Category: Sewing

An iron will is needed now

11/4/2024

Working out those wrinkles is so satisfyingIf you’re uselessly wringing your hands right about now, pump some iron.
Hear me out: Ironing is useful, which, in the few days left before the US election, is the opposite position of those of us watching who can’t vote or compel Americans to vote. With democracy itself teetering on the brink it’s best to stop flitting about, pants on fire, and instead grab onto something stable and practical. Just maybe don’t do it in front of the latest broadcast of any of the mega-rich misogynists’ rallying cries; the TV screen is no match to an overhand launch of an iron.
If you’re rolling your eyes at this suggestion you may still be triggered by the iron as symbol of just more unpaid women’s housework, promoted through those post-war images of an ecstatic housewife standing before the only board she has access to. If you view her hubby’s freshly starched white shirt as his day pass out of one of those little boxes made of ticky-tacky, you are still afflicted.
I get it; letting go of the iron-as-shackles connection doesn’t come easy when you are born into that milieu. My cousin recently shared a photo of the two of us, as young as six, standing knock-kneed in skirts and knee-socks at a kid-sized ironing board, playing ironing yet there was little evidence of ironing activity in my own childhood home. This shit was insidious.
Inflation was hitting hard those days, and the petrochemical industry found an opportunity: pushing polyester as the time-saver for women who by choice or necessity entered the workforce. When my grandmother found herself single in her 40s she traded her home-sewn floral cotton dresses for Sears Fortrel mix ’n’ match coordinates, got her teacher’s certificate and moved to a remote town for work. My McDonald’s uniform was an itchy kelly-green combo of stretch pants and striped zip-up collared top.
Skip forward a few decades and we’re barely treading water in the synthetic polymersea of fast-fashion clothing that fuels microplastic pollution.

Ironing has no role in this wrinkle-free, race-to-the-bottom system. It’s part of the repairing-is-caring continuum toward a circular economy of natural-fibre clothing and toward our own well-being. It relaxes both rumpled, creased woven cottons and linens and our fine selves. You can’t doom-scroll when you’re gliding across a soft surface, settling wrinkles with puffs of steam. Ahhhhhh.
Quilters know all about the rewards of ironing following hours of wrestling bits of fabric into new arrangements with a temperamental sewing machine. Even the wonkiest quilt blocks in that stack “will all press out.” Ohhhmmm.
The time spent ironing favourite linens and natural-fibre clothing is an investment in those pieces, a time for personal reflection on their making and their makers. Grandma Flo may have embraced her wash-and-wear polyester pieces but she never abandoned ironing her quality dressy things or her fine cutwork table linens hand-stitched by her sisters. When it was my turn to have her over for tea she would tsk-tsk at my creased tablecloth. That it was thrifted was no excuse; all linens deserved pressing.
A decade after her death I created a part-figurative alterpiece anchored by a Teflon iron plate. The assemblage of found objects reflects her strength in the face of tumultuous change and the little pleasures of her everyday like teatimes, decoration and costume jewelry.

Two views of “Teflon Flo”: Found lamp base, iron plate, jelly mould, tea strainer, chandelier crystals (Carlyn Yandle)

At this writing, it is Dia de los Muertos and Teflon Flo is front and centre and shining its light. A few feet away from this ofrenda is a deep scorch mark in the circa-1898 wood floor that, judging by its diminutive footprint, dates back decades. I take it as a warning from a past homemaker — I’ve conflated her with my grandmother — to unplug the iron or it will all burn down. Which I am not thinking will happen if Trump is elected. Not thinking about that at all.

A warning from decades past: Don’t let it all burn down (Carlyn Yandle)

A material love-hate relationship

10/12/2024

Masks keep our germs to ourselves but I don't have to like them

People! Am I going to have to bring out my Social Distancing Hat again? Everyone I know is either in the grips of one plague or another or sharing stories about a friend with Long Covid or flu or RSV. And that friend is possibly me (cough cough).

