i'm honored to say that i have written the cover story for this autumn's korean quarterly - on the pojagi of fiber artist chunghie lee. talking with her was an amazing experience and i'm very happy with the piece (and kept from being too prideful by a rather funny misspelling of my name, not on any of the other five pieces i wrote for the issue, but only on the byline for the cover story.) chunghie lee is a tremendous inspiration and anyone who wants to read the piece should contact KQ for an issue. with the corking misspelling, it's bound to be an incredible collector's item.

recently, a girlfriend sent me information on the art of kimsooja. still being rather new to the whole pojagi thing, i had certainly never heard of bottari - this is one more interesting thread upon which i shall follow up.

not immediately, though, for my life, like the big number before intermission in a sondheim musical, has no loose ends whatever, and every leitmotif eventually layers upon the next, perfectly, neatly, exquisitely. i don't know how i get this lucky with synchronicity, but it's for damn sure that i do.

in the winter issue of KQ i'll have, among a few other things, an interview with a writer i've admired for quite some years, for his incisiveness and his guts. the knitting blog world could use a b.r. myers. why, though would i be writing about the american author i wrote about here at the end of august, in KQ?

it was pure luck that i was discussing myers with my sister's boyfriend, and in digging up a link for him, stumbled upon what was, really, right before my eyes. now that we're in communication for the piece, i've felt like a foie gras duck with the funnel down my throat - and loving it. what a lot of brain, and heart, and nerve, some people in the world have. how so much of that has been brought to me in one way or another through korea is really remarkable to me.

i remember reading somewhere once that, throughout the history of the film industry, just about every facet of it has had its fifteen minutes as the "star" of the scene. actors and actresses never really stop being significant, where gossip and faces are concerned, but there have certainly been times when just as much oooh-aaaaah credence is given to directors (coppola! scorsese! romero!), or even writers (joe esterhaus?). and, keep in mind, back in the day, it was the heads of studios who were the bigwigs who everybody talked about! (louie b. mayer - what's he eating for breakfast?)

i have no chronology for it, but i have to guess that within the handknitting industry there is some shift from time to time as to who is the "star" - designers? writers? actual artists producing one-of-a-kind works to be shown in exhibition? spinners? dyers? people who run magazines? shopkeeps? bloggers?

or, a little more esoteric - is it sometimes the day-in-the-sun for... needles? of course, that sounds silly, but i think it just as silly, the amount of importance that has been placed on yarn in knitting. i addressed this over a year ago in a post entitled voluptuous stoicism, in the midst of my yarn-buying moratorium. that moratorium was a successful, albeit somewhat foreshortened experience, but put me in a new, permanent space. as mentioned in the "voluptuous stoicism" post, there is something repugnant to me about hearing yarn brand names and colors being spoken of nearly as though they were people. creativity at any elevation is not dependent upon materials to that extent.

more knitters seem to be stirring themselves out of the self-induced trance of buying and "coveting" yarn (the way the verb "covet" has attached itself to knitting lately is in my opinion particularly weak-minded), and there is now a group blog called "knitting simplicity" wherein knitters gather to talk about, it seems, using up the stash they have, using recycled materials, and concentrating on the knitting more than the acquiring. i think it's a good step, but it does bother me that each of the members of the knitting simplicity group blog has his or her own blog as well. why not just talk about the topics that matter to you about knitting, on the knitting blog you already have? is safety in numbers that much of a concern? and, even if it is, if the comment fields are open on your blog (and the blogs of others you read), why not just use them? in that way, i think "knitting simplicity" is a small step rather than a large one; i would feel like the empowerment was spreading even further when knitters just chose to express this heresy about not buying yarn in their own "homes", rather than just in the lantern-lit secret meetingplace. but i do applaud the effort. if that's where things have to start, then that's where they have to start.

but i'm well into the journey of knitting being far, far more than "all about the yarn", and the fact that other forms of fiber art are almost in spite of the materials they use, it's no wonder that i am thinking more about those forms.

