When I listen to music I really like, I am generally compelled to listen to a single track on repeat– like very on repeat– maybe 50-200 times in a row, until it has worn its groove in my brain and I can contemplate adopting a new mood, leading to a new track. Three cheers for monotropism!
I want to recognize these pieces of music that help regulate my days, and the artists who create them. So I’m going to try to notice, investigate, mention them, and if I can, actually purchase the tracks on Bandcamp.
Guccione is a Sicilian composer and violinist who incorporates synths, and other electronic instruments and methods, to create looping, atmospheric chamber music. Inspired by the relationship between sound and visualization, she has also scored two films, Lubo and Death is a Problem for the Living.
The album is performed by Guccione and eight other artists on violin, fiddle, cello, and voice. It’s produced by Guccione, and three engineers for recording, mixing and mastering.
I’m unable to purchase the track on Bandcamp, as only physical media is available, most of it sold out. I have followed her, and will bide my time.
When my father was in town for Christmas, he brought me a copy of YOU CAN WEAVE: A Simple and Basic Guide to Weaving, which my grandmother, Bessie R. Murray, wrote with Mary Ellouise Black, in 1974.
Weaver House calls the co-authors “two of Canada’s foremost professional weavers in the 1950-70’s.” My grandmother, Bessie was the president of the Halifax Weaver’s Guild (precursor to Atlantic Spinners and Handweavers), and is best known for creating the official Nova Scotia Tartan, which she apparently debuted in a display about sheep rearing at the 1953 Truro Exposition. She ran a busy weaving shop, and there are still Nova Scotian weavers around today, who remember her, as well as “the little boy who opened the door at the shop.” That would be my father, who was just a toddler at the time– the youngest of her five children.
Got this scarf from Tartan Gal at the Dartmouth Market when I was there in October
You can read more about the tartan at the hub for Canadian Tartans, which is helpful, because outside of Nova Scotia, I bet that not many people are even aware that Canada hasregional tartans.
Back to the book. YOU CAN WEAVE was published on New Year’s day, 1974, by McLelland Stewart. I would love to know more about why such an auspicious and inconvenient publication date was chosen. Did they think “let’s get it out there on a day when nothing is open and pre-launch promo will also be nearly impossible!” Did they forget that January 1 is New Year’s? Did they explicitly want it out after Christmas, even though it’s for children? Was there a big weaving to-do on the 5th? Did pub dates just not matter in 1974? I will have to investigate.
Bessie died when I was about five years old, so I never got to know her very well. My memories of her are mainly anchored around toys she made me and my brother– a dollhouse, a doll, and two sets of incredibly detailed doll-and-finger-puppet sets modeled after the Beatrix Potter books, Mrs. Tittlemouse, and Jemima Puddleduck.
For someone who created such an enduring icon, there isn’t an overwhelming amount written about her, or catalogued in archives either– though Dalhousie University apparently has a box of her correspondence from 1976-79 on file, and it’s intriguing to think I could read her own writing from around the time I was born.
And I do have this book, so let’s start there.
It’s dedicated to Natalie and Sheri Black, and to my cousins, Louise, Stephanie, Margo, Holly and Heidi. I can only speculate as to why my other cousins are not mentioned, so for now I assume it comes down to gender and birthdate.
The book opens with an Instructions page, which explains the book is designed for children and easy to follow. This, frankly, shocks me, because we had a copy of this book in the house growing up, and even as an early reader with a passion for making things, I must have passed it over a hundred times, never guessing it was intended for me.
The rest of the book is hand-illustrated, and printed in Bessie’s trademark handwriting. Its easy-to-followness hinges on a UX choice to print pertinent portions of the illustrations and their related text in red. (Pretty cool use of a 2-colour-process layout, actually.)
The jury is out on whether it’s actually easy to follow. This was a long time before the age of YouTube tutorials. Notably, the book has no advice on choosing a loom. It just says, quite suddenly on page 24, “Carry the warp to the loom carefully.” Presumably, you already have a loom, otherwise, why would you buy YOU CAN WEAVE? It’s an instructional protocol from a past time.
My initial reaction to many of the images and subsequent walls of red-painted text– math-laden pages on which nearly every term is apparently worthy of red, is panic.
There are so many things to measure, count, double check, tie and untie carefully. Warps and wefts, and pegs and clamps, and shuttles… Long before page 24, I am already starting to think it’s a miracle any of us wear clothes, let alone have the kind of additional internal resources that would avail us of things like the placemats and napkins that make up the early projects of YOU CAN WEAVE.
Something about the way my grandmother instructs weaving reminds me of the time my father told us (aged six and nine) that he was going to teach us to write codes to each other in binary because it’s easy. I absolutely can not ever remember exactly how binary works. COULD I WEAVE though? Could I?
When I was a teenager, painting and sewing and learning music, determined to figure out how to make everything I wanted to, our dear family friend, Katie Hastings, used to lovingly make fun of me. She’d come over for coffee with my mom, and perhaps ask me for advice on how to add an elastic to a skirt, or attach a ruffle, and if I didn’t know the answer– which was most of the time– I’d think it over and tell her about a book I’d seen at the library that might show the process. And then she’d hug me but laugh her head off. “A book, of course a book. It’s always a book.” I’d ask her why that was funny, and she’d say something like “because you think other people, can just figure any old thing out from a book!”
Well, it looks like I’ve met my match. It is called YOU CAN WEAVE, and my own grandmother wrote it.