Social Distancing Hat, March 2020

I’m just kidding about the hat; we Westcoast Canadians have umbrellas for that, at least for a solid seven months out of the year (and we wonder why we’re considered a reserved lot). I trashed the hat shortly after parading around in it for a little levity during Lockdown 2020. In retrospect, ridding myself of the wide-brimmed artwork was overly aspirational. I was obviously oblivious to the power of airborne illnesses to return like that damn leak in my studio every time it rains.

The joke’s on me these days. Embracing more social-distancing practices could have saved me from the cold/flu thing that hit Labour Day weekend and settled into my bottom right lung as pneumonia by month’s end. I did take general precautions: stayed home or sequestered in my leaky studio when I was feeling poorly; bowed out from gatherings and even coffee-shop meetings; took four of the reliable at-home COVID-19 tests over the course of this cough, even doing the whole thorough gaggy throat-scrape method. When they came out negative, I went back out into the world. I was sick of the social isolation.

I was so ready to re-gather with friends that I willed myself to not notice that all the women pushing the dim-sum carts were in masks, even as I barrelled past them to go outside for a coughing fit. I did take advantage of courtesy hand-sanitizer pump bottles at the entrance of shops and public buildings but I did not, would not see the masked-up cashiers, receptionists, servers, tellers and baristas as a sign that I should be following suit.

For the record, I was an early mask-adopter even before the spring of 2020. I saw more foreign-exchange students at art school masking up as early as January, and by the end of February, many weren’t coming into class at all. Seeing people in masks was normal to me since my 20s when I lived in Japan, where several commuters in any given train car were masked up, even little kids. When I moved back to Vancouver I lived near Chinatown where masks on faces are commonplace. So by the time the mask mandatehit I was already on it.

Pandemic-era Instagram posts (clockwise from top left): Early mask prototype; Photoshop’d Captain Vancouver statue; the best use of the MFA Class of 2020 graduation regalia; tiny crocheted masks for store-bought bunnies, Easter 2020 gifts.

In those first few eerie weeks of lockdown, when many people were wondering if it was safe to venture out of doors at all, I was part of a growing army of makers sewing up three-layer cotton masks, refining my design as I went and sharing the method online and materials in a system of drop-offs and pick-ups. I’ve made dozens on dozens of masks when the scant supply was reserved for frontline workers. I only quit when stockpiles showed up in Dollarama.

Instagram posts of some of many masks made for the masses in 2020

I don’t like thinking about those dark times, nor the long-term effects of that era of social isolation on ourselves, our kids, our community, our economy, our society. (Even as I write, my father, in long-term care, is being isolated for COVID-19 and he doesn’t understand why.) And I don’t want to consider the import of this:

Or this:

My knee-jerk reaction is to just move on from the whole masking-up rigmarole even as we’re all getting ready to hunker down indoors for the winter. Is that my privilege talking? Or is it growing up at a time and place when runny-nosed kids were just a fact of life? What’s it going to take for folks like me to adapt to masks as the norm in elevators, on buses, in Costco, at the dentist waiting room or the coffee shop lineup, even when feeling well?

Masking up is practical and courteous but I loathe the loss of any more social connectivity, including our unique ability to absorb facial micro-expressions that convey deeper communication — that one advantage humans have over AI and our future robot overlords (for now).

Repairing is caring

9/21/2024

Making things better requires thinking creatively, not throwing it all away

Can you do me a favour, a neighbour-friend asked, and I knew his sweet, destructive dog had done it again.
The pup, bred to herd, over large tracts of land, has made uneven progress adjusting to his home in an inner-city townhouse. Over the past year I’ve patched up a sofa seat cushion he was on his way to destroying; re-stuffed his new, disemboweled dog bed; and fancy-stitched an L-shaped rip on a beloved, specially-ordered Western-style shirt (the friend’s, not the dog’s).

On his most recent visit, his owner held up Exhibit A: a favourite art T-shirt with a bite-shaped chunk out of the edge of the sleeve. And then Exhibit B: the same cherished Western shirt I repaired a while ago, now with gaping hole in the lower back.

