Impulsiv

Sometimes, in the middle of the night the ideas assault me and next day I suddenly have a new project going on. This time I decided that my daughter had to have an kid mohair little bolero jacket for the fall. I'm experimenting with drop stitches. Will see how it all comes out. I have been knitting by 27°, my hands warm and moist, but what should I do, this is my obsession and little cute girls just must have a fluffy bolero!


And, Noah my eldest decided to take the production of football T-Shirts in his own hands for the school championship and is doing very well without any help. I teached the basics and he is doing pretty well alone. The numbers on the back are made of an old white linen sheet. He zigzags everything. The T's have a very cool grungy look.


This week, as impulsive as I'm I wrote to Elaine Lipson from the Red Thread Studio to just tell her how I very much love her blog, and I was lucky to gain a friend. Her blog is a treasure for all who share the slow cloth passion. She explores the web and other places to find her textile treasures. Elaine is absolutely worth visiting.

What's coming

This week I have been writting my plans, putting them to paper helps me think and get some stuff clear.

In november I'll be going to Chile for 6 weeks, Noah, Elias and Isabelle will be going to school there and I expecto to be able to get some research done about chilean slow clothes development.

I will be visiting Araucania Yarns (http://www.araucaniayarns.com). They are doing an amazing slow work. They produce yarns with row materials of mostly local provenience and dye it all by hand with local labor in socialy responsable maner.

Also will be visiting the women of Fundación Chol-Chol http://www.cholchol.org. Mapuche people from Chile working with self produced and self processed wool. The beauty of their work lies in simplicity and in the natural dyes they use.

Will be posting a very nice video about fundacion chol-chol (that is when I find out how to embed it, anybody there to help?)

Summer Knitting and Sewing

I had this old pair of trausers from my husband and made some pokets out of the sturdy fabric for the apron of my little one. After that I thought that the pockets of the trausers are actually something very difficult to do and dicided to recycle them into my wash hanging, pegs apron.

I also wanted to knit a hat from some Noro beauty I had but Iended up making a bag. Used some old piece of silk with a stitched fish I made for the insides. Yes...you can say I was very busy...

Summer

Yes, I was absent for a long time now, but... I was working hard too. The summer has brought me to many and very nice ideas. First of course all the preserving hat to be done, and of course the yummy eating of the many fruits from our garden. and then there was the kniting and new the sewing of course.

Reading was also in the list. I wanted to know more about textile arts in africa and found for ex. that the most apreciated wax printed fabrics whi

ch decorate the bodys of african women who look very gracious and beautiful in their traditional garments are MADE IN HOLLAND???!! Why? Because the Dutch have been a long time now in the african market. They send their peolple many times a year to the african countrys to search for trends. Why wax fabrics?

"In the mid-eighteenth century the Dutch recruited troops from the Gold coast to fight their colonial wars in Java. The troops returned to Africa with a taste for Javanese wax-resist textiles, which subsequetly were introduced into the region...By the 1920s, firms in Switzerland, France and Japan had adopted the process and fierce competition ensued to develop designs that would appeal to local tastes and reflect topical concerns" (The Poetics of Cloth/Alisa LaGamma). Now the predominant industry is Vlisco followed by Akosobo Limited Textiles in Accra, whose designers are trained in schools such as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana

And the textile traditions that have existed for at least a millenium and continue to be practiced in west africa today? They have a hard time competing with the industrialy produced staff, many workshops must close as the big producers get bigger and bigger.

I wanted to try and see this wax prints and bought some at the very nice and recomendable site of Rosa Pomar http://www.rosapomar.com, and did as you see just some cute experiments with it.