I’m going to get myself a table loom.
I’m going to WEAVE. Possibly.
Maybe in the process, I can come to understand something about myself and my family better. Why are we like this?
Please stay tuned for whatever tangled mess I am about to make.
P.S. There are two copies of YOU CAN WEAVE currently for sale online, from a bookseller in Dartmouth, N.S., so you could actually get a copy for yourself if your inner crafty 70s child is interested!
A couple of years ago at a tourist gift shop in Slovenia, we bought these marvellously weird placemats that have a picture of a cow in the alps, on the most perfect weather day ever, with some hand drawn floral art, and then, inexplicably, a gopher photoshopped into the foreground.
I don’t think Slovenia is especially known for its gophers? They do have an adorably invasive critter that’s like a tiny beaver without the big tail, but as implied— not native to Slovenia, and not what this was.
Anyway, when we got them home and out of the packaging (the mats, not the wee beavers) we discovered it was just placemat. Singular. Both pieces were stitched together, back-to-back. Why? I don’t get it. I separated them, and then let them languish in my mending pile…
Until yesterday! Using what I think is probably a sturdy poly-cotton blend, from some old curtains I thrifted, I finally gave the mats a proper backing. One became two again, and now we can eat breakfast as it was always intended: off the face of a photoshopped alpine gopher, while a cow supervises, unmoved. (Unmooed?)
When we moved into this flat, where we would each have our own office, I got the larger one on the grounds that I would also use it for a sewing room… and then I promptly didn’t sew anything for two years due to work crunch, and then burnout and then having an adopted cat living there during her adaptation, etc… etc… etc… You get the picture. One can simply never sew, the same way one never uses the cookbooks.
A year or so went by, and Rodrigue noticed a Facebook group about Projectors for Sewing. (Note: I only use FB for groups… apologies when I don’t see what you post there.)
This was cool for two reasons. One: dealing with paper patterns is the worst, most tedious part of sewing, IMO. Printing, taping, cutting out… potentially hours of work before even getting to fabric, every time you want to make something? Yuck. Two: It further distanced me from the time I would actually have to sew something by putting a lengthy tech and home improvement challenge between me and the activity I ostensibly craved doing most.
As shown in the featured image above, a mini projector is mounted in the ceiling, and projects pattern pieces directly onto the fabric!
Following advice from the group, I:
discovered we already had one of the group’s preferred tables, as friends had given it to us when they moved. I yoinked it into my office.
researched projectors and settled on a Yoton Y3, which was affordable and had the right throw distance to my table.
found an hdmi dongle that lets me mirror either my laptop, or any of my mobile devices
went on a long deep dive looking for very large cutting mats and finally settled on Ultimat, which lets you link together multiple small ones to form nonstandard sizes.
Mounted the projector in the ceiling and hid all my cables, except that one bulky connection, which I’ll need to hide under some art, once I find the right objet
Downloaded Pattern Projector, software which is developed and maintained on a voluntary donation basis by the group organizer, Courtney Pattison
Easily calibrated the software to my projector and table
Discovered the rad, adaptable, inclusive Apostrophe Patterns, which has a range of basics that you can enter your own measurements into, to generate a custom fit pattern for your own body, super easily
And then it actually happened! Seconds after completing my setup, I was actually sewing!
I was of course missing a million things (like elastic… it’s always waistband elastic), and my primary project is stalled.
But finally having the space in order unlocked some tailoring and mending projects that had been lying around, attracting moths for some time. I fixed a couple of shopping bags and hacked an old, icky jumpsuit into some serviceable PJ bottoms (see cat sitting on them, above)– all in the space of an afternoon and a morning.
Although there were many steps involved and many bits and bobs to sort out and acquire, this was a relatively affordable venture. The whole thing, including subscribing to Courtney’s coffee, probably cost about $300 CAD, with all taxes and shipping (spread out over a year). With the time, hassle, paper and tape waste it will save, I think it will more than pay off– especially if it helps me sew through my existing fabric stash, and keep using reclaimed and secondhand fabrics.
It feels good to finally get back to excitedly sewing!
One of the small things I was most excited about when we moved into this house was having a cookbook shelf actually in the kitchen. Now I would truly have everything.
So naturally the first thing I did after moving in was start working more overtime, and cooking less. The books at least, had a place to sit and wait.
At some point over the summer, pining for normalcy, intoxicated by the thought that to achieve it, we just had to believe, Rodrigue established a new house rule: once a week, we cook one recipe from a cookbook we already own.
Obviously we didn’t do it that week and haven’t done it since. Obviously.
Apart from the overwork reason, a few more important obstacles stand in our way:
1) When I cook, I cook randomly using whatever ingredients are going to go bad next, or challenging myself to figure out a meal I can make without opening the fridge or going to the store.
2) Rodrigue cooks exclusively with recipes but he uses a brand new recipe he googles every single time he cooks. If he makes apple pancakes five Saturdays in a row, we are eating five different apple pancake recipes. SEO determines what we have for breakfast.
3) New cookbooks are pretty. And pretty aggressive. Sometimes they just charge the front door of the apartment and fling themselves upstairs onto that shelf. The stack keeps growing.
Still, it seems like a pretty nice idea. So I’m going to cook from the cookbooks I have (and probably the ones that attack me on the sidewalk and come in on the cuffs of my pants like ticks), and perhaps I’ll note what happens when I cook from the cookbooks, here.
