Responsibility - rant part deux

Someone mentioned the things that they are personally taking responsibility for, to lessen their footprint on the planet.

I have mentioned here and elsewhere some of the things I have done over the years that are within my ability to control in terms of lessening my footprint.

Beginning with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, I became aware of the damage humans were doing with chemicals.  In 1969 I left Canada for Sweden aboard a freighter as a passenger.  As we sailed down the St. Lawrence River, I noticed the suds that news programs had been warning us about - all the phosphates that were being sent down our waterways from detergents.  I vowed to find phosphate free detergents when I got home. 

As a first time home owner I planted a vegetable garden - because that was what my parents had done, and so I did the same.  For the five years we lived in our first (mortgaged) house I grew the standard assortment of veggies - lettuce, carrots, peas, beets, radishes.  My little garden plot wasn't very big and I had to fence it off to keep our dog from 'helping' by digging things up.  Unfortunately when we moved to our current house, the soil was poor and since I was busy with Life Happening (the move, the death of my father, beginning the weaving program at the college) I didn't have the time or energy to try and improve the soil to the point where a garden would grow. 

A hardware company offered a 'digester' to deal with household compostible waste and I bought one.  As I diverted vegetable waste from the garbage to the digester, our garbage output reduced considerably.  And the end result was waste that could actually go into the soil to improve it.  A few years later the municipality offered large compost bins for free and I made the ultimate sacrifice and got up early enough that I could snag one.  We have used it ever since and Doug routinely takes the compost from the bin to use in the yard.

A local initiative was begun where people could bring their newspaper and other recyclable papers which would then be shipped to a recycling depot and we began saving all the newspapers and such.  Again our garbage at the curb reduced.  Significantly.  The initiative grew and recycling containers began to spring up at various locations and tins, glass, cardboard and paper could be dropped off.  Again our garbage reduced.

The original group called R.E.A.P.S. then pressured for plastic recycling.  In BC we have had glass drink containers (at first) with deposits that would be paid back when returned to the depot, and the group pressured for plastic drink bottles to also have deposits.   Eventually most drink containers had deposits added and people could return those to depots to get their deposit money back.

A couple of years ago, the BC provincial government instituted province wide recycling programs.  The bad news is that a lot of the stuff that we carefully sort and put into the blue boxes still winds up in landfills, but I continue to sort the things out in hopes that if enough of us do it, some business in the province will actually begin to recycle the plastic.

We have dedicated the space beneath the counter for the blue boxes and the small garbage bin for things that cannot be recycled. 

The end result of all of this is that we wind up putting the garbage bin to the curb every second week and it might have one small bag of garbage in it.  The recycle gets put to the curb every second week, and since our local newspaper stopped production of a daily paper, our paper recycle might go out once a month.

There are areas in my life where I could do better.  Over the years I have been guilty of travelling - a lot - by air.  With no longer teaching for guilds, my air travel will drop about 90%.  Quite possibly more.  I drive a minivan because we did shows and it was the most economical way to get us and the booth stuff to where we needed to go.  I also drive to Olds, partly because flying from here to Olds is difficult, partly because I can bring a van load of things to enhance the class.  If I'm teaching a class elsewhere, I try to just bring one checked bag on the flight, mailing the rest of the things ahead of time.

We have replaced most of our lights with LED bulbs instead of incandescent.  We recently upgraded our house with extra insulation, and bought a more fuel efficient furnace a number of years ago when our old furnace was threatening to quit.

Our vehicles are as fuel efficient as we can afford, and I have been seriously looking at a hybrid once I'm no longer teaching and need to drag teaching materials around.  OTOH, there are now quite a few options and it might be possible to downsize to a large sedan and still fit most of my teaching stuff into a car instead of a minivan.

I try to buy 100% cotton clothing, but that's difficult, especially outerwear.  So I have some jackets made from polyester, but they don't get replaced every year but get worn 'out' - usually around 8 years or longer.  I have some wool coats as well, and those last at least 10 years.

We don't eat 'fancy' foods although we do enjoy out-of-season fruit during the winter.  We don't have kids so we never had to worry about things like Christmas (over) giving and I gave up decorating for holidays a long time ago.  At first I was simply too exhausted to do it, then I just didn't care anymore.

