Through my textile souvenirs, I’m revisiting Peru today. One of the most wonderful textile souvenirs I’ve ever collected is this lovely arpillera from the markets in Aguas Callientes, the town nearest Machu Picchu. I’ve written about it previously so will focus on other things today.
It’s wonderful wall hanging, but I try to focus on practical textile/fibre art I can use when we get home. This table runner from Cusco, Peru is an example. While without doubt it was produced for the upper end of the tourist market, such things also offer insights into the best of local craftsmanship. In common with most cultures, weaving and embroidery go together, and Peru artisan markets and shops are a bewildering delight.
This is a table runner of hand woven wool, embroidered with Andean cultural images in earthy coloured wools.
Those colours fit our decor perfectly, and I’ve used this table runner more or less continuously since our Peruvian trip in 2008. Raised in Australia to always hand wash anything made of wool, I had reservations about putting it into the delicates cycle of the washing machine – but eventually took the plunge several years ago, held my breath, and it came out beautifully. I take great care of it, and it needs washing only every 3-4 months. I hang it over the clothes airing rack before putting it back on the table, as there’s no way I’d let it find its way into the drier. If I didn’t take care to circumvent her, my wonderful cleaning lady would have it have it thoroughly washed and felted in no time flat 🙂
The full width of the runner is used – there is no hem along the sides
Writing about this souvenir had me searching for information about the chain stitch so widely used in the Ayacuchano area around Cusco, and I found this video explaining and demonstrating the plain simple chain stitch punta cadena and its variations punta crespo which are used to form fillings and textures, and all of them are used with stem, straight and satin stitch. There’s an academic paper to delve into, too, if your spanish is up to it, on how the Spanish colonisation broought European influences to indigenous textile making over time.
Front and back of the same section of the runner. I’m sorry I didn’t ask more questions, because I’m not sure whether the embroidery was done by hand or machine, but chain stitch can be pretty fast and rhythmic, so I feel it was hand stitched.
The next two things are in the bright colours which by far dominated everything on sale. Glorious riots of colourful textiles abounded in street markets and all the shops selling local artisan made goods.
The full width of woven red wool formed into a bag with a sturdier wool textile base (just showing) and woven wool straps just showing on each side. Chain stitched imagery is of of daily life in a fishing village.A landscape-inspired border on each selvedge is a similar style to the table runner.
We hung this woollen weaving at this head of the stairs, rather that just pull it out occasionally for a table for which it’s a bit short. Their beaks suggest humming birds;I love their feet; and the border suggests mountains.
I know, I’ve claimed to focus on practical things I can use at home – but I now confess I have never used this red bag for anything 🙂
At least ten years ago or more I attended a Studio Art Quilt Associates conference, at which there was a merchants’ mall where I just couldn’t resist buying two rolls of artisan woven fabric, one cotton, one silk, and each about 30cm wide and ~4m long. Perhaps I wasn’t very well, or perhaps I got caught up in the ooooh-aaaah group frenzy of a bunch of fibre artists being seduced by fabrics and threads laid out in front of us…. but blue’s an unusual colour for me to consider working with. And I bought some wonderful threads, too, that I have never used for stitching or anything – I think they’re actually weaving threads as they’re in some quantity on large cones….
Detail Untitled (#4 in ‘Spirogyra’ series)
Most of my works are neutrals and earthy colours. However, SAQA currently has a call for entries in an exhibition to be titled “Colour in Context, Blue” and since I’ve had this blue fabric sitting in my stash for ages, it seemed reasonable to whip up an entry. It’s a small work, and if not selected would fit within the parameters for entry into the Australia Wide 10 biennial for 2026.
So as entries close at the end of the month I’m scooting along with it and about ready to commit to a photography date for it and another recently finished work, #2 in the Spirogyra series – here shown in the early stages.
Even as I write these words I am mentally going through some possibilities of something wildly experimental and really quick…. so enough writing – I’m off for a walk to mull over a couple of ideas, and then up to my work room to do a sample or two with them.
