The Basic Dorset Button

Day 294: I thought a revisit to Dorset buttons was in order for today so that I could show you a real one (as opposed to "needle-lace" style). Have I mentioned that I don't get out much these days, what with a little wild creature to tame, gas prices, hot weather, and a round of covid combining to keep me off the trails? I'm a bit desperate for material again, so bear with me. Anyway, the traditional and most basic Dorset button is made in this manner: using a single length of thread (4 meters here), a closely packed base of buttonhole stitch is applied over a ring (in this case, a 1" plastic curtain ring). The bumps around the outer edge are turned to the inside of the ring, and then using the same thread, a web of spokes is wound over it, progressing as if following the numbers on a clock. The number of spokes is up to the individual. When the spokes are complete, the center of the web will appear quite chaotic until a few cross-stitches are worked at the middle to separate them. Once the spokes have been isolated, the winding of the wheel begins. The thread is brought up from the back to the left of a spoke (assuming the worker is right-handed), then taken down through to the right of the same spoke. It is brought up again two spokes to the left (counting the spoke just wrapped). It is then taken down to the right of the leftmost spoke, creating a wrap around it. Again, bring the thread up two spokes to the left, and repeat around and around and around and around until the web of spokes is covered. I ran a bit short of thread before getting all the way out to the buttonholed ring, and because it's difficult to join a new thread seamlessly, I decided to let it stand as is. After all, this was just for a demonstration and, in fact, many old buttons were made this way without completely covering the spokes. With different ways to wind, many different patterns can be made over the spokes, even many which are not geometric, such as trees and nosegays.

Patty's Potato Chip

Day 296: Yesterday, the Potato Chip Quilt arrived at its final destination, taking my sister-of-the-heart Patty quite by surprise. Oh, I'd baited her with a tracking number so that she could follow a Mystery Box as it travelled across the country, but had given her no clues as to what it contained. The third member of our triumvirate was in on the secret, keeping her lips zipped as tightly as mine. I wanted her to share in the suspense and the moment of revelation. Now both of my "sisters" have quilts I hand-stitched, although Mousie's was pieced by her grandmother about seventy years years ago.

Quilting is one of the ways I've kept sane through the pandemic. When I finish the one currently on the frame about two weeks from now, it will be the seventh one I've made since covid protocols became a new way of life. Of those seven, one was quilted with the sewing machine and one was tied, using buttons at the anchor points, but the other five were all hand-quilted to make the puff pattern visible on the back side (photo, right). This stitching helps stabilize the batting, although modern batts don't tend to lump like the cotton ones of yesteryear. I find hand-quilting very relaxing, even meditative, and I am grateful to the friend who gave me her old quilting frame which has made the job even more enjoyable. As much as I love piecing the bright colours and arranging them, I am truly in my métier when doing hand-stitchery. One hand remains above the quilt, the other beneath it, driving the needle straight down or straight up, striving to keep my stitches uniform and aligned. As my mother often said, "A thing worth doing is worth doing well," and I try to live by her philosophy. Even so, my hand-work is far less meticulous than that of my great-grandmother who, although I barely knew her, has served to inspire me in the art of quilting.

Tablet Weaving

Day 70: I've been drawing on old skills to keep boredom at bay as I shelter in place during the pandemic, and in most cases, that just means digging into the back of the cupboard for equipment I already own. That said, I knew I had thrown out my old cardboard tablet-weaving cards at least a decade ago because they had deteriorated to such a point as to be unusable, so I ordered a set of 25 plastic ones to replace them. Having not touched tablet weaving in ages, I was pleased to see the art benefiting from technological advances. Forty years ago, plastic cards weren't available. I started with a simple pattern "to prime the pump" (as it were): a single diamond which, worked with thrums from weaving gave me a sample piece about half an inch wide and five inches long. For my second project (shown here), I dug out two skeins of space-dyed #5 perle cotton which I had originally intended for hardanger, cut each in such a manner that I could best utilize the entire length, and doubled the pattern so that it would yield two diamonds instead of one. The space-dyed thread gives a shimmery effect to the weaving. Tablet weaving (also known as card weaving) is an excellent introduction into the art of creating textiles by manipulating warp and weft. Although I've used plastic cards here, you can make your own from materials you probably already have on hand. You'll need some stiff, thin carboard and a hole punch. Cut out 2.5" or 3" squares , punch a hole in each corner and round them so they won't catch on your threads. Then all you need is some yarn or thread (beginners should use smooth fibers, not yarn) and you're on you way to a weaving adventure.

