Thanks, best wishes and bye for now!

It’s the last day of the month and here’s the blanket off the loom, after a day of the yarns relaxing. I typically block items outside on the porch after fulling them, but realized it was masochistic to try and block a white handwoven blanket on a Vermont porch in mud season. Blocking and hemming will just have to wait a day or two, until I know there’s less rain in the forecast and fewer muddy kids running around.

At the time of this writing, the CVRAN Arts Marathon raised $66,500 to support newly arrived individuals and families in our region. The volunteers at CVRAN have been very busy lately supporting newly arrived Afghan families in Washington County and planning for the arrival of a Russian asylum seeker recently released from a detention center. Vermont Edition dedicated an episode to their work earlier this month, if you’d like to hear more about the experience of resettlement in Vermont. Thank you to everyone who contributed and joined along on this project. I’m so glad to have done it and will certainly participate next year. Next steps for me? Now I’ll be headed to the ceramics side of the studio to plan for my spring ceramics sales and finish fiber pieces for the year’s upcoming shows and exhibitions for my fiber work. The loom is empty and waiting for whatever comes next!

And it's off!

Here’s the blanket, as I took it off the loom after lunch. It’ll lay flat for a few hours, to allows the threads to relax and then I’ll darn in any loose threads, give it a bath and (hopefully) hem it tomorrow.

Almost...!

Here’s the point in the weaving where I start to prematurely jump up and down and say to myself “I’m done! I’m done!” and announce to everyone around, “look, I’m done!,” when we all know perfectly well that I have one more weaving session ahead of me to complete this piece.

Above you can see the blanket from above and below the front beam and also see what the back looks like. This one has come together pretty efficiently, given that it’s had to fit in between everything else that is happening in my studio, home and professional life. I’m pleased with it and can’t wait to get the last few inches woven, hemmed, off the loom and into the bath. That will give me a better sense of the cloth in its finished state. I’m expecting to be done tomorrow evening, meaning that this blanket will be done just in time for Saturday’s monthly Studio Place Arts Art Social.

If you’d like to stop by the studio to see it in person, please join me on Saturday at any point between 4 and 5:30PM. This will be an opportunity to view the three new gallery shows at SPA and some of the resident artists will open their doors for visitors to pop in and see what they’re working on. If you’d like to stop in sometime, but aren’t really feeling like doing it during a public event, please let me know and I’ll be in touch with what hours I’ll be in the studio.

Progress!

We’re at the point in this blanket where 2/3rds of the length of the weaving is complete, but because the remaining weaving is less complex, the last 12 inches will come together quite quickly. To get a sense of what the blanket looks like now, we have to look at the loom from above…

And from below! If all goes well, this blanket will be off the loom by the end of Wednesday.

Weekend projects

I’m a few inches closer to completing the blanket this evening and I finished the woven baltic belt I meant to send to my niece several weeks ago, along with another piece of handwoven wool ribbon for my parents’ birthdays. These woven pieces are ‘recipe weaving’ meaning originating from established patterns—in this case, traditional baltic tape weaving drafts—as opposed to designs I had made myself. The Kevin Aspaas talk yesterday had me reflecting on concepts of authenticity and how weaving fits into one’s cultural world, spiritual world and generational inheritance. I’ve never loved Navajo wedge weaving, but when I listen to anyone describe the work they enthusiastically love, I often come around to liking it. Aspaas won me over and I even liked the scalloped edges of his wedge weaves (which had previously turned me off to the pieces) because I could finally understood the scalloped edge as a set of aesthetic and technical choices that could be contextualized within the history of Navajo making and appreciate the challenge of making these diagonal shapes on his particular style of loom.

Baltic woven tapes are one of the few recipe weaves I do that have specific ethnic references. It does fit within my own ethnic heritage—the tapes are a part of most Eastern European handweaving traditions—but what really draws me to them is their mix of the practical and cross-culturally mysterious. It’s wild to remember that before one could just buy a spool of ribbon, rope or a shoelace, these were all handwoven objects. Woven tapes are any thin ribbon-like weaving, typically are no more than 3 or four inches wide. They’re used for adornment, but also for fastening, tying, covering external seams to make an object more watertight and strengthening seams and hems on the inside of garments or woven objects. Even the humblest kinds of handwoven tape, single color twill tapes (think flat shoelaces) still required skill and a significant amount of labor to make. The weaving of tape was so commonplace that Inkle tape looms are even referenced in the Shakespeare play Love’s Labor Lost.