My regular readers know I love a bit of glitter! Last weekend I went to a big store here in Montevideo that stocks all kinds of things for the craftsperson and upholsterer including leather, batting, threads, zippers, crochet and macrame supplies. Strangely enough they don’t stock the needles and embroidery thread I was hoping for… but there’s another merceria nearby that will be open when I’m in that zone later in the week. Even without those things though, Centro Tapicero is a veritable Alladin’s Cave for people like me. Just when I thought I was ready to go to the cashier, I spotted this fabric – and just had to buy the minimum 0.5m x 1.5m cut to try it out for, um, something.
Pewter colour, the surface of this polyester is metallic and to me, irresistable.
It’s a metallic finish on a very fine black jersey knit base – the surface looks a little like sharkskin satin perhaps – anyway quite irresistable. Once I got home of course I did some sample making to see how it handles. It’s a lot easier to handle than leather, and as I’m in the middle of another project just at the moment, I have time to think about how I’m going to use it.
I cut some of my beloved squares and wavy bits and, using a pewter coloured thread ‘tacked’ down some shapes into position. Pin and needle holes do show.
Here’s what did and found with this material
Far left – using a long stitch using pewter coloured thread, it was easy enough to machine sew down BUT wrinkling and stretching occurred when I sped up.
Wavy bit – hand tacked into place and stitched over with a sewing machine red thread and a perle #8 in the pewter colour…. hmmm – I don’t care for the stitching showing underneath, but potentially useful to know.
Like fine leather, it can be more easily pinned and hand sewn, but marks show if it is unpicked.
The squares -were stitched with, from L-R: perle #8, neon red machine embroidery thread, black perle #12, metalic silver, but the effect of this thread was blah – not significant enough to bother with.
the wavy bit from lower left corner diagonally up is glued down – there’s no apparent damage from the glue on the surface of this material, so full marks of approval for that – sometimes the glue causes wrinking and distortion on similar fabrics.
Ironing: at even a medium heat the iron caught on the surface of the hotplate; but turned over and ironed from the back at top heat all survived just fine; and ironing with top heat and using a teflon sheet there seemed to damage either. This augurs well!
The question now is –should I return this week and buy some more?
There were about 20 artists on yesterday’s SAQA JAMs YAK zoom call, and we discussed a number of topics, including the pros and cons of larger and smaller sized works, and different views on presenting or displaying our fibre art, including the thorny old one of whether to mount and frame textile works, under glass or not. There are so many acceptable options these days, which can appeal or not, depending on what field you’re coming from, and where you’re showing your work is a factor, too.
In the context of this discussion, I mentioned a juried fibre art exhibition held in the late 90s, I think by WAFTA (West Australian Fibre Textile Artists) in Perth, Western Australia – at least I think they put it on. I will never forget one piece in that show I found quite astonishing to see it hung it using several grommets along the top edge which were looped over a few nails in the gallery wall. They were positioned so that it buckled a bit, deliberately not sitting flat against the wall. In addition the edges of the canvas were just cut and left raw, bereft of any kind of finishing off that I recall. Looking back it was a bit innovative, maybe ground breaking at the time, and although I can’t remember the surface design, I’m sure that it probably was entirely appropriate, as I now see I myself was more focused on technique rather than its message, because that was where my own art was.
In the late 90s I was 100% into freehand cut, machine pieced quilted works with bound or faced edges. With top quality workmanship all my threads were skillfully, neatly and carefully finished off as I diligently buried all knots between layers – they didn’t even show on the back of a work, and still don’t on any of my backs. After all, I learned taught good sewing and embroidery skills by my mother, grandmother and domestic science teachers at school; and as a teen I often successfully sewed myself outfits using the more demanding Vogue Designer patterns. In the late 80s my earliest contact with quilted textiles had been with the exacting requirements of traditional pieced geometric patchwork. Much of that changed when I met freehand or improvisational piecing. in an art quilt workshop by Nancy Crow – after which whatever I made was less precisely structured but still neatly finished off.
“Green Island” 1997. 142cm x 104cm) Irregular shape, with faced edges photographed against black.
Considering some of my own recent work, and images in my Pinterest collection, an informal, unfinished look is something I have been working towards for some time…. and it isn’t always easy to carry out on purpose. But it does fit with me seeing any kind of Life as a continuum between start and finish points without any set length or pattern. A life can be long or short, and it can be a smooth continuum, but it is more likely to be untidy in places, occasionally punctuated by upheavals or mistakes at some points along the way. Fabric marked by stitches is a statement or an exploration of something on the artist’s mind, and, just like a life, a stitchery can have messy stops, starts and changes of directions, stitches or threads along the way.
