Cryosphere - Hydrosphere completed and out there

Cryosphere II - Hydrosphere, 80"h x 50"w, machine sewing, dry felting, stuffing; nylon, polyester, net, cotton, beads, glitter, Timtex, cotton and rayon thread.

An exploration of the way water changes its molecular structure each time it shifts from a frozen state to a solid-state and back again. It is a process known as a phase change and is unique to the water molecule. 

Stuffed icicles of frozen water with bead-filled ends.

Attaching all icicles and flowing water panels together.

Attachment to the hanging device

While visiting hardware stores, fishing stores, pharmacies, a haberdashery and chandleries I bought clip-rings, lure swivels, silicon hair ties, tapes of hooks and eyes and nylon cord. I worked with them all to find a hanging device that would allow the panels to hang freely, hang straight and reposition themselves after being moved.

I settled on the tapes of hooks and eyes.

I bounced ideas off Ron, my resident problem-solver. He made a solid wooden frame to hang the work from.

All packed and ready to go with one and a half hours to spare - just enough time for a shower before I have to leave for the gallery. 

At the gallery attaching the hooks to the eyes.

Velcro to hold on the pelmets. An eye screw and carribenna type attachment to hold the wire to suspend the work from an overhead beam.

Cryosphere - Hydrosphere was my entry in the recent Vancouver Island Surface Design Association's annual exhibition 'Current Threads 2016' installed at the CACSP's Tulista Gallery.

Nyonya Baba Culture in the Straits of Malacca - Traditional Garments

Georgetown, the old part of Penang, is a well-preserved UNESCO World Heritage Site. There one can explore a unique culture that began in the 15th century when the Straits of Malacca was one of the busiest shipping routes in the world. Chinese migrated from southern China and settled up and down the Malay coast and into Indonesia. They married the local Malays and over time developed a distinct culture reflected in their houses, clothing, customs and cooking - the Nyonya-Baba culture. Here is a link to a Nyonya's blog where she explains her origins.

The above image is outside an award winning restored Nyonya Baba mansion in Georgetown. It shows the Baba (the man) in typical Western formal men's dress of the day while the Nyonya (the woman) wears the traditional garments of her culture.

An elaborately embroidered blouse is worn over a wrapped sarong.

The sheer fabric is silk crepe or Swiss lawn embroidered with silk thread in satin stitch and long and short stitch. The area around the hips is edged in buttonhole stitch before the centres were cut out to make intricate organic patterns. The blouse is secured with 3 to 5 elaborate, jewel-encrusted pins.

The fitted shape with the long front is typical. It certainly emphasised the wearer's main role in life - to produce heirs.

However, when the woman turns 60, after 5 cycles through the Chinese horoscope, she refits her wardrobe with simpler more boxy garments usually made in heavier more opaque fabrics. 

The under garment has a starched raised collar like the stay of a men's shirt and it is held together with gold studs as found on 19th century western men's formal wear. This shift to clothing elements normally worn by males is interesting. In this matriarchal society, as she ages and becomes a grandmother the woman's role changes from child bearer to being head of her family.  

She still wears her costly pins, kersang, to show her family's position in society. The Nyonya line began with a Malay born woman who owned the land and passed ownership on to her daughters, giving them long-lasting and legal authority. At the same time, the Chinese-born immigrant Baba set up the business and if  he was successful brought wealth to the family - a powerful combination.

A 1930s matron's/grandmother's over garment made from apple green embroidered flowers on lavender Swiss organdy. The 3 pins are circles covered with gold and rubies.

The starched collar of the under garment has gold studs.

A Nyonya Matriarch

The wealthy Nyonyas were expected to master the skills essential for finding a good husband - an effective beauty regime, how to behave in public, and how to run a household. 

Above is a painting on the side of a Georgetown building of 3 Nyonyas having afternoon tea.

In several museums, I did notice it seemed pretty important also to learn how to master bead embroidery because one was expected to make one's own bridal shoes.

Here is a mother teaching her daughter to bead. The daughter's unmarried status is evident by her side-buns hair style. Her married mother wears her hair in a single high bun. Gold, silver and jewelled hair pins, Cucuk Sanggul, are worn in the buns. 

Bead-embroidered shoe fronts still in the frame.

A pair of velvet beaded bridal shoes, embroidered with phoenixes and peonies, made sometime before the 1930s.

A pair of beaded pink and green check bridal shoes made in the 1920s or 1930s. 

This culture was very open to new ideas and trends. Trade ships brought the latest commodities and luxuries from around the world and the wealthy travelled to other countries. Evidence of this can be seen in the Art Deco influenced design this modern bride worked on her beaded shoes compared with the more traditional floral design seen displayed under the shoes.

I must say my family was very patient as I absorbed and documented what we saw in the museums we visited. They would even come and find me if they saw something they thought I might be interested in. I am so fortunate to be fully supported by my family in what I do. 

Morocco - Things Textiley I Saw

Our annual family holiday was spent in Morocco this year. As you can imagine I have many pics of this fascinating country. I want to show you a few of the textiley things we saw.

Above is a display in a pastmentarie shop of handmade braided belts ready for the discerning bride to select from. Many of these pastmentarie shops could be found together in every medina. They are filled to the ceilings with braids, tassels, cords, cloth covered with sequins.... Every one an Aladdin's Cave.

Here is our wonderful guide, Tahar, explaining how the door into a house/riad works and what all of the symbolic embellishments mean.

But look at what he is wearing over his clothes. It is the traditional Berber unisex onesie, called a djellaba. Everyone was wearing one because it was cold.

