I've been thinking about it, and I'm relatively sure (without exhaustive Googling or digging through books) that the Phoenicians didn't stencil textiles. I just fall back on the Phoenicians as the ultimate example of dye artisans, because who else in world history managed to found a massive commercial and political empire, based on a single color? To the point they're even named after said color? (Phoenician = purple people in Greek.) They even used their wealth to kick the ass of the Roman Empire for a while, and almost won. Hannibal, the guy with the elephants over the Alps, who looted Rome? He was from Carthage, in N Africa. Carthage was a colony of the Phoenician empire, founded originally as a trading post. Rome eventually won, but it took a couple wars to do it. So they sort of live on in my memory as the badasses of the textile world. (And isn't it fun how everything in world history is inter-woven? Who knew Hannibal's elephants were funded by snail snot dye? They leave out all the good parts in world history class.)
However, what's really funny is, once I started thinking about cultures that DID stencil textiles - Polynesia and parts of Africa most famously - I realized I am following in their footsteps rather neatly. They used banana and ti leaves for stencils. The same types of leaves they used for wrapping up leftover food to keep for later. Sort of like... a Cool Whip container.
And may I add one tree hugger comment for the day... there's lots of ways to recycle. Not all of them are obvious.
4 comments:
This, my dear, is one of the best examples of recycling ev-er!
Let's hear it for a green lifestyle! No matter how you accomplish it.
it's always cool when you can reuse something instead of or before recycling.
my next non-knitting project is going to be organizing the junk drawer with -- wait for it -- JUNK!
yup! i eat a lot of ramen noodle meals that come in plastic box-thingies and i sometimes cook "cellophane" noodles in 'em later. my grandgirl's school loves 'em for paint trays and sandbox play, but i'm going to save some, stick them to a piece of cardboard the size of the drawer and add other "throwaway" things like sushi boxes and mushroom cartons to hold scissors, night light bulbs, stray twist-ties, "labels for education" and "boxtops for etc." that friends' kids' schools collect, and all the other crapola that collects in the top drawer next to the sink.
reusing such things as much as possible lets me "justify" buying them for the convenience. and then eventually they get chopped up and melted down and remade.
That's it. I quit. I'm turning in my crafting flag in and selling all my yarn. You can do that with a cool-whip lid, and I can barely knit with wool.
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