I do still use plastic bags - because I have them.  They were purchased in bulk for customers to carry away their purchases at the craft fairs.  They exist.  I will use them, but not replace them.

I buy in bulk where possible, but our food needs are modest and bulk isn't always economical, when you wind up throwing excess away.

In terms of my weaving practice, I decided many years ago to not weave with synthetic yarns.  All the yarns I use will degrade back into the earth.  I have a lot of rayon in my stash, but since finding out how damaging the production of rayon is to the planet and the human beings who work in the factories, I don't want to use it any more.  Since it exists and I have it in my stash, I will weave it up but not replace it.

(Yes, rayon is 'natural' in terms of it's chemical make up - it's cellulose.  It may be man made, but it is not a petroleum product.)

None of what I do is particularly large or important.  But all of it is within my control.  When the natural gas pipeline blew up about 28 km (as the crow files) from my house, we had no natural gas for some weeks, just as winter was settling in.  We then were on reduced rations for some months afterwards.  We kept the thermostat at 66 F (our thermostat is pre-metric) and used a couple of space heaters to keep the house livable.

A friend asked me why I bothered because no one else would be doing it.  I told her I couldn't control what anyone else did, but I could do the right thing myself.  By reducing my needs, there would be natural gas for others down pipeline.  (The pipeline services people for hundreds of miles south of us.)

So no, I cannot, all by myself fix what is wrong with our planet.  We have ignored climate change to the point where we are in serious trouble and too many people continue to ignore it.  Corporations continue to do business as usual when they could look to ways to reduce their energy needs, or join the movement to reuse, recycle, or just use less.  Instead of constantly lining the pockets of shareholders, shareholders could redefine when enough is enough.  When you are a billionaire, unable to spend a tiny percentage of your wealth in your lifetime, perhaps you have too much?  At the very least wages could be raised so that those people at the bottom could have at the very least a living wage instead being homeless.  I try very hard to not purchase from companies I know have bad track records in terms of not paying their employees a reasonable wage.

I have been privileged to live in Canada where I have benefited from universal health care.  Times have been tough, but we have managed to make it to this point in our lives.  The very least I can do is pay attention to what I can do to make my footsteps on this planet as light as I can. 

Uncomfortable Truths (long rant)

If you aren't interested in my thoughts on politics...scroll on.

One of the things I have been working on the past while is to see beyond my perception 'bubble'.

I grew up in a largely 'white' community.  As such I had little contact with people outside of the largely 'white' (European) cultural context.  Part of that non-exposure to other cultures meant that I didn't get negatively indoctrinated about other peoples/cultures.  I took to heart the teaching in Sunday School that 'Jesus loves the little children of the world'.  Didn't matter to me what colour someone was, or their religion, even, because somehow I missed the memo that Christianity was the 'best' religion.  Instead, as a teenager and young adult, I read about other religions and philosophies, noting similarities to the teachings of Jesus. 

On the other hand, because I grew up in a 'white' bubble, I have had to learn how to start to tear down my perceptions. 

I got an early start on this as a child, in large part because I read voraciously, just drinking it all in.  Discovering science fiction at the age of 12 meant even further exposure to 'the other', this time life beyond our earth, cultures that were stranger than I could imagine, finding common ground with other forms of sentience. 

But I still had my perception bubble, my version of 'reality'.

Breaking down that bubble is uncomfortable.  While I would like to think that I'm aware, I have found myself, over and over again, shocked at how other people are treated, even in my own country by my own government, beginning in high school when I first learned about the Japanese internment camps and how aboriginals were treated.

There are many folk who are trying to open the doors that have been closed to them, one way or another.  There are many folk who are trying to work on equitable treatment of all people in society (not just ours, although it is the one I am most familiar with, of course.)

The attitude in North America seems to be to at first deny there is a problem.  Then there is the disbelief that things can be as bad as people who are marginalized say they are.  Then there is the 'not all' deniers.  Then there are the folk who insist that those who have been discriminated against educate the person who has lived in a bubble of privilege.  And finally the segment of the population that throw up their hands and say there is nothing they can do about it.