Do you think the dog might be trying to tell you something? I asked. He gave me the look of one who’s heard that line a lot. But I kid. It is my pleasure to do these repairs. He knows it and I’m sure he felt just as good about bringing over a slow-cooked pork roast when I was consumed by grief.

Making is connecting. I share this no-sew method to inspire others to think twice before chucking a favourite piece of clothing. To me, this twice-repaired shirt is a perfectly imperfect object, now rich with the layer of meaning of That Time the Puppy Ate A Hole In My Shirt, over the previously added layer, Fancy Embroidery Where the Puppy Ripped My Shirt. It all connects with the Japanese idea of kintsugi, the obvious and artful repair of broken objects:

Making useless stuff like artwork is fine for the gallery but I get more satisfaction making useful things out of material that’s already in the world, items that would otherwise be thrown away because we know there’s no “away.”

This week, that satisfaction came from taking a can of flat black spray-paint to a metal filing cabinet (everyone’s dumping them; the local Craigslist listings alone showed 36 for sale and three for free this weekend) and converting it into a bamboo planter on casters.

Perfectionism is part of a runaway capitalist system of productivity and purchase. It exists as a superlative in a black-and-white worldview. I distrust this fixation on perfection and what some will do to try to get there.

There is no time or space in this system for down-to-earth conservation ideals like “make do and mend” or “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Those Great Depression directives feel quaint in this Great Production era of stuff, even in the face of climate catastrophes.

Repairing is caring — for the object or material, for the person who connects with it, for its history and against wastefulness. It’s a wabi-sabi mindset that values time-worn objects and materials in direct opposition to the sterility of perfectionism. Sharing ideas and building on that knowledge knits up community and reinforces our commonality despite divisive political forces.

This is how repairing a shirt for a friend or finding new life for a throwaway thing and sharing those ideas are small political acts of resistance to market forces that see us as individual consumers to be fuelled with desire for luxury and novelty.

Living simply, with our imperfections relegates self-identifying artists and makers to the fringes in a perfectionist world. I happily make do with that.

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.

Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

Faith is key when you're cutting up family heirlooms

6/7/2024

Is it easy to cut up hand-embroidered linen tablecloths, runners, pillowcases?

It is not. As an adequate hand-stitcher I understand the skill, labour, time and patience that goes into each linen. I understand the desire to cherish these vintage domestic-craft objects made for the joy of it that are eventually passed around and down the generations only to be hidden in some drawer or closet. I understand the impulse to rescue them from the humiliation of their thrift-store price tags of maybe five dollars.

Cutting through all these layers of meaning feels a little like slicing into someone else’s skin. What right do I have?

Am I ruining family heirlooms? Or daylighting unused linens that have been in the dark for decades? (Carlyn Yandle photo)

As word got out that I was amassing old embroidered linens for an artwork I gratefully received donations from friends and family. It’s a lot easier to be the rescuer of those tragic cases dotted with stains or holes. At least I can console myself that I’m ending the quandary over whether to keep this piece of Grandma or let it go.

But the weighty, pristine Irish linen tablecloths that bloom with finely stitched bouquets and drawn threadwork borders are quite another thing. I take a deep breath and make mental apologies and thanks to the unknown or long-gone maker. I remind myself that I’m not ruining a family heirloom but daylighting the work of handmade things that have been in the dark for decades. Then I let the rotary-cutter rip. I am Edward Scissorhands. I can’t help myself. Sorry, not sorry.

This is the struggle behind Forage, an under-construction field of improvisational log-cabin blocks in my preferred scale of queen-sized. Each embroidered scrap is a literal snippet of a larger piece, the analogue equivalent of a digital thumbnail image. Machine-stitched together the blocks are as cacophonous as an Instagram Explore field.

That effect grows exponentially as the blocks are stitched into rows, then rows onto rows. I’m now part-way through constructing the thing as a single field (“top”, in quilt language). Viewed horizontally it is a chaotic community garden of 42 unwieldy plots that spill out into the paths (“sashing”). I find new patterns for connection while merging the embroidered elements of one block into another block through the sashing, in a sort-of snail’s trail of stitches. As I mimic these markings of those makers, I feel a connecting thread. I am walking in their stitch-steps.

