Morocco, tajine and tajine

If you've ever been in Morocco you had to know the tajine. It's a kind of casserole-like food, and the dish in which the food you could cook. I wanted to buy there - in Marrakesh - the dish but so I had to carry that for a week more to bring it home with me later. So unfortunately I couldn't buy the tajine, but acquired a morroccan cookbook with tajine-recipes.

At home I tried to make tajine (the food) without a tajine (the dish). I had to use a large earthenware pot but I succeeded. The meal was very good, but not so good as in Morrocco. But later I cooked it regularly and I found the food was getting better. I think now that is why I forgot the original taste of the food. But if you want a slice of Morocco sometimes you can make tajine with your own pots and materials. The essence is the memory of the real tajine, the real Marrakesh, the real Morocco.

if you want to know more, see this:  http://www.maroque.co.uk/tagine.aspx

Tomorrow I'll share my favourite tajine-recipe if you interested in it.

I asked help...

The last week I found a site, a webshop in England, Great Britain which sell goods from Morocco, too. Some items are made of cactus silk. So I wrote them an email asking help to sell our silk. My email address is my name.

I thought that they'll answer me politely to inform me why is not possible. Because one of them is an italian woman and italians have warm heart, and the others english who ar polite. 

But I received an answer which is not warm or polite, and they did not sign it if I see this well:

Sorry we are not resellers for threads
Good luck
AM
Crafts of the world online
Ps. in future learn to sign your emails

Sometimes I think the people are warm and polite only if they want your money. So I decided not to ask help anymore. 

But if you know somebody who wants to sell cactus silk threads online, please contact me.

Knitting with silk thread

Today I search the web for some information how to knit cactus silk thread into a pulli or other kind of project. I found nothing at all. But I found hiw to knit silk thread with. It's an awsome project. I tried to knit my royal blue cactus silk and -as I said in my first note - it was very difficult. The cactus silk is as slippery as the silkworm-silk, and the stitches drop anytime. It sometimes tangled. So the cactus silk is very similar to the silk. 

But the result is worth the suffering. If I ever finish my pulli I'll share you the photo.

I show you some of the wonderful things made of silk (unfortunately not by me):

How to make cactus silk threads?

I found a site where you can find the method how Moroccan people make the cactus silk thread. This is the link:

http://craftsoftheworldonline.blogspot.com/2013/01/vegetable-silk-also-known-as-sabra.html

They have a webshop, too, where you can find some items of cactus silk.

"Also known as Cactus silk, Sabra silk is a natural fiber harvested from sustainable sources of Saharan Aloe Vera Cactus (the Aloe Vera plant being part of the Agave family).

The fabric is a 100% vegetable silk blend of extracted filaments from the aloe cactus grown in Morocco. It is sought for its quality, strength and beauty since millennia. The process to produce sabra silk has not changed for centuries. Once the Cactus plant is collected from the long agave plants, the long spiky leaves are crushed and the fibres washed and hammered, then the leaves are soaked in water to separate the fibres & filaments and then these are spun and woven to make "silk thread" which are then dyed in different colours. The textile produced has a high elasticity and this makes Sabra-Silk free of wrinkles.

You might have come across - when walking through the narrow lanes of the Medina in Marrakech –men threading fine, almost invisible, fibers on spools. These are then twisted into thread by small battery powered twisters and tacked along the walls of the medina while they were being created. The colourful threads of the cactus silk are then sold in spools."

 

Tapestry with silk

Weavers can use the pure silk threads to make fine tapestries. I found an ancient example for it, a french antique on from the middle-ages. You can see here:

 http://www.thewadsworth.org/mythofpsyche/

"Made of wool, silk, and gilded-silver, these designs were based on fifteenth-century engravings and were part of a series produced by an unknown manufactory in Paris around 1660. While exploring the allegory of Psyche as told in the second century Latin novel Metamorphoses, this installation addresses the history and use of tapestries through its narrative reinterpretation during the Renaissance and Baroque eras."

You can see this tapestry in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, USA.

"I want to colour in my life with it."

There is a hungarian poet - Dezső Kosztolányi - who wrote a poem of the colours. The title of the poem is

I dream of coloured inks. Of every kind.

The yellow is the finest. Reams and reams
of letters could I write in yellow ink
to her, the little schoolgirl of my dreams.
I'd scrawl something that looks like Japanese,
then try a bird, most intricately scrolled.
And I want other colours, many more,
like bronze and silver, emerald and gold,
and then I want a hundred more, a thousand,
or rather, I will have a million:
dumb-charcoal, funny-lilac, drunken-ruby,
enamoured, chaste or brash vermilion.
I ought to have some mournful violet,
a palish blue, a brick-red-like maroon,
like shadows seeping through a stained glass window
against a black vault, in August, at noon.
In reds I want a blazing, burning one,
and blood-red, like the blood-stained setting sun
and then I'd go on writing: with a blue
to my young sister, mother will get gold,
I'd write a prayer in gold ink to my mother,
a golden dawn with golden words re-told.
I'd go on writing, in an ancient tower.
My colour set, so fine and exquisite,
would make me happy, oh my God, so happy.
I want to colour in my life with it.

This was the poem what popped in miy mind when I first saw the silks.

Embroidery with gold silk thread

I've found some wonderfoul patterns and things to demonstrate what kind of embroidery can make with our silk threads. These embroideries are created with gold silk threads. See the examples:

And these are hungarian embroidered feit coats for shepards:

Ages ago the nomad people used silk threads to make embroidered feit tents to live, too.