Rag of the Day April 3 2013

A terrible photo with the phone's camera, but hopefully shows just how it was. Blue mid-weight woven cotton that was carried along by the spring flood up over the bank. The cloth is about six inches wide and eighteen inches long. Tangled between two branches about two feet off the ground. It caught on the branch to the left side of the photo and twisted around before the other end caught another branch. Just a lovely little blue cloth from who knows what.

Weaving a Community Economy

Gift from my friend up the street; March 16 2013.

Walking the dog this morning, we were coming upon a pair of evangelists. They were going door-to-door the way they sometimes do. As they were leaving my friend's house after a brief exchange and flyer-delivery, we were in front of the house. I called 'good morning' to my friend. She called me over with "I have something for you". By the time we bid goodbye to the departing visitors, my friend emerged with a clear plastic bag with these four tablecloths and three napkins. The two floral prints are cotton, the right size for the special table we live at under the arbor all summer, the red is linen and huge. The white is gigantic- as long as a bedsheet- and very worn Irish linen damask (the napkins match). It is festooned with ribbon shapes and clover.

This little event happens a lot, and today it cemented for me the grandness and yet invisibility of an entire 'hidden' or invisible economy, and my place in it. My friend and her son buy things at auctions and re-sell them, or in my case, give them away.  There was time when she could have become kin- decades ago my brother dated her niece; I didn't know her then, she had small kids, but now I turn to her for information about the neighbourhood (her family goes "way back" here), advice about my dog, we always work together when neighbourhood things need to be done. And when she's at an auction and buys a box with cloth in it, she gives it to me.

She and her son use the income from this enterprise as a tiny supplement to their wage jobs. Both are employed, and I don't really know the role of their income from this enterprise in their overall household, but I expect that when she retires in the near future it is going to be 'a bit extra'. But key to me today is that this enterprise of theirs produces more than cash. That she comes upon things that friends and neighbours she knows can use, it is also producing bonds and ties within a network. I hardly reciprocate with any finesse, but that doesn't matter. It's just a bond. One that makes us part of 'a community'. And that is grand.

Waste cotton fiber from woven cloth, hand-spun into yarn. Fair Trade from Julie Northcott-Wilson.

Which leads me to the next manifestation of such a grand network on my mind today, which is the magnificent yarn above. It is made from cotton waste from industrial manufacturers and spun into yarn by a women's collective and produced for a Fair Trade buyer in the United States, Julie Northcott-Wilson. The production of goods like this provides steady cash incomes for women, which means of course a steady source of income for a family.Women's production everywhere in the world is core to household economies, whether that production is for wages or unwaged labour to provision the household or most likely both.

Today I'm thinking about the collision and interweaving of the economic ties represented in these sets of objects. These are economic forms that stretch and strain notions of 'economic activity', that force human concerns and human relationships to the forefront, that short circuit the cycle of production/consumption/disposal. The women in Nepal and I will never share a breezy evening delivering flyers to the community picnic door-to-door, but when I show my friend up the street this yarn, she will immediately understand it. She will recognize their economies as similar.

There is something in this all today for me....

Rag of the Day Digest: The Whole Winter

I can hardly believe that I have been away from this the whole winter. I have kept track of your blogs and stayed in Magic Diaries with the ever amazing Jude Hill, but it has been an unusually busy time with no evenings 'long enough' to post. But with Spring in just a few days, I had to start posting.

Part of the problem is that the four finds I have had folded on a table awaiting documentation are each kind of strange. I just haven't figured them out. But here goes.

January 2013, frozen solid in roughly this shape, on the boulevard on Grey Street. It had a round imprint on top, presumably because it had been sitting underneath a garbage can during the day before the night I found it. Burn test tells me it is mercerized cotton or linen. It is the most luscious, soft but sturdy cloth and it is this perfect walnut brown. One edge is machine hemmed on a home machine. It is just a beautiful piece of cloth, found frozen into a little block with the imprint of a garbage can on the top.

