Category: Textile

The nodes know

1/30/2026

Hope empowers quirky denim objects

I’ve had this exchange a few times this past week:
You’re so busy. What are you working on?
Uh… hard to say.

It’s hard to put into words this curious crafty endurance with a deadline. Better to just hold up my needle-scarred fingers and gnarled hands. Hand-work stuff. For exhibition.

I have only myself to blame for spending these glorious foggy-sunny mid-winter days indoors cutting out seams and waistbands from discarded jeans and stitching them into quirky little coils and nodes. But they want to emerge, like characters in a novel that surprise even the author. They want to sprout like spores out of a knotted network of denim created back in the months before the global pandemic lockdown.

Resurge started as a compulsion during the first tempestuous Trump administration and soon after the release of an alarming report on climate change and rising sea levels. I fell into a daily rhythm of knotting and braiding a pile of discarded jeans, for the simple satisfaction of bringing new life to this particular abject material. The work revealed itself as a ground-zero eruption, an unstructured sprawl of frayed tendrils and rivulets of global brand logos in a very West Coast marine palette.

But now Resurge wants to rise above its heaviness, no longer limited to the floor but installed at a vantage point that suggests topography: a whole new world.

I didn’t overthink the urge to needle up a population of nodes to insert into a tumultuous water-scape. Instead I’m immersed in the material and the method, allowing the swirl of ideas and responses from local and global realities to infuse and entangle. The making is irrepressible, eclipsing my weekly writing time, as I make one benign conical object after another. Soon — hopefully — a critical mass will emerge that must be reckoned with.

In 2019, this slippery, shapeless sea of knots held space for more layers of meaning. In 2026 Resurge offers regrowth and resilience, from the fracture. I hope it will resonate in these perilous times.

(Cross-posted at https://carlynyandle.substack.com/)

UNRAVEL, Mixed media works by Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki, Amanda Wood and Carlyn Yandle runs from Feb. 3 - March 14, 2026 at Seymour Art Gallery, Deep Cove, B.C. Reception: Sunday, Feb. 8, 2 - 4 p.m.; “From Conversation to Practice” Program with Amanda Wood, Sunday, Feb. 22, 2 p.m.; “Hearth” social stitching event with Carlyn Yandle, Sunday, March 1, from 2 p.m.; artist talk with Tatiana Mirkov-Popovicki, Sunday March 8, 11 a.m.

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)

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.

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)

work-in-progress 'Unbridled' stitches up pain and pleasure

8/31/2022

Exploring tattoo tropes (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Thirty years ago this month I floated down the aisle in a pearly silk dress. Recently I pulled this relic out of deep storage to give it new life.

It is a ballerina-length A-line number, a fitted silhouette of crisp, Japanese Dupioni silk festooned with faux pearls, featuring a winding pattern of woven ivory ribbon stitched around the shoulder and ruche bodice, and bateau neckline edged with mini pearls. A strand of 14 pearl shank buttons nestles into handmade button loops running down the back, disappearing into a bustle of box pleats. A puff of shoulder sleeve slims to a fitted forearm, leading down to three more pearl buttons and ending in a pointed edge at the wrist edged in more pearl trim. The pattern was painstakingly customized by the maid of honour, possibly still this city’s most skilled professional in design development. The sleeve itself is an architectural feat, with three delicate darts at the elbow and invisible underarm gusset for ease of movement when slow-dancing.
The dress was a big effin' deal, is what I'm saying.

Covid-era expression

Following the one night of festivities, the gown and accoutrements — ivory silk pantyhose, pearlescent strappy heels, pearl-bead tiara-hairband thing and matching teardrop earrings — were cocooned in a cotton sheet, placed inside a garment box and embalmed in clear plastic. The box took up precious space, first in an Eastside housing co-op unit, then a Westside condo and finally back to the Eastside where it has been languishing as a past attachment out of place in my much different life. Clearly I needed to address this fetish I had for this dress.

My first job as a full-time newspaper reporter included re-writing submitted wedding announcements — a bit of a comedown after an intensive year of journalism school wrestling with ethical issues and the craft of long-form investigative reporting. Banging out descriptions of sweetheart necklines and fingertip veils was tedious work that made me crabby.

