Hand sanding

This weekend I will be sanding by hand 8 of 31 maple tiles for a new flooring idea.  I enjoy the process of sanding wood by hand as it allows the mind time to work through other ideas and thoughts, whilst physically working towards a beautiful finished piece.  While mechanical sanding is a lot quicker and very useful for shaping and precision lines etc I have not been able to get the organic shapes I want only with a machine.  I also love the connection that the hand work offers me.  As someone who loves the sensory stimulation gained by touching and feeling materials, the tactility of handwork like this offers immense satisfaction.  I like the way my hands and arms feel tired after this work and the occasional blisters!  I feel that it also offers me a small insight into the times when machines weren't so readily available, if at all for this kind of work and for the effort that went into producing a fine finish on old furnitures etc.

The tiles in the picture are maple, although they are not the tiles I will be working on this weekend.

AR in textiles

Listening to an old Veganfreak podcast with Gary Francione talking about how demand from the public leads to bad meat production made me think - does demand for wool and silk lead to the harsh farming methods used in fibre production.  I think so.  This isn't just limited to protein fibres (wool, silk) but also in cellulose (cottons, linen) as farming for cellulose is also environmentally harsh, and does not include leather or fur production as they are a whole different ball game, both as processes and in ethical terms.  However as wool and silk directly use animals they could be seen as being as morally wrong as battery farming. 

Does consumer demand lead to bad farming practice - I think the answer is yes.  Demand for cheap woollen clothing leads to practices such as mulesing and to sheep being treated as commodities rather than as living beings. 

Silk is a tougher question as it is not known for being cheap.  Silk is produced by boiling cocoons to release the fibres the silk worm has spun aound itself.  However, if the cocoon is left until the worm has morphed into a moth (which chews its way out) the fibres are damaged so the worms are boiled inside along with the cocoons.  Personally I see this production method as highy unethical, however as poorly fed and housed silk worms produce poor silk they tend to be kept in slightly higher conditions than a lot of other non-humans used to produce things for humans.


More about this when I have thought about it further.

Textiles from the Burrell Collection

A recent trip to the Burrell Collection, Glasgow brought these embroideries to my attention.

Also these 3d embroideries, amazing gold work.

And this lovely beaded leopard. 


The stitches in all of them were tiny, the beads also tiny, and all done by candle or day light, I find that incredible. 

Ulla Von Brandenburg

 

I went to see Ulla Von Brandenburg's work (pictured) at the Pilar Corrias yesterday.  Based on old railroad quilts these super-sized details were both beautiful and inspiring.  

Quilts were often made from old work clothes and other well worn clothing, nothing went to waste when it didn't need to.  

I saw another quilt exhibition at the PMA about 18 months ago, again hugely inspiring.  The Gees Bend quilts appealed to me both for the care and time taken to make them, the irregularities where different fabrics met and off-geometric shapes that resulted and also in that so little material was binned.  Spent clothing became quilt panels or innards.  This lack of waste and full use of existing materials is something that is not always thought of, however some designer-makers are pushing their work as far in that direction as possible (and many include green thought processes in their work).  

Bespoke quilter Katherine May said 'what is the point of me selling this very considered product if I just wrap it in plastic which will just get thrown away - I wanted to lessen the landfill not add to it! So at the moment I am thinking of ways that packaging can be reused.'  This is a train of thought that leads down an interesting path - in my mind it starts with Japanese furoshiki (cloth gift wrap) which can be reused afterward the gift is opened.

Even Weave as Metaphor, first thoughts on feminism in textiles

In Thinking Through Craft by Glenn Adamson (p152) it says:
'For Jefferies and other Feminist artists of her generation, the notion of a flexible, evenly dispersed weave has itself come to seem like a model for a more democratic and egalitarian social "fabric" '.

An evenly dispersed weave is a visually pleasing thing, comfortable to touch and be around; potentially a more evenly woven society also offers these sensory pleasures.


(Jefferies refers to Janis Jefferies, an arttst with a particular interest in feminism and fibre)

Animal Ethics update

I have been hearing quite a lot about the meat that is being grown in labs recently.  There have been textile and food rumblings about this for a few years (growing your own leather jacket for example, BBC article about meat from 2005), however the latest thing that I read is that the science involves taking cells from the muscle of a living animal and then growing it in a solution of blood from animal foetuses - if this is an accurate explanation of the process then another ethical question arises here.  Can it be considered ethical to grow meat like this?  I don't like to pit one stance against another like this usually but here goes - is it more or less ethical to eat grown meat than to eat farmed meat?  And thus the questions comes - is it more or less ethical to wear grown leather than farmed leather?  Feasibly leather as a meat-industry by-product could become sparse if we  eat more grown meat, could this lead to demand for grown leather? 


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6936352.ece

Feminism in Textiles

Can textiles be feminist? 

Can they be political beyond the sense of cloth banners with written messages?
 
There is a lot of debate surrounding appearance and womens rights.  This has started me wondering if cloth has anything to do with these debates, or is it only when transformed into a form that it takes on 'personality' and, as clothing, becomes a discussion point.
Hobbies or skills associated with cloth have many messages:  Originally embroidery was a pastime used to occupy the minds of women in rder to prevent them from getting distracted by sex.  This was then twisted back onto itself by women being seen to do embroidery to show that they had sexual thoughts that they needed distracting from.
The exhibition at the Women's Library in east London at the moment focuses in part on the clothing and craft skills women used during the first and second waves of feminism.  Here now in the third wave, running concurrently with a resurgence in interest in handcrafts, it can be harder to tell what relates to feminism and what doesn't. 

Can cloth be considered gendered at any point?

I will continue on this point later...