SNL

When we moved to the valley, in Avalanche, it was hard to get a television signal, without putting an antenna on the ridge, or buying a large, expensive, unattractive sattelite dish to mount in the yard.  We opted out, stashing our little black and white tv in the granary attic.

 For many years we watched no tv, that is, until we had children who were old enough to start digging through the dusty boxes of our former life, in the granary attic, who discovered the old black-and-white tv.  Sofie brought it into the living room, squeezed tinfoil around the rabbit ear antennas, plugged it in,  and we all sat watching as a snowy blizzard with shadowy figures came into view on the small square screen,  our first look at  Saturday Night Live. We were hooked.  For years we continued to listen to and watch what little we could see of Friends, and Will and Grace, through the snow, never able to see what the actors' faces looked like. Eventually, my husband brought home a larger antenna, which leaned against a tree in our front yard, and brought a little more clarity, if turned in the right direction. This meant someone had to go out and turn the antenna, while television watchers inside yelled when the picture was clearest. In summer and winter we watched somewhat better tv with this system.

Still, the hard hearted parents were against the idea of becoming a tv watching family, so this compromise held. Our children grew up, and rejecting our idioscyncrasies,  have moved to far away places with ample bandwidth, and clear signals. Today, I confess, in our own living room,  is a huge, black, flat screen tv sitting in front of my living room window, blocking most of the view into the front yard.  We watch a lot of Netflix on it, but in order to see a bird,  fawn, or approaching storm cloud requires walking over, and looking out over the top of it. So, we can change our minds.

The woven inlay, teal-and-cream colored square in this cushion commemorates our first SNL viewing experience, our first tentative dip back into the mainstream we'd so gladly quit.

old north

Pictures from a family album I hadn't seen before.  My grandfather, John Anton, ca. 1920, on a Minnesota lake.  A picture of my grandmother as a young woman in Bessemer, Michigan, ca. 1920, before she married. There aren't many pictures of her.  The farm in Bessemer was on a high bluff, and Lake Superior could be seen from there.

Sweets

Scarf No. 3 on this mostly silk Rosepath warp.  I'm really warming up to the seductive warm colors, with a little aqua for the sugar-on-top.  Figuring out color is always my first interest, and I usually try to make it more difficult, because the results are often more interesting, at least to my eye.  But even with a simple color scheme,  nothing is automatic about color and design.  There's always the chance of good color going bad.   Seeing the rags I used to start this scarf makes me feel itchy to do a little more rag weaving.

There was a torrential downpour on Friday the 13th, another flood in Avalanche.  It was a little scary. Soon after the waters subsided,  a sister, nephew, and son and brother in-law, came to visit.    Our table has been full of people talking,  eating good food, and laughing about I don't remember what,  but was very funny at the time.   The good feeling is what lingers.

Around the Block

I rode my bike up the road yesterday and passed the old house where Tillie and Leona,  two sisters, married to two brothers,  raised their families together during the Great Depression.  At one time,  I've been told, that 27 people lived together in this house. Those were hard times. 

Now the poppies and the bleeding heart are putting on their show for an empty house.

Looming Lempi

Deep Diving scarf, plain weave & Rosepath, linen, cotton, silk mixed wefts on Swedish cotton warp.

Creativity, inspiration, borrowing, copying. Where do the ideas come from? For me, they spring from many sources. Some that I'm aware of, and others that I'm not. I'm someone who believes she knows her own mind, but come to find out, I'm too close to the forest to see the trees.

I'm old enough to know there's nothing new under the sun, everything we can do has been done by someone before us. But not quite the way we will make it. That's the way imagination works. It spills, and moves from person to person. Ideas are meant to travel. I've met artists, weavers, who try never to look at anyone else's work, so they'll be sure never to be guilty of being influenced. It might be their method to work that way, but what kind of artist stops looking at anything? I try to see everything, everywhere, all the time. The effect can only be beneficial, and, frankly, I need all the help I can get.

My ideas come through my window, from other artists and painters, from pictures on Flickr and artist's blogs, and some, spookily, seem to come over my shoulder while I'm weaving at the loom. I think it may be a Finnish grandmother suggesting, "Yes, now pick up the unbleached linen...." The biggest enemy to my creativity is self censorship. When I see how far and wide other artists go, I wonder, Why do I stop myself? I'm actually not doing anything alarming, or earth shakingly over-the-edge. It's only a scarf, and mine is a scarf with crooked edges, and bright moments.

Congratulations, Sofia Arnold!