Detail “Odds and Ends” 2023, it took a while to get used to leaving threads hanging as I’d planned – and every now and then I pulled a section of stitching that I felt was too regular …
My favourite artists whose medium is stitch include Roberta Wagner (“Much of my recent work has a feeling of age reminiscent of memories and buried treasure”), Shelley Rhodes , Rieko Koga (“She expresses her universe through threads and needles, working spontaneously.”) , Anitta Romano (“It is above all a question of inscribing time in matter, of transforming time into matter”) Carolyn Nelson (“…by hand, torn, layered, stitched, embedded…” To this list I’d add Cristina Llambi, the artist whose exhibition I recently loved. All of them stitch their ideas free of any sign of tradition or technical rules, and that freedom brings an air of spontaneity and sensitive response of the stitcher to his/her environment.
It’s no secret to my readers that I love hand stitching, and as I move along I do so rhythmically with a result that the marks tend to come out in a pretty regular way:
If machine stitched lines are developed into a kind of traintrack pattern like this pattern audition, it requires conscious effort to make them irregular – see examples below.
Detail, “Displacement” 2024
Detail “Moth Buffet” 2023.
Moth buffet, 2023, featuring moth eaten trangles of knits, and outer edges savaged with pliers to suggest moth damage.
There are times when I have delighted in stitching a regular kind of pattern leaving out anything that disturbs it. I’ve written before on primal shapes – squares and triangles in particular, and how grid layouts represent systems of order, like societies, or a body of knowledge, or a record of the passage of time. A couple of my recent works have this theme –
On saturday last Mike and I attended a book launch “Arboles de Montevideo” written by Eloisa Figueredo and beautifully illustrated by Javier Lage. The morning promised a talk by the author Eloisa Figueredo (who has loved ‘trees’ all her life) to be followed by a tour of the garden, and then a tour of the 1918 house itself, a small museum we hadn’t ever heard of, Museo Quinta in calle Vaz de Ferreira in the Atahualpa barrio of Montevideo, adjacent to the historic Prado.
The 11am talk began at about 11.10, and every few minutes someone else shuffled in trying to not be noisy but nevertheless disruptive to both speaker and audience. The last stragglers wandered in at 11.35, requiring chairs to be moved across the wooden floor or lifted over heads to accomodate them….pretty typical in a country of people who have a fairly laid back approach to the concept of a starting time 🙂 We bought a copy of the beautiful book and then instead of traipsing around with the guided tour, took our time to wander through the large urban block that from the beginning has always been allowed to grow completely naturally as a forest would.
One of the paths we followed with a stand (centre right) of Monstera Deliciosa – a favourite plant with beautiful leaves.
Monstera – seeing these thriving in the garden reminded us we haven’t had any in a garden since the Mt. Isa days – that will change asap!
Though Mike’s the one with the green thumb, we both love leafy green environments, wild or manicured, that are so good for our sense of well being. We love gardens generally, and once bought a fairly ordinary house in a Mt. Isa suburb of hundreds of others like it, purely for that particular house’s wonderful, slightly overgrown garden sporting magnificent fruit trees – mango, grapefruit, lemons, custard apples, pawpaws, bananas and more including a lovelywhite bauhinia tree.
Apart from the gravel path from the gate up to the house and around it’s base, all the other garden paths took us through the rich green foliage, around the tree trunks and over the roots, and they were simple bush tracks of composted fallen leaf matter, soft and quiet to walk on. Gorgeous.
As we wandered, every now and then we came close to a wall topped by coils of razor wire – a bit jarring, but so necessary for security these days around such a historic house that is no longer actually lived in.
The very natural track/path through the verdant ground cover including lots of ivy, and leaving hardly any bare ground.
The rich ground cover included patches of asparagus fern which wandered up into the nearby trees.
This stand of ginger looks pretty happy.
These days the museum is only open for private events, but once per year it’s open to the public on the annual weekend of Dia del Patrimonio. However, speaking with one of the members of the board that controls the museum, I learned it can be booked for a special group tour, and put my name down to be notified by email of upcoming events there, because we will go back.
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