Because these woven objects are thin, there’s not a lot of space on them for illustration. I describe what I weave as “baltic weaving,” meaning that I’m using designs based on drafts copied from historical Eastern Europe examples, but they bear many similarities to the indigenous Sami band weaving of northern Sweden, Norwegian band/tablet weaving and the thin backstrap-woven belts and trims weavings of many South and Central American regions. While some Sami and Columbian examples have extraordinary color work in them, the small number of threads available to design with means that there’s a limited vocabulary of shapes available to the weaver. The same designs or repetition of shapes appear across multiple cultures or regions in tape weaving, but have different meanings. I love that weavers have been engaged in processes of abstraction from neolithic times and that as soon as they started to manipulate threads, they began to express aesthetic preferences and encode their own meaning into the shapes. A semi-spiral shape could mean a wave, a vine, a labrynth, a bird craning its neck. Tapes are such humble objects, but that magic’s in the meaning.

I’ve woven tapes as utilitarian objects, but also ritual objects, for ribbons for couples who are marrying and want to wrap their hands in a version of a ‘handbinding’ blessing, for folks with Celtic heritages for Imbolc or St. Brigid’s blessings who want to bring a year of good luck to the household, for parents of new babies who appreciate the superstition that a handwoven ribbon made for the baby will fasten her spirit to her body, so it doesn’t wander off. I don’t know that I need to share the specific spiritual beliefs of the folks I’m weaving for, but I do feel quite connected to the intention of the blessing or superstition. I certainly want them to have the union, the good or long life. In the example of the belt woven for my niece, it will probably wind up being used as the strap for her first electric guitar. It’s woven with the knowledge that she’s right on that teenage threshold and I want her to have every bit of extra boldness and fortune available to her as she steps over it. There’s a solidness to this kind of weaving that’s different than when I’m weaving blankets of my own design. I fuss over my own designs pretty frequently. Maybe it’s just that I get to lose myself in the repetition a pattern, but tape weaving is a really different headspace. It would get dreadfully boring if it was all I did every day, but I love returning to it a few times a year and imagining up generations of weavers with their fingers in the threads, playing with squares and triangles and lines as far back as we can go. An fiber artist friend of mine—someone who I consider the most decorated weaver I know—the most international recognition, most impressive CV, highest profile commissions—recently moved homes and studios. After a long dry spell and with no clear sense of where she was going in the work, she started weaving traditional overshot coverlets. I think about overshot coverlets as one of the most foundational and fundamental pieces of American handweaving. They are certainly beautiful and beautifully made, but it was what she said about making them that captured my imagination. “After all these years, and all this time at the loom” she said, “I finally feel like a weaver.”

I listened to a talk with Dine/Navajo weaver Kevin Aspaas while I wove today. Aspaas is a weaver, spinner, dyer and designer of his own work, in addition to keeping his own small flock of Churro sheep. He focuses on wedge weaving—his favored method—and weaving commissioned rug dresses. His instagram page does a great job of showing all the different parts of his life and how the actual practice of sitting at the loom and weaving is just one small part of the process. I’m appreciating that as we roll into the last week of the Arts Marathon. I typically am not keeping track of time in the same way that I have been this week—noticing how long each part of the process takes when I commit to doing one piece from start to finish. Typically, I am simultaneously spinning and dying to have materials ready for a future project while weaving a current project at one of my floor looms. I’m also usually throwing pots in the early mornings or after bedtime. It’s been pretty interesting to spend a month with a single start-to-finish blanket project, while writing. I can tell that my hands are feeling pretty antsy to get back in some clay. Here’s today’s progress on the Receiving Blanket.

