Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Rug progress: 3 partial border outline rows
Word count: 125

This entry inaugurates my new Arraiolos category with a fun Red Sox link I found at Boston Common.

I’ve been preparing the canvas from my Arraiolos kit - stitching up the edges and marking a grid. The graph is a bit odd in that the center of the design isn’t centered in the graph and it’s 8 squares per big block rather than 10.

I could have handled the problem by making a free cross stitch charting program in Konfabulator and recharting it properly, but instead I’m just following the weirdness as-is.

I also took all the wool from the board it came on and put it into skeins. There’s a lot of wool. The directions leave much to be desired - they show only the one horizontal stitch instead of the 4 horizontal varieties, the 4 vertical varieties, the 4 diagonals and the mitering stitch for the corners. Most of them just serve to make the back of the canvas neat, but the diagonal stitch might puzzle a beginner. Fortunately I have the elusive book.

Just a brief piece of advice: never program a game to which you are addicted…

You may ask, what is jute? (Or, alternately, Que é a juta?) Well, this entry is devoted to answering all your jute questions.

Jute is a plant from India used to make burlap, twine and a variety of other materials. Production involves fermenting the jute (retting) then separating out, drying, and sorting the fibers. See JM Jute for details and pictures.

The word jute comes from the Bengali jhuto. There are two species of jute: Corchorus ularis (Jute) and Corchorus olitorius (Jew’s mallow). You can see a picture of the jute plant at the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute. They’ve developed a cheap wool substitute, jute yarn. Jute is a big industry in India - the Jute Commissioner even has his own website.

Why jute? Evenweave jute is the base for Arraiolos rugs. In the US, you can get ten-count jute (ten threads per inch) and Persian yarn (a three-ply needlepoint wool thread - Paternayan makes the best one) to approximate the traditional Portuguese materials. Or you can order a kit from Portugal, which is how the whole jute question came up.

The oldest Arraiolos rugs were made with wool on linen, but linen has been out of style for several centuries now. It’s beyond me why Casa dos Tapetes de Arraiolos offers any wool on linen products, or which ones they might be. I have established that my kit (Seteais, the top one in this image) contains jute.

The price may seem like a lot (for Portugal), but it’s cheap compared to, say, buying painted needlepoint canvases and then wool on top of that, plus shipping. The kit is 1 1/2 feet square - not quite a rug, but big for a pillow. It takes a lot of wool to cover 2 1/4 square feet. The real appeal to me, though, is the Seteais pattern itself. Seteais is the most popular Arraiolos design and my favorite as well. It comes from the carpets of the Seteais Hotel outside Sintra, though it can also be seen in the Portuguese Embassy in Washington D.C. Normally it’s laid out in alternating squares, as in this rug. I don’t have a pattern for it.

Now that I’ve bored everyone to tears, I promise to stop rug geeking.

Rumor of the day: New PowerBooks tomorrow!

I was looking for Boston blogs to add to my RSS reader and I found an incredibly useful page at Boston Online: the Wicked Good Guide to
Boston’s public restooms. I tried to send in an update for the Copley Library facilities, which deserve at least 2 rolls, but the form script was broken so I emailed my recommendation instead.

On the Arraiolos front, I’ve put off my Persian yarn mission to the local needlework and knitting shops (eg., Woolcott in Harvard Square) because I’m in negotiations with a kit supplier over foundations. If you ever need to ask a Portuguese speaker whether the kit comes with jute or linen, the words are juta and linho.

I’ve found more Arraiolos links: Santo Antonio has a nice selection of images of Arraiolos rugs and also stitch diagrams (em português). Serranofil still has kits and magazines, but I like the looks of the Casa dos Tapetes de Arraiolos kits better despite the inscrutable order form.

