Wild Yarn E-Book

Imogen Bright Moon

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 129

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A practical and inspirational guide to choosing, blending and spinning richly textured artisan yarn for weaving, knitting and other textile art applications. Imogen Bright Moon is a British Romani textile artist who creates richly textured, highly tactile woven textile works from yarn that she spins and blends herself. In this elegantly designed book Imogen reveals the secrets of her practice. In evocative, engagingly written text accompanied by sumptuous images of her work in her studio throughout the year, she explains: • How to choose raw fibres for use in your work: the author's are ethically sourced from various ecologically responsible sources, including a rescue flock of sheep on the South Downs. • How to put together different types of fibres – raw sheep's wool, plant fibres such as hemp, soya and wild silk, alpaca hair and much more – to create richly textured yarn. • The delicate art of blending naturally occurring pigments, working with shade and tone to create subtle and nuanced colours, a process that Imogen likens to a painter mixing paints on a palette. • The principles of hand-spinning, from a simple single spun thread to more complicated yarns such as triple-chain ply yarn, using a traditional floor spindle. • How to skein, soak and wet-finish your yarn, and how to store your yarn stash. • Ideas for taking your yarn into finished craft and art projects, with details of the author's own work. With an emphasis on engagement with nature, the rhythms of the seasonal craft cycle, ethical making, sustainability and mindfulness, this book is ideal for weavers, textile artists and anyone seduced by the joys of yarn.

Leseprobe

Imogen Bright Moon creates richly textured, highly tactile woven textile works from yarn that she spins and blends herself. In this elegantly designed book Imogen reveals the secrets of her practice in evocative, engagingly written text accompanied by beautiful samples of her work.

In Chapter One Imogen outlines the different ethical fibres that are available to use, as well as suggesting ways of working with new textures, shades and tones, and ideas for sourcing your own materials. Chapter Two explores different tools and processes for blending, including the historic use of tools, and how you can adapt these into your own studio practice. Next, in Chapter Three, Imogen looks at hand spinning and outlines the different spinners and spindles available while the rest of the book takes you through different finishing techniques, explores how to collect and curate your own yarn collections as well as suggesting different project ideas for a range of different textile crafts.

With an emphasis on engagement with nature, the rhythms of the seasonal craft cycle, ethical making, sustainability and mindfulness, this book is ideal for weavers, textile artists and anyone seduced by the joys of yarn.

DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to the craftswomenwho picked up their tools and innovated:Theo Moorman, Madeleine Vionnet,Georgia O’Keeffe and Virginia Woolf.

To Clara Nezbah Sherman,wisdom from Spider Woman:I offer this work to the First Spinner,hand to hand, to the very last.

SPINNING

My mother’s spindle

is a slender stick

on a hardwood whorl.

Under her fingers

it spins like a dancer,

winding itself

in twisted yarn.

ANN NOLAN CLARKLittle Herder in Autumn

‘(The other aspect of) craft work is concerned with art work, the realization of a hope for a lawful and enduring nature. Other elements, such as proportion, space relations, rhythm, predominate in these experiments, as they do in other arts. No limitations other than the veto of the material itself are set. More than an active process, it is a listening for the dictation of the material and a taking in of the laws of harmony. It is for this reason that we can find certitude in the belief that we are taking part in an eternal order.’

ANNI ALBERSOn Designing

Contents

Introduction

1

SensoryCraft

Experiencingethical fibres

2

Paintingwith Wool

Painterly approachesto wool blending

3

Spinning Beauty

The principlesof hand spinning

4

YarnFinishing

How to hank, soak,weight and wet-finish yarn

5

Curating& Collecting

How to curatea yarn collection

6

Project Ideas

Working with handspun yarnin contemporary crafts

Bibliography

Artists & Organisations

Resources: Fibre & Tool Suppliers

Index

Introduction

What is wild yarn? I have spent eight years finding out, and it’s my pleasure to share this journey with you in the pages of this book. It is my hope that you, too, will discover and kindle your experience of yarn through exploring with me, and because I’m a self-taught spinner and weaver, I hope that my ‘wild yarn’ story will inspire and empower you to spin your own unique yarns for use in your textile practice. Let’s begin...

ENCOUNTERING MATERIALS

Whether a proficient spinner or a complete beginner, I believe that each time we encounter our raw materials, it is an opportunity to experience them for the first time. Just as we bring ourselves into the immediate moment of making with whatever our lives contain, the materials are in relationship with us, and we with them. In the arts-therapy model, the raw materials give us permission to be ourselves, just as we are. There is no expectation or idea of perfection from the materials, and nothing they are imposing upon us as a craftsperson.

