The Beijing Winter Olympics are in full swing. In Luojing Town, Baoshan District, Zheng Xiaorong, a representative inheritor of the municipal intangible cultural heritage cross flower picking district level who was once an athlete, was inspired by the wonderful performance of the Olympic athletes, and inspired by the snowflake elements in the opening ceremony, used the cross flower picking technique to pick out a pen curtain with the characteristics of the Winter Olympics.
Luojing Cross Flower Picking is a traditional folk art in Luojing Town, Baoshan, which was selected into the first batch of Shanghai Intangible Cultural Heritage List in 2007, with a history of more than 300 years.
Since the Yuan Dynasty, Luojing has been widely cultivating cotton and is popular for spinning and weaving. Native cloth has become the main raw material for people's clothing, using soil cloth parts to make a hood hand towel, which is used to protect against suns in summer and resist the cold in winter, and has gradually become the habit of Luojing women. However, due to the ominous suspicion of the natural color of the earthen cloth bun head, some people picked flower arrangements on the cloth surface in order to change the original appearance, and then gradually developed into the cross flower picking technique.
It is worth mentioning that picking is an embroidery method, specifically picking up the warp or weft of the fabric with a needle, and passing through the needle and thread from the bottom to form a pattern. This sets the cross-picking apart from the familiar cross-stitch.
In the process of more than three hundred years of circulation, Luojing cross flowers have formed twenty or thirty unique basic patterns. These patterns are mostly named after animals and plants, such as octagonal flowers, hexagonal flowers, butterfly flowers, bird flowers, etc., expressing people's pursuit of beauty and happiness. Compared with the picking flowers of other regions and other ethnic groups, Luojing's picking patterns are simple and clear, with both pictograms and abstract colors, and the flower types are radial. The organic combination of these patterns forms a colorful and allegorical overall picture, which is exquisite and attractive.
With the change of the times, cross flowers have been used in the past for practical daily necessities such as turbans, tie ditches and feet, and corsets, and have extended to today's decorations for gifts such as pillows, sachets, and coasters. Although the style is more exquisite, there are fewer and fewer people who can pick flowers.
According to Zheng Xiaorong, cross-picking flowers were widely circulated among local working women in Luojing, and at its peak, almost every local woman would, and among women over 60 years old today, there are still many people who will meet. However, for many young people, cross picking flowers is already a "familiar stranger", they have heard and seen cross flowers, but have not tried it themselves.
In order to make this handicraft that carries the local women's yearning for good things and happy life known to more young people, Zheng Xiaorong decided to combine the Elements of Olympic Snowflakes with the traditional pattern of Baji to make a pen curtain.
Every artistic creation is a challenge, and for non-hereditary inheritors, daily creation, like athletes, requires constant self-breakthrough. Zheng Xiaorong said that the traditional needle of cross picking flowers is relatively simple, and the pattern performance is not vivid enough, and to fully express the agility of snowflakes, we must use our brains. To this end, she kept trying, and finally boldly spaced a distance of warp and weft yarn between each cross, making the overall pattern vision more stretched and more tense. A beautiful, agile snowflake was born.
Luo Jing cross flower picking technique is a cross on the front and a word on the back is neatly arranged, and it is also a problem facing Zheng Xiaorong to present the simple and elegant beauty of the front and back sides of the cross picking flower in front of the viewer. After thinking about it, she opened a skylight inside the pen bag and used the sheer yarn process to present the back of the flower picking. As a result, both sides of the flower in the snow and the moon flower picking process in the mirror can be accurately presented. At the junction of the pen curtain and rope, Zheng Xiaorong also applied the traditional Eight Ji pattern, pinning people's worship of life and hope for auspiciousness, symbolizing the endless and continuous life of beautiful things.
See the local art between the inches, and the subtleties are full of heart. Zheng Xiaorong hopes that the fighting spirit passed down from generation to generation on the Olympic field can inspire more people, and the beauty of traditional skills can also arouse more people's attention.