Hello Friends and welcome! We’ll spend the next month gathering here to dive into the making of a new woven piece. You could probably guess from our password what’s in the bag…
You’re looking at just over a pound of Clun Forest wool from Bill Blachly’s flock in Calais, VT, spun into roving at a local mill. I’ll share more about this specific breed of sheep and its history in later posts, but Cluns are generally beloved (by folks who love sheep) for not getting into too much trouble (for a sheep,) being relatively easy to care for (for a sheep,) and offering small scale farmers streams of (very modest) income for both fiber and meat. Vermont has a long history with sheep, their promise and peril. It’s why we have so few old growth forests in the state. We’re starting our month together at the beginning of lambing season. Friends of mine will swap stories about improvisational midwifery, headlamps nearby.
For all the pastoral charm these animals offer, it’s a certain type who takes on the work of tending to the bodies of animals. Filmmaker John O’Brian, his Seven Days Article about raising sheep, explains: “Why do I still have sheep? My father was a Democrat, so I’m a Democrat. My parents never smoked, so I’ve never smoked. My parents raised sheep, so I raise sheep. These weren’t logical decisions; they just happened. Children imitate their parents, and then all of a sudden it’s midnight and you’re up to your elbow in a ewe’s uterus trying to deliver a breech birth and you remember your mom doing this during the Nixon administration.”
Where did I start? Why do I work in fiber? It’s what was around. There was no single moment when I learned how to weave or fell in love with the process. My mother and grandmother and all the women before and around them sewed, quilted, made things themselves, even as the economic illogicality of the act increased with each new generation. I grew up in a beautiful, scrappy, forgotten area that had more barns and historical reenactment villages than actual extracurricular activities. Working as a teenage “pattern girl,” for a weaver paid better than other options. By the time I went to college, I had been around enough looms to know the basics, even if the nuance of a particular technique or fabric structure was new to me.
I don’t mean to suggest that I came out fully formed as an maker. There was some actual art school involved. When I saw the work of installations artists like Ann Hamilton and Kiki Smith, I found an aesthetic and spiritual home in their gospel of handwork. Growing up someplace agricultural and forgotten left me stubbornly devoted to the reality of how things are made. When I was dissatisfied with the cloth I found for sewing & quilting projects, I began to weave my own. Dissatisfied with the yarns within my budget to weave with, I started spinning and then dying my own. Dye materials were too expensive, so I planted a dye garden. I don’t raise sheep—my family has drawn a bright line there—but I hear you can keep silkworms at home, if you’re not too squeamish about crawly things and this is our starting place together, a pound of wool.
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A final note today—it’s not lost on me that as we begin this month together in support of resettled families and newly arriving families, the Russian military aggression in Ukraine is displacing more than a half-million Ukrainian citizens. The 44 artists in this project have collectively raised more than $44,000 for CVRAN. I am grateful for the opportunity to bring dollars to their work. I’ll close with a link to the paintings of Ukranian artist Maria Prymachenko: https://www.wikiart.org/en/maria-primachenko Yesterday, the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry announced that a historical museum in Ivankiv containing 25 of her original paintings was destroyed. (This is still being independently verified, as per the NY Times.) Thank you for the financial support you have offered our local refugee resettlement services and for the space to write and think aloud together about the threads of interconnection that bind us.