Summer dress

Fun to sew a new dress, this time using Japanese fabrics, from Kokka (Melody Miller's Ruby Star Rising collection). This dress has hidden interior pockets inside the large patch pockets. Dragon flies in the medallions on the front. It's 95 in the shade today, the perfect day to wear a new summer dress.

good weaving days

I walked up to the quarry this Sunday afternoon, in a perfect breeze, a perfect light.  I wanted to take a picture of the ferns that grow across from the quarry, and there they were, in softly filtered sunlight. Some butterflies were dead along side the road.  I've woven two new plain scarves, in linen and combinations of silk, alpaca, and cotton, but mostly unbleached linen. One is ferny,  greens and browns. The other is dark teal blue, browns and charcoal gray,  lakey.

What was I thinking?

No, seriously. What was I thinking about before we left to visit our family out west just 5 days ago? This book and these yarns were on the table. I was thinking about something new. But what?  The show catalog Tradition Transformed, Brown/Grotta, No. 22,  is a favorite of mine. Japanese ideas and  9 contemporary weavers, are represented in a collection originally curated by Sheila Hicks, in 1995, at Brown/Grotta gallery, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in  NewYork,  and to coincide,  Brown/Grotta gallery, 1998.

Chiaki Maki and her sister, Kaori Maki, weavers, are part of this group.  Their work and words are so clear to my mind's eye, and help me to think better about what I try to do, every time I come back to weave in my own studio.  Their elegance alone would be hard to match, but their textiles incite memory, or something less tangible, something not quite remembered.  Can a textile do that?  What a painting or a poem can?  Obviously, it can.  Here are the proofs.

When I was weaving as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I experienced a moment in which I disappeared, and only the weaving remained. The piece that was born of that moment was fascinating, beyond any description. Such a moment is the very heart of my creation.   Chiaki Maki



                                                                

Cowbird

An especially handsome male cowbird was sitting in the tree near the footbridge. He had with him two light gray, slim female cowbirds. I don't know if cowbirds are polygamists. If there are birds that mate for life, mourning doves, geese, for example, then other marital arrangements could be possible in the bird world. Or, this little fellow is just exceptional.

His coloring is exceptional, a brown head, with a wreath of indigo around his chest and the top of his wings.  The rest of him, to his tail feathers, is a dark, ash gray. He was all the colors I was looking for.
I suppose I fell for him, too.

The scarf is made of unbleached and washed linen, and cotton, and silk. The weave is my summer favorite, Swedish myggtjäll, or mosquito net. The scarf is a simple, rustic check, and Japanese inspired. Fresh from the loom, it has a lot of body, but, as with all linen, will soften with time and wear.

Native Big Blue

The rain last night bent over the clumps of native prairie grass, Big Bluestem. Some of us like to use the colored, segmented dried stems as wefts. It's flowering now, and the stems will continue to color into September, when we harvest it. We cut it with scissors, wrap it in bed sheets, and put it out in the sun to dry for a week. I like to use it in a plainweave linen warp on the big barn loom with traditional Scandinavian ticking stripes. With Finnish and Japanese paper yarns it has a crosscultural feeling that I like: Japanese and Finnish.

All My Eggs in One Basket Again

I'm constructing a new piece of spaced linen warp and rya knots. The warp is bleached 16/1 Swedish linen, and unbleached 20/2 (if I remember right, since the label has dropped off).
I'm making the knots of paper yarns from Habu, and Finnish paper yarn I brought home from Finland. I fine cut some organdy rag, and just added some knots out of white mohair. This is fun, but slow, slow.

Finish and Begin Again

The first window weave is off the loom, hemmed and ready to deliver. Now I'm moving to my next project, a spaced linen warp with rya knots made of Finnish paper yarn, Japanese paper yarn, linen, and silk ribbon. It's another in my series of All My Eggs in One Basket. I'm excited, but it is time consuming to weave it, and there is a mid June deadline. I'm happy that the loom is already warped with enough linen to do this project. The linen on the
9 silver paper pirns is to weave the tab loops to hang the finished weave.

Grass Weave

Here are all the ingredients for my next grass, linen and japanese paper yarn weave. My unbleached 20/1 linen warp is finally wound on and correctly threaded, though a demon must have been in the loom this time. The 5 yard warp was days in the making. Errors kept showing, and I had to rethread it again, and again. I finally quit fighting the frustration and submitted to the process, until there were no doubled threads or two threads to a dent. Though it was just plain weave it certainly got the upper hand this time.

The yarn is paper yarn with a silk strand, from Habu, and the grass is the native midwest prairie grass called Big Bluestem. It is a sturdy stemmed, jointed grass that has a blue cast coloration when it matures in August, and is about 4 - 6 feet tall. These prairie grasses covered the Great Plains when western settlement happened in the 19th century. Gradually they were plowed down as crops were planted, but now there are many who wish to restore these native grasses and flowers to our lands. We cut bluestem grass stems with a scissors in late August,
when the grass is ripe, and let them dry in the sun before bundling and storing them to weave. I think they resemble bamboo, and remind me of Japanese design when I weave with them in Swedish linen warp.