Tahar's djellaba had beautiful braiding along the front opening and all of the seams were embellished.

A braider at work in his shop making and attaching braid to a djellaba. I don't know if you can see all of those threads he is manipulating while he sews. It is one of the many, many traditional, specialised skilled jobs still being practiced in Morocco. This is a man's job. 

Our driver, Mohammed, had my favourite djellaba. He comes from the High Atlas mountains where his mother spun and wove (women's work) sheep's wool, maybe goat as well, cloth for his djellaba and his uncle made the braids. It is a rich brown colour, letting people know that Mohammed is an eligible bachelor. I was so engrossed listening to Mohammed talk about his beautiful djellaba I didn't think to take a picture.

While walking the dim, narrow streets of a medina one has to take care not to trip or be garrotted by the braid maker's tool at work. When he needs to make cord he puts his twisting machine out on the street because there is not enough room in his shop to stretch out the thread to make the meters of cord needed to make a braid.

This is the only woman I ever saw making cord. I thought she was very clever to use the holes left by the construction of the ancient city wall to hold the sticks she wrapped the thread around. She walked back and forth along the wall warping up the sticks before taking one out of the hole and twisting it to make the cord.

More posts on Morocco to come.

Busy Weekend

Each day I have continued to repair the bead work on this dress.

The weekend started out warm and breezy - perfect conditions for laundering my collection of domestic linens, acquired over the winter.

Outside in the breeze until damp dry.

Then "polishing" with a steam iron.

This process took 2 days!

The Bridesmaid and the Bead

There will be a family wedding this summer. Older daughter is the bride and younger daughter is a bridesmaid. We found the bridesmaid dress. It has a beautiful  hand beaded, flowing design all over it.

But there is a problem - I counted 71 places where the beads have come off.

 The bridesmaid pointed out the problem to the cashier and got a further discount on the price then confidently said her mother could fix it. 

I looked at the little pack of extra beads attached to the dress's tag. 

Hmmm, not enough for the repairs.

There are 4 different beads in the mix. 

I went into my bead stash. No matches. 

I didn't realise my bead stash was so inadequate.

I spied this beaded place mat under a plant pot and found 2 of the beads in it. The dress has priority. The place mat will just be a little smaller when I have finished. 

Oh dear, now I have to go to a bead store to find the 2 missing beads. 

The things I will do for my children! 

Articulation, Bridging Waters Exhibition

Here is my Postcards From Fundy series where I looked at the history of human settlement in the Bay of Fundy through the textiles the people made, wore and used.

When people entered the gallery Wendy Klotz's "Lost at Sea" work greeted them. It was so moving to talk to a man who had worked as a fisherman in Nova Scotia in his youth.
Wendy's work is about the statistic that as a Nova Scotian fisherman you are 19 times more likely to die on the job than any other occupation. She knitted 19 fish.

Miriam Birkenthal's 'Fundy Algae' caused most people to put their faces very close to the work to more clearly see the details in her bead work.

Wendy thread painted a series as a memorial to the now closed Bay of Fundy lighthouses.
Barbara McCaffrey made a series of small 3-dimensional studies of bivalve shells, found as ancient fossils in the Bay of Fundy and still found on beaches today.

Bridging Waters: Joggins Coal Trees

I sewed 3 different trees' leaf scar patterns on heavy cotton velvet.

Embellished with coconut shell and dried seeds.

Embellished with porcelain painted beads I bought while in India.

The sewn pattern on the velvet ends of each form suggest the trees' water carrying xylem cells.

'Joggins Coal Trees'

Luxurious bolsters referencing the wealth of the Industrial Age being dependant on the vast coal reserves these trees formed during the Carboniferous period.

Articulation Work

I have been working on a series for the Articulated Materials: Bridging Waters exhibitions Articulation and Material Girls have organised. Each member of Articulation made and sent one work to the UK where it was exhibited with a body of work produced by a similar group, Material Girls, based around London.
After a successful 3-gallery tour in 2012, the work has been returned to Canada, including one work from each of the Material Girls group. There are 3 galleries in Canada booked to show Articulated Materials: Bridging Waters over 2013 and 2014 (see side bar on the right).
In the meantime, Articulation members are in their studios producing more work to add to their response to the Bay of Fundy to complement Material Girls' study of the River Thames.

For my first work I researched some of the many rock carvings left by the first inhabitants of the Bay of Fundy coastline. I have continued my research of the Mi'maq material culture.

During 2 visits to the Fundy area I found Mi'kmaq artifacts in museums.
A chair seat cover (mid 1800s) made from dyed porcupine quills on a birch bark ground. The technique is often described as a form of weaving but I see it as an embroidery technique because the quills are manipulated the same way as thread. They are twisted, laid down and couched, while the ends pierce the ground.

This colourful porcupine embroidered basket is newer as evidenced by the use of aniline dyes to produce brighter colours. It was entered in the 1901 Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition in Halifax.
The small basket in front would have been produced for the tourist market. It is made from ash splints, hickory bark and grasses by a member of the Waban-Aki group in the mid 1900s.

I found Mi'kmaq footwear in the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto.
The white decoration on the vamp of these moccasins (1830-1840) is beadwork, using the smallest beads on any shoe in the museum's collection.

Beading techniques allowed embroiderers to move away from traditional geometric designs. The more organic lines and shapes were appropriated from European embroidery styles at the time. It is an indicator of increasing contact between North American aboriginals and Europeans.
My research continues...