A couple of new zines

Just added to TheTangledPress Etsy Store:

‘Profound Tapestry’, a 24 page, A6 (quarter-sized) zine.  I umm-ed and aah-ed over whether to put this in the Tangled Press or the TangleCrafts store, but it’s poetry, not a practical craft zine, so the Press won out.   It is a collection of found poetry, that I discovered within the pages of my many vintage weaving & tapestry books. Weaving, spinning, and technical weaving terminology like warp and weft lend themselves very easily to metaphor, so that the poetry frequently does not appear craft-related at all.

Just added to the TangleCrafts Etsy Store:

I’d been meaning for ages to try out covering buttons, after my fabric badge-making experiments using a kids’ badge-machine left me with very sore fingertips indeed.  Happily, buttons appear to be far friendlier, and this little zine is the result of my explorations.   ‘Cover-Button Moon’ is a 16 page mini-zine that comes with 3 free buttons!  It is a complete introduction and how-to for covering buttons with your own funky fabrics, including full step-by-step instructions, photos, tips, and 5 simple projects to start you off (the 3 buttons included can be used to try out the projects, too).

Check out the store listings of both items for full details & more pics.

I found more poetry

From ‘The Craft of Weaving’ by Irene Waller (c) 1976

we are astoundingly blind
and really do not look at
and see properly
the world around us
which is the source of
everything

The next step on from finding poetry within fiction was to start flicking through  my ‘archive’ of vintage  weaving books.  I felt sure there must be poetry in descriptions of this wonderfully repetetive and meditative craft.  I wasn’t wrong, but what I found still surprised me, erring towards the philosophical and the abstract, rather than a simple appreciation of craft and colour.

Anyone who has read Telaic Fantasy 1 will already know about my dichotomous feelings towards Irene Waller – on the one hand so creative, on the other, with such a frightfully upper-class, scarily no-nonsense attitude (can’t you just see the attitude oozing out, even just in that cover photo above?).  If there was one author I didn’t expect to find poetry in, it was Irene Waller, yet there it was, all the same.

I also wanted to share another idea I found in the above book.  It’s possibly not entirely original (although you must remember it was written several decades before the likes of Keri Smith’s fantastic ‘How to be an Explorer of the World’), but I really like it:

“A marvellous way to break down any inhibitions you may have about colour is to have several large glass jars on your shelving and to drop into them fragments of anything, colourwise, which you find pleasing – beads, glass, paper, yarns, fabrics.  Have a jar for blues, another for greens and so on.“

This is just supposed to be an exercise in developing a greater understanding of colour, but I think a jar crammed with miscellaneously textured colour would make a fantastic ornament, or if not ornament exactly, source of inspiration, in my workroom.  I don’t think I could put yarns inside, though, as I would just have to fish them out again, when inspiration struck.  Could get messy.

I really need to overcome my resistance and look out Irene Waller’s other books…