when a friend and fellow writer - a woman who sews but does not knit - read my first draft of the interview feature i did with chunghie lee for KOREAN QUARTERLY, she (my friend) claimed to be "very glad (chunghie lee) didn't say 'i just let the materials do what they want, and the pojagi happens.' " that was an unprompted comment from someone completely outside the fiber arts community, and i feel the same way.

i don't let yarn "figure out what it wants to be". i am sure this does work for some knitters, and that they achieve the effects that they desire. it's certainly less likely to work in making pojagi, where the materials aren't as likely to tell you "what they want to be" as much as yarn might, for two big reasons:

one, they already are something (since pojagi are often created from scraps of existing garments and goods); and two, they're going to be a pojagi - which, sure, could be a sock or a hat or a kite or other pojagi-inspired piece. but it's a matter of pojagi materials going from a bigger range of identifiables to a smaller range, whereas with yarn i think it's the other way around.

if i don't know what i want yarn to be, i put it away. then eventually i want something to be, and i'll find the yarn for the job. it might be here, it might not. when i buy yarn i concentrate more on what seems to me to be the quality (which will not alter, regardless of the project) or the specific type of fiber content and color (because they are aesthetically correct for me, for a garment or for my home, and this does not change that much from project to project either.) i have a local yarn store that i trust to give me accurate information on the quality, durability and tendencies of any yarn i choose there, and a decade of shopping there has proven to me that i'll never get upsold or pushed towards the flavor du jour. that's what i depend on, when i do purchase - that knowledge.

some people think it's posh to have a room with a skylight. not me. they get all clogged with dead bugs and frankly can be rather ghetto. our skylight gets dirty, and in the summer, it makes the den very uncomfortable to be in during the afternoon, even with the UV blocker on it. i have never been a fan of bright light - even since i was little, i liked cool, dark rooms.

at some point in recent weeks (around the time the temperature in philadelphia went from a steady sixty-five to a steady ninety-five over the course of a day) ben asked me what we might do that would maybe make summer a little less... punishing. for me. (and thereby him.) i said, something about that skylight HAS to change. afternoons are my ebb; i don't write then or even function very well with cutlery. if i had my way, i'd sleep between noon and seven pm every day - they are utterly pointless hours. night, and morning, is what i like. but since i HAVE to be awake, afternoons are a very good time for me to knit, with a movie on the television. everybody knows how uncozy it is to watch television in a bright room -- it's ridiculous!

we decided to make a paper pojagi-style cover for the skylight.

when we set out, i warned ben that i would be making some unquestionable aesthetic decisions as we went along. he assured me that he was there to climb the ladder and cut paper, nothing else. but halfway through the project, i left him to his own devices. he was obviously enjoying piecing the thing together.

this photo does not let you see, in the areas where the most light is coming through, that there are muliple pieces of "seamed" organdie there - blue and green, like the rest. they are actually my favorite part of the piece and i will have to try to get a photo at another time of day.

it's definitely going to help me through those few hours of every midday where i'm just a zombie. i will be much happier to recharge my battery for dinner-preparation and an evening stretch of printing or errands, if i am comfortable in the den. we figured out how to make that happen, and it took just under two years!

if you are interested in pojagi, i have recently been working on an interview/feature piece with chunghie lee. i first posted about chunghie's work last august, and recently read the interview with her in selvedge, and decided to write about her for korean quarterly. i spent about a half an hour on the phone with chunghie a few weeks ago, have been exchanging e-mails, and this feature should appear in KQ's autumn issue. (if you wish perhaps to subscribe, you can still catch the summer ish, at press now, for which i have contributed book and film reviews, a feature on how to make a cake that looks like a bowl of dolsot bibimbap (this is a writing-photographic-handmodel collaboration with pals kathy and louis), and an interview feature on korean-american punk rock photographer jim jocoy.) check it out! check it all out.

yep, i'm loving this utterly. do you have any idea how many years i waited to know what i was going to do with this fabric? and i think this is really working. we're probably about halfway there with this one -- most of the little pieces are in place, but i'm going for about a 30" square piece in the long run.

i love the sorta "ransom note" feel of pojagi. working with the plaid and checked fabrics is good in a way -- all the nice straight lines helped me figure out where to put relatively straight seams -- but when it came to wanting to do diagonal joins, or three-sided pieces -- going against the print to find a nice straight angled seam was like being in a funhouse.