This middle third of the blanket is the slowest going—I knew it would be. In between each full pass of the white weft yarn, the pattern yarns are placed and hand manipulated to ensure that the edges are clean. At this point in the weaving, there are six separate supplemental weft sections that need to be placed by hand in between every pass of the shuttle, then checked and measured every few rows to be sure everything is placed correctly (and unwoven if it’s not!) I’ve got about five more inches with this level of complexity and then the final seven inches will only have one or two areas of hand manipulation and will weave up much more quickly. The end is actually in sight! At the beginning, I had wondered if I might complete two blankets during this marathon. It looks like I’ll comfortably complete one blanket and have all the materials ready for the next one.

Some colors

Continuing to weave today, but its gotten too late and dark to photograph the progress! To follow up on yesterday’s post on color, here’s the spectrum of wool dyed with botanical and natural dyes from last summer. This is what I’ve currently got to pull from as I plan the next weavings. I’ll post blanket progress and a longer post tomorrow!

Color blending

Today was a research day—not very picturesque. I’ll be dying some of the handspun I wove grey this weekend, but its unclear what shade of grey to choose, so I’m comparing possible dyebaths of tannins, iron and pomegranate. Typically, I’ve used pomegranete greys, which are a silvery-green grey. Lovely, but I’m thinking about a warmer blue-grey and that means some experimentation this weekend.

I realized yesterday that I haven’t mentioned much about how to work with color in weaving. In painting, you have the opportunity to mix colors to achieve a shade and apply layers of colors. In weaving, color is the result of how our eyes perceive shades created when one color of thread sit near another. Below is a photo of the two blankets that were woven just before the one I’m working on now. These blankets are fraternal “triplets,” all born from the same tan-colored warp. The blanket I’m currently weaving reads as a warm white color. Below you see the effect of weaving on this warp with a tan weft yarn and a peach weft yarn.

Below is a closeup of the blanket currently being woven. These blankets are made with a balanced weave, meaning that the viewer sees an equal amount of weft and warp and perceives a shade that is the result of seeing an equal amount of each color. There is not a lot of contrast between weft and warp in these three blankets. The brown blanket on the left is woven with weft a shade darker than the warp. The peach colored one is woven with weft and warp of slightly different hues but the same value and the current weaving displays what happens when the warm, tan color of our black walnut warp is desaturated by adding a white weft thread. For reference, the color of the black walnut warp is the same shade as the peachy-tan color you see below the two butterflies of indigo yarn below.

Color blending takes practice. Many weavers start out by weaving a gamp—an experiment that interlaces a spectrum of colors, to understand how the perception of colors next to one another differs from the mixing or layering of pigments. Through experimentation and practice, I’ve learned that I am not a fan of high contrast warp/weft combinations. The receiving blanket below shows what happens when you play with high contrast shades. There are chestnut brown and white stripes in the warp, a dark brown (almost black) weft and a white supplemental weft. This is a really different look than the blankets above. I’ve actually never finished this one, even though I put a ton of work into it. I find the background a little too jarring and distracting. It reminds me of the handwoven dishtowels I saw for sale at craft fairs growing up. I might still change my mind and fall in love with with this blanket, maybe finish it someday—just hasn’t happened yet!

Preparing a warp

When I began this blanket, I had some cotton warp on the loom that could accommodate one more blanket before running out. Here’s some photos of how that warp was prepared this summer and dyed before getting onto the loom, followed by a photo of today’s progress. The warp for this piece is made of 304 threads, measured out on a warping board, which you see in the photos below. After running the thread over the same path between pegs 304 times, you gather the threads up to dye them and thread them through the loom’s beater and harnesses. This warp was dyed with fresh black walnut dye from the tree on Washington Street. The other materials you see in the blanket below are a the Clun Forest warp you’ve watched me spin, some handspun Gotland wool from Washington, VT (the grey,) some handspun shetland dyed with indigo and two tapestry yarns dyed with frozen avocado pits and fresh marigolds with some iron to change the color from yellow to green. It seemed appropriate to stick with materials that had a very close connection to the immediate surrounding landscape (or as close as I could get to Barre City,) to weave this particular blanket inspired by the streetscape.

