I attended the 2017 CIETA conference, held at The Hermitage. Very interesting discussions of textiles as symbols of power. The Hermitage treated us to a special exhibit of their collections ... including a display featuring garments worn by Peter the Great. His military uniform included a sprang sash. The curator told me that the sash originally was tricolore: red, white, and blue. The fiber is silk with silver threads worked in. You can tell it is sprang, because one side features an S twist to the stitches, the other side features Z twist. There is a line at the shoulder where the S and Z meet.
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I'm off on another adventure. This time I will be attending the CIETA conference to be held in St Petersburg, Russia. The first leg of the trip takes me to London, England. Waiting at the airport I finished off that neckscarf ... the one I've been working on at the fingerweaving support group meetings in Winnipeg. The extended handle of my carry-on bag was the perfect place to attach the neckscarf while I worked on the fringes.
Now at a hotel in London. Here's the view out of my window: The idea of sprang mittens has come up ... twice within the last week. A researcher colleague of mine found a pair of sprang mittens at a textile market in Bavaria. The seller had no provenance, but they look like sprang mittens in the collection of the Brussels History Museum, that date to the early 1800s. And then and e-mail from someone who took my sprang class earlier this year, Jenny from Regina. She sent me photos of her explorations since that class, including a photo of a lovely sprang mitten. Mittens are a great place to explore sprang. Make two rectangles, cut them apart, tying knots at the cut ends. Sew each piece into a tube, and voila, two fingerless gloves, aka, mittens. Use the opportunity to explore patterns.
I'm working my way through the collection of Coptic bonnets in the collection of the Krefeld Textile Museum. Number 12729 is an interesting one. It features a couple of twined motifs. Interesting to me was what happened with the shape. It began as a 34 inch long warp. Getting to the middle I was thinking that my replica would be tall and thin, not the short squat shape of the original. Then I put in the chain line, which appears a few rows below the initial edge loops on the front. The chain line seemed to make the hat want to be wider. I sewed up the side seams, and blocked the hat to satisfy that chain line ... and voila, the same proportions as the original!
Getting ready for another round of teaching, I'm preparing warps. I special-dye them, to ease the learning process. My daughter hosted the dying. We used the leftover dyestuff to color some knitting yarn. It was perfect weather to hang the skeins to dry.
My daughter has helped me make a new website. In honor of what people have been calling me lately, "the sprang lady" the website has a new name as "sashweaver and spranglady".
The organizers of the Intermountain Weavers Conference asked me back for this year. I taught three classes: intro to sprang, sprang lace and sprang in S&Z. The students were eager and enthusiastic. The world has a few more practitioners of sprang! Then on to the DC area, to be specific, George Washington’s Mount Vernon. I’ll gave a talk on the subject of sprang. I also handed over another replica of the Braddock sash. This time the beneficiary was Carlyle House. They will soon unveil a mannequin dressed out as Edward Braddock in his military uniform. Then on to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. They have a collection of some 200 pieces of sprang bonnets, some complete, some just little bits. Researcher Julia Galliker and I had a look at these pieces. We’re intending to compile our findings into a database (Julia has a gift for databases) and we will present this information at the Textiles of the Nile Valley Conference in Antwerp, Belgium, at the end of October.
Here I am in Victoria, just arrived at the airport. The conference is taking place at the University of Victoria. and here I am, teaching the class, talking a student through a tricky maneuver My lovely daughter Claire accepted my invitation to accompany me. She’s my teaching assistant and photographer. Finger weaving students sit in a row, each chair works both as seat and as anchor point.
I’ve been wanting to make a sprang shirt or sweater for my husband. He says that wool is always too hot. So I found some linen yarn, and made a vest recently. I set up a ‘false circular warp’ to make the work easier. I worked from hem towards the shoulders. Here is the front and back on the frame, the sprangwork done, a knitting needle in the meeting place at the shoulder. When the two sides met, I chained from selvedge towards the middle, starting at the right side, working towards the place of the neck hole, and then starting from the left side and working to the place where I will put the neck hole. I then cut the threads across the center line, just to the front of where the chain line should be. I took photos as I formed the neck opening, cutting threads and tying knots. To cover up the knots, I knitted a length of i-cord covering the knots and encircling the neck hole, giving it a nice finished look. Measurements now indicated that the width was insufficient for the intended waistline … I expected that, and made side panels. This started out as a warp that was a bit shorter than the front-and-back. I made the side panels both at the same time, cut them apart, as I tied knots. Now for the sleeves … made two-at-the-same-time. But before assembling, I added ribbing to the cuffs and at the waistline. And then the final assembly to make a lovely sweater for him.
There was this skein of yarn that I purchased a while back from Redfish, a rainbow dyed tencel. I’ve been meaning to work it up into something. Last month at the Regina Shindig, I was inspired by Terri Bibby, and her Saori techniques. She demonstrated an origami approach to garment design. With this in mind, I set up that rainbow dyed skein on a circular warp, and created a circular piece. Once the sprang was finished, I chained across the place where the two sides met. Here is my schema, how I transformed the circular warp piece into a shrug. I folded the circular warp piece, trying to align the color scheme. To make the color scheme work out best, the chain line does not exactly line up with the starting rows. I sewed up part of one side, leaving open places for the arms, and it became a shrug.
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