ironing would be a good step at this point. i broke the iron a few weeks ago -- or, the iron broke and i found it that way, one of the two. we need to get to target for an iron, and this will look even better.

every year i get very involved in my valentine making -- i always have (as an adult anyway.) there are years where all friends and family get valentines, but this year isn't one of them, since these pojagi-style valentines took a lot more time than any i'd ever made previously. the one on the left is for ben, and the one on the right is my dad's. i based the dimensions around a package of blank cards i have here for use with the press, so these cards fit perfectly into the plain envelopes.

there is a specific kind of pojagi that is made of paper, in fact, oiled paper, but i am sure these papers are nothing like what is used traditionally. some pojagi were made entirely of oiled paper, but others were cloth on one side and paper on the other side.

since i had other february birthdays than just my own to commemorate, and had so much valentine-making paper left over, these gifts also got rather pojagi-inspired packagings.

this year as we often do we are avoiding the restaurant cattle call for valentine's day; we are staying home for a meal of homemade gravlax, pot roast, oven fries, a salad, and creme brulée; and a stack of MST3K episodes on bootleg DVD. sounds like glamour and romance to us. ben and i are two peas in a pod; we have been from the day we met.

let's get the hubris out of the way: i am so incredibly proud of this. i have never been very interested in sewing and NEVER have trusted myself to sew anything by HAND (i'm not even very good with a machine). every stitch of this little curtain was made by hand -- my hand! and i'm super, super SUPER proud!



this is my first completed fabric pojagi project. pojagi are divided into many categories, so there is more than one way to describe this one -- it is min po, made by and for common people (as opposed to kung po, pojagi for the palace.) it's also an example (sort of) of chogak po -- cloth made from left-over scraps of material. as in most piecework situations, that's only half-true here -- i bought a lot of this fabric specifically for this purpose. and, again, it's the cintamani or wishing stone motif -- considered one of the most complicated designs in pojagi. yeah, mine are kinda imperfect, but come on -- for a first timer they are pretty darned good-looking!

many pojagi are comprised of or at least contain the five "basic" colors -- blue, red, yellow, black and white -- which correspond to various grounding things such as the four points of the compass plus it's center, the five elements of the universe (wood, fire, metal, water, earth) and the five (yes five) seasonal changes of the year (i particularly like this way of thinking): spring, summer, autumn, winter, and then the koreans acknowledge a fifth period called toyong -- toyong is the eighteen days that preceed the onset of any new season. isn't that just the way it works, too?

this curtain lacks the yellow element but it does go well with the room for reasons stated in a previous post and, as previously stated, because it goes so well with the picture of truman capote that hangs in the powder room. very, very hard to take a flash photo of a thing behind glass in a room that isn't three feet wide. so, an odd angle, but it should show the color inspiration pretty well.

although i also plan to give it a plain red-and-white border, the hard part of the little cintamani curtain is done. i got better as them as i progressed, and while far from perfect, this is so different from what i usually do that i'm still pretty tickled with the results.

this, again, is going to be a curtain for the tiny window in the powder room of literary rejection. which recently had a new addition to its walls! (as you know i only put the best rejections on the walls in there.) ben recently commented that he hoped i got rejected a whole lot, and soon -- because he wasn't as happy with his painting job as he might have hoped and he wanted my failures to cover up his own. i see. i see how it's going to be.

i wanted to have some color in this piece aside from just the black, and looked at the room, and then headed off to the fabric stores for some broadcloth. when i got home, i was kind of surprised to see what was in my bag. had this really been my idea? red... white... and not just blue, but turquoise? these are not color combos i usually associate with my own desires!

and somehow, it's working. the colors are meant to play off on a portrait of truman capote that also hangs on the wall in there (i will include a photo with the finished piece) and, for that matter, the blue and red combo seems to be picking up the ballpoint-blue of the handwritting on the rejection notes on the wall -- many of which have red-and-black letterheads. so apparently i did know what i was doing, although it went against what i might have done otherwise.