That's better

After a frustrating unweave yesterday, a good solid chunk of weaving completed today. I’m less than an inch away from the halfway point. This means a little bit of celebration, but also time to look ahead to upcoming work. Time to start imagining and preparing the next blanket.

Whoops.

Wove a few inches before breakfast and coffee, was feeling very accomplished and contented. Went to finish some other wage-earning work and returned to the loom to realize I had made a measurement error and had to unweave everything I’d done that morning. Boogers. No photos of progress today, because there is no progress. That’s how it goes sometimes. Instead, please enjoy this embroidered portrait of Baby Yoda from the BUUSD Art Show at the Aldrich Library. Hey, kid artist—two thumbs up! Best in show!

Unbloomed

Just like a potter has to wait until after the final glaze kiln is fired to assess any cup they make, a weaver has to wait until cloth is off the loom and washed to evaluate its successes or shortcomings. This is called ‘fulling.’ Because the loom holds the threads under tension length and width-wise, the cloth initially presents itself as tidy, flat and orderly. The weft threads sit above or below the warp threads and retain their basic definition and structure. Their fibers are not interlocked with each other; the woven cloth resembles a gauze. At this point, the woven, unfulled cloth that sits on the loom is called ‘greycloth.’ This name probably dates back to pre-industrial homes or weaving shops, when cloth would accumulate all kinds of household soot, dirt and dust on it before being washed and prepared for use or sale. White or neutral colored cloth would certainly appear grey or dingy, after being in a space with poor ventilation, in close proximity to a fireplace hearth or being touched by hands that were also involved in other domestic or agricultural pursuits. The final step in finishing a piece of woven cloth is to soak, wash and agitate it, which causes the yarns to expand—this expansion is called the yarn’s ‘bloom.’ When the yarn blooms, its fibers interlock with the fibers of other strands, making the cloth denser and changing its appearance—sometimes substantially. Here are some before-and-after fabric samples created by the weavers at Harrisville Designs in NH, followed by some close-ups of the fabric I’m weaving. The woven samples are on the top, swatched of the completed fulled cloth are on the middle and bottom, demonstrating the effects of different levels of agitation.

Wool takes very little encouragement to bloom, just a water and hand-agitation. I like my blankets to retain some of their initial ‘gauzy’ definition, so you can still distinguish between weft and warp threads. This might not make for the warmest blanket, though. In the first sample above, you can see that the finished swatch on the bottom has become very dense, the fibers are well interlocked and the any visible space between the yarns is gone. To create a dense woolen blanket, modern weavers use the agitation of their washing machines. Preindustrial weavers didn’t have this luxury and the cloth was agitated or beaten by hand. In a process called waulking, weavers sit in a circle, beat the gathered cloth against a hard surface and pass along to their neighbor, often aided by worksongs. Below is a short video of Norman Kennedy of the Marshfield School of Weaving waulking with a group of students, posted by Thistle Hill Weavers, the mill and studio of textile historian Rabbit Goody in NY.

Drawing with Twills

The technique I use for weaving supplemental weft shapes into these blankets was something I brought into my work after reading Theo Moorman’s Weaving as an Art Form. Moorman is credited with developing an inlay technique that allowed her to make painterly pictures within a plainweave structure. In the text, she acknowledges that she is credited with originating “Moorman Inlay” as a style of weaving, but humbly notes that she is probably not the first weaver to use this method and is almost incredulous that one single weaver should get credit for a technique so simple. There’s a nice write-up of her technique, along with the draft if you want to try it for yourself, at this site. You can see in the illustrations on the page that Moorman technique uses a plainweave ground cloth like I do, but then uses a secondary set of warp threads to hold the colorful shapes in place. Moorman’s work was the first to give me the idea of using a secondary colorful yarn to '“draw” shapes within the woven groundcloth.

