Remembering

sample silk nuno

the idea has been fizzing around on and off for a number of years, and with the focus of an exhibition coming in September, it's sample making time...

Another prompt was this -

mouse nest of wool and silk

The mouse invasion meant I needed to completely clean and sort a stash of cloths crossing generations from Great Great Grandmothers to babies - a collective female history (herstory perhaps)

cleaned and dried awaiting repurposing, remembering

This is Great Great Grandmother Alice Gertrude's wedding dress, thick silk satin, see how rotten it is -

Alice married in 1891

Would this fragile cloth felt in or completely disintergrate?  The woman died of pleurisy when only 37 years old, leaving two children.  The age before antibiotics ... the only remedy was to use a mustard compress to draw off the liquid. 

invisible baste on Alice's silk

stitching right side

To secure the scraps I used a variation of Jude's invisible baste to hold them long enough for the wool to do its magic in the felting.

Freda's wedding veil

another treasure is Great Granny's wedding veil, married in 1932.  Also to be included would be some of the velvet from the sleeves - she had a winter wedding and then removed the top to make a velvet skirt died black during the war.

unfelted

and then this became this ...

felted

and this

closeup of Alice's silk

This ...

woven scraps

became this ...

felted woven nuno sample

I've been using fleece from local sheep - teased cleaned and carded so blending dark chocolate brown with creamy white.  So soft.  A little book would be good to make too to record these folk - to accompany the mantle that emerges.

artisane yarn producers?

Almost gone... Off to the Pyrenees!  Ahh mountains - space, big skies, brooding, bare, misty, cold - a place where the ancestors live.  This peak is less than 2000m so should be able to manage this - slowly...

pic du Cagere
Pyrenees

Wonder if I might find an artisanal yarn producer, or 'wool fleece processor' or even better a felt maker. If you know of anyone in the Haute Garonne or Ariege districts please drop me a line.

Hoping to visit caves too.


And found a link to a textile museum.




Last year we stayed in Snowdonia and hiked up a couple of mountains, found a woolen mill still powered by water, as well as a slow magician - Helen Melvin who introduced me to the idea of slow dying, and talked about this Australian artist India Flint - well I've raved about her work here.