Despite the garden-plot references, this work is defying the horizontal, offering a reverse-side textural experience of an unstable grid of frayed edges. The maker-contributors never intended for the ‘wrong side’ to be seen, but when it’s all brought into the light, the translucent stained-glass effect cannot be denied. Suddenly I see connotations of religious symbolism, and I’m wondering about the power of the loose threads and those cryptic-looking stitches when viewed from behind the scenes. Something about sacrifice or at least about having faith that the discomfort in detaching from nostalgia is for good, not evil.

That openness is rich ground, another area to forage.

Connecting embroidered elements feels like walking in the stitch-steps of past makers. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

A backlit view of this work-in-progress adds further layers of pattern, texture and symbolism. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Halloween a reminder of fiery end to a neighbourhood hub

10/22/2022

Just a week before Halloween — prime creative costume time — we in these parts are again reminded of the tragic, toxic end to our local Value Village.

The general love-hate relationship came to a fiery finish one summer night four months ago yet I can’t shake thoughts of all the stuff that went up into black, acrid smoke that hung over the East End the next day. Those long aisles thick with petroleum-derived clothing, incinerated. The shelves on top of those aisles crammed with knicknacks, contorting in flames. The baskets would have burst first but would the candles, as accelerants, have melted the glass vases? I would like these images to stop.

The Hastings/Victoria Value Village linked the communities of Hastings Sunrise, The Drive, and the Downtown Eastside. Until it didn't. (Found photos)

I’d like to make peace with the fire, seeing it as the ultimate cleanse, a final decluttering. But there’s a bigger hole beyond the charred rubble that remains today; after 40 years we’ve lost a social hub that attracted a colourful congregation of non-conforming fashionistas, DIYers, vintage-hunters and regular folk of all ages and on limited budgets from all over Hastings Sunrise, the Downtown Eastside and The Drive.

Yes, the prices were crazy by the end — you could get the same wine glass for a buck cheaper at the newish dollar stores a few blocks away — and the recent switch-over to self-checkouts led to some comical performance-art moments. But the diverse, unpredictable clientele was generally served well by employees and security guards with the steely nerves of air-traffic controllers.

And yes, this was no mom-and-pop shop but one of more than 300 locations here in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. Savers, Inc. is an international, privately-held company far removed from its original San Francisco thrift shop that opened in an old Mission District theatre in 1954.

To fully appreciate our local loss you would have to go back to 1980 when this Value Village opened, the first one in Canada (near as I can figure; someone please correct me on this). Before that, the only cheap one-stop clothing/housewares store in the vicinity was Zellers, further east up the hill, which used to be Fedco. (Insert Napoleon Dynamite sigh here.) All that changed when the department-sized thrift store opened us up to a whole world of self-expression. We could actually afford to take fashion risks, and they could include long wool coats from the '40s or '50s, '60s glam boots or ’70s caftans — the opposite of the flimsy fast-fashion mall stock that fed the summertime fire. (“I took pride in being alternative,” my youngest sister says. “I was teased by some random teens though.”) It was also an escape of the day, the kids, the worries, where one can mindlessly flip through those racks of clothes like beads on a rosary, with no chance of encountering pushy sales staff.

So I guess this is an overdue obituary, the kind that would be written about someone who was quite the opportunist and just a little creepy but who also opened up the door for us to question the status quo, think creatively, fly our freak flags and mingle with the all-sorts people in the neighbourhood.

Above: The East Hastings Value Village was one of the few hassle-free spots left where a diverse community of regulars could find basics, fun stuff and common ground. (Found photo)

Homemade masks are not all about you

4/3/2020

We who turn to rote hand-making activity to quell our anxiety have been knitting, sewing, embroidering, crocheting and needleworking up a storm. My go-to, like countless others stuck at home, is making masks. As the death tolls roll in, I am on auto-pilot.