Fiber Artist In Residence

Day 57: Just so nobody thinks I'm slackin' off during the pandemic, I thought I'd pull a few of my current projects together for a group photo, emphasis on the words "a few." There are others which, for want of space, simply couldn't be accommodated, like spinning, weaving on the floor loom, piecework for another quilt. I do not believe in letting my hands rest idle unless they are holding a book or puzzle, and as I have said repeatedly to friends of late, I have the attention span of a nervous gerbil. Some processes demand longer stints of activity than others, but many of these crafts are such that I can do a row here, a few throws there, fifty stitches in another place and then move on to something else. This keeps me from getting bored (a mood I fall into all too easily), and a bored Crow is a cranky Crow, and a cranky Crow should really come with a big red warning label.

A bit of backstory here: one of the first full-time jobs I ever held was that of art-needlework consultant for a chain of three stores on the east coast. I was already well-versed in many forms of needlework, although at the time, I leaned more heavily toward knitting than anything else. It was during my employment that I learned to tat with a shuttle, rounding out a knowledge base of the most common types of needlcraft. As I matured, I kept searching out other needlework methods: tvistsom, Russian knotwork, netting, cardweaving. Admittedly, I found that I didn't enjoy each as much as the others, and some were abandoned forevermore (I will never be a fan of macrame, although I love marlinespike work). For the most part, I prefer to work with finer threads than with yarn, although knitting still ranks among my favourite pastimes, and when I do crochet, I seldom use a thread larger than size 30. Weaving, whether on the floor loom or my small rigid heddle, is also high on the list. It is a rare day when I don't have a knitting project in progress or the big loom stands empty.

So...to the details, then. My living space has been occupied with one quilt or another for at least the last four years straight, so the Hexagons form an appropriate background for (top left, going counterclockwise): kumihimo (beaded), crochet (a pineapple tablecloth motif using ecru vintage thread), peg-loom knitting, rigid-heddle weaving, nalbinding (an Ugly Yarn project), knitting, and last, hanging on an inprompu loom in front of the fireplace bricks, sprang (again using the Ugly Yarn seen in the nalbinding legwarmers). Ya think I have enough to keep me busy for a while?

Old Dog, New Trick

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Day 53: This old dog has learned a new trick: nålbinding (or at least the Oslo stitch, so far). I happened across the word in reading about språng, and from hereon out, I'm going to dispense with the diacritical marks for the sake of my English-speaking readership. Indeed, nalbinding can be spelled multiple ways including naalbinding, nalebinding, nalbindning or naalebinding, depending on what part of Scandinavia you're in. The term was only coined during the 1970s and means "needle-binding," although the process has been documented from 6500 BCE. You can read more in Wikipedia if you're curious, and especially since that is currently my main source for its history. Traditionally, it is done with a large-eyed flat and somewhat blunt needle made of wood, bone or horn, but not having one handy, I made do with a yarn needle to create a pair of wristlets. It took a few false starts. In fact, I still have a tendency to make a Möbius strip when starting the second row if I'm not paying close attention to my work. Strangely enough, once I had completed a sample piece, I recognized the technique as something I'd seen before and assumed was knit. Apparently, even the experts have some difficulty telling whether a piece is nalbound or knit when certain stitches have been used. Oslo stitch appears almost braided, and in worsted, makes a very dense textile with an attractive surface character. It has very little horizonal elasticity (i.e., following the direction of the rows) but is somewhat more stretchy on the vertical. The major drawback of the technique is that it must be done with short sections of yarn because the full length must be drawn through the loops as each stitch is made. When worked in wool, new strands are joined by felting, but in synthetics, the needleartist winds up with a lot of tails to tuck. Each wristlet was made over 25 stitches and required two 10-yard lengths of yarn to complete five rounds. Oh yeah, my real needles will arrive Monday. I like nalbinding.