When I tell people that spinning yarn is forgiving, I mean that the creation of yarn can really hold us with whatever we are holding in ourselves, and the craft itself patiently awaits our encounter to teach us how to be with the process; the rhythm and the ‘mistakes’ are always a pause to refocus and go deeper. (The same is also true of my main crafts practice of weaving.) Around a quarter of a century ago, Sarah, my then 81-year-old yoga teacher, a former Catholic nun, would say to us at the start of each practice, ‘One thing at a time, breathe.’ So, with craft, one thing at a time, breathe, becomes one moment of encountering the methods, that turns into a conversation, which becomes your story, breath by breath. Breathe with your materials, breathe with your tools, breathe with your hands: this is the beginning and the end of craft.

CRAFT LANGUAGES

In my earliest woven works, I was attempting to translate the story of the textures and tones of the land, and the mineral forms, shells and knapped flints I was filling my pockets with each time I went to the beach, the woods, or over the South Downs. It was a particular sense of feeling (emotion and texture) that needed to merge to speak the language I was hearing in the landscape. Developing and combining weaving techniques (cloth and tapestry) allowed me tangible access to larger textile spaces of structure and form; however, it was the spinning of yarn, and the haptic processing of raw stuff into a firmer context without losing its essential nature-language, that allowed a way into the authentic translation of the song I was hearing.

I think every artist comes to a place where they can hear the muse communicating, and that might be hard to explain objectively; however, the work created from that conversation, if done with awareness, openness and integrity, has the capacity to hold, echo and broadcast something of these moments of creation. In this way, one’s signature, voice, story, and deeply personal process, can be facilitated, supported and amplified through the medium of craft processes and outcomes. I am not seeking to replicate a surface; I am reaching into a bag of raw wool and hoping that I do it justice, that its essence is represented, that I am as light as possible, as gentle in touch and sincere in translation. In this way, the undoing of impactful overdesign, brutal subjugating of materials, denial of Nature herself, is antidoted by works that are as undesigned from a projected imposition, and alchemically distilled into something more real, more ancient and more familiar.

I hope my craft is something that our oldest souls can remember as being their inheritance, to say: this is old, this is from another time, this is contemporary, this is for me, now… spinning wild yarn is a deeply connective practice.

It may seem obvious that craft is a sensory experience, and I would really enjoy exploring why this is important as a creative aspect in itself. Your own body is your primary tool, and from our earliest moments we are sensing and perceiving, via the media of the body, the world we inhabit and the impressions it leaves upon and within our somatic experience. These impressions last a lifetime, and work their way into the psyche-somatic system. Often misrepresented as wholly or partly ‘imaginary’ in the fields of health (as psychosomatic), the psyche + soma is the unity of the inner experience with the outer physical experience for holistic wellbeing. In the Jungian model, our psyche holds many layers of depth and feeling, both collective and individual; and through craft and the arts, we can give shape and form to these impressions. Through the creation of craft we can speak a language before language, and embody processes to create symbol-forms that powerfully take the place of speech. In this way, craft is a tactile glossary for the senses, and for the soul.

DEFINITIONS

Subtle Comes ultimately from a Latin pair: the prefix sub-, meaning ‘under,’ and tela, meaning ‘web’. The two were joined in Latin subtilis, meaning ‘finely woven’. The word was literal; it was originally a weaving term.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Subtle matter (n) Rarefied or weightless matter (supposedly) pervading the atmosphere, the universe, the animal body, etc.; a substance of this nature; esp. ether…

Oxford English Dictionary

Layers of Experience

The layers involved in wild-yarn creation as a form of sensory craft might be experienced in the following ways:

OPTIC AESTHETIC The visual texture of yarn – the look, shading, depth, light, shadow. The many shades of naturally coloured wool, the use of botanical plant dyes and inks, and the many ways to use these in harmony or harmonic contrast.

SCENT Wool in all its stages has a depth of scent that often surprises visitors to my exhibitions – not the raw farmyard smell, but the warm, rich comforting scent of wool. Even when washing it in specialist eucalyptus wool soap, the background scent of the essence of wool is beautifully present. Other natural fibres have their own unique scents, and one of my favourites is raw, wild muga silk, when it is warmed. Linen, nettle, jute – all these plant fibres contain scent-memories of the time before they reached my hands.

TOUCH Our hands are involved so thoroughly with the entire crafts process, that we might begin to take these, our earliest tools, for granted. How fibre feels to the touch is incredibly personal, and this can be a very rich point of departure into a new experience of creating wild-yarn.