The thing about busying the hands with tiny repetitive motions is that it opens up time to think, to reflect on the incoming: the unfathomable graphs, reports, studies and scandals. What I’ve been reflecting on as I rotary-cut those squares of cloth, feed them into the machine and steam-press in the pleats is the great homemade-mask debate: to wear or not to wear. To that question I have no doubt: it’s a hard ‘wear’ if you are in the vicinity of others.

Sure, there is a tsunami of science that proves that the three-layered, tight-weave cotton reusable mask that I’ve been making won’t protect you — the wearer — from catching the virus but this is not about you and you alone. This is about us, about keeping our own damn germs to ourselves, a civic duty seen in east Asian nations that have been-there-done-that with SARS. As pointed out in today’s (at this writing) article in The Atlantic, a store full of shoppers in masks may be seen by those on this side of the Pacific Rim as a sign of the coming apocalypse but one of assurance on the other side: I’ll protect you if you protect me (Check out #masks4all and #youprotectmeIprotectyou).

At Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where I’ve spent the last two years, masks suddenly appeared on some student faces as Covid-19 hit the news, far before any social-distancing policies were set. My personal observation is that those taking these early precautions were likely international students from Asian countries where mask-wearing is a norm for anyone contending with even a cold or seasonal allergies. The sudden sight of all these masks in class and corridors may have unsettled the rest of the student body but it inspired me to design something I’d like to wear: reusable, washable, of natural felted fibre, sculpted so it didn’t touch my mouth, infused with my favourite “Panic Button” essential oil blend.

I wasn’t always cool with milling around with the masked ones. When I landed in Japan for what would be an 18-month stay in the late-’80s my first snapshots were of all kinds of people in masks in Kyoto, from little kids in black uniforms on their way to school, to teens picnicking under the blooming cherry trees to old ladies in the narrow streets of Gion. I came to appreciate all the masks worn while cheek to jowl in the infamous Midosuji subway in Osaka, starting with the official charged with gently pushing the commuters into the cars. Reflecting on this (now, while I sew), I wonder what those socially-responsible commuters must have thought about being stuck up against these gaping, mouth-breathing, sniffling foreigners.

I’m reflecting on the real, insatiable need for masks in my own vicinity, right now, for those who are jammed into shelters and squalid hotel rooms with shared bathrooms. While I await reports on how this pandemic is hitting the sick and homeless, I’ll assume masks are a basic need. And until I am tested, I’ll assume that I am an asymptomatic carrier.

I mask up for your protection when I go out for my essential business and when I return I disinfect it, put it back in its baggie, then get back to the task at hand. See my simple three-ply pleated pattern below, or, for you non-sewcialists, check out the T-shirt version at bottom.

No sewing machine? This can be hand-stitched too (46" total stitching). No elastic? Cut 1-inch-wide strips from an old T-shirt, stretch to curl, then replace the elastic directions with two 7" strips, to be tied by user.

My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

Comments

The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

Comments

Materials matter, and Those of loved ones gone can live on

5/26/2018

Comments

Clockwise from top left: Great-Grandfather Quilt; Dad's Throw; Tie Cushion. (Carlyn Yandle photos)

Materialistic. People say it like it's a bad thing.
But there's not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little more materialistic we might not be now contending with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or space junk. I want no part with parting so quickly from one-use-life materials when a meaningful second life is possible.

So when a couple of people dear to my heart were clearly torn about parting with some favourite clothes of their loved ones who recently passed away — one within this year, the other within 18 months — I felt it too.

These bits of cloth are interwoven with the memory of the wearer, his style, the special occasions and the everyday. Just looking at them hanging in the back closet brought the son, the wife, to tears. Some of that emotion is also about feeling at odds with what to do with it all. Yet holding onto useless things, especially in this town where we're so squeezed for space we have to go outside our living spaces just to change our mind, can even bring on some shame or panic that we can't let go, move on.

I felt the potency of the pieces too, and suggested selecting a few items to be repurposed into something that would bring comfort, and in remembrance.

The first project this spring was the Great-Grandfather Quilt, for the first of the next generation who missed meeting his great-grandfather by 9 months. The second was Dad's Blanket, which lives on one of the two matching sofas where father and son watched the baseball in his last three years. The third is a lumbar-support cushion made from silk ties that's parked on his wife's favourite reading chair.

