Hand weaving

 

We meet in each other's homes and studios, all around the area, once a month. We don't call our group anything particular,  unless it's 2nd Mondays.  We go to Dell, Asbury Ridge, Norwegian Hollow, Viola, Viroqua, Avalanche, Jug Creek. We each show up,  bringing what we have to offer, sometimes an apple salad, sometimes  what we've been weaving, knitting or spinning. Or, we bring our sad or funny stories about where we've traveled, what we've seen since the last time we were together.  Sometimes it seems hard to take the time out from work to get there. But, not one moment of our precious time is wasted with idle conversation, and the conversation (and laughter) starts right away, and covers a lot of ground.

We are friends, we are mostly weavers, and we are women. When I brought my freshly woven wrist warmers, I'd hoped to find a hand model. These women took the stack from my hands and spontaneously put them on. One pair was strung together, so two women had to stay very close to each other while they moved to the window to take a picture of their interwoven hands.  Angie took the beautiful picture with her new camera. These laughing friends of mine, putting their hands together in a circle, with my weaving on their wrists, was warmhand modeling I never imagined.

It was kind of wonderful.

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.

These Days

Suddenly we had a cats-and-dogs rain, with no disastrous floods or tornadoes. I admit to feeling more anxious than usual, lately.  The bee yard up on Salem Ridge was soaked. The random colors of Bill Pike's bee boxes were free for the taking, so, inspired, I rushed home to weave. The supple scarf is silk and cotton, mainly, with some tencel, and cotolin. It is one of the new ones with the great spring story moving through my imagination, and hopefully through my hands

(update: Bill was just here to look at the bees and told me he paints the colors on his boxes so the bees won't drift into the wrong hive when they come back from gathering. It's their address. He paints with paint returned to Walmart by people who had the wrong color mixed.  Can people do that? I thought once it was mixed you're stuck with it)

Rag mad

More we're not out of the woods yet rag and yarn panels, in Rosepath. When I have woven enough of them I plan to sew them,  cushion covers, and a deerskin bottomed sack, probably a back pack. My fascination with thready, raggedy weaves isn't wearing off. I hope I never find my way out of this woods. (On a walk up the road today, I practiced a little skipping, which felt pretty good).

April Fools Scarf

 

Early spring torments me. It's always been like this for me, like being invited to a birthday party that's supposed to be fun, but which inevitably will be chaotic. Nervous energy, too much coffee, too bright, too much old snow, too much coffee, wind, mud.  I start one thing, and then another, and finally there are a string of started jobs behind me, a trail of open stepladders, half wound spools, tax paper work, peppered with forgotten coffee cups, misplaced threading hooks and calculators.

Settling down to weave is important. Bringing my nose to some work at hand calms my innervation.  Color and Rosepath contain this flux of ideas I'm experiencing, and make some sense of it. Going outside is a big help, too.

I tried this scarf I just finished, on a walk up  the road to the quarry yesterday.  An experiment, Would I like it, or would I want to tear it off? I wound it on and checked the mirror.  It looked fine. With my old brown and green wool plaid jacket, it looked surprisingly fresh.

Then I walked up past Falk's old house, where the new neighbors are cleaning and clearing out what's left of his stuff.  It was late afternoon, and the crew of guys were calling it a day, standing around a smouldering brush fire of Falk's old overgrown lilac hedge, and his roses.  They looked like they were  well in to a 12-pack.  Some little kids stood on a heap of debris nearby. They all stopped talking and stared as I walked by.  I waved and said, Hi. Two of them raised their hands.  Maybe it was just the fresh air, but something changed. Or, it might have been my bright and shining scarf, but suddenly I felt good, like myself again.  I clearly knew what I wanted to do next,  check if the watercress at the spring is ready to pick, and look for pussy willows.

Deer Season, Deja Vu

Deer season ahead.  The deer are running now, sometimes in front of your car headlights.  Driving at dusk is a fraught experience, 45 mph seems too fast.  Not much has changed in my neighbor Falk's yard since last year, except he's not there.  His old blue truck is parked behind the sheds.

I wove 3 more pillows of rag, linen, and Rosepath,  and will weave some more.  I'm waiting for new yarn to arrive, silk and alpaca cones in choice colors, only 2 back-ordered! My plan is to make wristwarmers and scarves with similar designs to these pillows.  I'm also planning for Sno-Crush, first all textile show, here, Nov 20 - Dec 31.

uphill

The wild clematis is a little garland of puffs along the hill road. The woods on the side hill of the valley is not so leafy now, but the Witch Hazel is in bloom with its small yellow starry flowers.
I wish my weaving could merge into the rough fissured bark of the century (at least) white pine. I don't try to copy what I see. It's usually after I've woven something, that I see what I have been looking at.