"Nevertheless, she persisted", a Trump-era memento

I resented the notion that this was a ritual of every young woman’s life worthy of space in the local newspaper and the time of a salaried employee. The only vow I was willing to make was to not end up as that girl in the accompanying photo. But question marks hung in the air all through my 20s, not about If but When. Over time my replies of ‘never’ turned into ‘not now’, then ‘who knows’ then ‘soon’ and before the end of my 20s I was a married person with a useless dress in a box.

I’m not nostalgic about the whole patriarchal wedding ritual and its objectifying notions of purity but I did love that dress. Whenever I re-organized my deep storage I would unfurl it from its wrappings, a little ashamed at my attachment to the thing. I needed to poke holes into the whole notion; I needed to break through this pure silk skin.

I texted a friend for support, someone whose own actual skin is needled with ink here and there like it’s no big deal. Do it. Why not just do it?, she texted back. I took a deep breath and plunged the needle into the silk, embedding stitches of ink-black embroidery floss into the ivory cloth. I winced at the first piercing but like tattoos, there was also a flood of pleasure. I began embroidering significant moments of this significant era then hung it on a hanger in my studio until another compulsion came on. This is how this dress and I work together now: it is a work in progress, like that bride who is always still becoming.

I feel zingy about this mark-making with no overall plan that will not be erased, this disruption of expectations for young women — of my time and place, at least. Unbridled is a work in progress, an unkempt keeper, that weaves the pain in with the pleasure.

Reminder of the Women's March on Washington, 2017

The chemotherapy drugs code of a family member close to my heart

Sciatica source, as depicted in tattoo-style lightning bolts

Weather bombs and forests in flames: Tattoo-style flames licking at hem of dress

A bicep full of vaccination pharmaceutical company logos

Moths in flight: symbols of transformation and regeneration

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

6/13/2022

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When my nerves are frayed and it feels like the social fabric is unravelling I feel the urge to amend the situation, often by actual mending.

These hands do much less flailing when they're taking up loose ends, making something out of nothing anybody wants or repairing the damaged, discarded and disregarded. But the pandemic has hit hard and for the first time in ages, I am compelled to fall back on something cozy and familiar, for the body — any body — in need. I need to make a big ol' quilt.

Even as the fleeting thought was bonking around my distracted, pandemic-disturbed brain I worried I was regressing. Are a dozen queen-sized quilts — each a barely-passed test of my patience and endurance — not enough for one lifetime? Have I gone circular?

This (and much more) mental pummelling has manifested in the not-yet-completed "Current Conditions" quilt, a weighted blanket in a bluesy palette and undulating pattern of strips of discarded, freely available jeans. Too thick and heavy to wrestle through my vintage Pfaff, I've taken a page from the Japanese traditional "boro" method and hand-stitched long waves of white cotton sashiko thread through the layers of denim, cotton batting and denim whole-cloth backing.

BORROWING FROM BORO: The "Current Conditions" quilt in progress, after hand-stitching through the layers and before the growing roster of pandemic-era hashtags are embroidered.

Soon another layer emerged: hand-embroidered text in the form of some particularly heavy hashtags over the course of this making. Working each of those hashtags into the strips of found textile has become both a meditative activity as well as a meditation on the meaning of those words of these times. This is my physical engagement with the world, one stitch, one block at a time.

Weighing in at more than 10 hot pounds, "Current Conditions" is an unwieldy beast of a blanket but my stitching encounters with the latest hashtags seem far from over. (Should #monkeypox be included? Do I need to reserve a line for #heatdome2022?). Like the global pandemic at this point, it's not clear whether the beast is finally done or will demand more from me.

Tripping on this troublesome rug

12/6/2019

In the final critique of my final work in this second-to-final semester of graduate studies, I could see that there was going to be trouble.

From the start, there was the trouble of actually getting a full view of this sprawling, chaotic, twisted mass of deconstructed jeans. It required everyone to stand around the perimeter of the low-lit white-cube gallery, in a circle, facing in, looking down at this problem child.

There was the troubling of its position: Why not on the wall or hung from the ceiling? Since it’s sprawled out on the floor, does it invite being walked on?

There was the troubling of method: Why the knotting and weaving and braiding? Why the obvious waistbands and labels? Why spend all this time and labour? Why not just a pile of denim strips?

And there was the troubling over concept: Is it too obvious? Too simple? Too many signifiers? Not enough points of entry? Or too many? Is it art or craft? Who is this talking to? And to what end?

And those are just my questions.