Langer Spranger, Longer Spronger

Day 47: In between bouts of working on the Hexagon Quilt, I've been playing with sprang...to be correct, "språng," and pronounced "sprong"...and wanted to figure out a way to construct a frame on which to make larger pieces. A brainstorm struck in the middle of the night as my brainstorms are usually wont to do, and this self-tensioning contraption was the result. It allows me to make sprang of any length as long as it fits between floor and ceiling, and could be any width depending on my (currently quite limited) supply of dowels. The bonus is that I am able to keep the warp under uniform tension, and although the water bottles are empty here, they could be filled as required to suit the fiber. Garden velcro coils hold the shed sticks in place until it's time to beat in the next row. That said, I will apologize to my readers for the garish yarn. It was something I purchased during a brief dance with knit/crochet colour-pooling (a technique I've determined is a complete waste of effort) and it needed to be used up in some manner. What better way to get rid of ugly yarn than in a fiber experiment? I will have no qualms about throwing it away after it has served its purpose as a "classroom material, and who knows? I might even come up with something worth keeping. Doubtful, because the long-dead days of hippies and psychedelic displays are best forgotten, but since history tends to repeat itself every few generations, it's possible they will resurface.

Crewel Embroidery

Day 136: I was only four years old when my grandmother first started instructing me in needlearts and, oddly for a child who quickly became bored with any other endeavour, stitchery held my attention. Admittedly, my patience was (-cough!) somewhat less than it is now, but seeing an image develop from nothing more than thread and cloth entranced me. My first pieces were kit work, cross-stitch on printed pillowcases and table runners, but when my hands had become familiar with the action of inserting a needle accurately, Gma advanced my lessons into stem stitch and French knots worked on handkerchief linen. "Over four threads and back two," she'd insist, not allowing me to be sloppy in my execution. By the time I was six or seven, I'd become sufficiently proficient at buttonhole and satin stitch to be introduced to cutwork, but my fascination with it was somewhat short-lived. I much preferred working with bright colours, creating pictures rather than patterns. It was a logical step from floss embroidery to crewel which, for many of my adult years, was my preferred medium. I don't do a lot of crewel these days. These two pieces were done not long after I moved here, and have hung in the living room above the vanity ever since.

Beadwork

Day 133: Although what springs immediately to mind upon hearing the word "needlearts" (i.e., knitting, crocheting, tatting or other handcraft involving hooks, needles and thread), beadwork nevertheless falls within the definition of "art-needlework." I don't do as much of it as I used to, largely because the finished product is closer to art than it is to functionaltiy, but every now and then, I break out the hair-fine needles and waxed threads and settle in with pots of #11 or #13 seed beads arrayed on the table beside my chair. This, of course, is an invitation to CATastrophe despite the fact that both Skunk and Tip know they are not allowed on hard surfaces. Curious noses nevertheless investigate and the occasional probing paw dabbles where it should not, and tiny beads are enormously hard to retrieve from carpet plush. Nor is the fault always feline; I have been known to reach for my coffee only to knock over a stack of bead jars. Yarns and threads are much easier to untangle, therefore beadwork is done more or less as special occasions demand.

Pulled-Thread Sampler

Day 127: Yesterday, we examined hardanger, in which the threads of the foundation cloth are removed to form holes in the finished work. Pulled-thread embroidery is very similar, but for the most part, the threads of the even-weave fabric base are left intact. The working thread is pulled up tightly to create open areas in it. Here, several different stitches are displayed in a 48-count sampler. The three rows on the border have had threads removed, with the cut ends re-woven into the base cloth. However, the center has not and, in the execution of pulled-thread work, the route of the working thread must be planned with care to keep it from showing on the face of the needlework. More commonly seen than the lacework shown here, hemstitching is a very basic form of pulled-thread work.