It takes a bit of faith to allow those blazers and sweaters, ties and dress shirts to leave their dark cupboards and be subjected to my fibre-art experiments but I'm grateful they did. It was a little unnerving, plunging wool blazers into a hot-water-wash and tumble-dry, or severing several silk neckties in one swipe of the rotary cutter, but that's the deal with making and innovating: sometimes you have to take a deep breath and boldly go, risking failure.

And there is definitely failure in all of this making. Design changes happen on the fly, dictated by odd dimensions of the pieces and unpredictable fabric behaviour. (It's a thing.) Trying to wrestle slippery bias-cut silk, unstable cashmere knit and coat-heavy woven wool into submission enough to lie flat together is a test of one's patience. The trick is to embrace imperfection and keep the big picture in mind. I think about the Gees Bend quilters I saw a few years ago at Granville Island and the gospel spiritual song two of them sang at the start of their talk, and I say a little prayer myself: God I hope this works.

The other challenge is creating works that resonate with the spirit of the original wearer, so it's not just a matter of chopping up the clothing into tiny unidentifiable pieces to be re-fabricated in a generic quilt. You don't want to be too literal either, appliquéing ties into a Ties Quilt or (creepier) using every last button and pocket or (horrors) just sewing all the clothes together into a blanket or something.

Binding the one blanket with necktie fabric and appliquéing the suit labels in one corner of an army blanket backing (for the man who served in the US Army) felt like the right balance.

I post each Remembrance Pieces project on Facebook to inspire other material girls and guys, and to pay my respects to the stuff of life and to those of this life no longer.

Comments

Wild, brilliant colour is rocking my concrete-grey foundations

11/17/2017

Comments

A wall of a Peruvian restaurant in Merida, Mexico is devoted to customers' reviews written on ribbons. Carlyn Yandle photo

Modern science calls it bunk but I am fully on board with chromotherapy, an alternative medicine branded by the labcoats as a pseudo-science. The preferred term is photobiology now, an acknowledged science that includes the indisputable benefits of light therapy. I prefer the more mystical "chromotherapy" because it's less about rational explanations and more about feeling. And, for the synaesthesiasts (more specifically, those of us who experience chromesthesia), the beautiful music.

Consider these accompanying images from southern Mexico. Bask in the warmth of these visual fields of wild, intense, unrestrained, unleashed colour jumping out of our monochromatic devices.

A sewing notions store display of zippers in Merida, Mexico. Carlyn Yandle photo

Still in my first couple of weeks here in the Yucatan, I am bobbing around the crowded city streets, slack-jawed at what just may be the direct opposite palette of a Vancouver B-Line bus on any given November rush hour. My outlook has shifted from a low-level, gunmetal-grey resignation to a hot-fuchsia/blood-orange exhilarating mixto, all from looking at the zipper selection in a notions shop (of which there are plenty and another reason for exhilaration), or a glimpse into a hot-pink and aquamarine courtyard restaurant.

But it's not all feel-good. I am seduced by vibrant art and I use it to seduce in my own making: first the beauty, then the crack in the beauty. It's working when I think, "This is pretty and pretty horrifying."

Bright, hand-stitched floral motifs on everyday clothing say more for the Mayans than "pretty." Carlyn Yandle photo

If colour didn't entice then Walt Disney could have saved himself the price of acres of paint and Disneyland would be just metal and asphalt. The superstore cereal aisles would look like a newspaper periodicals library. You get the monochromatic picture.

Colour is a social statement in the bright, face-framing embroidered embellishments around a huipil (blouse) worn by mainly older women, or the brilliant woven blanket hanging from a balcony of a colonial facade. There is some needling in all that needlework, but without the dazzling hues we might not clue into the significance.

All this visual heat here in the southern part of North America is creating my own little inner unrest, clashing with my northern hometown palette of bruisey skies infinitely mirrored through the city's colourless glass towers. My concrete-grey foundations are being rocked. And I like it.