One thing that did not appeal to me about her technique was that it leaves a relatively open weave that always reads as a balanced plainweave. It allows an improvisational, painterly approach to weaving, but does not allow for more concentrated blocks of color the way other supplemental or “pattern thread” weft techniques (like overshot) allow. After some experimentation, I landed on using denim twill pattern for weaving shapes into my blankets. This means that the thread goes under one thread, over three threads in a repeating pattern. It results in a pattern of diagonal lines, dense enough to read as a unified shape and adding dimension to the cloth. The design reads differently if you are facing it to the right, left or straight-on and reads differently up close versus from afar. Of all the woven cloth around us—particularly the cloth we wear—plainweave and denim twill are the most utilitarian and ubiquitous. You’re probably wearing them right now! I really like the idea of taking these absolutely everyday threadings and using them in painterly ways as the foundation for one-of-a-kind art pieces.

If you’re a weaver who wants to start playing around with pictorial weavings, Moorman technique is a lot more forgiving than traditional tapestry and a great place to start. If you’re curious to learn more about her and her work, there’s a Zoom lecture and demo coming up in a few weeks from Redstone Glen Fiber Arts Center. Here’s the link.

Taking Shape

After yesterday’s walk through the neighborhood, I spent some time imagining the shapes of the built environment. I really love the architecture in Barre City, especially what it’s like to see into downtown from the neighborhood above Matthewson playground, where you can appreciate the mix of shapes created in the built environment by single and multistory buildings. Then compare that experience with what it’s like to be at pedestrian street level and look up towards the decorative top floor archway windows on the Scampini, Worthen and Blanchard buildings. We took a serpentine walk through the neighborhoods around Potash brook and appreciated all the stonework happening below the ground to keep water where it’s supposed to be.

I guess I’ve had the durability of buildings on my mind these last few days, given photos on the news, (not to mention how incredibly lucky I am feeling to be living in a place that is free from military conflict.) The final photo below shows a blanket I wove two years ago. The blue ‘rectangle with feet’ shape always read as a building to me and it’s a shape that has asking for me to revisit it for a while. This time, the “feet” read to me as the deep-set granite foundations so many buildings have below ground level, but alternately, I also imagine them as a pair of legs that could pull themselves out of the ground and walk the building to safety, like the chicken legs of Baba Yaga’s house.

Sunshine, seeds, planning

I did a little weaving while dinner was in the oven, but its gotten too dark to photograph anything well tonight. The day’s activities ran late; it was absolutely glorious out. Finally, that first springlike day when everyone goes outside. I walked all up and down town with the kid, while they made a sprawling choose-your-own-adventure story about a magic key that comes alive and a wall that opened up in the studio and a golden shuttle and a yarn blaster. When we got home, we inventoried dye plant seeds, composting the old ones. I tend to be an over-planter, especially when it comes to dye plants.

Below, you see the pink flowers of the indigo plant on the left, against my (very) old indigo demin jacket. Technically, indigo is actually a pigment that adheres to the surface of each fiber, not a chemically bonded dye. It’s applied to fabric through successive dips into the indigo vat to accumulate more and more layers of pigment onto the fiber’s surface. The appearance of these pink flowers actually mean that this indigo is a little beyond its peak and should have been harvested about a week earlier! Indigo is wonderfully light- and wash-fast, but because it’s actually only sitting on the surface of the fiber, it will wear or wipe off over time, giving demin that ‘worn-in’ look. In the middle, you see flowers that give yellows and golds, but with the addition of some iron or a pH shift also give greens and oranges. These are marigolds, dyer’s chamomile, dyer’s coreopsis and cosmos. In the final photo, you see the reds from various madder dyebaths. Madder is a fantastically ugly plant that grows in a tangle with grabby, velcro-like leaves. Its magic comes from its roots, that will grow as thick as your thumb and look disturbingly like rusty, bloody worms when you harvest them.

Our lot is a little too small for me to source all my own dyeplants, especially the madder—which doesn’t seem to have enough of a growing season in VT for its color to fully develop—and indigo, which you need so much of. The plant must be composted before it can be used in the dye vat, so it takes a huge bushel of leaves to result in a good color through traditional methods. Rowland and Chinami Ricketts have built an amazing small-scale indigo farm for their dye work in Indiana, based on traditional Japanese indigo processing techniques. The photos of the process are amazing—much more than a backyard grower can manage! I try to do grow enough of my own dye plants to continue to feel connected to the process, but not so many that it stops looking like a front yard! This year, I’ll probably do some more indigo for some fresh-processing experiments, along with more coreopsis and marigolds to build up a better stash of green shades. I feel a little self-conscious cutting off all the blooms right at the head when they’re at their peak of vibrancy, (sorry neighbors!) but that’s crucial to getting the best color of the plants.

