Lockdown in South Africa started on Friday 27 March 2020. DH and I had already been in a week of self-quarantine due to us having arrived back from the USA on 20 March 2020, so our lockdown started a week earlier!
I am not going to go into any personal issues from this lockdown period. I am merely going to illustrate how I have coped with it, and continue to cope with it, on a month-to-month basis. We have all had to make sacrifices during this strange time in our history, and we have had to think of ways to cope with those stresses and strains to which we have been subjected, wherever we are in the world.
I hope you are as fortunate as I am in that you have a creative way of dealing with this chaos.
- Felted Rug
The first project that I decided to tackle was the felted rug that my 3 friends and I had spent almost 2 years preparing.
We had made 10 felted blankets, about 1m x 2m in size, from scratch – ie we dyed the fleece, packed it out onto a table, and hand-felted each and every one of them! Just before lockdown we all got together to cut up the blankets into triangles so that we could take them home to work on them. It was a very fortuitous decision, as we would have had to delay the project even longer because of COVID-19 if we had not prepped it in February.
I started off by cutting out the template shapes from the felt, so that I had a positive and a negative pattern piece from the different colours. I tacked, then couched the puzzle piece triangles together, using some funky hand-spun yarn that I had made at a workshop.
Once I had all 4 triangles couched with the hand-spun yarn, I placed them all on the main felt (green base blanket). I secured them with double-sided vilene, sewed them in place, then couched them using black sewing thread and thick black wool to highlight the outlines.
I felt that the blanket/wall-hanging was missing something. I have always had a particular fondness for Ndebele art and design, so I decided to put a red strip around the entire piece with small triangles felted onto it (a typical Ndebele design element). I cut each of the triangles out of 4 of my colours, and then used my Elna felting machine to secure them in place. They all got a thicker black wool for their borders as well. The red strips also had to be couched onto the green base. I used a white hand-spun wool for this. To complete the edge, I blanket stitched around the felted edge, then did a row of white single crochets, and finished it off with black crab stitch.
Originally I was going to make this project into a floor rug, but after all the work that we put into it, I decided it should rather hang on a wall and not be degraded on the floor! The finished size is 0.9m x 1.2m
- Face masks
Our life as we knew it, seemed to change all of a sudden with COVID-19. Not only were we pushed into a very strict lockdown, but we were also advised to wear face masks to avoid becoming infected by the virus. Medical masks were to be reserved, wherever possible, for essential and medical workers, so we were encouraged to make fabric face masks (if we could). Luckily a number of patterns became available, and our sewing machines came out and we sewed! Some people made hundreds and thousands of masks and donated and sold them. I made masks for DH and myself as well as for our staff and their families (who had not been near our house since mid-March). I did not enjoy making them as much as I make other things, so the minimum number came out of my sewing room! Here are 2 of them – one made of Malaysian Batik and the other from South African 3-cats fabric.
- Hand-spun Alpaca
I was given some terribly dirty alpaca fleece that had tons of vegetable matter in it. It is impossible to get clean, but I could not bear to throw it away! Stupid, I know! I dyed it in the colours of purple and green succulent and spun it up (getting pricked by the VM at regular intervals)! I want to weave it into outside cushions for the garden bench.
- Circles and Checks Cotton towels
I found a really nice cotton towel pattern in Handwoven magazine (May/Jun 2019) called Circles and Checks. I did not have any coloured cotton to use for the project, so I dyed 6 different colours of natural cotton I had in my stash.
I warped up my loom with the beautiful cottons and wove 6 towels and a tray cloth on the last section of warp. Most of them have already been given to family members!
- Hand-spun kid mohair shrug
I had some beautiful kid mohair (it came from a farmer in Kwazulu Natal) that I had dyed. I knitted a shrug of it. It was really nice and cozy on the cool April and May evenings, but not enough for winter, though!
- Workshop Apron for DH (and one of DH’s projects)
DH, now on retirement (that was a good decision with the chaos that COVID-19 caused in the workplace and economy) was getting very busy with DIY projects. He asked me to make him a BIG apron that covers his clothes sufficiently for all the woodwork and other projects that he is doing. I had some bull denim that I dyed black and then cut out and sewed it and put bands on for fastening. I printed my trademark logo on it, effectively branding it!
The first project that he completed after I made the apron, was shelves in my weaving room cupboard and shelves and cupboard doors for the granite counter on the patio. He used the table we had used for the felted blankets as well as an old packing crate to complete the projects!
Very busy and super dexterious bewteen various crafts!!