wool foot vol. iii

Image 1 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 2 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 3 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 4 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 5 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 6 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 7 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image 8 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

We were at a small village market the other day and there were hand-made socks on sale on one stall for 5 Euros. My friends were balking at the price, but I feel I have to lead the defensive on this - do you have any idea how long these things take to knit? And you have to make two of them…

While rummaging around on the V&A Search the Images I stumbled across these beautiful images of socks and stockings from across the centuries. Once you start to learn just how to make these things, you start to appreciate them as small but wonderous (and somewhat unappreciated?) works of art. 

Images 1 and 2 have bible mottos woven into the upper part of the stocking. These were both most likely produced for the Great Exhibition to show the high quality that manufacturers' machines were capable of. 

Image 3, 4, 5 show socks produced in Egypt in 250-420 AD, 410-540 AD and 200-499 AD respectively. They all use the single needle method of knitting which was much more time consuming than knitting with two needles and more like a form of sewing to knitting with two needles. The double-toed design meant that they could be worn with sandals, although the patching shows that wear and tear was common, though the socks were repeatedly mended.

Image 6 has little information but was knitted  in England in 1838.

Image 7 shows a pair of women's stockings made of knitted silk, in Spain, during the mid 18th century.

Image 8 shows a pair of hand-knitted men's stockings in coloured wools, produced in Kashmir in the 19th century.

in the basement

 

 

The wonderful Erja Huovilan at Paperitalo here in Fiskars loned me kit and paper to ramp up the press in the basement this weekend. It was good to just change the pace, work with inky stuff and try to play for a while. All the above very childish and crude really, and not neceessarily a means to any particular end. But the exercise has made me stop to think a little bit more about the nature of the shadows. Particularly the knitted one I'm making. It's so very static. I like this - but in the above prints the ones I think captured the qualities of a shadow the best are exactly the opposite: the ones that shift and waver, the ones that are more enigmatic. And of course, all the most interesting things in print are not the pieces you try your hardest on, but the ones that on the throwaway newsprint behind the print intself… Always the way.

it grows vol. iv

Modeled by Peter Pan himself, the sock is complete. Finished a couple of days ago but forgot to photograph it. It comes complete with grass and other small scraps of nature and smells of sheep and hedges and woodsmoke. Perfect for a boy who would rather not wear socks at all, but this way gets to spend all year round treading on meadows.

Now, onward with the much larger shadow. And the writing…

swing time

Just watching Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams and came across this incredible Fred Astaire Bojangles of Harlem dance sequence from Swing Time (1936). Start from 5:00 minutes in for the part I'm talking about…

pinned

Studio wall. Things amassing ready to try my hand at printing over the weekend on the big press that's down in the basement here. Will be nice to do something different and just have a play with some ink for a day or so.

it grows vol. iii

glass domes

Time - and dust - stops under a glass shade…

Still gathering things for the Black edition of The Paper Museum. Not sure this exactly fits, but the idea of a visual pause seems synonymous to me with blackness, darkness, shade.

it grows vol. ii

it grows vol. i

So imagine you are looking at the top of a sock…

The left image is as if you were looking at the sock from its toe towards the heel, the right image is looking from the heel towards the toe…

You will note that I have managed to knit in a round…

And how to shape what is the beginning of the heel…

Onward.

I actually feel like I'm learning something.

(From this pattern here, using these tutorials here.)

a collection of things that may well be called absences

1

2

 

3

4

5

 

 

I'm still gathering things that might be called absences to potentially go in the Black edition of The Paper Museum…

 

1. A black-out lantern: Photograph taken in Fiskars Museum of what was once a regular lantern, but which, during the war, was blacked over to hide the light during night-time raids.

2. Shadow of a plane: This image of the shadow of a plane on a landscape, by Lois Darling for the Japanese translation of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Found at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

3. Painted-in windows: I remember seeing a lot of these in Bath where I grew up, but I never knew why. And then SB told me about the peculiar window tax, which required occupants to pay property tax based on the number of windows in a house. Houses built during the period between 1696 and 1851 (when the tax was revoked) are often seen with bricked-in windows, ready to have glass put in at a later date.

