awayuq

back from beyond

I am so glad to be home. Things aren't quite organized--camera batteries are dead, there is no food in the refrigerator, piles of books needing to be read and clothes needing to be washed are multiplying hour by hour--but I am glad that I am out of the airline system and have no trips planned for the near future.

If I had a gazillion dollars, I would devote myself to creating a different long-distance public transportation system in this country. Bring back the railway, I say. Bike trails to everywhere. Canals. Any alternative to planes.

Anyway, about the Projects. The blue lace shawl is one of those ill-fated items that insists on never being quite done. First, as you may remember, there was the issue with missing instructions in the middle of the Peruvian desert. Well, I got it home, and found the instructions, and took it on the next trip, and worked on it from time to time. I love attaching edging, but you know how it is--there's a point at which you knit and knit and knit and can't believe you still have so much edge left. It languished. Finally, the last two days of my visit to Mom's house, I decided that I really needed to finish it, and began to knit furiously, mostly after dinner while watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. (We watched it twice. I felt I had to see it again because I'm supposed to be becoming an archaeologist. It was very useful. Resolution for the next year: learn to use a whip.) I knit and knit and knit and about the time I got halfway through the third side, I began to get a nervous feeling about the size of the remaining ball of yarn. I turned the third corner and was on the home stretch and was about evenly divided as to whether I'd have enough yarn to finish or not. Finally, I ran out in the middle of the final side. *sigh*. This project just does not want to be finished. Possible to get more yarn? Unlikely. Probably I'll finish it with something in a plain color and it will be a reminder to me to avoid hubris in the matter of yarn estimation. No pictures of this sad shawl example yet, as I mailed it back from the midwest. (or my Mom did--thanks Mom).

Returning to the first subject--am I the only one who hates to fly? I abhor it. I do it, and I've learned to deal with it, but I hate it. I mean I hate the actual flying part, the being in the sky, as well as taking off and coming down, and I hate all the rigamarole around it like undressing and having to remember what can't be carried on and standing in line and weather delays and the media hype that doesn't improve anyone's peace of mind. The day I left was the day people were arrested in England with alleged plans to blow up flights over the Atlantic. (yep, that was a treat, traveling on that day.) I came back the day a flight crashed in Kentucky (I flew out of Ohio. A little too close to home.) Really, does it ever seem to you that flying is just tempting fate? The more often you fly, the more likely you are to be in one of those situations that nightmares are made of. And did I mention that both my bags got lost on the last flight? Things seem to get worse and worse. This year I truly feel that if I never had to fly again, I could be ok with that. In fact, I'm thinking with a world fuel crisis looming it might be time to learn how to keep horses. Yet another reason to learn how to wield that whip.

more dirty textiles

I spent the last couple of weeks looking at early colonial textiles from a site on the north coast of Peru.  In time I may be able to post pictures but you aren't missing a whole lot without the visuals, because the things I saw had just come out of the ground and were so encrusted with dirt that in many cases it took hours of cleaning to figure out what they were.  The textiles, mostly scraps of things, have been all mixed up in the ground due to centuries of looting, so it's not possible to date many of them with certainty from context alone.  However, IF we are able to get permission to take samples and IF dates from said samples indicate that the pieces are 16th-17th century, I may have studied some of the earliest knitting in South America.  At this point I am cautiously optimistic that two of the pieces found, striped stockinette tubes, represent early importation of the technique of knitting to the Americas.  They are both knit with multiple strands of singles cotton yarn such as was used for indigenous weaving.  One piece has half the stitches held on a yarn and the other half continue in a garterstitch band.  The whole thing looks to my mind very much like a sock top with a heel flap.  Because of the yarn and the incompleteness of the piece, it´s almost certain that the knitting was done here in Peru.  The second piece even has a simple fair isle pattern of blue and white squares!  They look like bedraggled sad little raveling objects, fully saturated with dessert dust and dirt, but they could be important evidence of the spread of knitting. 

And there was not only knitting, but lots of fascinating woven textiles, including  many pieces with twill damask stripes.  The twill is 2/1 and the damask makes an elaborate pattern of stepped diagonals and interlocking spirals.  At first glance, it looks like a floor-loom product, but these patterns appear on four-selvedge textiles.  I´m wondering if some special heddling was used, possibly some kind of dual lease system with pattern rods?  In order to fully understand it, I'll have to review a lot of structural information which is presently deep at the back of my brain.  There are examples of indigenous cloth with hemmed seams, and mixing of indigenous and imported fabrics, and even early buttons made of rolled wool fabric felted into little toggles.  Amazing stuff.

In my personal textile creation efforts, I encountered a sad setback.  I got to the very end of the center of the Weeping Willow shawl (pictured in the last post, the blue thing) and found that I had forgotten the directions for attaching the border!  I have the graph, but no word directions and unfortunately, I can't remember how the pattern handles turning the corners, or even whether the border is in stockinette or garter stitch.  So I've tucked the almost-shawl into the back of my suitcase for the time being and I'll finish it when I get home.  In the meantime I started two others.  Hey, I have a couple long flights coming up.  You really wouldn't want me to run out of knitting over the Carribean ocean.  I'll be home soon, and I can't wait to revisit all my projects and start making things again!