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American, and British languages, Semantics in knitting is a real problem to all of us who have worked with foreign publications. 
There is an excellent section on knitting with ribbons. It is possible to elaborate on the many other fine features of this book, but it is not necessary. Better for the serious knitters to discover for themselves that Barbara Abbey, also author of 101 Ways to Improve Your Knitting, has written an excellent new book. 
Only one thing bothers me . . . why are the diagrams so small?
-MARY WALKER PHILLIPS 

Chase-Riboud
continued from page 23
always been fascinated by the couple ('Adam and Eve I'; 1958), the male/female equation extended to its wider boundaries of soft/hard, negative/positive, convex/concave, black/white, aggressive/passive, all the way to yin yang and tantra."
Combining the soft materials with the metal, Barbara Chase-Riboud acknowledges her debt to Sheila Hicks, the weaver, who helped her learn the techniques of knotting, wrapping, braiding, and cording, also found in the dance masks of New Caledonia, and the ceremonial masks of Mali and Gabon. In these dance masks the purpose is the same, to camouflage the armature which is the person wearing the mask, and to disassociate the mask from the ground and its surroundings so it is no longer a static piece of sculpture, but a personnage. Thus likewise the braided and woven parts of Barbara Chase-Riboud's sculpture act as a support and transition between the floor and the sculpture. She works with thread as volume (weight, mass), much in the way she works with clay or wax; she works with the skeins of thread, not with the individual threads. 
"Sheila," page 22, and "Time Womb," page 24, have a combination of similar elements—the abstract, oblong, folded top, and the lower part, long, soft/hard, skirt tresses. Both pieces are aluminum and silk. The tresses are knotted as in Sheila Hick's hangings and with great weight and dignity; the image forms a kind of cross. 
Barbara Chase-Riboud's sculptures combine the monumental and intimate. They are both personal and universal, and this feeling becomes entirely classic as we feel the emotion rationally contained. Her sculpture does not excite or agitate but moves by its stillness and poignance. 
Barbara Chase-Riboud's jewels bring the concerns of her sculptural investigations into the realm of the intimate and personal and form a distinct unity with her sculpture. Not reduced or miniature sculptures, but on the contrary, variations on an evolving theme, they seem to gain in intensity, luminosity, and brilliance when transferred by the artist into pendants, neckpieces, clasps, and rings. The jewels, eighteen karat gold coupled with silk or wool, cast in editions of eight, reflect and refract more light than the bronze sculpture, which by its nature is cooler and darker. There is opulence in these small, molded, molten pieces, their undulating slow forms, their gently worked contours sliding like a quiet lake. Small creases in the folds suggest drapery or perhaps female genitalia. 
In the pendant on page 24 gold is combined with silver cord; it is two-thirds silver, one-third gold, the first golden third, a simple sculptural shape with the slight accidental or automatic element in the working of the folds and textures. "Sometimes the folds are indented accidentally by the folds of the plastic sheets in which the wax sheets are made," says Barbara Chase-Riboud. The lower part resembles and reassembles into tresses, waterfalls, tangled wires—echoes of surrealism, fetishism, eroticism. 
Her pendant with shoulder pin is an elegant statement of gold with black silk. To the right is a simple abstract shape that seems almost to resemble a bird with its diagonal thrust to the left; on the left, a triangular shape like a bee or a butterfly pointed down is joined in the middle by four cords to its sculptural wing-heart center. It is a flow of convex/concave, sharp/soft, cold/warm. Condensed, concise, specific, and particular, her jewels are like poems.
Barbara Chase-Riboud attended art schools in Philadelphia, the city of her birth. She received her BA at Temple University in 1957. When she was nineteen she was awarded a John Hay Whitney fellowship and spent a year in Rome where she began to work in wax for bronze casting. "I have stuck to that method ever since," she says. She did her graduate work at Yale University "with one foot in the sculpture department" and where she met fellow-student Sheila Hicks, with whom she has been friends ever since. In 1960 after having received her MFA at Yale she went to London and eventually Paris where she now lives with her husband and sons. In 1968 she started working more on relief sculpture, "due to the discovery of a French foundry capable of doing sand casting aluminum, which lead to much more abstract configurations and brought me face to face with the problem of support, the problem of the relationship between the base, the floor, the wall, and the sculpture. As I was not happy with solutions which were either architectural (i.e. bases) or structural (i.e. legs or supporting armatures), I had to find a technical solution to the problem of relating the sculpture to the floor. This is how the idea of combining ropes and cords as a method of camouflaging the support of the sculpture (instead of legs) came about. I made some preliminary drawings which I showed to Sheila Hicks, and we worked out the materials. (I wanted non-anthropological materials, i.e. I didn't want to fall into neo-African aesthetics.) We decided on a silk and synthetic thread for the polished bronzes and black wool for the black bronzes...the solution of combining the metal and fiber suited my purposes perfectly."

Rosanjin
continued from page 43

when the Osaka branch opened in 1935. To it came the powerful and wealthy, Japan's politicians and industrial leaders. Rosanjin demanded the very best—in everything. He has often been quoted as saying: "In Japan, the highest form of cookery is the absence of cookery. It is the material (zairyo) which counts. It must be good fish in the first place, and that in its proper season. Also with pottery it is good material and its sagacious use which counts."
When he searched for the proper dishes on which to serve his food, Rosanjin found that the ones he had in mind were few. As a result he opened the Hoshigaoka kilns at Kita Kamakura. They were located on the hillside behind his splendid farmhouse residence, one of the three buildings he had had moved from deep in the rural countryside to this peaceful, rice-paddied valley that was to be his home until his death.
At the kiln he assembled the very best potters and technicians that Japan had to offer. He paid more than other master potters would have and he got whom he wanted. He brought whatever clays were needed for his purpose from their original sources. These were stored in big wooden bins in the earthy tunnels that led from the house to the kiln. Among them there were bins of Korean clay to fashion kohiki and hakeme tea bowls. 
It has been claimed that Rosanjin could not use the wheel. Other critics have said he could but they suggest that he seldom did. Most often, seated comfortably alongside an artisan, with a cup of tea in hand, he would supervise the making of precisely the form he wanted. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that after his death stacks of old auction catalogs were found in his storehouse from which he had snipped shapes and designs that had caught his fancy. When he succeeded in getting something that was exactly to his liking he would often have a mold made and subsequent pieces cast. He was the first of many of the foremost contemporary potters to do so. But when he took each piece into his hands it became fresh and new he scratched or drew on its surface, sloshed it in still a different glaze or fashion, or squeezed or pinched the form. 
In later years, when he had become weary of the more exacting demands of porcelain and overglaze enamel decoration, he would sit on the porch of his home entertaining guests, From time to time a young helper would come down from the kiln with a huge tray of pieces, freshly thrown or molded or cut. Rosanjin would turn his attention to them one by one and it was amazing to watch as each piece took on a different vigor and excitement as the master made it his.
Among those who worked closely with him was the present ningen kokuho (literally, a living national treasure) of Shino glaze, Arakawa Toyozo. Another such "treasure," the previous master of Bizen—Kaneshige Toyo—built a kiln for Rosanjin.

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Transcription Notes:
roks be like (rok) the second row