I’ve been thinking about aniline dyes while cross-stitching my Arraiolos-on-cotton experiment. Dyes, like so many things, are much more complicated than they seem. It used to be that you mashed up the right plants and you got a certain range of colors. Then came progress, in the form of aniline dyes.Aniline dyes have a bad reputation from the nineteenth century, when they were made from coal tar and gave garish, runny colors that faded easily. I suppose people used them then because they were new and cheaper (like Windows) than colorfast dyes. Aniline dyes have allegedly improved over time, but it’s still a scare word in the handmade rug world, where other “chemical” dyes are used - mainly “chrome” dyes using potassium bichromate, from the acidic dye category. (See the rugtime dictionary for more terms and definitions.)

To see how far we’ve come, walk into a craft shop and look at the DMC embroidery cotton colors. We can make any color we want - or rather, DMC can. I have no idea how they do it, though, so if I were trapped on a desert island I’d have to go back to pounding veggies - or worse, using aniline dyes.

It disturbs me how ill-equpped I am for life on a desert island.

By the way, the Repository has been updated with a bunch of names from TV Tome.

Today Veronica, her nearly-ex-roommate, and I went to CAOS, the Cambridgeport Artist’s Open Studio. (Cambridgeport seems to be the snooty name for the neighborhood between between Central Square and the river.) The art wasn’t particularly interesting except for some glass. Glass blowing is technically a craft, rather than an art form - like writing fanfic or cross-stitching. I was inspired to cross-stitch so I stocked up on Monaco evenweaves and DMC #4 tapestry cotton at Pearl.

Well, not actually cross-stitch - I prefer Hardanger and Arraiolos. I spotted the book in English about Arraiolos rugs, Portuguese Needlework Rugs, at Rodney’s Bookstore for $25. It’s out of print, so snag it while you can. I love the Arraiolos stitch, which is actually several variants of long-armed cross-stitch, because it’s all done freehand on the top of the fabric. I’ve been experimenting with other threads on other foundations than the traditional Persian wool on ten-count jute. At the moment I’m doing three or four strands of embroidery floss (over two) on 25-count evenweave.

By the way, I was geeking so much yesterday that I forgot to blog, but I did get the preference picker working with MJB’s fic. Jade is next.

Word count: 202

I’m still staring at the Persian Rugs in LifeLab. I tried to find more information about them online, but I came up with nothing but the LifeLab Gallery itself and a passing reference in a newsgroup. The rules to make rugs are B234/S, which means that new squares are born (B) to squares with 2, 3 or 4 neighbors, and that old squares never survive (S). The effect is an inversion of the pattern every round, plus constant progress outward at the edges.

Since the gallery images are very early on, they don’t show the true beauty of the pattern. You can see a nicer one on the Apple download page, but I think I’ll put up a few screenshots of my experiments as well. I’ve been playing around making rectangular and odd-shaped rugs. Here’s the standard rug at 1000 generations:

[click image for a larger version or here for a popup]

I was also thinking that one of the early generations might make a nice Arraiolos rug design. It would be mostly travelling stitches, not to mention too geeky for words, but I’m tempted…

Word count: 1200

Despite Jerie’s noble attempts to drag me through the Stargate into the Mirror Mirror Fandom (new drabble coming soon), I’ve written yet more of Colony: The Neverending Fanfic. I got plenty of missives from Zendom, but no one took me up on my offer to run a Fanfic Taste Test. The only email that changed my life was Earthlink’s advice to turn off my modem volume - I’d had it on for a while so I could gauge the line quality and give up if the phone lines were hopeless, but they seem fine at the moment.

On the geek front, I attended W3School for some info on xsl:output and spent all of ten seconds contemplating

Tomorrow I may have more Fun Geek Toys™ ready, but for now I have a drabble to write.

The following is an excerpt from “The Age of Envy” by Ayn Rand, an
essay she published in both “The Objectivist” and The
Anti-Industrial Revolution. I stumbled across it when surfing
for information about her posthumous how-to-write book, The Age of
Fiction. I include it here because the topic occasionally comes
up, and people toss around the allegation of envy without, I suspect,
considering just how nasty a vice it is. (Rand had a real talent for
exposing evil, as seen, for instance, in her href="http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/texts/huac.html">HUAC
testimony.) Note that envy is often mistermed jealousy, though the
latter word is more properly associated with love (no matter how
warped a love) rather than malice.