There may not be anything major that one person can do, but I am finding many small ways that I, personally, can begin to break down the wall of my bubble.  I am a work in progress, and I still find myself bumping into another section of 'wall' I didn't realize was there.  But here are a few things that have worked for me.

Read books written by people who are not of your culture.  I have found books written by Canadian aboriginal folk who tell their story.  It may be painful, but we need to witness.

Read history written from the viewpoint of aboriginal people.  Yes, various aspects of the Canadian government tried to wipe out the aboriginal people in Canada.  Yes, smallpox infected blankets were distributed.  In BC one smallpox infected person was taken to coastal aboriginal villages to purposefully infect the aboriginals.  No, this isn't fiction, there are actual letters detailing the plan.

We watch programs on the APTN network and the BC Knowledge Network.  There are a number of programs that will enlighten and inform 'white' folk.

Lately I have been following aboriginal people on Twitter.  Cindy Blackstock, Paulette Steeves, and others.  While I am not an internet influencer by any means, I can hand them the microphone, so I re-tweet their posts with no comment from me.  They don't need me to interpret what they are saying, they can say it perfectly well themselves.

Paulette Steeves has a book coming out in 2020 which will discuss history and I will be reading it.

While reading The Reality Bubble, I have had to overcome my discomfort on a number of occasions because I am learning things I would rather were not true - but are.  There are things I can do nothing about as a person, but I can at least understand that this is happening.  I can speak out against those people who attempt to obfuscate reality by reinforcing the bias that people live with behind their bubble of perception. 

As human beings, we look always for a level of comfort.  Giving up oil and petroleum products is extremely hard because plastics have become 'necessary' in so many ways to our current comfort in North America.

I remember when people set out to 'save' the trees, replacing paper with plastics.  When I was a child, food came in glass, metal or paper.  Now?  Damn near everything comes with a covering of plastic.  Christmas mandarin oranges came in cute little wooden boxes.  Now?  Plastic mesh bags.  Ice cream came in cardboard boxes.  Now?  Plastic.  Medications came in paper envelopes or cardboard pill boxes.  Now?  Plastic. 

There is a segment of society that is rushing to condemn the use of animal products.  Instead of leather, plastic (vegan leather it's billed as, apparently).  Instead of wool, polyester.  Instead of dairy products, soy. 

Agriculture is now mega farms and soil depletion is a thing.  If our world does climb to a human population of 10 billion (think about how many zeros that number has), food shortages will become even more prevalent.  If climate change is not halted - or better yet, reversed - we will continue to see declines in wild animals in favour of domestic production and ultimately the collapse of agriculture entirely.  It is already happening with biodiversity shrinking and animals like bees and other pollinators disappearing.  I have noticed the lack of migrating birds coming through to eat the mountain ash berries, just in the last 10 years.

Where I live the forests are dying, first because of invasive bugs/beetles, then the standing tinder burns, releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere. 

Australia, Amazon, Africa and other places around the world are on fire - literally.  Sea levels rise as the Arctic and Antarctic melt.  Greenland had a fire this summer because so much of the permafrost had melted, fire was able to catch hold and burn for weeks.

Since I have no children, I can't tell you how tempting it is to throw up my hands and say "There is nothing I can do about this" and let it happen.  But we can make changes.  The oil industry could switch to alternative energy sources.  We as people can make different choices with our purchasing.  We can stop buying crap we don't need that ends up in the landfill (ugly Xmas sweaters?   Made from acrylic, worn once and tossed into the garbage?  We can stop doing that.)

We can define what is 'enough'.  We can tax billionaires as has been proposed by some politicians.  While it is all well and good to see some billionaires donate a tiny fraction of their money to charity, how about they pay their employees a living wage?  Companies like Wal-Mart who hand new hires an application for food stamps know they are not paying a living wage and are making money through corporate welfare.  Amazon (the company not the region) could give their employees better wages and treat them fairly instead of making them work insane hours for a pittance.  (I rarely buy from either Wal-Mart or Amazon - they are last resort options.)

Instead of buying - over buying - things that are not necessary, spending money on more and more and more plastic decorations for various 'holidays', we could just quietly celebrate without making a big splash at every house on the street.  We could have community celebrations instead of trying to out do the neighbours.