January 1 or 2 2013, one side of a collar piece from a blue nylon coat. Found in the middle of a narrow path along the river near weekend park, the day after a 36 hour windstorm. The kidney bean-shaped holes are certainly chewed by a squirrel. The wind had been so intense for so long that every trace of anything that could be whisked away by the wind was gone. Except for this. And so I think it is kind of special.

December 2012 Weekend Park. Parts of a light cotton jacket that once had a black lining. Wrapped completely around a thin Box Alder branch that had dipped down into the river during high water in the Fall. It was wrapped so thoroughly around the branch it looked like a giant cocoon. The cloth to the inside of the bundle is in good shape, but the cloth on the outside melted away when I washed it. Once an extremely ugly jacket, with a fussy little collar, shoulder pads and puffy sleeves. The stripes are printed on one side, not woven in. But it is a beautiful cloth.

Mid-December 2012 Bathurst Street. A salmon coloured cotton men's pyjama top. I broke two of my rules with this cloth. First, I ever so lightly bleached it when I washed it because it had a lot of road-filth (oil, who knows what) on it. Thus, it turned this very light pink. Second, it had been deliberately made into an object of art by someone else- someone had tied the sleeves around an empty cardboard box, had knotted them in the front and pulled the shoulders up around the edges of the box. I had walked past this configuration many many times as wind and who knows what moved it from one place on Bathurst to another. It was the most poignantly beautiful thing. It was a sculpture of a hug. When I found the whole thing crushed by the snow plow I brought it home. I never otherwise meddle with other people's deliberate and artistic interventions of this kind.  

Walking by the river tonight I can see it is higher than it has been in three or four years, and is staying higher for more days and hours than it has in many years. After a terrible drought last year, all this flowing water inspires hope. And of course it makes me think about what will be washed down stream, what will be dislodged, what will appear and where.

Thank you for stopping by. I have new updates to come on the 2013 blanket, but they will have to wait.

Boro Yogi Update: It's Done!

Well, it's done. Into the laundry last night, hung to dry overnight, a few shreds trimmed, and it's done. And by 'finished', I mean that the two fronts are lined with a patchwork of scraps. And so this is now what the inside looks like:

The fronts and sleeves are thus now four layers of cloth thick: a foundation cloth (hidden both inside and out), an outside base that was woven into and patched (making this layers two and three) and then this patched lining cloth.

I didn't stick with found cloth on this lining. This is all second hand, and each piece is more personal. Some of the plaid flannel is old sleep pants from the guy who lives here, the batik (brown on the right hand sleeve) is part of a napkin I bought at the Goodwill, the emerald green is shantung silk I got second hand. I just basted these on a piece at a time, holding the whole garment in my lap, smoothing each piece and adjusting until it 'fit'. I discovered pins were not useful doing this part- I just needed to work with each piece and the foundation until they worked together properly. I overlapped the edges an inch or so in most spots.

This is the outside back. As you can also see, I completed the sleeves, both inside and out, with a base cloth over the foundation which I then wove into and patched. The inside of this back is not yet lined, for two reasons. First, because it just might not need it. It is three layers thick now, and the foundation cloth is quite sturdy (it was a new second hand scrap of some kind of heavy cotton). The second reason it is not lined is that the back is translucent- meaning that I will have to line it with white, or the colours will show through. So I'm still deciding what to do with this. I am going to start using it for now, and see what happens.

And finally, this is a close up of one of my favorite parts, built up with two cloths 'full' of holes (the grey brown on the right and the sun faded blue on the left), holes I just filled in with other small bits.  I love how it looks abraded and worn away.

That's the outside front above. And so now the boro yogi will go on the bed and be the blanket it is meant to be. But it is always ready to travel, too:

I'm ready to start something new for the new year. I started this on January 1 2012. It's a very exciting prospect. I have a found quilt (a 'Dresden Plate' pattern) that I want to work with, so it is on my mind in quiet moments what it might be best to become. 