no sewing machine is being used in the creation of this little piece -- it's all handstitching, imperfect, but pretty. i want a teeny tiny little iron -- one of those teeny irons on a long stick. i thought they made them, i assumed they had to, and then last night on cops i saw one! (as they apparently also have some use in the drug trade.) a little iron will make things even better.

saturday morning in the dorko stopper levin household.





my stitching has gotten much more confident and even, and i am more adept at putting together smaller pieces of fabric, and branching out a bit shapewise.

i think i am using seven different fabrics here. i have five or six more upstairs but will probably use them for a different, separate pojagi. i expect this one to come out to be no more than 25" square (most pojagi are square).

i like this story about this late chosun dynasty christmas. heck, i just love the 19th century.

and here we are in the 21st century and there was a bit of a theme to some of our gifts this holiday season -- because i have a new textile obsession. i let these things simmer for a while before i commit -- the whole blackwork thing had been long mulled-over before i asked for the very first kit for my birthday last year.

and this year... i was ready, months before hand, with a request for the book rapt in color: korean textiles and costumes of the chosun dynasty. and soon -- during the long pining period awaiting my book -- i gathered more and more information about the korean patchwork called pojagi or bojaki (you might even find a bojagi -- mix it up when you search).

pojagi are made by korean women from all stations of life. making pojagi was a way to use up small scraps of cloth -- those common in use in korea being hemp, ramie, cotton, and in finer circumstances, silk. pojagi are wrapping cloths -- used to store and protect important sentimental items and documents, and have also been used as altar coverings. three- and four-sided scraps of fabric are most commonly used, and while color is everything, so is the absence of color just as striking in these works, often valued and preserved, but with no provenance to speak of. the women who made many of the pojagi valued today in museum collections are nameless, faceless women. it is a populist craft form, born of necessity. women who made pojagi in korea were not women who could have hoarded koigu, for the most part, and women who made pojagi often did so in solitude -- none of the social construct that surrounds quilting seems to accompany this form.

today, the japanese seem to have embraced pojagi. quite a bit, really. this book about making pojagi (purported to be in korean but it looks like japanese) can be purchased online.

a recent rash of ebay auctions out of japan offered many gorgeous, high-priced, and "authentic" pojagi, with this poetic and enigmatic "description" on each auction:

This is made by 83 years old Korean woman

will die soon

well. i did of course receive my book, and, as a hanukkah gift for ben -- the ben who has gotten a little lax lately about using coasters (and granted, our coasters were in need of replacing) -- i got some pojagi coasters.




even before getting my christmas presents, i had zipped ahead a tad and began making what i now know to be the cintamani or "wishing stone" design. what i am making here, however modest and however amateur, will serve as a little curtain for the tiny window in the powder room of literary rejection.

i've also begun practicing the stitching and piecing techniques of the garden-variety min po (pojagi are often called simply po and min po are the pojagi of the common people, as opposed to the kung po of the royal court.) i have been practicing, with some success, using a large collection of plaid and checkered garments that i have owned over the years. i am wild about plaid flannels, particularly red ones, and have always had dresses and pajamas and pants in such. (this all stems back to a dress that i bought at mooshka on 6th and south streets, when i was fifteen years old. i seem to have spent quite a bit of my life trying to replace that dress with others like it.)

many years' worth of pj's, pants and dresses -- and some boxers that were ben's -- have given me a great stash to sample from, and thus, my mostly red, mostly plaid, mostly flannel, pojagi has begun. pojagi fills a need for me since i have always been interested in piecework, but never been interested in quilting. many pojagi are one layer, unlined objects. pojagi are perfect! my stitching is not. but there is a pretty wide range of stitching aptitude shown in the pojagi of many museum collections, and how else to get better?

i have posted previously about chunghie lee. do take the time to look at her pojagi-inspired works at the victoria and albert museum. she takes it all in a whole different direction.

here's just a little teaser for a new category here at do the things. i won't post in detail until after i get all my christmas prezzies. i am just not as good with the needle and thread as i am with the knitting needles, but i am lucky to know the difference between how i feel when i want to learn something, versus when i want to want to learn something. the patience level shoots up far outside of my horizon with the latter. and here we are.