There are many ways we could make better choices.  My choices may not work for other people, but we each can at least poke through our bubble of privilege and begin to see what is happening before our very eyes, but that we cannot see because of our selective blindness.

Thank you to Ziya Tong for helping me tear down my bubble.  It's not comfortable.  It is necessary.

Sprouting

When I began telling people that I was going to 'retire' and close down my business, the question would be asked - what would I do? 

The short answer was - I don't know.

I knew I would keep weaving, just not production weaving.  I knew I would write - for this blog, if nothing else.  I knew I would teach - the Olds program for so long as they wanted me and I was able.

Beyond that?  No idea.

Having been in the business of being creative for 44 years, the one thing I knew for certain was that when the time was right, the idea(s) would come.

The past six months have been a steady slog of downsizing, getting rid of production equipment I no longer needed or was useful, getting rid of yarn I would not use, re-arranging the studio to hold the new, smaller, loom, erasing the goat trails of clutter and working out the last of my contracted obligations.

Now that 80% of that is accomplished (still some AVL loom bits but Doug is dealing with those so I'm not sure what the status is on them), my shows are all done, shelves have been crammed into every nook and corner and lined every inch of wall space, boxes are being emptied and I can see what there is, it would appear that I was ripe for a confluence of things to happen and a way to show itself in terms of a creative idea.

The seed was planted last week.  When I picked up the silk from Ingrid Boesel, I wanted to make Bob a scarf from her silk as a thank you.  So I have had that idea quietly dormant in the back of my mind since July.  Then a bulk email from Handwoven with their upcoming themes dropped into my inbox.

At first I ignored it.  The deadline for the one theme that caught my eye was fairly tight, I have company coming in January, there are special orders I am working on, workshops to prepare for and a tea towel warp on the Megado.  So I closed the email and let it go.

Well, not entirely apparently because suddenly a tiny seedling appeared.  It was based on a weave structure I'd played around with in the 80s but it was slow and I'd let it go because I had to produce.

I no longer need to weave with a product to sell foremost in my mind.  It doesn't matter if the weave structure takes two shuttles, or is in some other way time consuming.  I can weave purely for my own intellectual stimulation and enjoyment.

Hmm.  Intriguing.  Remembering my desire to weave a scarf for Bob, I dug through Ingrid's yarn and found some that could double as a scarf for Bob, and a suitable project for Handwoven. 

Over the past few days I have thought about the colours I have available, changed my mind several times, ruminated over what I would do, remember how the weave structure actually worked, crunched the numbers, changed the colours I would use - again - so I could make a longer warp, make two scarves and still do a sample at the beginning of the warp to make sure I was remembering correctly.

Then as I started winding a skein of the silk onto a cone, I had a sudden flash that let me know how I could manipulate the weave structure to make it more 'interesting'.  Still just using four shafts, so still appropriate for Handwoven. 

Today while weaving a tea towel on the Megado, I thought about the project, decided that ideally I should do it on the Megado so that it didn't matter how many treadles my idea would take, it would still be 'easy' to weave.  And then I thought about the scarf for Bob, and further realized that doing it threaded on all 16 shafts would allow me to really play with the warp.

I still have to crunch the tie up and treadling, but already I'm getting excited about forging ahead.

It may all dissolve into tears if I've thought it through incorrectly, but never mind.  I'm having fun.  And seeing the whole concept of our conference theme of Confluences coming together.  

Book Review - The Reality Bubble

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

― Francis Bacon, The Essays

The Daily Planet was a weekly news program on the Discovery Channel (in Canada, I don't know about the US) that covered developments in STEM - Science, Technology etc.

Ziya Tong co-hosted the program for quite a few years.  As a journalist interested in STEM, she was on the front lines of being aware of developments and covered the stories with enthusiasm.

Discovery Channel made the decision to discontinue the show after 20 years which was a great disappointment to me as it was one show I enjoyed watching, and being kept informed of the latest news kept me fascinated about what was either available, or where research was looking for answers to questions.

Tong writes eloquently and engagingly about how our perceptions colour our world view.  While I have not finished the book, I have read enough to be an enthusiastic promoter of folk reading the book.  We live in bubbles that we call reality when the fact is, those bubbles restrict our understanding of how amazing our world, our universe, our very existence truly is.

