to Belle’s quilts. Well, it is taking time. I have to choose the right moments to work on them. They feel and smell of Belle. Making them is not an easy thing. But there has been some progress recently.

For the first quilt I chose twelve of Belle’s many stripey t-shirts. I cut them up and pieced them. The cutting was emotionally rather difficult. Once I had the pieces, though, the process became more abstracted and easier to do. I was making something, not cutting up her clothes, and the t-shirts were becoming another thing.

So the block design I chose is (rather loosely) based on those used in ‘bedspread 31′ in this book:

(There are some really lovely designs for all sorts of things in here and, because the diagrams are so clear, you do not need to read Japanese.)

Piecing the T-shirts was quite tricky at times, because of the different mix of fabrics. Some are made of pure, and rather heavy cotton jersey, others are lighter, and contain different percentages of viscose, lycra, and elastene. Not only did the pieces (being made of essentially of knit stockinette) want to curl up, each separate piece behaved differently under the sewing machine because they were made of different fibres. And the fact that I wanted my stripes to go in different directions — often against the grain of the fabric — complicated matters even further. Aigh!

Here are the pieced blocks laid out:

you can see how they like to curl. I tamed those babies with pins and sewing machine . . .

. . . and then put them all together:

Hurrah! I have now finished piecing the quilt top, and this is as far as I’ve got.

This quilt is supposed to have a seaside aesthetic — deck chairs and beach huts — and I’m pleased that it seems to suggest this (well it does to me in any case). Because of the unruly nature of the fabric (and perhaps, too, my own ineptitude) there is nothing neat about the piecing, but:
1) I really want the quilt to look like it is made, for its origins to be suggested, if not entirely visible
2) wobbly is a good look. Oh yes. A look I like.

Though cotton jersey — in various percentages and weights of cotton — is certainly not ideal quilting material, the resulting top is satisfyingly soft, and very fluid. I rather like it so far. But rather than face the horror of feeding acres of jersey through my machine again, I am going to quilt it all by hand. This might prove interesting as I’ve never attempted this before. I’m actually looking forward to it, though, which, given the emotional and difficult nature of the project, is a good thing.

Speaking of cotton jersey, I’ve been reading Natalie Chanin’s Alabama Stitch Book. All her projects involve pieced jersey, and all of them are sewn by hand. No feeding lycra mixes through your machine for her! Chanin designs clothes and accessories rather than quilts, and she certainly has lots of interesting ideas for recycling and refashioning cotton — putting a notoriously high-impact commodity to good new use. Admiring the idea of the book immensely, I felt almost ashamed that there was nothing in it that I actually really liked or was inspired by. This is probably because I just don’t go for stencils or reverse applique, or something. However, it was certainly refreshing to read an introduction from a designer who clearly thinks about the meanings of fabric, is sensitive to different textile traditions and histories, and makes these things integral to her design process. But though I enjoyed the book’s introduction, and found Chanin thoughtful and intelligent as well as creative, I did think that the particular spin she put on the history of cotton in the South was weirdly obfuscatory at times. To put it bluntly, it all felt a bit white.

Anyway, more from the t-shirt quilt soon. Have a nice weekend.

miscellany

The postie has been bringing me a right bag of treats lately. Here’s a selection.

Big thanks to Lara, Felix, Jesse, Annushka, and Philippa!

The top pic shows some absolutely delicious Oxford Kitchen Yarn’s sock yarn in the plum colourway. The colour (which is not quite true in the photo) has a precise and very evocative childhood association for me — of blackcurrant jam mixed into rice pudding (thanks so much, L!) You see here also lovely buttons, badges and ribbons, as well as the Fantastical Reality Radio Show activity booklet which has brought me untold joy over the past few days. It has also made me strangely — nay, not a little obsessively — aware of ordinary household sounds. Mr B was bemused to discover me with a dictaphone, recording the sounds of making a pot of tea. And you’ll see from the last photo that I’m already putting Philippa’s red grossgrain to good use. More of this later.