Tatting - The Transfer

Day 102: If I had a dollar for every person who's said to me, "I tried to learn to tat, but I kept getting knots in the wrong places," I'd have substantially more to spend on fibers than I do currently. That said, I sympathize with their plight. I made the same error when I tried to teach myself using a book. It wasn't until I got some...ahem...hands-on instruction that I saw what I was doing wrong.

It's difficult to see what is meant by "the transfer" when working with something as fine as crochet cotton, even in the larger sizes. To make it clearer, I wound a "Tatsy" with nylon cord. "Tatsy" is a giant economy-sized shuttle, very awkward to use with hands as small as mine. I can't imagine how you'd ever use it for a project, but that's neither here nor there because it serves its purpose well as a teaching tool.

For this demonstration, I'm only showing the first half of a double stitch (ds), but the principle is the same for the second part. Tatting is comprised of double stitches and picots. Double stitches are comprised of two half-hitches, the first made when the shuttle passes under and then over the ring thread, the second made when it passes over and then under (the exact opposite move). We won't worry about that for now. Let's just get the transfer down, because that's where people make their mistakes.

To start the first half of the ds, the shuttle thread is looped over the back of the working hand (right hand in my case), then passed under and over the ring thread, and under itself. The shuttle thread is then slid from the back of the hand and pulled tight as the tension is relaxed in the fingers holding the ring thread (left hand in this case). This allows the knot which has developed in the SHUTTLE thread to be transferred into the RING thread so that it actually slides along the shuttle thread as it (the shuttle thread) is pulled taut. Note the loop of thread in the center photo. Observe that it is still in the shuttle thread. Now look at the bottom image. The shuttle thread has been pulled tight, and the half hitch has transferred to the ring thread on my left hand. After a series of ds have been made, you'll see that they slide along the shuttle thread easily if the transfer has been done correctly. If not, they won't budge. When sufficient ds and picots have been made for a ring, the tatting is dropped from the left hand and the shuttle thread is pulled up to close the ring.

Most tatting is done with two threads, shuttle and ball. The shuttle thread is used to make the rings which give tatting its characteristic "little flowers" look, and the ball thread is used to make chains between rings. Tatting can also be made using tatting needles, although needle-tatting is seen less often than regular tatting.

Cat Hair And All

Day 347: I picked up my Home Arts submissions from the Washington State Fair today and finally got to read the judging cards. The judging criteria include craftsmanship, degree of difficulty, design (proportion, line, colour, individuality) and presentation, the judges may elect to suggest areas which need improvement in stitch evenness, tension, blocking, cleanliness, seaming, ends and outer edges (selvedges). Both of my woven pieces drew comments of high praise for the selvedges, an area which is a major issue with many weavers. I received high marks for craftsmanship in my weaving, but since both pieces were relatively straightforward designs, the degree of difficulty score was not as high as it could have been. I am quite pleased with the way the judges scored the weavings.

Although the bobbin lace piece took first prize with a nearly perfect score in craftsmanship (missed by one point out of 40), it was down-pointed for cleanliness, which puzzled me until I read the judge's comments. It seems some "fibers" were caught in my work, something other than the threads used in making the lace. It took me a second to realize that the judge was referring to the unavoidable. Yep, it was cat hair. I'm thoroughly amused.

Results Are In

Day 328: Today was my first day of duty at the Washington State Fair (Puyallup Fair) for 2018, and I was finally able to find out if I'd taken any prizes for the two pieces of weaving and a bobbin-lace edged handkerchief I'd entered. I've never participated in Home Arts before, although I did take "Honorable Mention" in an annual national-level hardanger contest three times. Last year, I noticed that the Fair was chronically short of bobbin lace, so after talking to one of the docents, I resolved to put in an entry. The process was a little confusing, having to select a "division" and a "class" without a clear idea of what those terms meant, but I got it figured out. I delivered the works to the Fair office last month and settled in to wait, not really expecting to receive any awards. The Fair does not post results on line, so today was the first chance I'd had to find out. I located the green overshot weaving first and squealed like a piglet when I saw a "Second Prize" ribbon hanging from it, but I was having trouble finding the other two pieces. A docent came to my rescue, and to my great delight, I found another "Second Prize" ribbon on the second weaving and a "First Prize" on the bobbin lace. I will definitely be entering again next year!