I have been trying to break down my personal bubble of social constructs and finding this book valuable in helping me see through the fog of my own perceptions.

The Reality Bubble should, in my opinion, be tasted, chewed, then read 'wholly, and with diligence and attention.'.

Shoulders of Giants

Wall of Troy (or extended point progression)

Had another weaver phone this morning with a question.  She wanted to pick my brain, and it was a lovely conversation as we examined a technical question about a weave structure.  Or rather, an approach to creating designs based on a weave structure.

It is the kind of conversation I just love to have as two weavers explore possibilities, what has been done before by our forebears, how it might be used, applied to create 'new' designs.  We agreed that there probably is nothing much that hasn't been done before, but that we are simply re-discovering something that had been 'lost' - for a while.

There is very little under the sun that is truly new.  There is a group of folk who adamantly insist that ancient humans couldn't possibly have done amazing things - we must have been visited by aliens in order to have the Mayan Temples, Stonehenge. the Pyramids and so on.

I very much doubt our ancient ancestors were stupid in the way that these people seem to think.  They may not have had the same kind of technology as we do, but they used what they had and made amazing things.

Cave paintings using perspective - something people assumed really wasn't understood until much later.  Rendering sculpture in three D - ancient 3D sculptures of bison have just recently been discovered, dated to 14,000 years ago.  The various 'Venus' sculptures are certainly 3D.

Agriculture, both plants and animals.  Sericulture.  The harvesting and processing of bast fibres - linen and hemp, rami and nettle.  Thousands of years old.

Navigation by the stars allowed Phoenicians, Vikings and Asians et al to travel by sea.  The sea was not a barrier, but a highway, for those who could read the stars. 

Just saw a post where archaeologists were trying to figure out the purpose of a bone - obviously a tool, but they didn't know for what purpose.  A modern day leather worker explained what it was and that to this day they still use bone tools to burnish their leather because it is simply the best tool available, superior to wood, metal or plastic.

Just because we don't know what something is, doesn't mean that our ancestors weren't clever and could work out higher mathematics, medical care, writing, astronomy, architecture.  The Dark Ages may have been dark in Europe, but they weren't dark in other places on the globe.  Asia, the Middle East, Africa continued to thrive.

Thinking that our ancestors were 'primitive' and 'ignorant' says more about us than it does about them.

This is one reason I continue to commit to the Olds College program.  Modern day weavers need good information, not speculation or misinformation built on misunderstanding the principles of the craft.  For anyone who wants to learn, I frequently recommend books and teachers.  For those who learn on line - Jane Stafford's on line guild - exciting things are being prepared for 2020.  Janet Dawson now on bluprint, for a good introduction to learning how to weave.  I have You Tube videos for anyone interested in my processes.

There are books that were published in the early part of the 20th century that remain classics to this day - Mary Meigs Atwater, S. A. Zielinski, Elmer Hickman, Clothilde Barrett, and so on.  Some authors have chosen a niche of the craft and dug deeply into the topic.  Others have done more of an overview.

Request the books from the public library, find out if it is something you want to own.  Or if you are fortunate to have a guild library, they tend to be repositories of older books that are not commonly available now.

Long Thread Media has acquired the video catalogue that F&W Media had, and now offer those as on-line workshops.  (including my two)

There is information out there, but as someone has famously said, if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know that you don't know it.

Or this quote from The Reality Bubble by Ziya Tong:  When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind.  Paul Veyne.  I will do a proper review of this book because it is, in a word, amazing. 

Tricky Twills

Most weavers have experienced the phenomenon of having the outside ends of their warp 'fall out' of the cloth when they reverse the direction of a twill.  It is the reason so many weavers recommend that a floating selvedge be used for twills.

Since I don't like using floating selvedges, I try to find work arounds.  For example, instead of using a large 'goose eye' draft, I will break the twill sequence and use what is sometimes called a herringbone or Dornick twill.

On the current warp, I designed a towel that has a twill diagonal going one direction at one selvedge and the other direction at the other.  The central motif is bracketed with \ and / at the selvedge.   For the majority of the towel, all is well - both selvedges weave as they are meant to.  But I also changed the twill direction in the hems, so when I get to the end of the towel, the change in the twill direction causes the two selvedge ends to drop out.  This is at pick 1140 of the treadling (I generate the entire treadling for one towel).  When I get to pick 1140, I stop, cut the weft off and then enter the shuttle from the other direction, which then brings the selvedge ends back into the cloth.