I question everything, especially as I work, with my hands, intuitively. But my first line of questioning is directed at the material itself. What do you want from me? (Or, to borrow from my then-eight-year-old nephew, in an inexplicable situation: What are we even doing here?)

As much as I could have sat and gazed at the striated piles of folded jeans collected, machine-washed and line-dried by my mother and hauled to my studio by my others, now those jeans demanded more of me.

Seams, the index of the work by mainly women in foreign factories, needed to be exposed, so I cut them away from the yardage, bound them up in my own hand-stitching into tight, potent fast-fashion/slow-craft units. For what? For now, just for today: my daily reminder not to overthink or force solutions.

The labels and tags required daylighting, too, and the more collisions the better between fonts and texts and all that those brands try to stand for.

That left the denim textile, the fabric of this whole fraught, toxic industry. Shucked from their constraints of style and function, I ripped them into strips and watched them fall from my cutting table into heaps on the floor like tidepools.

Image-searching "jeans industry" produces a blue-stained global-reality horror show.

As much as I love the immersive works of minimalist textile installations, more would be more here. I would be mining all my own making methods and circulating them into this circles-within-circles piece, in allegiance with all of those who work with their hands for a living or for the love of material. Or both.

Like most makers I know, I love the challenge of constraining the work to some specific rules of material engagement so I limited mine to a single material, a knotting/binding additive process and two tools: scissors and sewing needle (well, three, if you count my hands).

I intrinsically start from the centre in an almost innate process learned over a lifetime, from macramé plant-hangers (1970s) to braided rugs (1990s) to crocheted giant doilies (2000s) created to cover and protect in the public sphere.

The work begins with a gathering of material-energy into a tight nucleus of force (I’ve been mixing up issues of astrophysics and making over the last year) and spreads outward, finding pattern then breaking that pattern toward new horizons. It’s a process of allowing the material to ebb then roil up again into forces that break into near disintegration, a rhythm that keeps me in the swim of things. As it flows outward into small tsunamis, then eddies, I feel an oceanic, topographic, geologic personality wash over this thing.

And this definitely wants to be a thing, not an immersive installation. This is an object that requires some finishing, a symphony of soundwaves that started with a bang but wants to end in a hum, in the round. It is a rug you can’t walk on, borne of Seismic Rug that emerged while I was confined to the floor with sciatica, watching footage of the horror of the 2011 Japan Tsunami flood in.

It is a resurgence of that making, and that fear of that flood and of the oncoming higher waters, but also the resurgence of my ability to grab hold of physically-challenging handwork after falling on the low-tide foreshore this summer and breaking my ‘good’ arm in two places. I cast aside those fears of not being able to make/do from the cast-offs of this unsustainable era of human history.

Resurge feels right for the piece formerly known as the Monster that raises issues from the ground up, this fuzzy menace.

Left: A colleague lists initial reactions during critique; right: pattern and collapse seen in one section.

A useless thing with many functions

4/10/2019

Comments

The brilliant part about being an aging female is your growing self-acceptance. Maybe this is because you don't feel that ever-present gaze anymore so you’re not feeling as judged. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just had enough of all that and it’s tiresome and dammit you like to be cozy so screw them.

Part of my self-acceptance is stepping out of the ‘should-storm’ of art-making and doing what I love to do with my hands: hunting down materials that have already had their first use and playing up their inherent qualities through knotting, weaving, tying, stitching and binding. I want to work repetitively, easily, without technological assistance and without haste or waste. And in doing so I’m carving out space and time to calm down, reflect and to think deeper — more crucial as the distractions threaten to take over.

Nate Yandle photo

In this way the work is not just in the form or connotations but the well-being and challenge that is relatable to makers who may or may not self-identify as artists. Wrapped up in there are issues of endurance, innovation, history of labour, the learning of the skill, dedication (and frustration), the specific culture and history of the method, the muscle memory that extends back to childhood, and the relationships built through the gathering of the materials.

Through this making I make some hay over the established boundaries between the privileged art world and real life, between craft and sculpture, between tactile and political action.

Scaffolds is composed of found spun-polyester building wrap, tarp and nylon cord over an armature of waste construction materials including caution tape, PVC piping, rebar, conduit, baling wire, and junction boxes, all attached through simple knots.

Special thanks goes to the construction workers who delivered these materials from their many jobsites to my studio for my useless work with many functions.

Nate Yandle photos

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My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

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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)

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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.