Beauty. That old chestnut...

Writing about tapestry yesterday led me to thinking about how infrequently I work with forms that have no functional utility. I feel like it’s an old standard, a greatest hit—the functional versus non-functional in craft (and the ways this is and isn’t different from discussions about form and aesthetics that happen in fine art circles.) I do get something new each time I play it through. The pandemic has resulted in my dipping my toes deeper into the world of straight-up art objects. I can see the appeal and maybe one day I’ll loosen up and unabashedly make art objects for the sake of beauty, but I‘ll admit, I’m pretty damn ambivalent about the prospect.

Because tapestry takes so long to weave, I began making small paintings to explore proportion, play with color blending before committing a design to the loom. Frugal curmudgeon that I am, I also wanted to explore whether or not I even enjoyed painting before deciding to jump into making lake pigment paints out of the remains of my exhausted dye baths. To my surprise, several of the small paintings sold and a gallery inquired about exhibiting them, so I kept on with it. Despite this, my conceptual footing technique is situated first and foremost within a craft vernacular. I have a deep appreciation for beauty in the world. I’m distracted by it and often have to stay focused to not get drawn off course by some glint of light on a wall. That said, I have a hard time with objects that are made to be precious. I appreciate the lifespan and lifecycle of objects I make. I like that they change, that they will eventually fade, even like that they break.

I don’t know if the attribution is to the originator of the phrase, but in his book about Buddhist psychology, Jack Kornfield recounts his teacher Ajahn Chah appreciating a beautiful intact teacup and saying “the cup is already broken.” We use handmade porcelain pottery in our house, always have, including making cups available for any children that visit. When something breaks, as it did this week—a white bowl with a grey and black stripe, dropped into the sink—we all know the call and response: “It’s okay, she can make another,” to which the response is “the cup was already broken!” We don’t hang around juggling porcelain cups or intentionally putting them in harms way, but I think there’s something strange about an object born to be a little too dear. Ditto for one that has no intended destiny or mission in the world. I’m more comfortable with objects that have the unfulfillable or anti-mission than I am objects that exist only in terms of their aesthetic properties. Like I said, a curmudgeon, a real stick in the mud, so this project at the Everson Museum really caught my eye: “Ceramics Collector Louise Rosenfield Donated 3,000 Pieces to a Museum with One Caveat—the Works Must Be Used.” That’s my kind of gal.

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Not exactly related, but not unrelated either, today is the two-year anniversary of the first schoolday cancelled by covid. March 15th, the school closures were announced. March 16 was our first day of the New Now. I don’t remember that much, other than everyone in our household gathering in the kitchen to scream together. We howled a big, long NOOOOOOOOOOOO, holding the knowledge that it was a necessary harm-reduction strategy. I looked back at my photos from the day and this was the only one I had taken. It was to send to my parents, along with a text that said something like “I realize that you’re used to being able to just run out to the store and get more mayo for your sandwich, but please consider that this is a big deal and don’t catch an unknown virus on account of a ham sandwich.”

Lucky

I use several techniques in my fiber arts practice. You’ve mostly seen me weaving cloth—blankets. These aren’t the most labor, time and resources intensive of my weaving. That would be my tapestry work. I learned to weave cloth because weaving and textiles were around all the time as a child. But that’s not why I weave tapestry. I began to weave tapestry because of Executive Order 13769. Because of Donald Trump.

My great uncle fled Zirc following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In 2014, he commissioned a tapestry of the Virgin Mary from a family of weavers in his home village to honor the Cistercian monks who educated him as a boy and sponsored he and several of his classmates when they arrived alone in the United States. He had kept my family updated on the tapestry’s progress and shared photos and yarn samples throughout the making. He had grown up with the matriarch in this family; it took them a year to complete. Zirc, he explained, was known for its tapestries. My uncle has always been a devoted Catholic. I appreciated the gratitude and piety expressed in the commission. I can’t say the aesthetics resonated with me. At that point, I had seen very little tapestry I liked. (Unsentimentally, I did wonder if a boys prep school wouldn’t have preferred a donation of something a little more practical. A new gym or some computers, maybe?)