When that towel is done, I have programmed a lag that is empty and when that lag comes along, it is a visual/physical cue to stop, add a cut line in a different colour so that when the web comes off the loom it is an easy task to separate each towel and serge the raw edges for wet finishing.

The one pick of cut line automagically brings the shuttle back to the other side of the cloth and the towel weaves as it is meant to do with the shuttle catching the outside ends - until I hit pick 1140 when I cut off and insert from the other side of the cloth.  (Yes, I tuck the ends back into the selvedge of both ends.)

The treadling sequence is too long to 'capture' or I would share it here.

However, here is the threading draft showing 1.5 treadling repeats.  I ended on the half repeat to balance the motif.

Yes, there are areas in the treadling where the outside ends are not captured.  They equal 5 picks.  With a textile being woven at 32 ppi, I do not consider this 5 pick float to be detrimental to the textile and it's intended function.  YMMV.  If it was truly an issue, I'd change the tie up to add more plain weave to the mix and shorten the floats/skips.

This is a 16 shaft 'fancy' twill, the motif was taken from an Ars Textrina article about 17th century 'gebrochene' twills, modified to fit my towel format.  Thank you to Pat Hilts for providing the article to the publication.

Fast or Slow

Efficiency and ergonomics are integral to any 'slow' craft, like textiles.  When I discovered weaving, I was not expecting it to be so physical.  I was not expecting to enjoy the physicality of it as much as I have done.  Once I fine tuned my processes and developed good working methods, the end result of that was...speed.  Or as I prefer to say - efficiency.

Speed has a lot of negative connotations to some people.  Some people don't want to weave 'fast'.  They enjoy the slow measured pace of being deep into their zone of contemplation as they create their textiles.

Other people like to develop a rhythm that allows them to produce something in a shorter time frame.

Which is correct?  Both.

In the 21st century there are very few people who are actually relying on the income from the production of textiles for their entire income.  At least not in North America.    There are some, but usually, like me, the effort to keep a roof over one's head, food on the table, comes from a number of different sources.

The books, for example.  I have received a steady (albeit small) income from the sale of Magic in the Water and now The Intentional Weaver.  But that tiny income hardly keeps the lights on.

Magazine articles?  Barely covers the printer ink.

So during my career, I did a number of things - writing, teaching, weaving for designers, selling wholesale, selling retail.  Imported yarn, dyed it and sold it for others to weave with.  Everything and anything that I could do to keep an income, coming in.

To that end, being able to produce textiles efficiently was imperative.  But working that way isn't for everyone and I don't insist that anyone should do anything the way I do it.  All I'm saying is that if someone isn't happy with their results - they loathe dressing the loom because it always results in tangles and tears, they get bored throwing the shuttle or making something twice, or whatever is not giving them joy - that they might like to look at what they are doing to see if some other way might be better for them.

Some people are content to weave plain weave and play with texture/colour.  Some adore the complexity of multi-shaft looms and all the different ways thread can interlace to create a cloth.  Some like to slide back and forth along that spectrum, finding inspiration from many different sources.

Long time readers of this blog will know where I stand on these approaches - they are all valid. 

I keep coming back to Marie Kondo and her advice - if something does not bring you joy, get rid of it.  The past six months I have worked at deciding what I need to get rid of so that I can dwell in joy instead of stress and anxiety.

My new loom means I must slow down my weaving rhythm (yes I can weave 'faster' on the Leclerc Fanny than I can on the Megado, due to the the differences in the equipment) and once again I am trading speed for longevity.  I had to do that when the air assist was installed on the AVL, and now I am doing it for the Megado.

And it's fine.  I'm no longer producing textiles as quickly as I could before but neither do I need to.  My goal now is to weave for as long as I am able, not to do it as quickly as I can.

We are free to choose how we approach our weaving.  We are free to work as quickly or slowly as we find enjoyable.

And if someone really wants to know how I managed to weave as much as I have done, they might like to know more about my processes. 

Weave with intention, at whatever pace you find that feeds your soul.