José Leonilson was a Brazilian artist who died tragically young in 1993. He was only 36 when he died from AIDS, part of that generation of male artists that we lost far too soon.

His work has the sort of quiet melancholy that I always admire.

José Leonilson: 34 with Scars, 1991

I love this piece, especially the indelicate, puckered, slightly haphazard embroidery and the way the fabric is not stretched taut but instead is just hanging loosely on the wall. It’s pretty obvious why I like his work, since it relates quite strongly to my own, particularly my thread drawings:

Kirsty Hall: Parse, 2007

There are correspondences between our respective drawings too - although this small watercolour and ink drawing is more figurative than my style, I could easily imagine it on a Diary Project envelope.

José Leonilson: Desire is a Blue Lake, 1989

I like the emptiness in this drawing, it takes a certain amount of artistic nerve to leave a lot of white space on the page.

A couple of weeks ago, I booked myself onto a day-long spindle spinning workshop at Get Knitted, my favourite Bristol yarn store. I’ve wanted to learn to spin for several years, ever since a friend gave me her slightly broken spinning wheel but I didn’t want to spend money getting it fixed until I knew for sure that spinning was something I wanted to pursue. I have to be careful to balance my need to enthusiastically throw myself into new things with keeping a focus on my existing art: I am very easily distracted! However, number 55 on my 101 Things list is Learn to Spin, so when I saw the workshop advertised, I jumped at the chance to do it.

I’ve been feeling very unenthusiastic about my art for months now but this workshop really released my creative juices: I came home this evening ready to get right back into the studio and start making again. There were 9 of us on the course and our teacher was Jen from the hand-dyed yarn company, Fyberspates. Jen got us all spinning with a simple wooden and plastic spindle in an amazingly short time. Spindles are an ancient technology, possibly one of the oldest in the world - apparently in the Middle Ages they sometimes used a stick and a potato if they didn’t have a nice carved wooden spindle to hand! We got to play with wool, alpaca, silk, mohair, linen and even a little bit of cashmere. Just sinking my fingers into all the different types of fibre was an education and it was interesting to see how we all differed in which ones we found easiest to spin.

Kirsty Hall: Mixed Fibres For Spinning

My tiny lumpy balls of yarn don’t look like anything special but to me they’re quite magical because hey, I made yarn! Actual yarn, from fibre - how cool is that? OK, so it’s not very good yarn - a 5 year old medieval child with a potato could probably have made better. It’s extremely uneven, going from thick to thin and back again and some places aren’t twisted enough but I don’t care, it’s a beginning. This is the incredible thing about learning something new; the joy of looking at something that you’ve made with little technical skill but with utter concentration and passion and knowing that you’re back in that humble place of Beginner’s Mind. Every artist should keep feeling their way back to that place; it kicks you out of your complacency and gives you that little skip in your creative spirit that charges you up.

Kirsty Hall: Homespun Yarn & Spindle

A Boring Bit
There’s been a bit of downtime on the site this week because we needed to upgrade Wordpress after a possible spambot incursion - so if anyone’s had trouble getting the site to load, that would be why. A couple of things are still a bit funky: the gallery pages aren’t quite right and the blog archives have done a bunk but hopefully we’ll get everything back to normal soon. If you’re very observant, you may also have noticed that we’ve switched on a confirmation box for comments. I’m sorry about this, I know they’re a nuisance but I was getting upwards of 400 spam on the blog every single day and it was driving me absolutely nuts.

I spent some time in my local yarn store today. Sure, I needed yarn for my next couple of projects but much more than that, I needed an hour to soak up some colour and texture. I could have ordered the yarn from the shop’s website and saved myself a trip in appalling traffic but I knew that I needed to go: something in me was craving that experience. I wanted to wander around, picking up the yarns and squashing the skeins in my fingers. I needed to feel the softness, the springiness and the resistance of the different fibres. But most of all, I needed to marvel at the myriad of colours. I needed to see the ways in which different dyers had married shades together, to notice how some tones zinged and jumped, while others were muted and subtle. I spent some time holding balls of yarn next to each other, testing to see which would go well together and which were jarring or unpleasant. I didn’t have a particular project in mind, I just wanted to see what worked and what didn’t. You can learn a lot this way - maybe art teachers should stop bothering with boring old colour wheels and just take their students to a fantastic yarn store instead!

I’ve never been brilliant at colour, I don’t have the instinct for it that some artists do, but I still occasionally need a bit of colour therapy. Sometimes my muse (for want of a better word) craves time spent in art galleries, libraries, parks or beautiful buildings - and sometimes it just needs to smoosh some yarn!

I left with the yarn I’d planned to buy and only one extra thing (a bargain skein of very beautiful sock yarn) but more importantly, with my heart contented and my inspiration levels rising.

We all need to spend some time inspiring ourselves, otherwise our art will eventually run dry. What have you done to inspire yourself lately? Do you take yourself out on regular ‘artists’ dates’, as Julia Cameron recommends? I often forget and only realise that I need to once it becomes a desperate craving. If you’re in the same boat, then I hope you can take some time over the next few days or weeks to recharge those artistic batteries by doing something that’s just for you. It’s especially important to do this if you’re caught up in the seasonal madness. It doesn’t need to be much and it doesn’t need to take long but I think it’s vital to remind ourselves that our art is every bit as important as buying presents, baking cookies, decorating trees, placating relatives and all the other traditions that we may have encumbered ourselves with.

And if you don’t celebrate anything at this time of year, then maybe you can indulge in your own personal art hibernation while all around are drowning in festivities? Get a pile of good art books from the library, stock up on some exciting new materials, shut the door and spend a few days just losing yourself in play. Mmm, sounds good to me!

We Make Money Not Art is a blog that’s always worth a look, they have a lot of stuff about the intersection between art, design and new technology. As a keen knitter, I loved this story about a couple of students, Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener, who hacked a 70’s knitting machine so that it turns your voice into a secret binary design on a sweater.

Just say a message into a microphone and the frequency of your voice is analyzed by a computer and turned into binary code that the machine will interpret to control 24 servo-motors which will turn your words into knitted pattern. And hop! You can wear an individual voice message on a sweater. No one will understand the message, it will stay in your head. The pattern doesn’t just depend on the words but it varies also according to your modulation, whether you are excited or totally introverted.

Isn’t that neat!

I first came across Solveigh Gott’s excellent textile work when I showed one of her knitted pieces in the Knit1, Build 1 exhibition at the Here Gallery two years ago.

I’m a big fan of her project, The Textile Files. It’s a simple but very evocative project: she collects bits of fabric, attaches them to a file card and then blogs the picture with a piece of related text. I was just checking her blog and saw this picture of pins, which immediately got me excited.

Solveigh Gott: Pins from The Textile Files

I started reading the text and thought “hey great, someone else is working with pins!” - and then promptly realised that the reason the text sounded so familiar was because it was written by me! Yep, she was quoting text from this very website - thanks, for the mention, Solveigh, I’m very flattered to have been included in The Textile Files.

But really, fancy not recognising my own writing - I am such a doofus sometimes! Still, it’s not quite as bad as the time I started reading a list of livejournal interests and thought “wow, this sounds like someone I would get on with, I should friend them” before realising that I’d accidentally backpaged and was reading my own interest list. Still, I suppose it’s positive that I instantly liked myself…

Dancing Crow makes daily sewn postcards.

Of course, I couldn’t resist this one of keys!

I’m rather in awe of this project since I can’t imagine sewing every day. The Diary Project seems quite simple in comparison but I expect there are people out there saying, ‘ooh, but I couldn’t draw every day’, so I guess it’s all relative.