Needlework

The 2006 Rowanette Home&Hearth Exchange is in full swing. I got through my knitted project, a log cabin TV blanket, amazingly fast. So I decided to make a wrapper for it. I tend to go a bit overboard when I package things. I have use brightly coloured tea/dishtowels a lot, plain brown Kraft paper randomly sprayed with gold, the bright pink Financial Times along with a bright green Arabic newspaper, the Pravda, massively enlarged black-and-white copies of money or photographs.

So for this exchange I wanted to make something that I hadn't tried before. As stated so often I have an interest in things Japanese, language, culture, aesthetics, crafts. So I browsed through the Danish libraries on line catalog to see what they had on offer and fell over this book: The Ultimate Sashiko Sourcebook: Patterns, Projects and Inspirations by Susan Briscoe. (For more see my book list in the right sidebar)

I immediately decided that my gift wrapper would be a sashiko cloth. So I got some fabric, some needles and some sashiko thread over the Internet and sat down for two weeks. The result:

a 1m/40" square sashiko stitched wrapping cloth.

The base pattern is a simple double clam shell or wave.

It looked more like ocean waves to me than clam shells, so I added a rising sun in the middle to bring in some colour/texture contrast.

I was thinking quite a while about this. I'm quite satisfied with the look it as now, being defined through the 'negative space' of the unstitched cloth. The alternative would have been to fill those two areas with a very dense stitch giving some 'positive space'. It was only after I had finished stitching the cloth that I realized that the sun rises at the horizon instead of in the middle of the sea, but let's just call that an artistic license.

Of course, the needle workers amongst my audience will be asking about the backside, so a quick shot of that too.

Yes, those are knots. There are LOTS of them. I am a bit concerned about it, even though the book states that this is standard for sashiko. I even contacted one of my Japanese teachers and asked her about it. She said it was quite acceptable, as sashiko was supposed to be a 'rustic craft' practiced by farmers to use and re-use every bit of cloth. She even suggested that I run the cloth through the washer and dryer a few times to give it a used look, the famed sabi or 'rustic patina' that is one of the mainstays of Japanese aesthetics. I decided against that.

So the wrapper is done, the exchange gift is done. I'll add some of my homespun yarn and some Danish food goodies to it and then it can be sent on its way on July 10th. For once I'm way ahead of the deadlines...