Thank you for stopping by.

Rag of the Day December 01 2012

December 1, 2012 under the Horton Street bridge. Poly/Cotton blend from polyester-stuffed duvet that has been stuck in the mud here since at least August.

Other side of the above. This side had some tender small roots grown through it.

For comparison, the red I found today beside the red I found in the same place some months ago. The stiched piece above is a close up view of the red patch on the front of the boro yogi/dragon robe. I'm struck by the difference. The original red is more yellow, the new is more blue. And it makes a huge difference.

November 29, 2012, L and PS tracks at Bathurst Street. Really jammed up against the track. Probably from a quilted garment of some kind, there is a wisp of polyester fill caught in a line of stitches on one piece. Seems like a rayon blend of some kind, but I can't quite tell. Blue, full of holes, some from sparks, rust marks. Survived washing and being pressed dry.

Just a catalogue and process entry today, to keep track of the dates. Also, to note that I've discovered that I can take small parts of items too large to carry home or that would be impossible to launder properly (like 'sleeping bags that have been underwater in the river' or 'blankets embedded in mud for months') by poking a hole in it with my house key. I can tear segments of the cloth using this method. It leaves most of the item behind, and I only do this when the item is too far gone to recover whole, if there's no chance someone else could use it, or if it is home to 'wildlife' (by which I mean insects settled in for the winter!).

Thanks for stopping by!

Rag of the Day: Fall Digest

August 2012 Cotton summer shorts. Soaked for over a month, laundered, much of it just disintegrated, but two largish pieces left. Flecked with holes. Dramatically faded on one side, a lovely indigo colour on the other. Found them while stealing rocks from a factory that's been closed for 10+years on Bathurst Street.

November 6 2012 Swatches of cotton flannel; part of the lining of a c.1970s cotton sleeping bag. By the river at Weekend Park. No tag.

October 2012 Cotton 'fake' ticking; removable cover of a feather pillow. I say it's fake because I always thought of ticking as having the stripes in the warp of the cloth. This is printed on one side. The tag said "Made in the USA". Probably new. From a pillow abandoned in Greener Pastures with a chenille bedspread, various knit t-shirts and some socks. It's been there since July.

September 2012. A most unusual cotton/polyester blend shirt, Arnold Palmer brand, and I can't remember where the tag said it was made. Found perfectly folded up into a little square. It had been unearthed while somebody (the rail company? the city?) was excavating to remove the shack that folklore tells me covered the entrance to a terrazzo-tiled tunnel under the CN tracks near Clarence and Bathurst. The cloth is translucent except for the thin white stripes. I think the cotton is rotted away, and left the polyester.

A batch of little finds that have been adding up. Some of them are already getting worked into the hybrid boro yogi dragon robe.

 

The whole garment is getting difficult to photograph, because it is so huge. As you can see below, I have started on the collar. It is just a strip of walnut-dyed cotton (a cover from an ironing board), not even cut on the bias. But the stitching- long running stitches in parallel rows one way, and then perpendicular the other way- has given it the structure of a collar. Or the stitches shape it into a collar.

Someday soon I'll be able to get it set up outside to get a better picture of it. When it's light out, too!

Thanks for stopping by.

Foraging for Lost Cloth as Discipline and Practice

When I first started out with Jude's classes, my discipline was that I only used second hand cloth- inherited, gifted, purchased second hand. Because, at the time, I was interested in the intrinsic qualities of old cloth. Cloth made within a less rushed, less profit-oriented production process. I was  concerned with the failure of mass production to ensure quality and durability.

-September 1, 2012, Weekend Park. An entire Dresden Plate quilt. Hand pieced, hand quilted. Cotton batting, cotton cloth. Left behind in an abandoned mid-summer camp.

