15 Sep 2024 8 min read

In Search of the Real

Most of my life has been trying to got out from underneath various abstractions of one sort or the other. This isn’t just a product of our digital age or related information-based economy, though our current age has certainly accelerated the pace with which we are pummeled with such abstractions. Some of my earliest memories as a kid growing up in America were of my country terrorizing others or its own citizens based on made up concepts that were supposed to mean something to me. I remember sitting terrified while watching Night-vision footage of my country bombing Iraq in the name of some nebulous abstraction of “protecting freedom.” Likewise, as a teen, I sat in my high school homeroom and watch the twin towers fall, and subsequently, my country embark upon a 20 year “war on terror” in Afghanistan. Finally, I remember sitting in my college dining hall as the financial fiction of making bad bets on predatory subprime mortgages (collateralized debt obligations) all went bust before my eyes, tanked the economy, and led to thousands of people losing their homes and jobs. In the US at the center of a decaying world hegemon, I feel like we are particularly attuned to how stories and products that are just made up our of thin air are used against us to force us into war or propping up the hoarding of wealth.

In such a context, I have always been sort of obsessed with what is real, or what I know exists and isn’t just a fiction being used to manipulate me into some type of action or thought pattern. The tactile realness of weaving and spinning is one of the things that was tremendously appealing to me. I didn’t need to convince a board of editors of the utility of a textile like I did when trying to get sell them on accepting an article I wrote for possible publication. I didn’t need to sell the yarn or my looms on my worthiness and “fit” for plying my craft with them like I did when I had to try and sell myself to various organizations to do a simple job reading, analyzing, and writing reports. No, I could just humbly come with my tools and materials and build new worlds outside the fictions of the myths and stories that swirled around me.

One of the realest things I have ever done is make a textile for someone that serves a very important purpose for them. I am some 50+ technical reports into my career as a public sociologist, but I don’t think any of that work has ever been as real as hand delivering a memorial textile to someone that is made, in part, with the fur from their departed dog. In this moment, I don’t even matter, as I have said countless times. I am just plying an ancient craft in service of helping someone through the mourning process, a timeless rite of passage that transcends any sort fictionalizing. I know how impossible it is to escape grief through make-believe storytelling (e.g., “they are in a better place”), because I tried to avoid the grief of losing my mom to an entirely preventable form of cancer with such fictions. No, you just have to navigate the terrain of feeling your way through every stage of that process. That’s why memorials devoted to that person so that you can visit with them and feel through missing them will always be more meaningful than any abstract story about where they are now.

Recently, I have taken on a different type of project that has challenged me to show up in a familiar way to assist in support someone through a process that I haven’t before. I have been making a baby quilt weaving for my new niece Sophia, which incorporates my family’s woven language. Two of the biggest tragedies of my mom dying so young were that she did not get to meet her Grandchildren and my sister had to give birth without her own mother to support her. With such difficulties, I knew that I could develop a family heirloom that provides my mom the opportunity to be present for baby Sophia and my sister. I know my mom would have crocheted items for my wee one and Sophia if she was still alive and incorporated her woven language, the towers and spirals that were in all of the crocheted items she made for me. Consequently, I felt like it fell on me to keep that tradition of handmade textiles alive in my family with the baby quilt weaving.

I created the effect of patchwork quilting by blending various heathered and neutral 2-ply Jumper weight Shetland Yarn from Jamieson and Smith Wool Brokers. For each length of weft, I would combine three separate lengths of these yarns to create one larger heathered bit of weft yarn. I then varied which specific neutral and heathered yarn I would use to make up the weft for each 3.5 inch x 4.5 inch quilt block that made up the background of my piece. I ended up create six unique quilt block backgrounds that were just subtly different plays on the same neutral, heathered theme just by altering the 2-ply yarns that I used in each section. This is something I first did with the weaving I talked about last week with “Enter the Portal,” and it has really showed me some of the creative freedom you can find by supporting the 700 small crofters and farmers that Jamieson and Smith buy their wool clip from on the Shetland Islands.

