Rag of the Day- Winter Colours

 -February 16, 2012 in front of a fancy club on Queens Ave; it is a very nice quality and finely woven cotton handkerchief; seems to have been caught up in a snowblower given the networks of holes and frays. Bright bleached white. Machine stitched hem. Seems brand new, though well washed; not cheaply made.

-February on Ridout at Bathurst, but I'm not quite sure which day; cheap handkerchief with holes cut and abraded throughout; mauve cotton faded to grey; has a nice feel to it despite what all it has been through.

-February 19 where the L and PS tracks meet Bathurst Street; fine wool suit jacket; black pinstripe faded to grey, but also dusty; pinstripes are white, blue and burgundy; still frozen here; it was hung on a fence post, but too rotted in part to recover as a garment. Beautiful light-weight wool; tag says made in Canada.

It has been a remarkably mild winter here, punctuated by a few snowy periods. This is why I keep finding cloth this winter; it's usually a spring and fall thing- when the snow melts and then later when the plant life loses its leaves and reveals the ground. The cloth of the jacket is especially beautiful, and when it dries tomorrow in the sun I'll see how much of it can be salvaged.

Another Magic Diaries Cloth....

I have, kind of by accident, started a second Magic Diaries cloth, another one to help me think about foraging around in the outdoors here in the city. This one started with a funny little incident, when a squirrel stole a little shibori bundle off the back steps- I set it to drain on the lid of the walnut dye pot. This is kind of what it might have looked like to her, but not as frayed:

And it tasted like walnuts. So two days later I noticed a squirrel on the peak of the shop behind the kitchen nibbling away on something, something which kept getting bigger. It was the missing bundle unfurling in the wind as she turned it to nibble the edges. I found the cloth where she dropped it:

All nicely nibbled into a pattern. To preserve her work, I used one of Jude's methods from CWB, which is to just take the whole cloth and slit it where you want to weave something into it. I stitched the squirrel's patterned pieces to a walnut dyed tea towel, which seemed right.

Cutting around the eye/vortex thing below that came out of the same pot on the same day as 'the squirrel incident' (it's a mark made by a huge rusty bearing tied up in cotton), I started cutting in curves. This is another thing Jude taught us in CWB. So these slits, running in parallel but wavering lines, create these shapes that are fascinating me. And the weird warping movement of the thing.

There are twenty things about this so far that I am going to change, but for now it is just so easy to play with. It is almost all found cloth, except for a strip or two of old pillow case (my fern print thing above), some silk from an old blouse of my Mom's, a little yellow sari strip, a patch of linen tablecloth dyed in my indigo jar and a glorious strip of silk from Arlee.

But my favorite thing about this so far is this ivory coloured cloth:

It's a piece of a tent, a former Rag of the Day, that I found tangled up in branches at the river. It's just a fragment of a nylon tent, but it is just my favorite thing. It gives me hope for all of the discarded umbrellas I'll find in the spring. 

Rag of the Day 2011 Wrap Up

 -cotton-blend? velvet-type, partially sunfaded; found on the curb on Horton Street where it had been plowed up out of the gutter with the snow; had one panel of wood (at the top here) glued to it.  'Up-stream' is a place which regularly throws out old cases from musical instruments. December 2011, but I can't remember which day.

-polyester (some type) cover from an 'accent cushion'; tangled up at the bank in Weekend Park between Pebble Beach and Sandy Beach; the polyester fill stuffing had been pulled out by the recent floods and fanned out for yards where it caught on stems of plants and looked like tiny snow drifts. Horrifyingly the cloth has no fading, few pulls, no signs of erosion at all even though it has been underwater, in the sand, for weeks. December 31 2011.

Strange new finds. I love the colour of the purple and how it faded so consistently to mauve. It is not a particularly drapey velvet, it is stiffer, but will be a perfect base for stitching, maybe applique. The polyester brocaded kind of thing is easy to sew, but feels cold and unpleasant to the touch. I could use it as a lining for something, between cloths. And it appears it will last - forever.

Rag of the Day December 25 2011

 -December 25 2011CN tracks between Ridout and the station; cotton fabric woven in Austria according to the tag and shirt sewn in Canada; the front breast side is quite torn up; sun faded in parts, tears easily but quite sturdy. It is almost like a polished cotton.

I used some of the back to make this.

It is a gift for a young photographer and former student who made us the most beautiful gifts last year (a book of her photos and a flock of Chestnut Animals!). All of the silk is recycled Fair Trade sari strips except for the turquoise from an old embroidered robe I bought at the Buck a Pound a few years ago. The backing is a former rag of the day too, the thread is bamboo and second-hand embroidery floss. I'm not quite finished with it; I know she will like to know where the cloth came from. And that it is made just for her!

New Feature: Cloth and the Elements

I'm still thinking about these things. It's all cloth out in the elements, being used somehow or recently used, wearing away. These are each how we found them, though we did noodle a bit with the 'GAP' tag so it appeared a bit better. I just like to see cloth outside like this somehow.

Rag of the Day Special Edition: Neckties

-December 8 2011 Fishing Beach; the tan dot is silk, I don't know yet about the brown one.

Late this summer I found one necktie at the same spot on the river where I found these two today; that one is still 'in process' as librarians say, in a bucket on the back porch. It is is so tightly packed with sand that I can't get it out without tearing the cloth. So I'm waiting on that one for now.

But this evening I found the two above on the same little stretch of beach where I found the first one. I've already cleaned them and taken out the linings. Oddly they were tied to each other in big double knots, and around a bundle of brush. Odder still is that we have just finished a major flood here, and so these and the bundle they were tied to washed up sometime earlier this week. And it was such an extreme flood, the bundle could have come from anywhere up river. I'll have to start calling this necktie beach I guess.

When I find a cloth in a state like this- when it is an obvious effort by someone else- I usually leave it if it is as clearly a spontaneous expression as the figure below was:

This appeared by the train tracks last summer. Whoever made it found all their materials beside the train tracks, the same places we go to find stuff. The head, as I recall, was a purse, and the mouth was the purse's zipper.

I'm certain the necktie bundle washed up on shore as I found it, and had floated far away from wherever it was made. And maybe it was just somebody bundling their cut brush with whatever was at hand. And maybe that was just old ties.

I am still amazed at the sheer variety of cloth we find since I started down this path of using it in my sewing last year. I have thought a lot about why there is so much cloth discarded 'in plain sight', and about how much of it seems 'ruined' by being out in the elements- it becomes dirty, but really more symbolically I think 'contaminated' because it has been outside. But, as I'm discovering, a lot of cloth can go through an awful lot and still be perfectly beautifully fine.

Rag of the Day November 18 2011

-cotton-polyester blend; hospital sheet; November 18 in Weekend Park.

-detail of mold stains; cleaned with vinegar, laundry detergent, hot water and finally a bit of bleach to get the smell out, but these lovely marks are permanent.

This had washed up onto the floodplain at some point this fall. It was tied to a fragment of a nylon tent, one corner worked through two d-rings at one tip of the tent. Both were partly covered in sand and dirt that had been deposited by the water flowing over them. Given its association with the tent, I suppose this was part of some improvised shelter over this past summer.