I was acutely aware of the problems of a system of production driven not just by haste, but by a sense that everything is being made cheaply enough that it can be rapidly replaced. Everything from towels to garments to bedding to the cloth we buy to make things is engineered to fill a short term need. To me, old cloth carries the traces of different priorities.

 

-September 10, 2012, between the dumpsters at the paint store across the street. Cotton Club Monaco shirt. Not too filthy, but needs a serious wash.

But it is not just 'old cloth' that fascinates me. It is, it turns out, cast-off cloth. Stuff that has been sent off to the second-hand store, donated to charity or put in the garbage because it is excess. Not because it is worn out, not because it is used up, but because its current owner wants to move on to something else. Is ready to move on to the next thing and has too much.

 

-end of August, 2012, weird little meadow triangle where I found the grey Camp Shirt. Yellow with navy woven check, I guess. Cotton, blood stains on left front, but otherwise in perfect condition.

The same system of production that, arguably, drives down quality (and consumer's awareness of quality), also drives down production cost. Which drives up consumption. And drives up production. Less-discerning consumers do not need to discriminate on the basis of quality. They only need to discriminate on the basis of style, only to catch up to the ever-moving trends. Unless 'buying something new' itself is the end, which it could be.

 

Really horrible, inexpensive fashion shirt that inspired the boro yogi dragon coat. Because I kind of fell for it after all.

Consumption has become over-consumption, in short, and the excess that falls out of that system has to end up somewhere. And here, where I forage every day with the dog, in the big loops that begin and end at the gate, that excess is scattered around in various states of decay. Because, and this is the key, because this is the kind of landscape occupied by the people who catch this excess stuff when it lands. Where people without homes, without privacy, without a place to stash their stuff find themselves acquiring and then casting off the cast offs.

 

Camp Remnants in Weekend Park, September 8 2012; where the Dresden Plate quilt came from. Not an indictment of the people who stayed here, but a record of just how much stuff gets cast-off within our current system of consumption. Whoever camped here couldn't possibly have taken all this on to wherever they had to go next.

 

Most of the above has already been hauled to the dump. It had a brief respite from this fate after whoever brought it here found it on the curb, in a dumpster, at a second hand store. This stuff was all old, used, nothing here was even vaguely new. Most of it had still had some use.

 

Most stuff left behind in sites like this, however, simply rests there, worked into the plants and the soil by the usual stuff- rain, wind, snow, sun.

 

-Mid-August 2012, CN tracks on a rainy Saturday morning, behind the Men's Mission. Cotton (? it is still too wet to burn test it) from a padded jacket almost completely buried in the ground. This is pre-washing; it is still soaking, and turns out to have dozens of small holes in it.

It disappears to reappear in the fall and the spring. And it changes in those interactions. It gets.stained, fades, develops marks and traces. It gets shredded by lawnmowers, snowblowers, run over by cars. It finds its way into nests, gets eaten by insects, plants grow roots through it.

 

-September 9, 2012, Greener Pastures under the mature American Chestnut on the north side of the park. Astonishingly, I found another piece of this very same cloth about 100 feet away over a year ago.

That first piece is now part of the cloth that is on the back of the boro yogi.

Trying to understand why there is so much lost means, to me, understanding all of this- the long chains of production, getting, giving and losing. It has been necessary to me to understand that these are not isolated, individual, surprising processes. These are processes and flows that are normal. They make finding cloth unsurprising, expected, normal.

 

The practice of setting out to find cloth disciplines, sets the parameters within which I am sewing things like this above. This is 'discipline', not as in 'I don't eat a cupcake every day' discipline, but as in a practice that frames and limits the enterprise of making for me. Foraging is the practice that puts (welcome) boundaries on what I can use, but that also produces the ground for imagining what's next. For me, what's next has to include evaluating the processes that produce so much lost cloth.

 

Horrible shirt strips reworked into a flaming pearl for the dragon to pursue. HA!