Treasures from around the world

Some wonderful treasures arrived on my doorstep this week! It started with this, arriving from the Netherlands:

This is a wonderful new book (just now translated into English) about woven structures on divided parallel threadings, including what’s popularly called “echo weave”. I haven’t yet had a chance to dig into it, but it looks both clear and encyclopedic, and the photos are jaw-droppingly beautiful. I’m hoping to read it more thoroughly this weekend. (If you don’t yet have a copy, you can order it direct from Marian here.)

The next day, this treasure trove arrived:

I opened it and squealed in delight when I found my sheets of lacquered paper yarn had arrived! These are sheets of lacquered paper that have been cut into very thin strips for use as weft. (There is a version used as warp – that technique is called saganishiki – Google it for some very lovely photos.)

I tore open the box, revealing this:

(The ruler is just there to give you an idea of the size – it wasn’t in the shipment!)

And I opened up one of the packages to see if it was, indeed, what I had been hoping it was:

Click on the photo to enlarge it – you really can’t appreciate how finely cut the strips are unless you see the full size photo. It’s gorgeous, and will make lovely textiles.

I had won 42 lots of the paper on eBay – I bid on all of them because I knew they were quite rare and hard to find. In the photos, it looked like each package contained about 1-2 sheets of paper, so 42 lots would have been 40-80 sheets. That is more than a lifetime supply, but would have given me considerable variety.

Anyway, I was shocked at how expensive shipping was – it quadrupled the cost! But when the package arrived, I realized why…about 1/3 of the packages had only one sheet in them, true, but the remaining 2/3 had five to twenty sheets each! So I am guesstimating that I have 300-odd sheets of lacquered paper weft. That is more than I will use in several lifetimes. So if you are interested in buying a sheet or two (or fifty, or a hundred), drop me a line. It won’t be expensive and shipping costs should be minimal (it *is* paper after all!).

I have been up to some other things in the studio, but it’s getting late, so I’m signing off for now – perhaps I’ll write about the new stuff tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, here are the two athletes of the house, practicing their new Olympic sport – synchronized napping.