I’ve been taking an online course in textile anthropology, a gentle prelude to beginning graduate work next year, and I’ve been reading my notes, thinking about what I’ve been learning. Learning — or maybe recognizing is more accurate. I took an introductory anthropology course way back in the last century, when I was in my late teens, and I found the language and focus interesting, though I didn’t find the discipline itself particularly welcoming. I think it’s changed. (I hope it’s changed?) The course reading I’ve been doing for these online modules are congenial to the way my mind works.
So yes, I’ve been reading my notes, mostly from the last module, which focused on the way we experience textiles in part through our senses. That’s always been the way I’ve worked with textiles — preparing them for dyeing, cutting them and piecing them, quilting, even mending. How they feel in my hands, how my arms anticipate the weight of them as I tie and clamp and bind, how I know how to proceed because my eyes imagine a particular texture, my fingers knowing how the fibre will feel as I push a needle through the landscape of pieced or dyed linen or ramie or cotton.
I was remembering, as I was reading, how it was to work with my granddaughter in late July. As I was explaining the process we would follow to wrap and tie the prepared cotton and ramie before we dyed it with rose madder, I realized how much of this didn’t really have a known set of instructions for me to pass along to her. We can try this, I told her, but honestly the results will be something we can’t possibly know. We need to use this hemp string because it will grip. If we tie on a diagonal, we might get something like watery rays, and we can also tie stones into some parts of the surface if you want to do that. (She didn’t.) One of us would hold one end of a length of fabric and the other would twist, tying as she went along. The she was sometimes me, sometimes her. She is also related to me, a part of me, though we live far apart. When we’d dyed the fabric, one length at a time (there were 4 bundles), we let it rest overnight. I was filled with a kind of excitement and I think she was too. She is patient, which is good. She kept good notes. She was far more adept at the math (well, maybe more like chemistry) we needed to consider for the mordant, for the ratio of weight of fabric to weight of dye powder (it differs depending on the colour you are hoping for), anyway, far more adept than I was. (We learn this in grade 3, she said. Not meanly. Just as a matter of fact.)
So this is how material culture is embodied. A granddaughter wants to make curtains. Her grandmother is keen to share what she knows, knowing that much of it has to be done in a physical way for learning to take place. Hold the end of this and I’ll twist and try to wrap the string at the same time. If we twist tightly, I think the resulting pattern will have more contrast. We will rinse in cool water and then hang the cloth on the line before the final wash. Can you imagine the curtains when we do this?
And when the photograph arrived, later, after a drive home across the mountains, after unpacking, there was a simple caption: I love them!
And I do too.
