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| This is it. 4 oz of silk roving, one drop spindle, one set of watercolor pencils, and two sets of knitting needles. The piece of bamboo in the top right is my spare set of knitting needles--if I need them, I can carve them from the bamboo as needed. | The full set of fiber tools. The drop spindle is a polymer clay whorl with five removable shafts. I spin a very fine yarn (about 100 wpi, or 1/100" thick), on the spindle, wind it off onto the film canisters, and then ply it into a two-ply yarn. |
The shawl. It's a very simple pattern--the spiral octagon from Barbara Walker's _Fourth Knitting Treasury_. Spirals are a Wiccan symbol of life, and counterclockwise spirals are for undoing or letting go, thus a good choice for a walkabout shawl. I'm adding additional spirals to supplement the pattern, starting with the single dot you see in the center of each section. |
Detail of the shawl. Note how the colors shift gently into each other--this is characteristic of yarn handspun from a dyed roving. The pattern is actually quite simple--you increase one at the end of each panel, every other row. In theory this should produce triangles, but because yarn-overs shift the stitches around them by half a stitch, it actually produces a spiral. |
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| Center detail of shawl. | Detail of the two-ply yarn. The finished yarn is quite thin, about 1/50" thick. (For technical spinners, it's 45 wpi with about a 30-degree twist angle.) The 1" ball shown contains over 100 yards! | A Thai charkha (!) I bought from an antiques and furniture dealer in Bangkok's Chatuchak Market (Weekend Market). It's made of bamboo with a hand-forged iron spindle, and has obviously seen hard use. The dealer offered to sell me two pig troughs along with it, but I declined. :-) | Detail of the charkha spindle. The center part is wrapped with some sort of gummy fiber (presumably to provide traction) and the cord has worn a groove into it. The spindle is held by a pair of rattan bushings, pulled through holes and secured with a slip of bamboo, as shown. The spindle itself is hand-forged. |
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| Here is the wheel itself. Notice the many tiny bamboo slips holding the wheel together! | I have no idea what these are. I bought them from a sidewalk vendor outside Chatuchak market--the tips are very sharp and I plan to use them as short hairpins. I'd guess porcupine quills, but what on earth would a porcupine be doing in Southeast Asia?? |
An origami crab I folded for my diving instructor. It's life-size, about 5" across the shell, and folded from tissue-foil--tissue paper backed with heavy-duty aluminum foil. The photo doesn't do it justice. Tissue-foil makes for gorgeous origami work, since you can shape beautifully graceful curves |
A Lao skirt I bought in Chatuchak Market, Bangkok. It shows off elaborate overshot weaving in the hem, ikat weaving techniques in the diamonds, and more overshot in the "stripes". Lao work is usually done on a very simple loom, with frequent pattern changes. |
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| A (new) Lao silk piece. This is handwoven, I think; the selvages show tension irregularities, especially in the white-striped areas.. | Various details of Lao textiles. | I forgot to mention that these are used garments. They smell lightly of compost--not unpleasant, but definitely present... | ...this suggests that they're authentic, and not created for the tourist trade--unfortunately quite common in Bangkok. |
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Detail of a mudmee-woven jacket. Mudmee is a Thai technique similar to Indonesian ikat weaving, except that the weft, not the warp, is typically tied and dyed. |