Knitting In French

Day 112: Knitting on a French loom is easy and fun, and is a quicker way to make "i-cords" than knitting with needles. For knitting larger pieces, I find that it is faster than the "throw" method, but slower than "picking," and since I'm a "picker," I don't often use a loom. Recently, there has been significant interest in creating "brain" caps (a cloche-style hat with i-cord sewn onto it to resemble the convolutions of a brain), not only from people who intend to march for science, but from those who just love zombies. You'll need a lot of i-cord for the project, so think about using a French dolly (right) instead of needles.

Many of the girls from my era made "i-cord" in grade school under the name of "spool knitting." I'm uncertain where the modern term originated, but since it's popular to affix "i-" to practically anything from the internet, I suspect it was started by someone who wanted people to believe they'd invented the art. Several brands and models of dolly are available at craft shops, but you can make your own the way we made them sixty years ago. Find a wooden sewing-thread spool and drive four or five brads into one end, evenly spaced and sticking up at least 1/2". Other than a hook or picker of some sort, that's all you need.

Run the end of your yarn down through the center of the spool from the top down. Make a counter-clockwise wrap around the first peg (brad), holding the tail of the yarn against the spool so there is tension on it. Continue making counter-clockwise wraps around each peg until you have two complete passes around the spool, keeping the second wrap above the first. Now take your picker or hook and insert it into the bottom wrap and pull it out toward you. Lift it up and over the upper wrap and drop it to the inside of the spool, leaving the upper loop (the second pass) on the brad. Repeat for the remaining pegs.

You should now have a single wrap on each peg. Make a second round of wraps as before, and then repeat the "picking" step. Each time you make a full circuit of the pegs, you will have added one row to your cord. Until the cord is long enough to stick out of the bottom of the spool, pull down on the yarn tail to draw it through the center. You'll quickly get the hang of it...wrap, pick, pull...wrap, pick, pull...and in no time at all, you'll have as much i-cord as you need.

The same process applies to larger French looms. The wooden one shown in this photo was meant for finer yarn, but I used worsted to show the principle. Again, many different styles are available: round, rectangular, adjustable or rigid. If you've tried to learn to knit unsuccessfully, you can achieve the same end result with a French loom.

Temari

Day 65: Mind your spelling, here! We're talking about Japanese thread balls (temari), not thicker soy sauce (tamari). This art was originally developed in China, but was taken up in Japan at least 1000 years ago. In the traditional style, the ball is made entirely of thread, coarser in the center and finest on the exterior. Oftentimes the last layers are wound with very fine silk. Modern practitioners (at least lazy ones like me) start with a felt-covered styrofoam core and use materials such as #12 perle cotton and sewing thread.

Once the initial colour layer has been laid on, the ball is marked out with pins in equal divisions (in this case, 16), and then the decorative threads are wound according to a pattern. Many different designs can be achieved using the same division, but care must be taken to keep the segments precisely equal both in pinning and while wrapping. Occasionally, a final layer may be stitched in place, such as has been done here with the gold cross-hatch encasing the horizontal band.

This design ("Chrysanthemum") is one of my favourites. I haven't made temari in years and although I've given many as gifts, I've only retained a few for the Christmas tree.

Crows In The Corn

Day 9: It looks like a pair of thieves have found the corn the farmer's wife was gathering for her harvest display! These tiny cobs are beaded, and for a sense of size, I've included an inset showing them with a penny for scale. With any of the needle-arts, I tend to gravitate toward the "fine" (size) end of the spectrum, preferring to knit with #5 or smaller needles, to crochet with a #10 or smaller hook, to tat with the finest thread available, and in beadwork, I never use anything larger than a #11 seed bead. The corn was made with #13 beads, even smaller yet.

Each cob has eight horizontal rows worked in square stitch over a pigskin core which was cut at one end to form the husks. Two decreasing rows were added after the main cob was completed in order to make the tapered tip.

I have made a larger version of these using #8 beads which are about the same size as a kernel of  "Indian corn." I worked them over a felt-padded raffia core, with raffia for the husks. They look real enough to eat!