Meanwhile, miscellaneous weekend things.
A sunday lunch of bread and beer:

I made the bread (unusual, this, as I don’t bake much) but not the beer. It is a dark mild – much lighter and more refreshing than it looks in that picture – delicious.

Also, I made a keyring with a bee in it. Just because I could.

did you know you can get a bag of blank keyrings for around 3p each on ebay? well you can . . .

Finally, something to see and something to avoid from the past couple of days.

ONE TO SEE: The Writing in The Sand, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Amber Films (1991).
Having frequented the Side Gallery, cinema and cafe in Newcastle, and admiring the work of the Amber collective, I was looking forward to this DVD immensely, and it did not disappoint. Built out of of Konttinen’s fabulous photographs of the beaches and people of the North East, The Writing on the Sand is a miracle of editing: narrative-driven and highly cinematic. I am fond of British documentaries about leisure, and particularly seaside-associated leisure, but am often troubled by how treatments of this theme patronise their subjects. Lindsay Anderson’s O! Dreamland is a case in point (much as I love Lindsay Anderson). Written in the Sand, though, is a frank and affectionate, exuberant and celebratory portrait of people enjoying themselves outside. It’s really a great piece of work. And, as well as being a stunning document of the changeable and well-loved beaches and climate of the North East over the past 20 years; and providing an evocative, poetic critique of the effects of marine pollution, this short film also also conveys a very powerful message about the importance of public (and particularly recreational) space, and the threat to it from the wholescale privatisation of the British landscape — our beaches in particular. Eat that, Donald Trump (together with your plans for turning the dunes of Balmedie into golfing-hell)

I’m now very tempted to buy this book of Konttinen’s original photographs.

ONE TO AVOID:
Why, when I read the blurb (Michael Jackson connects with Marilyn Monroe on a Scottish island retreat for celebrity impersonators) did I think it might be a good idea to go and see Mister Lonely? Why, having disliked with a passion every other film I’ve seen by Harmony Korine did I still go and see it? I suspect the presence of Samantha Morton swung it for me, but that was two hours of my life I will never get back again. If I start going on about just how bad a film this was I’ll never stop . . .but it was seriously vacuous twaddle, made all the worse the worse for thinking that it actually had something to say. I soon got bored of noticing James Fox and David Blaine, or wondering what on earth Werner Herzog was doing there &c &c, and had to divert myself for the last hour and a half of the film (groan) by thinking about the design and construction of the lacy cardigan worn by the Shirley Temple impersonator. One final thing, though: by anybody’s standards, Diego Luna makes a terrible Michael Jackson.

troubled

Needled reviews Louise Bourgeois, Nature Study.
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Until July 6th.

I like Louise Bourgeois. I like what she stands for. She’s a woman whose early work challenges and outlasts so many of her surrealist contemporaries, with their ludicrous, dick-swinging excesses. I like her investigative, excavatory treament of sexuality and power. I particularly like her beautiful and evocative manuscript-textiles.

(Louise Bourgeois, Hours of the Day (cover), 2006)

Threads of complicity and humour, reproach and chutzpah run through her work. And despite its inward-looking self-scrutiny, what she makes has always seemed to me to be generous and dialogic in character. I can take or leave the psychoanalytic turn some approaches to her art have taken, but I like Louise Bourgeois. So I was really looking forward to the exhibition of her new work at Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens. I visited the exhibition about ten days ago. I’ve been profoundly troubled by it ever since.

In Inverleith House’s tradition of creating conversations between new art and old archives, Bourgeois’ work is set alongside the collections of John Hutton Balfour, one of the Botanic Gardens’ most important early patrons, and a teacher of plant science. Balfour’s teaching aids, notebooks and illustrations were downstairs; Bourgeois’ gouaches and objects upstairs.