Late Bus

Dusk happens suddenly these days. I walk up the hill after the late school bus comes through Avalanche. The woods is settling down, a few birds call, a cardinal chip-chip-chips. Two deer run across the road in front of me, their white tails flagging. There is a bow hunter in the woods.

My bench cushions are woven and shipped now.  Still some pillows to make and  sew together tomorrow.  But now, there are a few of my Hen-of-the-Woods mushrooms leftover, and some red wine, suppertime.

All Sewed Up

All the panels are woven now.  So, I sewed them. together.  This isn't the bench they'll be used on, but I wanted to see how they'd look.  I'm especially pleased with my sewing.  I'm finally getting the hang of that.

I'm also pleased that these remind me of the rag rug covered sauna benches in the Finnish saunas of Northern Minnesota, that I loved when I was young.  I wanted to weave something with a  Finnish look, that brought back that memory of sauna smoke, lake and northwoods. 

Rags and Mushrooms

 Look what popped up under the spruce tree this week.  Could I eat them?  Or, dye with them?  Probably both, eat and die.

I'm weaving my favorites again,  a little bit of rag, a little bit of linen,  leaving the edges raw. They are  a set of cushion covers I'm designing for modern concrete benches.   Good textures to combine, smooth polished concrete, with rags and linen.

Goose Eye

When we first moved to Avalanche we thought we would farm.  I decided to keep a pair of geese since we have a little creek here.  One thing led to another, and soon we had a flock of geese and goslings, numbering 27 animal units.  I loved to watch them swim, or stick their necks out and honk,  running,  flapping their wings chasing each other, or any unfortunate caught in their path.  I remember a pair of scrap iron dealers drove up in a rusted truck once, eyeing my husband's hoard of old rusty junk from the road, and wanting to know if I was ready to sell.  I may have been tempted, but the geese drove them back before they even made it to the porch.  The scrapmen were pretty rough looking, so I was happy to see them go.  And so it was with missionaries, insurance salesmen, and the tax assessor.

Since I had no marketing plan for the geese, and we had become vegetarian,  the flock continued to multiply, until there were enough of them to rise into the air, form a vee and take aim at their chosen landing spot.  The squeaky door of the log house, where their corn feed was stored, would bring on a rush and swirl,  a general rising of bodies into the air,  the vee formation,  direct flight, and crash landing among a din of general honking and flapping bodies around my feet,  a twice daily event.  Once, my visiting mother-in-law, a neat, orderly woman unwittingly opened the squeaky loghouse door, as I watched in horror from my kitchen window.  I dashed out, but not in time to save her.  She had turned to see why the sky had suddenly darkened, only to realize  that a  flock of geese across the field had suddenly risen into the air, formed a squadron, and was now bearing down on her.   She ducked and survived direct hits, but  her dignity was injured.

One fall the goose lot having became too small for them, and feeling the call of the South, the flock rose with a general cacaphony,  swirled twice around the lot, and then split.  Half of the geese formed a vee, and flew off down the road past the old Avalanche general store (downtown Avalanche)  about 4 ft off the ground.  I watched as they swirled around Junie's trailer, and veered South.  They settled on the stream about 2 miles south of Avalanche, and lived at the farm there comfortably for several  more years.

It's been so many years since  I gave them up,  but I did like keeping them.  They were a nuisance, mainly,  but always interesting. They were a cantankerous lot.  I loved the goslings, all in a row, necks outstretched,  weep-weep-weeping behind the mother goose.  And geese lay the loveliest eggs.  I made oak gall ink and wrote with quills a few times.  Once, I was inspired to make a set of authentic cork-and-leather shuttle cocks with real goose feathers, which added an element of unpredictability to a game of badminton.

Thinking of my geese this rainy, July, Monday, I just finished a set of goose eye woven summer scarfs,  of hand-dyed bamboo, with linen, cotton and tencel.  Oh, and a little silk.

Summer Rag Weave

This is the right kind of day to weave a little rag daypack.   With plaid fabric shoulder straps, and a honey bee applique (LFN ribbon trim) it's ready to go.