4. Author as shadow: Photograph by Hugh M. Neighbour Snr. Found at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

5. Scipod: The name derives from the Greek skiapodes or σκιαποδες meaning shadow feet. Also known as monopods, these mythical creatures had one leg with a large foot that they used to shade themselves from the sun with. Some illustrations also show the little dudes with two legs, one of which has a much bigger foot. More information here. Image found at the British Library.

night work

Knitting by lamplight: never a good thing… And it turns out I'll need bigger needles anyway, so a trip to Helsinki tomorrow is well timed. At least I now know how to knit in a round with double-pointed needles, so all is not lost. First challenge: check! 

(I realise that to anyone who doesn't knit, this seems meaningless and mundane. But I can assure you that it's no mean feat. A lot of swearing at you-tube videos late last night is testament to this. It's a good reminder for me in my lecturing role that telling people that something looks really complicated 'but is actually soooo easy' is utterly irritating and guaranteed to wind them up…)

wool foot vol. ii

It's difficult to believe it's taken almost all of today to get to this point. Had to make a guage sample to make sure that I have the correct number of rows and stitches for when I actually start making the socks. If you don't get this part right, you end up with midget socks, or giant socks. IT's close - not perfect, but it'll do. And it took three efforts to get to this stage - and ultimately involved a run down to the flea tables in the market place to see if anyone happened to be selling five double-pointed needles for a song. They did! But if I'm going to get this shadow-show on the road I really need to ramp the pace up a little…

dear, dear shadow…

 

Trying to get a sense of what this piece might 'be'…
A day just spent drawing.
Easier (more fun? more therapeutic?) to draw than write.
Sometimes.

But it's been a long time since I drew. 
And I need to do it more.

So. Like this. Only knitted. Full size. 
And the socks part will stand upright, whilst the shadow part will lay flat.

a man and his shadow vol. iii

Date: 6th, 7th, 8th August 2012, 8.00am to 2.00pm

Location: Basement of Meijerikuja 3, 10470 Fiskars, Finland
Figure: Steven Bond / Peter Pan

Weather: Sun intermittent

floccus

It always excites me to find a material that is utterly appropriate for a job. This wool is spun here in Fiskars by Eeva-Kaisa Ailus, a textiles artist and inhabitant of Fiskars Village. It's beautiful stuff. A natural brown-grey. Perfect. If you're going to make a piece of work using yarn, from a drawing originally created in a particular location, exploring a subject that seems to be significant to that place and its occupants, then it seems only right and proper that the material you produce it in also comes from that area…

wool foot

  

 

 

Looking around trying to find good patterns for socks, to develop my Shadows of a Man project… This will be one of a series of three-dimensional and drawn pieces that will fwork in conjuction with The Paper Museum. (At some point I will try to actually explain this whoel project, when I've managed to formulate the words - and the idea - myself.)

Have never knitted socks before. Looking at all the variations out there I am now reasonably skeptical that I'll be able to pull it off. Always just fumbled my way through before, or made it up - but this looks intricate and complex. Deep breath.

These images all from this site.

a man and his shadow vol. ii

This drawing keeps growing with the intermittant sun. But as its form grows, the more my confidence deflates and the less certain I am that I can actually make what I originally intended to. Let's see. More soon…

conceptual gymnastics

 Have been somewhat scuppered today in my intention to contiue working on the shadow drawings downstairs in the basement. No sun today, just cloud. But the sun is inclined to do that, so I'm not troubled that for today I have to devaite from my plan. (But do please come back bright and early tomorrow…)

I've instead used the gloom productively to concentrate on my Paper Museum project. This requires quite a lot of time scouring through digital archives for useful images. The Paper Museum is a newspaper that will probably comprise of three volumes. I'm working on two consecutively and have been for some time, but it's not something you can really just do in an hour here and an hour there. There's a whole lot of collating and writing to be done. So a whole day thinking about how many different themes might link - both visually and textually - is really rather glorious. I'm not sure when I last had a day like this - to just think. Conceptual industry is a fine thing!

And look at what I found at The Beinecke… sometimes you just need a bit of time to dig. And these are so perfect to help me with my own Peter Pan mission. Click to see them bigger and read the text.

Peter Pan [typescript of the three-act version of the play (with manuscript revisions in an unidentified hand and interleaved with lighting plots, stage business and prompt cues in several unidentified hands) used in the 1904-05 production] © Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University