Tassel former 4

Great Yarmouth was a very long drive in the intense heat but a worthwhile trip, some very nice architecture, very long wide beach.

OK, so here’s a video on Soumak and it will help you a lot to understand how to do stitch 2 that we were discussing.

Soumak Turkish Carpet Weaving


If you ask me, I think this Right Side Stitch is true Soumak, whereas Left side stitch is true twinning. How fascinating that they combined the two to decorate spherical forms.

Ok, so let’s dive in there....

Pull your fixed point brown thread taut, then with you worker thread come out in front, hook it over the top and pull it through to the RIGHT.  To achieve the ‘pulling through’ you need to reach in and grab it, or poke it through, whichever is more comfortable but my suggestion is find a way that works for you and reduces fiddling.  What you are aiming for is ease of movement and eventually a bit of speed.

A.

B.

C.

There you have it.

D.

As you can see in the link below.

RCT Bag: Gorgeous Bag 2

From these two basic stitches you can create shapes like the diagram you can see at the bottom of the sheet I’ve included and called D.

Another thing to note is that when they added new threads, using Larks Head Knot aka Rya knot, it creates an area of weaker tension, or put it another way, a desirable gap in the work, which they would either exaggerate or conceal.  I think that’s a very exciting concept.

Now you could say ‘oh well, you know that bag is the culmination of centuries of skilled work and rather like knitting, where you also only have two stitches, a knit and a purl, look at the endless possibilities in that craft etc?  I’d say yes, but if you could knit a sock or weave a bunch of flowers, which would you do first?

Exactly, where there’s a will there’s a way.  Or should we just let the bag rot and forget humans could ever make those things, and just sit around eating dehydrated food waiting until a space ship takes us to a new planet?

Precisely dear friends: we have a duty to rescue, collect and enrich our culture with knowledge from the past.

Have a good evening!

* I’ll come back to this RCT bag, after the Mermaid etc and I think the next step would be to draw the design carefully and try out a few motifs.  I think they made it like a giant Easter egg, then cut it in half.

I’m researching Alms Bags at the moment, in a very casual way,  nothing too involved,  but the oldest bag I found is French 1100....can you imagine!  I plan to map that one out too.  I figured if I draw it really carefully someone else might want to sew it.