Threefold 19
fibre wefted moons, tī kouka, and zibaldoni notebooks
Welcome to the Threefold Letter. This month a bound sampler of woven fibres, a summer of processing materials, and a contemplation on notebooks and their keeping.
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This month I bound a sampler book of woven fibres from the kitchen and garden: fibre wefted moons.
The weavings’ format was inspired by Rachna Garodia’s circular weavings on paper, River Haiku. There are four woven moons of hand-processed fibres (at least to some degree). They are little satellites of motion, testings, buoys in the sea of beginnings.
The pages of the book are handmade paper made from onion skins. The other plants and their fibres used include marigold bamboo leaves, tī kouka, toetoe, and dainty bristle grass.
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The summer so far has been reading, reading, reading, some weaving tests and trials, and a whole lot of fibre processing. I’ve made several batches of paper (bamboo leaves from my parents’ house in Maunu, marigolds from the freezer (from the garden before I moved house), and amaryllis belladonna (also from the freezer, but from my current garden). But I’ve also been processing tī kouka that I had left retting in a bucket of water throughout December (a mozzie breeding ground! I really ought to get a bucket with a lid). Here are a few photos of the hackling process.
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Last year I read Rolan Allen’s The Notebook: a history of thinking on paper, through which I reassessed the ways in which I use notebooks. Descriptions of zibaldoni (zibaldone, singular) and to a lesser extent, commonplace books, caught my interest. The Oxford Dictionary describes a commonplace book as “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.” These notebooks came about in a time that books were not easily accessible, and so people would write out excerpts, short and long, from the books they had come across, in their own book. Source books might be manuscripts or printed materials. In the definitions supplied by Allen, zibaldoni were the earlier version of this style of book and were first made popular by Florentine merchants. Zibaldoni were focused on notable or meaningful excerpts to the owner. Commonplaces came later and were more organised (often with headwords or headings suggested by publishers or created by the owner) and geared towards usefulness, often including recipes and measurement tables.
My own way of using notebooks is no doubt as amorphous as anyone else’s. Curious, I collected my notebooks from the storage under the stairs. I pulled out a stack of eight brown unlined 190 x 250mm moleskine cashier journals (and one, odd one out, black and white lined journal of the same size) that spanned 2015 to 2025. I noticed that the diaries, which I left boxed up and in the dark, filled me with dread. The notebooks had the opposite affect. My notebooks are filled with notations and excerpts from research and reading that has delighted me over the last 10 years. They are my own version of a zibaldone. The entries range from excerpts of essays and books by Joanna Drucker, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Anne Salmond, Tim Ingold, and Paul Carter, to copied out poems by Cilla McQueen, Ema Saikō, Lyn Heijinian, Audre Lorde, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, and Natalie Harkin, to notes from research on every topic that has piqued my interest in that time such as palaeography, Hadrian’s Wall, Star Carr, cryptarithms, Japanese rare books, and the Book of Kells.
There are links here for me about acts of reading and writing, and joy of handwriting, the time taken to learn, explore, and appreciate, and memory. An excerpt from Allen speaks to this aspect: “the labour involved in copying out a chunk of literature changes the way the copyist relates to it. Transcribing a poem or letter forces the writer to read it multiple times, paying attention to the fine details of word selection and word order, and to consequently enjoy what one scholar calls ‘a more intimate and meaningful experience than they could have with purchased texts.’ You only take on the significant labour of such copying if you really enjoy the text, and you then find that you come to know it and appreciate it much better” (p67). There is so much raw, unhoned, in progress activity in this style of notebook.
I began the tenth and current book in April 2025. It is a window, albeit possibly a frosted one, into my thinking on paper over the last 10 months. Reflecting on a comment by Allen that within commonplaces and zibaldoni there is a “juxtaposition with excerpts already there [which] tended to generate further shades of meaning” (p130) I thought I might share a few of these recent juxtapositions, though I think of them more like harmonies:
Imogen Bright Moon, in Wild Yarns “The microclimate we inhabit, along with its weather fronts, is also home to plants and creatures that are adapted to live alongside us, or rather, if we are being good ancestors, that we should strive to live harmoniously alongside”
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian in Forest Euphoria, The Abounding Queerness of Nature “I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation. And it is because of this that the planet is spinning through a devastating loss in biodiversity” (p11) / “Recounting the broad strokes of any genocide is like describing the ocean as a bowl of water” (p142) / “An understanding that you are note just here in the present but part of a long unbroken chain of cellular memory” (p153)
Amba Sepie, in ‘Settled Kin: Coming home to where we now belong’, in Kinship, belonging in a world of relations vol 5, “In our ignorance, we can mistake the content of someone else’s culture for that sense of connection we really seek” (p28)
Lucy R Lippard in The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society “Even in places we’ve never been before, human lives can eerily bubble up from beneath the ground and haunt us” (p8)
Caroline Dear, cited in Alice Fox, Wild Weave “Memory is enfolded into an object when we handle the material to make it” p180
Selina Wisnom, in The Library of Ancient Wisdom (regarding cuneiform) “Over the centuries, signs continued to acquire more and more values, even when it was perfectly possible to write words without them. It is as if we are seeing meaning proliferate for the sheer joy of it.” (p9)
In the end, I concluded that I keep notebooks for the proliferation of meaning, the moments of revelation, discovery, and belonging within an ever-widening personal network of knowledge and history, and “for the sheer joy of it.”