The tapestry crossed my mind now and then, but it did not move me until the evening of January 28th, when the signing of Executive Order 13769 resulted in chaos at airports around the country. The immediate suspension of the US Refugee Admissions Program was announced and reports of detained travelers began to filter onto CNN and the AP wire. Night fell; protests built. I was in bed with a feverish. vomiting child. I texted friends in Chicago and New York. Those who could help translate and provide legal counsel headed to airports. Those who couldn’t sent cab fare and babysitting cash to those who could—small acts to keep us from feeling completely powerless.

After those steps were taken, I compulsively hit refresh on CNN and sat with my hand on a small, sweaty brow. Eventually, I turned the phone off and sat with the sound of my kid’s breath and the radiator and the house responding to the wind. I flashed on Frank’s commission, the shades of blue in the Mary’s robe. A small and very clear sentence formed inside me. “I have to learn how to weave tapestry.” It seemed absolutely ridiculous. I tried some mild forms of objection. I don’t have time for a new technique. I don’t even like tapestry. But very clearly, there it was. And it stayed and would not budge or let anything else in until I cued up some videos of Archie Brennan at work. I’ve only had this clear voice speak up a dozen or so times and I never know what to do with it. There is no use arguing or asking for more details. I still think it’s kind of ridiculous.

Tapestry, unlike other kinds of cloth, is a purely an object of art. One could argue that its function was a kind of medieval home insulation, but that’s stretching it. Any cloth tacked up could meet that task. Tapestry is cloth that is about composition, visual impact, splendor. It is not adorned cloth, embellished with stitching or embroidery. It is a picture built, thread by thread. The skills to make it are fiddly, requiring intense focus and inch-by-inch problem-solving. It takes so dang long. Today, I spent half a day weaving and completed one and one half inches.

To be able to weave tapestry means that you are lucky. It means you are alive. It means the kin before you survived and the skills survived and you, yourself, have survived well enough to go to school, study art, birth another generation, move back to the region previous generations migrated from when the quarrying jobs dried up. You have the luxury of participating in this artform that has no functional utility at all. I began to weave tapestry with no clear idea of what kind of tapestries I would weave or even why I was spending time on it. (It’s not like I’ve got extra minutes to burn or need more hobbies.) The little interior voice didn’t have anything else to say but I’ve come to understand its directive as get to work, you will find a way to love this. There’s that theme of the unknown, unknowable future again. You don’t get to know if its going to work out or even why you’re here, but look around, pay attention, stay alive, try to get it right. You will find a way to love this.

Frank and Judy Tibenszky in front of the tapestry they commissioned for Cistercian Prepatory School, commemorating the relationship between the Cistercian order in Zirc, Hungary and the Cistercian order established in Dallas, Texas. As a boy, Frank’s village pooled resources to send him to the Catholic school run by the monks in Zirc. The Dallas order welcomed the Zirc monks when they fled in 1950 and the Cistercians financially supported Frank and several classmates following their escape from Hungary. Photo by Jim Reich.

Some Gleam in the Weft

After assessing the lustre and texture of the first few inches of cloth, I decided that the ground cloth was a little too homogenous. By adding some bulkier dyed yarns that have a hint of silk in them, I added created some variation in backround. This is the kind of effect that is hard to notice on camera, but will will be apparent in person. “A little surprise that you only see up close,” the kid noted. The silk will catch the light where it pops through and doubling the width of a few warp yarns will bring some dimension and remind the viewer that the ground cloth has its own structure and design, independent to any brocades woven in. It’ll be subtle, like a few Agnes Martin pencil markings, just enough variation.

These bobbins hold the supplemental weft threads, dyed with avocado and black walnut. They’re about to be brought to the rear of the loom, where they’ll dangle down off the back and I’ll unwind them as needed.

A close-up of three doubled warp threads.