Despite leaning on commerically-made yarn more than usual, I still felt it was important to incorporate my own handspun and natural-dyed yarn in to accentuate my family’s woven language in the piece. I used my own cochineal-dyed Shetland handspun for the boundaries, yarrow-dyed Shetland handspun to flank each side of the lifeline, and coreopsis-dyed Shetland handspun for the spiral in the middle of the piece. Like most quilts I admire, I wanted the visual symbols to pop with the vibrant colors of the natural world we are surrounded by. This is a key departure from my typical methodical dyeing process where I typically bring in key dye plants for their specific divination properties. However, my bike crash has still effected my ability to really be running on all cylinders, so I was unable to carry through on that typical practice. Yet, despite this shortcoming, I am still happy I was able to dip into my extensive collection of my own handspun, natural-dyed Shetland yarn to leave my mark on this piece. I like to think of my “bug-dyed” cochineal boundaries as an embodiment of weirdo ole Uncle Jimblers acting as a energetic barrier to anyone who would serve to try and bother or send any negativity to baby Sophia or my sister. I suppose those sorts of habits as the protective older brother die hard, don’t they?

I have to give props to Sandy Lamb (Website | Instagram) , whose work was a big inspiration in the idea to weave a quilt-like piece. His recent piece, pictured above, sort of blew my gasket off when I saw it. It served as a portal to show me how I could participate in the age-old practice of baby quilts without being a quilter. Also, just look at this level of detail and execution. This is why I try and practice my weaving everyday, in the hopes that I can get here one day. I just have to stop getting so sidetracked on my writing. HEHEH JK.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t able to craft the ideal yarn for the piece, I am just thankful that I was able to create a potential family heirloom with my mom’s symbols in it. A family woven language only becomes real the extent to which people engage with and use those symbols to pass down the magic and values taught to people through them. I have taken it upon myself to be the carrier of that woven language for my mom. It’s not lost on me how much significance this weaving has given that I took up weaving to finish my mom’s unfinished work of learning to weave. Now with this peice, I am literally carrying out work now that she is unable to create but can be expressed through. This baby quilt can be a physical embodiment of my mom’s presence in the lives of Sophia and my sister. This will easily take the place of my favorite weaving I have ever made.

This process of making my mom’s presence known and felt in the lives of my own child and my niece through potential family heirloom weaving is real beyond all the fictitious economic and political games we are surrounded with today. There is a depth to the work that is entirely absent from most of the “work” I complete in my wage labor. This work is intergenerational. This work is craft-based. This work has am inherent value that is respected and does not need to explain its worth. This work is the portal where I escape from the rat race to find a deeper purpose for myself as I enter my 38th year on the planet. I just want to be a conduit for the tactile work of creating cloths that bring people back into the grounded realization of the depth of this existence in all its joys and difficulties beyond all the abstractions, myths, and slogans that seek to pull us away from ourselves and our communities.

Three cheers for Wolfgang Voigt’s “Gas” project, which I listened to non-stop this last week. It’s odd this past week was when the Gas records really hit. I have been dabbling with this critically acclaimed minimal electronic project for years without having its claws really sink into me. Something shifted this week. I turned on Gas’ seminal Pop (2000) record one morning and it just washed over me like waves on a beach. It felt like I have been listening and enjoying this record for decades; That is the sort of embedeness I felt when listening to the record this week. I hope you listen to a record that feels like talking to an old friend this week. It’s one of life’s simple joys.

I cannot find my campsnap camera and it is annoying me. Consequently, I don’t have a photo essay for you this week. I do have little photos from the bike rides I took to celebrate my 38th birthday out to the edge of a SPACE FORCE (What I call X-files Point_ and a decommissioned military base near my house. And yes, I did wear my bootleg shirt depicting Murder and Scully’s office from X-files on my ride out to X-files Point, because why not? These photos mark my return to riding my bike on dirt trails and letting go of riding my bike really far. Lately, real life, actual people have wanted to ride with me, so I have been taking advantage of enjoying the community of others who like to move their bodies. Could it be that your friendly basement hermit will be coaxed back into community with others? Only time will tell.