Under the Web: Considering Tone and Shade

I will be very subtle about the word ‘colour’, as it implies (in the textile world) the idea that something has been additionally coloured or dyed. Dyeing fibre and yarn is a dedicated craft-form and deserves an entire book in its own right. In this book I will include a set of blended yarn skeins that feature locks (wool curls) that have been traditionally dyed with botanicals, to provide a reference in the discussion of yarn development; however, my own process tends to rarely use dyed fibre, unless it is for a specially requested commission, or something for a theatre production or for a historical museum replica. I will explain my reasons for purposely limiting my use of dyed fibre as you read on, but I encourage you to add in dye work if this calls to your creative vision, and keep it in mind for use in combination with the processes I will be sharing with you. The resource list at the end of the book (see Resources: Fibre & Tool Suppliers) has been compiled to support your research for how best to seek out botanical dyes if you wish to explore them further.

HOW I WORK WITH SHADE AND TONE

Natural wool has its own pigment that constitutes a shade or tone. To me, ‘tone’ indicates a depth of naturally occurring pigment that produces a ‘shade’ (a shade of grey, for example). This shade might be blue-ish, or mauve-ish, without actually being the colours blue or purple in a clear, obvious or direct way. Working in what would be perceived as a ‘neutral’ or ‘natural’ spectrum of colours is itself a discipline, as it asks us to really look to recognize the nuances between shades, to see how to get the best out of combined shades, and how to use the artistic eye to balance or contrast these tones to blend up a yarn that works for us and our project. Here we get into the similitude I invoke often: I liken my yarn blending technique to an artist mixing their own paint. The reason for this is that I have complete control over the blend: I can add light by adding in luminous fibres such as wild silk or seaweed silk; I can mute the tone with a matte plant fibre such as sun-bleached linen; I can add deeper, richer shades of wool to bring the blend into a different colour story. If you enjoy experimental artistic processes and discovering surprising and subtle combinations, then this book is for you!

GENTLE TASK

Consider your relationship with colour, shade, tone, pigment, light and dark. Note which emotions certain shades and tones evoke in you. Do you feel comfortable with a natural-neutral range of shades, or do you prefer botanical dyes? Do you prefer the bright, saturated, vivid colours of an additionally pigmented palette? This is an important step in comprehending your creative needs and finding your artistic voice, using shade and texture to tell a story.

KEY WORDS

light, shine, luminous, gilded, illuminated, reflective, shadow, depth, warmth, richness, resonance.

Texture: Textile, Language and Touch

I will talk a lot about personal signatures in yarn spinning, and in combination with researching the etymological threads of text-textile-texture, we can see that texture has linguistic roots in describing many forms of artistic expression, from the written and spoken word, the composition and performance of music, and the structure and form of fabric. In my yarn development, texture became the balance to support my exploration of shade and tone. Therefore, my methodology holds ‘texture + tone’ as an equation I use to fulfill my creative vision, and to which I return when I need to remember the founding principles of my practice.

HOW I WORK WITH TEXTURE

Single-origin fibres each have their unique journey and story. For example, some rare-breed sheep flocks I work with have named sheep that are dear pets, and their age and location yield a diverse variety of textures year-on-year, which are very powerful to use in my creative practice, as the very fibres themselves hold a story. Texture, or the implicit quality of the fibre, has its own lexicon: wool may be bulky, lofty, crimped, warm; silk may be smooth, slubbed and scaled; linen, flax and nettle may be firm, dry, cool, crisp.

The textural qualities of each chosen fibre are unique, and how I combine those together has the artistic methodology of an artisan craft; that is, I am creatively attempting to communicate something of my personal vision, my relationship to and with textile, through the medium of my blended and handspun yarn. I’m searching to combine the differing characters of textures that work together, either in balanced contrast or in aesthetic harmony, that begin to form a visual language, and the spin starts to add the signature personal to me – as your spin will be personal to you – and then the story of the textile work I am crafting is on its way to becoming realized in the final project or finished piece of work.

GENTLE TASK

I invite you to consider what your own creative equation might consist of, and keep it in mind as you encounter your yarn work going forwards.

DICTIONARY

Texture (n) The visual or tactile surface characteristics and appearance of something; the disposition or manner of union of the particles of a body or substance; a composite of the elements of prose or poetry; identifying quality: character; something composed of closely interwoven elements, specifically: a woven cloth; the structure formed by the threads of a fabric; basic scheme or structure; overall structure.

Texture (v) To give a particular texture to.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Texture (n) The process or art of weaving. Obsolete.

Texture (v) To construct by or as by weaving; to give a texture to (anything). 

Oxford English Dictionary