weaving and books

pictures from odette blog 

So, the other day I remembered an article or more exactly pictures of a project of weaving using branches as the loom, reminiscent of those mexican or south american stars using popsicle sticks and yarn you make at some point in art class as a child or at least a child growing up in Texas. I couldn't at first remember where I was remembering what I had seen from.

I had recently visited Anthropologie and looked around, where in the past the clothes had mesmerized me, now the books and rare magazines and paper items like calendars, I wanted them all & the four items I brought home I probably should have paired down to the one item that was on sale that I intend to be added to the next package I send my friend. I just didn't want to forget or pass up these magazines I'd never seen available in stores before even in Austin, Texas. This hybrid between "Dwell" and the ended sister magazine of "Make" called "Craft" and "Juxtapoz". So I picked up "Uppercase" issue 14 which is art as the 20/30 somethings make, I almost got Kinfolk vol. 4 which reminded me of Wiksten and the other one "Anthology" the issue is about interiors specifically home interiors for artists, how we combine the two "art and the living space". I picked up a calendar, the 2013 Cities calendar by the Rifle paper co. that reminds me of this book I really want called "Maps" and illustrated book by Lena Corwin available through the Other Books an indie book company.

Well, I ended up remembering I saw the article on the Odette blog. And the other day, arriving home after dropping my husband off at work I picked up a branch that had fallen and was resting on the mulch in the little plot of ground in front of our apt. It had rained that night so I set it on the porch camping chair where the sun light was resting and let it dry for a day.

The next day when I returned in the morning from dropping my husband off at work I dropped my bag of knitting and books I carry with my like a small child's collection of things to occupy my time, so I always have something to do and something that I'm working on, to justify periods of waiting and not see them as waisted time, but time God gave me to knit or read and not give into boredom and say to myself "Why so downcast my soul" but speak into it saying "you have no reason to be in a melancholy funk" "Praise the Lord!" "Be happy!" "You have life!""and that life in Christ!" and "God gave you this gift of knitting and the materials to do it" I can afford knitting needles and yarn and nice yarn at that. I grabbed my x-acto knife  and sat down in my porch chair in the morning light and after braking the branch down to the size I wanted it to be, I whittled the bark off leaving the smoothness of the wood.

I returned inside and picked some thick white embroidery thread that I bought at a village garage sale in Catries, France. Where everyone who lives in the town who wanted to sell something once a month would set up a blanket on either side of this rock gravel wide path in the park area and sell old clothes, odds and ends, antiques, toys, everything. Think garage sale market. And making a technique of wrapping the yarn around the branch so that all the strands of yarn went over the branch rather than over and under, easier to weave with. I recognized that I liked the closely bound white threads by themselves and that the initial weaving threads would work better if they were thinner than the threads of color that you were to weave with.