- Cloth manifesto
Making clothes, I think about dressing :: What it means, how it happens or is done.
:: True shibori. Yellow silk petticoat.
:: Wool felt skirt made from a remnant [£2:: Long underwear made of black wool jersey [ $23:: Skirt with flying geese, skirt with seedpods [ €8
:: the fabric markets in Goutte d'Or
Wedding dress of the verb to have
Dye made of unripe persimmons Dye made of indigo
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Wool.Things that bear a human mark, an animal mark.Cloth has terroir of a sort. [End Page 31]
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To have the pleasure of making them also :: to have beautiful things.
Tiny kakishibu checkerboardPersimmon dye makes everything from muddy brown to red
The shuttle and the loomA pucker made with small stitching
Blue triangles and black birds with their wings outRed thread
Onionskin
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In Paris last week, I saw a man wearing a scarf made of heavy silk chirimen printed with shibori; it was navy blue and black and the shibori pattern was white. He wore it with a dark wool coat and he carried his son in one arm. His son wore red. The colors, textures, patterns, the two people. Beautiful.
The matter of material :: bodies of living things, mine too, merit the work. Not just the eye; the hand.
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Not only my body but the bodies I don't knowat looms at mill tables at industrial machines on the cutting floor under fluorescent bulbs—
movement of cotton across two continents, that's a problem.In a room where the human body is unprotected by distance it absorbs vapors.
Ammonia zinc soda ashpowdered dye Amaranth
chromium copper tin
Direct blue 218 Disperse yellow 3 Acid red 114 Direct blue 15 Pigment red 3 Basic red 9 monohydrochloride
Bodies at dye vatsInhaling
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My boots resoled three times.Not frugality, I'm talking about something else :: relation not to money but to value—
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Interior quality the quality of been-made.Every day make one drawing of the clothes you wore. Do this for a year. [End Page 33] Hang the papers with your clothes on them from the ceiling.Get used to your face and notice patterns of color and shape.
Take the leftover paper and make yarn from itTake the undyed linen and put it in a tub with beet juice
borage roots
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To make beautiful things and spaces that are beautiful.Cloth a visible space between myself and others.
Line of cloth a possible extension to the world. [End Page 34]
Éireann Lorsung edits the journal 111O and co-runs MIEL, a micropress. She has published Music For Landing Planes By (Milkweed Editions, 2007) and appeared in DIAGRAM, the Colorado Review, the Collagist, ILK, and the Pinch. A second book is forthcoming in August 2013.