Starting to Weave

The washed yarn was wound up into balls today, which was then wound up onto bobbins. I have about one blanket’s worth of a black walnut-dyed cotton warp left on the big loom loom and that’s what I’ll use for the first blanket. The first photo shows the warp threads, which are wound around the back beam (300 threads, all cut to the same length.) These are each threaded through the middle of the loom in one of four harnesses, which will raise or lower them, then threaded through equally-spaced wire slots on the beater bar and attached to a bar at the front of the loom that moves the woven cloth forward.

In the final photo above, you can see the boat shuttle, which holds our bobbin, and the first inch of woven cloth, which will be turned under to form a hem when the cloth comes off the loom. The thick purple strips of cloth serve as to spread the warp threads out and space them evenly. They will be unraveled from the weaving at the end. This is a plainweave, which means that I raise the evenly numbered harnesses and pass the shuttle through, then raise the odd numbered harnesses and pass the yarn through. This forms our groundcloth—essentially the background cloth that any design will be woven into. Now that this header is woven, I can have a sense of what the texture of our cloth will be and can begin to add any additional stripes into the warp and begin to choose colors for the design.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Bet you’re getting anxious to see me start weaving. I am too. Weaving at the loom is one of the singularly most absorbing, peaceful, pleasurable experiences I have in my life. It just takes a heck of a lot of other steps to get there—especially if I’m working with handspun and have committed to showing folks the process start to finish. Typically, there are 3 or 4 projects at work at any one time in the studio, not to mention work in clay happening in parallel. Upside to all this wool work—I think we’ll actually have enough yarn done this week to complete two blankets together!

I did a little extra spinning because I attended two fantastic online events—a conference sponsored by MOMA composed of artists coming together to discuss the work of Sophie Tauber-Arp and a lecture by Virgina Postrel on her book The Fabric of Civilization. Postrel mentioned those Viking ships in her talk too. She compiled research on available tools and spinner output in an 8 hours period to peg time it would take to spin enough for a Viking sail at 385 days. (That’s not counting the weaving and dying.) Making the sail, she noted, would take far, far longer than the building of the ship itself.

At the Arp conference, curator Anne Umland invited triads of artists/writers to view the MOMA exhibition, share some thoughts or responses to Arp’s work and then begin to ask each other questions. The first screen above shows fiber artist Sheila Hicks and architect/artist Amanda Williams discussing the work of Sophie Tauber Arp. The second screen shows Virginia Postrel’s slide of a scrap of indigo-dyed textile next to a computer-generated grid illustrating the composition of the weave.

The last pairing of the conference were dancer/collaborators Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener in conversation with Mexican artist Pia Camil. Camil is an artist fascinated with Modernism’s promises and failures. She noted that within Arp’s modernism, she utilized motifs, colorblocking or visual composition that Camil recognized within Mexican folk art, historical architecture and the design of historical public spaces in Mexico City. Renier and Mitchell’s contribution was a four-minute dance composition based on the motifs in Arp’s painted compositions. The three agreed that Arp’s aesthetic and applied arts techniques had many antecedents; they weren’t born solely of her psyche. She was in an artistic lineage that was broader than her training. In making work based on hers, they, in turn, claimed her as an aesthetic ancestor. Mitchell described the pair’s film as “entering into a ghost dialogue with Sophie.”The three were in consensus that an artist never strives for new creative work without precedent—such a challenge was folly.

87 year-old Hicks, at this point, chimed in from her studio in Paris to note that the longer she lives and works the more convinced she is that all art is call and response and iterative repetition is the state of creative inspiration, even across generations of makers who are strangers to each other. Reiner agreed, “we are standing in the river of time together.” I love that image. I often use basic structures/shapes in my work and utilize labor-intensive processes to make pieces that appear (sneakily) uncomplicated until one explores the making up-close. I find it a solace that every shape and structure has already been woven and that when I spin, weave or feed my indigo vat some fructose, I’m participating in a relationship between plants and animals that goes back as far back in human history as archeologists go. Starting from the knowledge that everything has already been made before in some form or another, what’s left is the freedom to decide what tributary of that “river of time” you’ll slip into next. How delightful.