It was interesting to see Balfour’s teaching illustrations in the nineteenth-century spaces in which they might actually have been used. But I really wasn’t sure what to make of these three-foot high illustrations. The apparatus of the exhibition didn’t really help much. We were probably told enough about Balfour: his obsession with the economy of nature as evidence of divine workmanship seemed predictable enough. But these were just enormous teaching aids. It was like being in an undergraduate powerpoint lecture illustrated with (even by nineteenth-century standards) really bad slides.

I was at the exhibition with a biologist. He was mildly interested by the approach to scientific inquiry and pedagogy that Balfour’s illustrations evidenced, but felt that most other people at the exhibition wouldn’t really be concerned with this at all. “People just like the way this stuff looks,” he said, “like the way that old microscope slides are reproduced with a sort of empty fascination all over the internet. People say, ooh, that’s pretty, but don’t really ask why they like looking at hundred year-old insects”

I confess that I do like looking at such things, but I also like thinking about the why of that looking as well. Unlike my biologist friend, I believe it’s possible to regard such things not just as generic scientific ‘curiosities’ but as objects that are aesthetic and critical and contextualised (such as in the work of this talented designer, whose ‘creature series’ displays a careful reverence for the historic traditions of scientific illustration, as well as capturing the essential melancholy of the scrutinised object.)

But the thing was that Balfour’s illustrations didn’t invite this kind of looking. Rather than being (like other botanical images of their era) careful or critical or questioning, they seemed crude, expository, brazen, even. And I was completely bamboozled by what kind of relationship I was meant to conceive between these giant didactic images—whose sole purpose was instruction—and the art of Louise Bourgeois.

(Louise Bourgeois, Self Portrait (detail), 2007. Photograph Chris Burke. Courtesy Cheim & Read.)

Upstairs, the walls were awash with delicate puce daubs. Breasts multiplied in bloody repetition. This was vintage Bourgeois. These new gouaches respond, like so much of her work, to human parts and parting: separation, integrity, abjection. Femininity appears in these images as a something that’s in process—a process as disturbingly repetitive and perpetual as Psyches tasks. Bleeding, feeding, replicating—constantly iterating and re-iterating. Bourgeois’ gouaches also display her characteristic ability to shape-shift through several subject positions, using the natural transitions that a series of repetitive images provides (here most obviously between the positions of greedy, needy mother and child). And the formal quality of these gouaches—bright pink smears that are loud and fleeting, almost rowdy—add to the sense of impermanence and questioning and process in the work.

But why oh why were Bourgeois’ gouaches exhibited alongside Balfour’s teaching aids? What sorts of ways did the curators imagine that these two sets of incredibly different ‘nature studies’ speak to each other? There was no conversation or connection that I could see at all, apart from the obvious inference that the sexual parts of plants and women are, um, a bit like each other. Surely this unbelievably crass association between femininity and flowers couldn’t be what was meant here? And it wasn’t just that the two sets of images were dissimilar, but that they were produced in such completely different discursive contexts, at very different moments, for completely different purposes, and addressed to totally different kinds of audience. What was to be gained from their contiguity? This question bothered me the whole time I was looking at Bourgeois’ work. It has bothered me since. In fact, puzzling about Balfour got in the way of my enjoyment of Bourgeois. I really didn’t see how any sort of appreciation of her work was helped by accompanying it with thirty enormous and rather rudimentary diagrams through which young Victorian men might learn about the parts of plants. Where were the “strikingly similar themes” between the two bodies of work, mentioned in the exhibition blurb?

I’m still troubled by what was going on in the space between upstairs and downstairs at this exhibition. And somehow the whole experience has made me like Bourgeois less. But am I missing something? Am I misrepresenting Balfour? According to Catriona Black in The Herald, the pairing of Balfour and Bourgeois was the result of a “casual conversation” between the exhibition’s New York and Edinburgh curators. If anyone thinks that there is more to it than that, can you let me know?