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Hi, welcome to String Revolution. I'm Léan, I live in Dublin with my husband and two little boys, and I am a dangerous stringy subversive. |
(If you're feeling generous today, here's my vast crafty wishlist on Amazon.)
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This month, I have been mostly mourning my grandmother and – somewhat unexpectedly – rewriting my novel. (Sixth time’s the charm, I’m hoping. It’s time this thing fecked off out of my head.)
These activities and others have taken me far away from the stringy regions of my life. Recently, though, I’ve been feeling the familiar tug, and knitting and sewing have been getting themselves done again despite everything.
Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting to show you some of my paintings (…or “paintings”, as my inner critic would prefer me to call them – I maintain that as they constitute paint applied to canvas, they meet some kind of basic criterion; she says well that’s just stupid, so there).
Inner critic be damned. I really like these. I did them while we were staying with my friend Ailbhe and her family in August – she paints all the time, and gets a kind of eldritch glitter in her eye when encouraging her friends to do likewise. It’s very difficult to resist…
Continue reading Hardly Stringy At All
Oh, my friends, I have such an unruly mob of posts clamouring to be written.
My poor brainchildren. I didn’t think they’d have to wait this long.
August into the first part of September was a jostling, sprinty, headlong dash, with four separate trips away, house guests, several birthdays, creative feats ranging from a Master’s thesis (Niall) to a short film (the Oyster, with a little help from his friends), a work trip (Niall) and a choir trip (me).
Lots of firsts, for me. I went to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham. I taught classes on embroidery, Shiva Nata, and gender normativity (severally, not jointly). I did paintings in acrylic and oil. It was marvellous, and I’ll tell you all about it soon.
And then there was sadness. My grandmother, who turned 91 in May, was admitted to hospital at the beginning of August, suffering from pneumonia and the effects of a minor stroke. She rallied, and was doing quite well, but then her younger sister died, which shocked her profoundly, and she began to decline again.
Meanwhile, Niall’s grandmother also died, and we travelled to Belfast for her funeral last Tuesday.
I was worried that my grandmother would die while I was away, but she hung on.
I saw her twice more. She died yesterday, peacefully, surrounded by her family. (I wasn’t there, but I had seen her earlier in the day.)
I am very sad.
I will be back here as soon as I can.
You might have noticed my silence around these parts of late. I’m having a rather complicated time of it at the moment. Plenty of good stuff going on … and also, alas, plenty of not so good stuff.
Logistics are not on the side of my updating String Revolution regularly at present, and I’ve decided to stop prevaricating and call an official hiatus.
I’ll be back in September.
Love to you all, my siblings in string.
When I was writing my 100th String Revolution post a few weeks ago, and looking back over the first 99 posts, I was struck by the fact that this used to be a much knittier blog than it is these days.
I haven’t written about knitting in ages. There are all sorts of reasons for that (most notably: I’ve done barely any knitting in 2011 so far…), but I’m going to set them aside for a moment and just write the bleedin’ update, already.
Works in Progress
That up above is my Elizabeth Zimmermann open-collared pullover, which I laid aside late last year, and didn’t pick up again until June. It’s really very nearly finished.
Continue reading On the Needles
If you’re in Dublin any time between now and 2 August, you can see my Root & Branch quilt hanging – in breathtakingly illustrious company, I might add – in the IPS annual exhibition.
If memory serves, 94 quilts were hung in all, out of a total of 149. I’m delighted to have made the cut, especially having seen the amazing work of the other exhibitors.
Details
What: Irish Patchwork Society 30th anniversary exhibition
Where: Botanic Gardens visitor centre
When: 1 July to 2 August 2011
I’ll be taking my turn at the welcome desk on Saturday 30 July (10am-1pm), if you’re free to come along then and say hello. If not, try to find time to see the exhibition another day – you won’t be disappointed.
This is the 100th blog post here at String Revolution! Whee! Celebrations!
I’ve been looking over the 99 posts that got us here, trying to read them with a bit of perspective – wondering, what sort of blog do I write?
It’s evolved, certainly, from that first hello. Internally, I’ve shifted focus from the simple presentation of projects, stash, and techniques to a more reflective approach. I still write about what I’m making, but the posts I’m most excited about tend to be the ones with a strong political or philosophical slant. This suits me better than [what I think of as] the standard “craft blogger” mode: since I produce work very slowly, I don’t have the output to sustain a purely project-based blog.
(If encouraging comments are anything to go by, it seems to suit you fairly well too!)
Favourite Posts
Your favourites among the first 99 posts – measured somewhat crudely by the number of comments – have been these:
Continue reading One Hundred Acts of String Revolution
Hop aboard – I’m riffing again on the theme of string politics.
Because string is so important, and we take it so deeply for granted!
Important? Really?
Yes! It’s so important that it’s practically invisible.
You know this already. String is everywhere. If you can’t name five stringy things you’ve encountered today, I’ll go so far as to say you live an unusual lifestyle. (Either that, or you’re really unobservant.)
Here’s my list:
- Bedding
- Pyjamas
- Carpet
- Curtains
- Towel
And that’s before I even came downstairs.
We live in nests that are strewn and draped with string in its various arrangements. We wrap our bodies in fabric, woven or knitted, by hand or machine. We use string to fasten things, attach things, hang things. We sleep in it, sit on it, walk on it. As children, we play with toys made from cloth and stuffed with fibre. We transport our possessions using bags and ropes. We use nets to keep pests off our crops and to catch fish. We carry our babies in slings, or wheel them around in fabric structures hung from frames. Our vehicles are lined and padded with string. We wrap our dead in it.
And that’s not even half the story. The technology of textiles underlies so much else in our world, too – obvious things, like surgical stitches and the fan belt in an engine, and less obvious things, like paper and electrical wire.
Subtract string, and our lives change out of all recognition.
Continue reading String! It’s Important!
That cluster of beading I showed you, from the Cork workshop – what did I do with it next?
It became the lid of a little box, which holds some earrings I made for my mother’s birthday.
The outer part is made of high-moral-fibre organic fair-trade cotton velvet, and the box is lined with some silk that I bought at that same event in Cork. I used two weights of card for the structure: some thicker stuff from the box our new router came in, and some thinner stuff from a cereal packet. Each piece is separately padded and glued, and they’re then sewn together.
Continue reading A Beaded Box
Look, look, it’s a series!
A little while ago I published my first audio post, featuring me singing “Tuirne Mháire”, a traditional Irish song about a spinning wheel.
This week I recorded a second song, “The Weaver and the Factory Maid” – as performed by those linchpins of English electric folk, the fabulous Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span. We had their Parcel of Rogues album when I was growing up, and this was always one of my favourite songs.
My version doesn’t have any of the gorgeous crunchy instruments or harmonies, obviously, since it was just me and my phone (…in the bathroom, on account of the acoustics), but I rather like how it turned out.
Continue reading String Songs: The Weaver and the Factory Maid
Right. About that veiled reference in a recent post to other things I made in March.
It was all rather lovely, actually.
Some time in February, I saw a notice about the Cork Textiles Network‘s 2011 conference, Function & Form in Textiles, to be held on 5-6 March in Cork city. As soon as I read the details I realised that I really, really wanted to go.
So I did.
Continue reading Big Messes
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