Trust me...I'm a museum label

On this quest to make an Indo-Portuguese colcha a.k.a Indian embroideries made for the export market, I have bumped up against several issues.  Here is the first big one:

WHAT THE HECK KIND OF SILK?

Early in my research I found that most books say that the silk used is a wild silk called tussah that is naturally bright yellow.  Well I thought that was neat and went about trying to find this magical silk.

Well wouldn't you know...I can't find it.  I found soft shades of under cooked baked goods mostly ranging from beige to a slight pink.  To add insult to injury there are a million ways to spell tussah... I mean tassar ...you see what I mean.  Even the Europeans had no idea what it was called.  They called it lawne because they thought it was a vegetable product.

I did stumble onto something called muga silk.  It ranges from a cream to dark brown (which is very slubby and kind of looks like someone spun the hair they found on the salon floor).  Most examples are a pale honey color.  Occasionally I found references to Assam silk which can refer to muga, eri or white pat.  Where is my magical yellow silk?

So yellow...So magical...

The museum and book labels are no help.  No help at all.  They just seem to call the silk what ever they feel like.  Maybe they don't know or don't care because I'm the only loon trying to find this stuff.

I came to these possibilities:

1) Tussah silk used to come in this color but climate change effected this or they fed the worms something special.
2) They dyed the tussah and sold the Portuguese a bill of goods.
3) They used bombyx mori and dyed it.  They also sold the Portuguese some magic beans.
4) Muga silk was used on some of the paler embroideries (some of them are less yellow)
5) A mix of these things.

My money is on #5.

So what are my options?  Will Rae: 1) pick an option 2) lose her mind with indecision 3) Buy all the options she can find and try them all?

My heart says find all the options and buy them.  Lay them out on the floor and roll on them like a silk hording dragon.  My brain says get a few options and try them.  Which leaves me actually losing my mind with indecision. 

I have a sickness

It can only be cured with yellow silk

So what the heck am I making?

Here is a picture of a kantha I found on wikipedia because I'm lazy and this is a perfectly good example.

So why am I dancing around, poking awkwardly at the term "Indo-Portuguese colcha"?  Well lets start with the term "Indo-Portuguese".  It wasn't used in period, so that's one strike against it.  The Portuguese landed in Goa in west India and pretty much took over (more on that later).  They called this area Estado da Índia.  Creative, very creative.  A guy named Francisco de Almeida decided to build a fort there and there you ago, a Portuguese state...I know I'm over simplifying but it's for brevity.  What I'm saying Indo-Portugal isn't like a celebrity name mash-up like Beniffer.   It was a colony set up for making money not for sleepovers and braiding each others hair.  So calling something that was made by a colonized people a sort of cutesy nickname diminishes that fact that these textiles were made well before the Portuguese landed. 

The fast answer to what I'm making is an Indo-Portuguese colcha.  For the long answer keep reading and as a bonus there is a hurdy gurdy project I'm working on.  It's beautiful and involves a hammer.

The latest quilt beast is based on objects made in India (Bengal and Gujarat, Bengali examples being my main focus for this project) .  They are cotton with silk embroidery (it feels so wrong and yet...so right).  They depict a mix of scenes ranging from hunting scenes, nautical scenes, biblical tableau, Hapsburg double headed eagles, Greek mythology, giant snakes eating elephants and not to be ignored is the peacock eating regular sized snakes.  I mean they could be giant peacocks eating giant snakes but who knows.


The second term I take issue with is "colcha".  Yeah I know...it's just Portuguese for quilt.  Big whoop, a quilt is just a term for a fabric sandwich.  Well guess what?  Chicken butt.  I'm pretty sure that these come from the same tradition as the kantha.  A kantha is a way that old sari were used to make padded floor coverings to be used as sleeping or sitting mats.  I'm still trying to figure out if that's a fact or just the ravings of a crazy embroiderer.  So again, I'm trying to acknowledge the colonization by use of my language in describing these objects.  Is a kantha a quilt, yes.  Is a colcha a quilt, yes.  Is the word colcha used by the colonizers.  You betcha. 

So what am I going to call my newest quilt beast?  I don't know.  "Quilted embroideries employing aari technique, using native wild silk and made for the export market" doesn't exactly roll of the tongue.  Nor does, "Colonized India embroidered textiles".  So for now it's called quilt beast.

Now for the hurdy gurdy project!

Did you know gurdies require their wheels to be rosined?  They do!  And to make it is a sticky mess! The maker of the instrument said that my best bet is to use liquid rosin and I could make it myself.  I ordered so regular old rosin from the internet and examined it.

It say "Violins violas cellos" not hurdy gurdy...but is doesn't say that I can't

It was pretty color too...

shiney and candy like

Me, not wanting overkill selected an appropriate tool.

That's right! The correct tool is a cross-peen hammer!

Don't worry it's my small hammer and I thought the wedge shape could gently persuade the rosin out of it's case. So I gave it a love tap.  It did remarkable little damage.

Why are you so strong tree sap?!

Hoping a second love tap would break it free I gave it a try.

It crumbled into what looks like dust and pop rocks

The real kicker is that the stupid plastic rosin case was fine.  Like nothing had happened.  I scraped up what I could into a little jar and added rubbing alcohol.  Not the normal kind mind you, this is 99% alcohol 1% awesome. 

Look science!

The rosin is dissolving now and I will have to wait and see what happens.  I'm taking as a good sign that the jar and my hands are a sticky mess.  

The cat was judging me

So that was my science project for the day.  

Just what the world needs...another craft blog

So....


I have a habit of doing big embroidery projects.  Like 4'x5' size monsters that are white on white and look like a polar bear in a snow storm in photographs.  So introducing Quilt Beast II: The Low Contrast Embroidery Strikes back:

Any guesses?  If you guessed that Rae has slipped of the deep-end you would be correct.  Also a correct answer: Indo-Portuguese colcha (the term Indo-Portuguese is not the best, but more on that later) To add to the lunacy I won't be copying any one given colcha.  I don't ask musicians to play 'Free Bird' and I don't expect myself to reproduce a historical object just for the sake of reproducing a historical object.  I like to look at meaning that the symbols had historically, the materials and the people that made them.  By constructing my own embroidered story I hope to connect with people who have come before. I know this might make me sound like I'm fancy.  I'm not.  It just means that I find a shoe in a midden pit more interesting than the crown jewels.

A very interesting pair of shoes

So, in theory, I will be breaking down this project into bite size pieces (and not breaking down in a snot bubbling toddler).