Superstitious

Sofia painted this pin for me years ago ( maybe she was 14?). I'm wearing it in the hope it brings her good luck today: Go, Sofie!

Laying Season

Linen transparency, spaced warp, with mixed fiber rya knots, 14" X 28"

I'm back at my barn loom, working on a similar piece to the first All My Eggs in One Basket, made in 2007. After all, it's spring, and definitely laying season. Weaving this transparency I used many different yarns, silk ribbon, unwoven plastic tarp, Finnish paper yarn, Japanese paper and silk yarn, wool, and linen, in the rya sections. Each section contains over 100 knots, with multiple strands bundled in each knot. Linen transparency weaving is a traditional Finnish weave, as is rya. The predominant yarn, after linen, is Finnish paper yarn I first bought on a trip to Finland in 2004, with my mother, Irene Johnson, also a weaver, who lives in Ely, Minnesota.

At the time I saw many contemporary weavers in Sweden and Finland using it, and I was already familiar with Hanna Korvela's brushy paper yarn designs using paper in rya knots.

On our trip, my mother and I visited a restored block of workers' residences in Tampere, Finland, which provided housing for workers at the Finlayson cotton mill in Tampere.
The houses were open to tour, and we saw an apartment similar to where my mother's mother,
Impi Sofia had lived with her sisters, while she worked at the mill.

These were civil war years in Finland, and my grandmother was known to have tried to throw bread to her starving brother, held captive in what our family describes as a large, empty molasses vat. Other brothers in her family had been shot and killed, including a 14 year old brother acting as a messenger. The story is vague, but her own life was in danger for trying to help her brother. For her safety, her sisters and family friends gathered money for her ticket to the United States. She left Finland suddenly. We were able to speak to her youngest sister, who was still alive, and remembered the terribly sad day when they were packing her trunk to leave. My grandmother never saw her sisters or Finland again. She was 17 years old.

All My Eggs in One Basket celebrates and commemorates her escape, and the result that my mother was born, and, so, I was born. These are strands that connect me to her life, and her experience. When my grandmother left Finland to come to the US, she put all of her eggs in one basket. It may be that she had few good choices, but I think it was an act of great courage.

All My Eggs is about taking the risk and sticking your neck out, not holding back for fear of losing. To choose to work as an artist calls for putting your skills, and insubstantial ideas out and claiming them, in public. No one shows up to say you're not allowed to do this.

The "eggs" in my baskets are partly made of the Finnish paper yarn produced there in Tampere.
By unwinding some of the tightly twisted paper yarn, these eggs "bloom". To me they are blooms and eggs, imagination and creative potential.

Though conventional wisdom discourages the idea of risking all, I take the opposite view.
To create anything new and of value to the future often requires that you put everything you've got into the basket, and maybe a little more than that.

wall marks

On birthdays, or when we finally remembered to do it after your birthday, we marked the height of the birthday person on the dining room wall, balancing a graham cracker or macaroni box on top of its head, steadied against the wall for the true measure.

We kept the record, noting shoes on or off, wondering when Ursula would overtake Mom. (Just for the record, she didn't). Then there were friends and family who we invited to add their height to our wall, after we'd shared a good dinner. It didn't need to be their birthday, just the occasion of our good time together.

Everyone laughed and acted as if it were a big thing, stood straight and tall, but it wasn't such a big thing. Just a pencil mark (or magic marker!) on our dining room wall, proof that you were here with us, on what date, and how tall.

Early Fall

I rode my bike downtown (Avalanche, pop. 20 + or - ) this morning because the breeze was cool, and the sun soft. School has begun again, but I don't have any little children to put on the bus. It may rain this afternoon. Life here has never been perfect, but it has always felt right, and it's another good day to weave.

Plastic!

When the Finland girl mentioned her grandmother's golden plastic coffee bags woven into rag rugs, I remembered my mother telling me, after she had made her first trip to Finland, "Susan, they are saving up golden plastic coffee bags to weave into their sauna rugs. I will never weave plastic in my rugs."

I thought, I might weave plastic in my rugs, and I did. I liked it. Today, I started looking for more white things to tie into my rya weave. Thinking of plastic, I found a woven plastic tarp on my packing shelf that I unwove. Now I have narrow striped pieces, very strong and easy to thread on my needle. When I threaded the first one into the weave I felt a small thrill. There are the plastic ribbons, just after the silk ribbons, the paper and the mohair. It's the mix that excites me. The idea for this was put into my head this morning from someone I don't know, far away in the north.